Season 2, episode 12: borderline fortune //
Thursday, December 9, 2020

This is Shelter in Place, a podcast about coming together in a world that pulls us apart. From Oakland, California to Hamilton, Massachusetts, I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

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Teresa: This is the thing that my life has revolved around and it doesn't seem to be making me happy. It just seemed like a lot of pain and a lot of work for no reward. I was actually saying, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore. It's too painful.”

Why do we keep doing what we’re doing? How do we find meaning in each day? How do we experience joy no matter what else is going on around us?

I’ve found myself asking these questions a lot lately, but they’re not new. They’re the questions that undergird all of our lives, that make us feel hopeful or despondent depending on how we answer them. It’s a little easier to ignore them when things are going well, but when life feels hard, they can send us into a tailspin of despair. 

Homer’s Odyssey begins with a somber, depressed tone. Odysseus’s wife and son fear that they’ll never see him again. Odysseus himself is described as “heartsick,” having suffered “many pains,” and “weeping live warm tears” both over the friends he’s lost and how long he’s been away from home. It takes a king throwing Odysseus a party to change things. He gets Odysseus talking, telling stories, and that storytelling is what shifts the tone.

If you’ve been listening from the beginning of season 2, then you know that my family has been on its own Odyssey, traveling from one side of the country to the other after wildfires and pandemic living pushed us from our home. Along the way there have been some live warm tears, some heartsickness, and many pains. Especially this time of year, when the days are getting shorter and darker, when so many places are under stay at home orders, and the holidays remind us of how different this year is from years past, it can be easy to feel discouraged.

So in today’s episode, I’m going to do what I can to shift the tone. While I can’t throw you a party, I can do what Odysseus did: he told stories. Those stories didn’t change his circumstances, but they reminded him that there was some joy to be found in the journey. They helped him to reframe his experiences, and to remember that he wasn’t alone.

To help us with that, I want to introduce you to someone who is very dear to me. You’ve heard me mention my writing group of fourteen years several times, including in season 1, episode 34: Writing in Place, when I spoke with my friend and celebrated author Nina LaCour. Today I’m talking with another friend from that group.

Teressa K. Miller lives in Oregon, just outside Portland. She’s the lone poet in our writing group, but she’s also a fantastic essayist and has even penned some beautiful short stories. These days she works as a freelance editor and ghostwriter, but in past lives she’s been a special ed teacher in the Oakland Public School district, a horticulturist and climate activist, and has even had side careers as a massage therapist and yoga instructor while she was putting herself through multiple graduate degrees. 

Teresa has accomplished a lot. I’ll say more about that in a minute. But she’s also no stranger to life’s challenges. She’s cried her own live warm tears. She’s taught me a lot over the years about using art to engage life’s hard questions without being sunk by them.

Teresa grew up in Seattle, and as a teenager she sometimes attended writing events with her cousin, who was a published author. One of those events was the Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, Washington, where she got to sit in on workshops and readings. 

Teresa: There was something about seeing that modeled; it's like, this is how a professional writer conducts herself. This is what you do if you're a writer. That experience really lit a fire under me to start pursuing that path. I went to Centrum for their high school experiences and creativity program. We would give a reading at the end of the week. They really took us seriously and took our art seriously. And so by the time I got to college, I already had a clear idea that I was a writer.

Laura: Teresa attended Centrum seven times, and she got to work with poets who had won major awards, like the National Poetry Series. She didn’t yet know what those awards meant, but she would later.

Teresa: When I was in high school, I didn't have a sense of who was a successful writer and who wasn't a successful writer, just which writers did I like and who had a book. As far as I could tell, if you had a book you were successful, right? I didn't know about all these awards and sales numbers and marketing and publicists. I had a very, very vague sense of that from my cousin publishing her novels, but for me success was the high of writing a poem that I love. I wrote pretty much everything longhand in spiral bound notebooks, and I'd cross things out and rewrite and rewrite. So you might see the same poem six pages in a row that I was working on in my  notebook. That was success.

Even today, there really is an incomparable high from writing something I love. Nothing else really compares to that state of flow, and then sticking the landing and having it turn out the way that you envisioned, or at least a way that you love as much as the way that you envisioned when you embarked on the process.

Laura: After high school, Teresa attended Barnard College in New York, where she majored in history and minored in environmental science, but she continued studying poetry under the mentorship of the poet Saskia Hamilton. 

Teresa: We met every week and she helped me start to see what I thought a poem was. But even through college, it was still very much about did I love the work or not?

