All Things Yellow

On Making Art & Our Times

The dahlia blooms
without knowing
it blooms--
radiant halo
each petal
a fiction.
Does lightness
seek 
light? Dahlia 
spreads open
its inflorescent 
form
creates
because it must.

• In the midst of a nation’s tumult, this photo of a dahlia blooming on November 5, 2023 appeared on my phone. Appeared when it needed to, as all things go as must.

• In the midst of a nation’s tumult, if one merely has opinions—what good will they do? Paulo Coelho wrote that “The world is changed by your example, not by your opinion.” Meaningful change in the world, granted, does not happen through mere words, but when backed by action. Yet now we have seen the tragedy of citizens being executed for expressing their first amendment rights to protest deportations and the violent and horrific methods used to confine undocumented immigrants who make our nation great.

• Shining in the midst: A dahlia, like all plants, purifies the air. They originated in Mexico. Karen Renae Bender writes, “The Aztecs…were known to cultivate Dahlia species in their gardens.” Their colonizers imported them to Europe in the 1800s.

• In the midst, it has seemed crass to promote my book— YELLOW— arriving on shelves in March.

• Even creating, creators say, has seemed frivolous in the midst. But because of it, in spite of it, in harmony or off-key, creators can’t stop. Here’s my friend Katy’s son, Jack Gerhard, singing this beautiful ballad “Kidnapped” about five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias. Asylum seekers from Ecuador, they were arrested on January 20 by ICE agents. Photographs soon went viral of 5-year-old Liam wearing a fluffy blue cap and a backpack, being held as he was detained by a federal agent dressed in black.

• Amidst it all, YELLOW is about connection, about how a unicellular organism, the physarum polycephalum, finds itself to know itself. Real and really spectacular, the slime mold becomes both in the book for my main character Z and her brother Clem.

• Thus, betwixt, I initiate a sequence: All Things Yellow— spurred by the years of the novel’s making—and this year when YELLOW will bloom.

• Stay tuned, Kindred Spirits ~~~

  & please share images of the yellow you see in your world…