I’m taking a break from this project. I’ll update this page when subscriptions are open again.
To Make a Prairie
To Make a Prairie is a small zine that you'll receive in the mail each week. It's a bit like a periodical, a bit more like a letter from a friend. This weekly zine will be personal, like so much of my writing—something funny, something sad, a reflection on whatever I've thought about or learned that week. The name of the project is taken from a poem by Emily Dickinson:
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
I found the poem during a period of deep quiet, after I had experienced months of illness and social isolation and was craving connection and meaning. Reading it sparked a sense of excitement about creating things that I hadn't felt in some months. There I was, feeling very much like a lone bee—so maybe this zine could be the clover, the beginning of some beautiful new growth.
This project started as a Kickstarter campaign, and afterward I continued taking sign-ups here on my website. I wrote the zine and sent it out to subscribers each week for six months of 2021, and it was an interesting, challenging, and very healing experience. I plan to continue the project in the future, so please check back again soon for more information.