I went straight into the Mills MFA program out of college and I loved it. I’m so glad I went there. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything. But there was also somewhat of an artistic crisis that came along with that experience, because suddenly there was a ton of talk about who was selling their work and who wasn't? And what was a good journal and what wasn't? And what was a good press and what wasn't? Were people getting agents or not? 

One good piece of advice I got at Mills was from Steven Ratcliffe, who was my thesis advisor and my workshop instructor. He had us look at an anthology that had a bibliography of each poet's work. And he said, “okay, so, you know, here's her first book and it's published by blah, blah, blah, press. Never heard of it probably doesn't exist anymore. And here's her second book published by dada press. Never heard of it. That one's probably out of business now, too. And now you see here is her third book and it's with Omnidawn, and Omnidawn is still around. And that's a well respected small press. And then you see her next jump was WW Norton. That's how you build a literary career.” 

And I think in a lot of ways, that's great advice. You start where you can get your foot on the ladder and then you start climbing. And I took it very literally and seriously, and that's what I started doing. And I got my first few poems published my last semester at Mills. A year later I wrote a chat book, and I turned the chat book into a full length book. And that was a National Poetry Series finalist. And I thought, okay, I'm doing the thing. I'm climbing the ladder and following Steven's instructions. And then the book came out. It took a little longer than I thought it would. I went from 2008 to 2013 was when sped was finally published by Sidebrow. And at that point, I got all tied up in knots. Once that book came out, I felt like, okay, now it's all about books and it's about following that up. I had really ridiculous counterproductive goals for myself--like I had to have another book come out in two or three years, or I was going to become irrelevant.    

I had been shopping this other manuscript, California Building for years, practically since sped had come out, and it had been a National Poetry Series finalist, and a finalist other places as well. And it kept being a bridesmaid and not a bride. 

And this is the thing that my life has revolved around and it doesn't seem to be making me happy or going the way I thought it would. It's not working the way that I'm doing it. It just seemed like a lot of pain and a lot of work for no reward. I was actually saying, “I don't know if I want to do this anymore. It's too painful.” I had to get to the point of looking at, well, do I give it up?--which I was legitimately thinking about. But I think it became more am I willing to give up all of the trappings of art that aren't actually art?

I'd really lost sight of what success is. It was six years in. I'm not going to have that book out in two years, the followup book. When I finally set it down and stopped putting this artificial deadline on myself, and said, okay, I still believe in the work, but I'm going to start on something else. And this new thing that I'm starting on, I'm not going to have the simultaneous editor brain going, which is hard for me because I am an editor by trade. That's the main way that I make my living. But I had to turn off the idea of success and timelines and awards and publishers and editing, and what would somebody else think is a good poem? It wasn't about planning a book or figuring out which editor was going to love what I was doing before I'd even started it. It was really just this mental, physical, almost spiritual ritual of going back to how I used to write. I finished my revisions the weekend that the National Poetry Series closed and sent it in. 

Laura: The National Poetry Series is big. It’s a publication award, meaning that if you win, your manuscript gets published by a very prestigious press. It can skyrocket a writer’s career. It’s the establishment saying, “You Have Arrived.”

The manuscript that Teresa submitted is called Borderline Fortune. In June, she got the news that she was a finalist.

Teresa: And I thought, okay, here it was the third time I'd been a finalist. The eighth time I'd submitted. The fourth manuscript I'd submitted. It had been 14 years since the first time I'd ever submitted. And it was this new project that I did when I finally went back to my high school ethos, when I actually succeeded. 

And then the day after my birthday I got the call that I'd won. Now Borderline Fortune is going to come out in 2021. All those things are nice. It's nice to be published. It's nice to have awards. It's nice to have recognition and readership and work with great editors. I don't take any of that for granted. I'm super excited about this next step. 

And if I had the choice between all those things or feeling the high of loving the work that I'm doing, I would pick loving my work. I'd pick that high first, because if you don't have that, then you just have a job. And there are much easier, less tortuous jobs than creative work.

I think even if I hadn't gotten that email, staring down the despair and deciding, yes, I still want to do this--given the choice, it would be better to write something I love for myself and then detach from the results. And I think that's where I ultimately got. And so it's not that you can't professionalize or you can't submit to contests or you shouldn't, or you shouldn't try to publish. But there's a level of detachment that I think most people will ultimately have to cultivate. It does seem like there becomes a trade off between the essence of the art and the marketing of the art. And for me, it has to be about the work that I'm proud of, because just putting out any old book because it'll sell, or it'll get attention, it seems like such an empty endeavor. 

