Solstice Announcements (market, new project)

It's a busy summer, it's a sad summer?

Happy Solstice <3

I’m not gonna talk about my mental health this time, I promise — or am I? We’re well into summer, and it seems like the city is well aware of itself and its capabilities. We’ve had a Knicks win, the World Cup, Pride, Puerto Rican Day, Juneteenth, and probably other things I’m not that aware of. I’ve mostly been keeping to myself and having a handful of silly thoughts and feelings, but perhaps I’m living the way summer is meant to be lived? Controlled recklessness along with some summertime blues. There are versions of myself that I am mourning. I feel like I’m either molting or sprinting faster than I’m comfortable with.

I miss nature. I want to feel like a damn Mary Oliver poem. I’m thinking of the introduction to Alice Walker’s The Color Purple.

Whatever else The Color Purple has been taken for during the years since its publication, it remains for me the theological 
work examining the journey from the religious back to the spiritual that I spent much of my adult life, prior to writing it, 
seeking to avoid. Having recognized myself as a worshiper of Nature by the age of eleven, because my spirit resolutely 
wandered out the window to find trees and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother 
with religious matters at all. 

I would have thought that a book that begins “Dear God” would immediately have been identified as a book about the 
desire to encounter, to hear from, the Ultimate Ancestor. Perhaps it is a sign of our times that this was infrequently the 
case. Or perhaps it is the pagan transformation of God from patriarchal male supremacist into trees, stars, wind, and 
everything else, that camouflaged for many readers the book’s intent: to explore the difficult path of someone who starts 
out in life already a spiritual captive, but who, through her own courage and the help of others, breaks free into the 
realization that she, like Nature itself, is a radiant expression of the heretofore perceived as quite distant Divine. 

I think in a lot of ways I’m missing God.

Announcements

Before there was the Black Zine Fair, a lot of you all may have found me via Parkmart in the years 2022-2023. Well, it’s back for one last hoorah, and I’m gonna go as hard as possible to show out for it and hope to see you all there.

Letters of Blue Confusion

I’m quietly launching a project that I am hoping will become something bigger than it is in my head. Inspired by the color blue, which you can read some of my reflections on in one of my previous newsletters. I want to start publishing a “Blue” zine/publication featuring simply stories of blue. Think of the book Bluets. I want to know the role the color blue has played in your life. Big or small. A pair of jeans, the color of someone’s eyes that wronged you, your favorite pencil, branding on the sunscreen you used as a child, your first favorite painting. Feel free to also leave me “blue recs” like movies, poems, books, and such!

Whatever blue it may be. You can get ahead and email me at:

lettersofblue@praise-fuller.com

Raffle

I’m raffling off these decks for neighbors affected by ICE.

That’s all I’ve got! I’ve been working on a secret project that’s just for me for now, but I'm excited about it. I’ve been reading and writing a lot and kind of putting those words to use in my secret corner of the internet, but maybe I’ll share who knows.

Talk soon, stay cool and hydrated <3