Anticipating our first Cross, I was like, “Yay, Jenny’s going to come back and talk about more vampire stuff, there’s so much juice there! It’s going to be more about the vampires and Midway!” I remember the feeling of excitement to meet with her, go sit in a cafe, it felt like I was going on some really exciting creative adventure. So when Jenny shared the song and these amazing words and quotes of Nabokov and others, I was suprised — not vampires!

 

There’s something about the way that she explodes an idea. Her process of thinking and following ideas, different from mine, was enlivening and provoking — an invitation to tilt how I approach things.

 

I discovered that, all the time, I was holding Helices and this process in the back of my mind. Wherever I was out in the world, whatever I was reading or seeing, kept getting filtered through the helix. And so what actually landed on the page was, first, a response to an artifact that I’d picked up on our first meeting/walk: a bunch of autumn oak leaves. I was also reading A Botanical Abecedarian, which I found very provocative, and which included information about the Chthulucene — a kind of timeplace for “learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying in responsibility on a damaged Earth.” This resonated with me, so I decided to cut out quotes from the book.