You really just have to figure out how to enjoy where you are. Otherwise there's no point, right? Because it's a choice to write. If you're not enjoying it, then stop. Sometimes taking a hiatus can be really good, to stop torturing yourself long enough to miss it, and then notice what it is that you're missing. And then go back to that part.

I’ll be right back with more of this story, right after this.

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Laura: Like Teresa, I started writing as a teenager because I loved it. I loved the way it made me feel when my friends sat in the back of the bus passing around the stories I wrote in spiral notebooks. I loved crafting tales about the tall blonde cornfed Todd falling for Ashley Winston, who looked and thought and was exactly like me. 

Over the years I had some great writing teachers, who helped me get better. Eventually I had my first story published. I won some awards. One of them came with an all-expense trip to New York to meet with agents and editors. I remember hearing that every single former recipient of that award had gone on to publish a book. I felt so hopeful, like I was on the path, doing what I loved and the world was affirming it.

But then there were many, many years when I did not publish a single story, when I sent out manuscript after manuscript of the novels I was writing, only to be told once again that the work was good, but it just wasn’t right for them. I could see myself improving and getting better. I’m still proud of that work today. But it wasn’t getting the recognition I’d longed for. I was no longer certain that it ever would. 

Teresa and the other women in my writing group saw me shed a lot of tears during those years. They were the ones who urged me to keep writing, to start something new, to get back to the love of the work, to let go of the need for affirmation.

When I began Shelter in Place, they listened, and encouraged me to keep going. After all of those years of not making it past the gatekeepers, I was taking the gatekeepers out of the equation. And at first, it was enough to just put out episodes. It was fun. 

I started hearing from listeners, and the work became even more rewarding. It felt like I was part of something bigger. And I started feeling like, okay, I’m doing the thing. I’m gaining listeners. I’m creating. Maybe in some small way I’m making a difference.

But over time, it became harder and harder to feel satisfied. I still believed in the work, but it felt like there was a disconnect between the quality of the work and the external validation--or lack thereof--it was getting. I would go deep emotionally to write a particularly challenging episode, and emerge feeling proud--only to realize that most of the people around me weren’t listening, or if they were, they had little to say.

My experience--and Teresa’s--isn’t unique to writing. So often the work we’re putting out doesn’t match up with the results. We tell ourselves that it’s enough to keep doing the thing we love, but we still long for proof from the outside world that we’re doing a good job. We want our kids to love us and become kind, respectful people. We want our parents and siblings to be proud of us. We want to know that we made someone’s life better, that in some tangible way, we’re making a difference. We know deep down that success and the praise of others won’t satisfy us, but we can no longer remember how we did the work without it. 

If we’re good at distracting ourselves, then maybe we can live this way. But often, we can’t. It’s why even the most successful people out there sink into depression, why we’ve lost people like Robin Williams and Anthony Bordain and--most recently in the news this week, Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos and the author of the best-selling, industry-changing book Delivering Happiness. Even people who have brought us so much joy and laughter and delight--people who have achieved more success than most of us could dream of--even they have asked those questions of meaning and purpose, and come up wanting. 

I want to stop here and say that as a person of faith, I do believe there are answers to these questions. Things like prayer and the wisdom of scripture and meditation and mindfulness can be lifelines in times of trouble. I’ve created a 1-page pdf on choosing gratitude that you can find on our website, with some practices that have really helped me. 

But all too often we offer these practices as pat answers when others are hurting deeply, when they feel alone, and don’t have the energy to take action. Like Odysseus, we need people to listen to our stories when we’re hurting, maybe even throw us a party.

Our writing group has been throwing an ongoing virtual party for Teresa ever since she got the news about winning the National Poetry Series. There have been a lot of celebratory emojis flying around our writing group text chain. We are all so proud of her. 

And she’s really excited about this next stage of her career. But she says that that process of finding her way back to the love of the work? That’s the thing that she’s most grateful for right now. Because after the book is out and the party is over, she’s still going to be writing poems--and the world will not always reward her for it. 

Teresa: Among the people I meet who aren't in the literary world, I get two standard lines about poems. One is “I just don't get poetry.” I hear those exact words from quite a few people. And the other is, “a poem can mean anything you want it to mean.” And so I think on the one hand, “I don't get poetry” implies that there's a code to crack, and they just don't have the skillset to crack it. And on the other hand, this idea that it means anything you want it to mean implies that there's no intention or inherent meaning in the poem. 

I think the truth is somewhere in between. You know, you could think about kind of a continuum between a recipe and a piece of abstract visual art. So with the recipe there's one meaning that's correct. And with the hundred percent abstract piece of visual art, there are probably tons of meanings that you could glean. And I think most poems fall somewhere in the middle. And there's a continuum even within poems. Some are very proselike and very narrative and very literal. And others are much more abstract and experimental. But I don't know of any poem that's really a recipe that only has one possible interpretation, and I don't know of many poems that don't mean anything to the point that you could just project anything you wanted onto them. 

It's a collaborative recursive process that goes into reading poems. Any kind of reading is collaborative to a certain extent. You know, one of the big things that you do when you teach a kid to read who's struggling is figure out how can you get some hooks of knowledge that they can hang onto as they go into a text. And adults do the same thing. We just don't realize that we're doing it most of the time if we're fluent readers. We bring our own knowledge bank and experience into a text. And if we're engaged and we're not letting our mind wander, then we're asking questions as we go, and making hypotheses, and bringing up pieces of our own personal history and things we've seen in the news. We're constantly making these little connections. 

I think a poem requires more of that and it's less linear than say, if you sat down to read a novel. For the most part, if you're reading a novel, you're not going to go back and reread sections of it as you go. You might reread a paragraph if you lost your place, or you might reread a sentence if you're really savoring it, but given the length of a novel and the general linearity of a novel, you're going to read it from start to finish and glean the meaning in that one pass. 

I don't know that it's possible to read very many poems in one pass. And the good news is they're shorter than a novel. I think one of the reasons why people think they don't “get” poetry is because they come to it trying to read it like prose: one pass, let it wash over them, and then they say “I don't get it.” 

If I'm reading a poem--even one that's relatively proselike, that initial letting it wash over me, that's just step one. And that can be a really enjoyable experience just to kind of let it wash over me. But then I go back and read it again and see what starts to emerge from the haze, what becomes a little bit clearer, which images jump out or general themes. And then another pass would be based on those images or themes; what is it trying to do? Because not every poem is trying to tell a story or have a moral or send a message. It might almost be trying to evoke an experience or there's a certain cadence and use of language that's trying to mimic a physical sensation. I mean, there are a lot of different things that a poem could be trying to do, but I can kind of go back to it then with another pass of my hypothesis, and more clarity will start to come to me. And in general with a poem I really love, by the time I feel like I understand it, I pretty much have it memorized. Like that's how many times I will have read it. Not everybody loves that process, but it can be very rewarding. And I think most people could “get” poetry if they were willing to take a different reading sensibility towards it. 

Edward Hirsch wrote a really great book called How to Read a Poem, and he brings a lot of love to that book, rather than breaking it down into the mechanics of this is how you get it right. When you read a poem, he talks more about why are you reading a poem? And what are all the great experiences you can get out of reading a poem? And sort of coming to the poem instead of with fear and trepidation about whether you're going to crack the code correctly, how can your excitement to meet the poem, wherever it is, help you gain understanding of it and engage in that collaborative process?

I think a lot more people could enjoy poetry and feel like they understand it if they had that permission to be a little bit more creative in figuring out their hypothesis as they go and just doing an experiment and trying it, and what do they think it means? And read it again. And does that hold up?

Laura: I think reading poetry in this way has made me a better writer. But it’s also helped to give me some perspective on life. Because poetry is a lot like life. Sometimes we don’t get it right away. Sometimes the best we can do is let it wash over us, and observe how we’re feeling. Sometimes it takes a while for insight and understanding to emerge from the haze. Sometimes we need to sit with it, revisit ideas, connect them with our own experiences, and ask not what they mean, but why we’re doing them in the first place. Sometimes we need other people to show us how. Not everybody loves that process, but it can be very rewarding.

Teresa’s first book is called sped. I’ve had the experience of working through those poems in the way Teresa’s talking about, and it is rewarding. Even years later, I find new windows into her words, into the time when Teresa wrote them, when we were first becoming friends during some of the hardest months of her life. 

Teresa: Some poems are trying to tell a story. You know, there are narrative poems, but not all of them are. And that's probably where most people get tripped up with poetry; they bring that narrative mindset to things that aren't narrative. And so against the narrative yard stick, it doesn't make any sense and it's not enjoyable, you know. But they need to use a different lens.

My work probably falls somewhere in the middle. It's not narrative, but it's not entirely abstract either. And I think my first book was intimidating to people just formally, because it didn't look like other poems that they'd seen. 

With sped, I wrote the first section of that book, Forever No Lo, a little more than a year after my father was killed by a street racing teenager in Seattle. My dad was out riding his bike and it was super important for a 17-year-old to get ahead in a street race. And so he drove up onto the bike path to get around a semi-truck and he hit my dad. And that was that. And, you know, I say that was that, because it was quick. But it'll be 15 years in March that that happened. And in some ways that's still the most formative experience of my life. I've committed myself to the journey over those 14 and a half years of figuring out how to make sense of what happened and integrate it into my life in a way that doesn't keep me in a holding pattern forever. But certainly at the time that I wrote Forever No Lo I was pretty deeply in a holding pattern. Some things had changed. I had recently gotten out of an extremely toxic much too long relationship. There was enough movement, I think, from that transition to let me actually come to the page and write that chapbook.

But at the same time, I was engaging in very repetitive kinds of thoughts. And that's what trauma is: it's kind of a snag in the space time continuum, where the psyche fragments to a certain extent and then just repeats over and over and over and over again. The book enacts that. The mechanism of the language enacts trauma. And I don't think I knew that when I was writing it.  My subconscious put this thing in there that I didn't even see at the time, but there it is. One of the things that it tries to do is bring the reader along into how the mind works in grief, and that extremely recursive process, and so there's the sense of you could start anywhere and end anywhere and split and recombine parts of the piece. There are a lot of ways that the language could be sliced and diced and reassembled to make meaning, because I was very fragmented at the time that I wrote it. And I was writing about an even more fragmented time. The trauma for my father, but then also the experience teaching special education in a school district falling apart.

One of my coworkers who said she didn't read very much, and thought of herself as the least qualified to understand a poem, she bought the book, went home, came back the next day and said, “I'm so moved by all the things you have about working with the kids and what that experience is like and how their minds work.” And here was this person who thought she was the least qualified to understand poems, who just went full steam ahead. We ended up having such a great conversation. She had one of the most incisive readings of the book, and I felt like, you know, she really got it.

Laura: I asked Teresa to give us a window into her most recent book, Borderline Fortune, and to read a couple of poems from it.

Teresa: One of the things that this latest book is grappling with is inheritance, but not primarily literal physical inheritance of objects or money. I'm more interested in the inheritance of mindsets and challenges and traumas that are passed through the generations. I have a lot of addiction and mental health struggles and also interesting stories of perseverance on both sides of my family. And I've become more conscious in the last two or three years of how the experiences of people I never knew shape how I see the world. My great, great grandmother was long gone by the time I came on the scene, but actually my grandmother knew her. She was one of my primary caretakers. And I think part of that interest comes from the fact that my father was an extremely relentless genealogist. By the time he died, he had tens of thousands of names in his database, and he was killed in 2006, so that was before you could spit in a test tube and click through ancestry.com and have it tell you who you are. You know, he was taking grave rubbings of headstones and knocking on random people's doors in rural Iowa. He was really a detective in a lot of ways.

His mother died of cancer when I was four, and he had been extremely close to her and was grieving her. And so it set him off on this Odyssey of trying to reconstruct the family on paper. It kind of sent me on a similar Odyssey once I lost him, of feeling like I needed to look backward in time and think about how I got here and how what seemed like our individual choices and experiences and struggles end up echoing through the generations in a very literal way. That's one of the things that this latest book is grappling with. 

Insert poems.

Laura: Teresa isn’t just looking at inheritance as it relates to generations past. She’s thinking about the ways that she can change the course of life for future generations.

Teresa: When my father was killed, the kid who killed him was 17, and the DA wanted to try him as an adult. And my mom and I persuaded them not to. So he was tried as a juvenile instead, and he had a very small sentence as a result. We knew from experience with a family member who was wrongfully incarcerated for almost seven years that there's no restoration that comes from imprisonment, particularly for a 17-year-old. What is left to him but misconduct? If his adult life begins in prison, what is left to him? We never really let people serve their time. For the rest of his life, he would have trouble getting housing, getting jobs, but we somehow expect him to learn a lesson and become a productive member of society.

What will we do with what we know about how we've behaved or how our ancestors behaved? How can we make amends in a way that isn't about domination or revenge? 

I think so much of what's happening right now politically is coming from just such a limited toolkit. It's about one side dominating the other side. And even the idea that there are only two sides is so artificial, right? There's nothing natural about a red team and a blue team. And I say this as a committed progressive, who was a union organizer and climate activist. And I'm not promoting some sort of watered down, moderate compromise. That's not what I'm saying. But at some point

We're just going to have to be willing to model alternative ways of interacting in the world, some way of finding common interests rather than defending positions.

And that's kind of negotiating 101. I'm not sure where we lost sight of that in politics, but instead of getting so attached to labels, figuring out what is our common interest, because even as polarized as we are in this country, there are a lot of common interests, right? We want to be safe. We want to be able to support ourselves and support our families. We want a world that's inhabitable for us and that's inhabitable for future generations. 

I'm talking about something that transcends the debate that we're having right now, where we could think more expansively and more creatively about how to move forward. What is the next step that you could take that would move you forward and not simply recapitulate what's already been happening that isn't working? How might you find common cause with your neighbors, with your community, with people you don't necessarily agree with to make progress or at least reduce harm? I mean, we need to start breaking out of the rut. We need to start looking to those examples of where actual movement is happening, and then how can we replicate, scale up, borrow, adapt those kinds of approaches? Because the old way is not working. And I'm hoping that people are reaching a point of exhaustion with the current divisiveness, regardless of where they fall. 

Laura: I don’t know exactly what it would take for us to break out of the rut. The best I can come up with is that whether we’re talking about our divided country or our own discontented lives, we can learn a lot from Teresa’s reading of a poem. 

If we’re feeling stuck, like we’re just not getting it, we can remember that sometimes life, like poetry, requires multiple readings. And that first reading--that feeling that washes over us--is only the first reading. There are layers to be peeled back, deeper insights to gain, when we ask not just what life means, but what it’s trying to teach us.

If the things that used to give you joy have got you tied up in knows, or have just become a job, take a step back. Slow down. Start something new, just for the joy of doing it.

And finally, when the need for approval and affirmation from others is pressing in on you, reframe that longing as a signal. When we’re craving approval, what we really need is connection, some proof that we’re not alone in the struggle. Reach out to someone. Remember Odysseus. How it was telling his stories that changed the tone. Maybe it’s time to tell yours, or to invite someone else to theirs.

That’s three things a poem can teach us: allow for multiple readings, enjoy the process, and know when to ask for help.

We’re thinking a lot about these things at Shelter in Place, and we’re dreaming up ways beyond the podcast to bring them to your life. I’ve been ending each episode with an invitation. Today, I want to invite you to accept a gift we’d like to give you, to say thank you for listening to Shelter in Place, for giving this work meaning. 

During the holiday season, we’ll be sending little gifts of delight to your inbox. These are things we’ve been gathering for months, things that have encouraged us or made us laugh, that we’re really excited to send you because we think they’ll put a smile on your face. If you’d like to receive our little gifts of delight, make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter at shelterinplacepodcast.info. You’ll also find show notes and ways to support the show.

We’d also love to hear your requests, of things that would make your day during this holiday season. We might even include them in the gifts we’ll be sending. You can reach out to us at hello@shelterinplacepodcast.info. Send us a message, or even a voice memo. We’d love to hear from you. 

As always, if you listen to the end of the episode, you’ll hear Shelter in Place outtakes, a little something to make you laugh. But first, if Shelter in Place has provided a home for you in 2020, we’d love to hear about it! We hope you’ll take a moment to rate and review Shelter in Place on Apple Podcasts so others can find us, too. You can also send us a message on Instagram or Facebook at the handle shelterinplacepodcast, and on Twitter at laurajoycedavis. 

The Shelter in Place music was created by Chase Horsman at Reaktor Productions. Additional music and sound effects for this episode come from Storyblocks. Nate Davis is our creative director, Sarah Edgell is our design director, and our amazing season 2 apprentices are Fatima Romero-Afi and Sarai Waters. Shelter in Place is a Hurrdat Media production. 

Until next time, this is Shelter in Place. I’m Laura Joyce Davis.

Continuing this episode’s literary theme, here’s a reading of The Cat in the Hat, by our 3-year-old Mattéa:

Don’t worry if you didn’t get all of that. It might take multiple readings.

Teresa K. Miller won the 2020 National Poetry Series with Borderline Fortune (Penguin, October 2021), having previously placed as a finalist with two other manuscripts. A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, she is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.

You can find links to Teresa’s work at teresakmiller.net/bio. Pre-orders of Borderline Fortune will be available in mid-2021, and she encourages you to consider placing your order through Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company. In the meantime, her first book, sped, is available directly from Sidebrow or through Small Press Distribution.