Hello my beautiful Write Queeners,

I want to share something very special with you. If you haven't had the chance  to look at my previous post (Open Letter to Sonia Sanchez) from earlier, you should do so now to understand what's going on with this post.

But first I want to share a little story.

This morning, I had a case of the Monday Blues: The Writer's Edition. I felt that I was not being true to myself and the writer in me. I was upset that I did not have the time to write because I was rushing to work. When I realized that I would have no time to draft any of my thoughts, the first thing that popped into my head was: Don't quit your job today. It was a little unsettling. But it continued to drum through my head like a mantra. I had to keep repeating it. To calm this thought, I treated myself to Starbucks, despite my recent vow to save money. This is how low I felt.

Now let's back track a little. My previous post from the twilight hours, which is a letter to Sonia Sanchez, was a part of an assignment from an online writing course that I am currently taking called Digging Deep, Facing Self (whew, run on much?) I had to send a message, along with a poem to someone I greatly admire, but have never met or spoken to.

So I chose Sonia Sanchez.

I sent this to the publicity team of her publisher, listed on her website. I sent it with a quivering hand and let the universe have a go at words she may never see.

After having a mini breakdown in my head, I posted these thoughts in the course's super secret online meeting place. Feeling a little better about sharing these thoughts, I signed into my personal e-mail on my phone, since I was about to take lunch.

I found something that shocked me into almost a crying mess at my desk. There was a response to the e-mail I sent to Sonia Sanchez!

I read it...and then sat at my desk whispering Oh my god, over and over again.

Then I had to go into the bathroom and cry.

As I told my cousin earlier, I have never felt so blessed to receive an e-mail. I didn't even know what to do with myself.

Here's what was said (parts of the e-mail omitted for privacy):


From: Nicholas DiSabatino
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2013 9:16 AM
To: 'info@crodonline.info'
Subject: Sonia Sanchez

Christina,

My name is Nicholas DiSabatino and I’m the publicity assistant at Beacon Press. Thanks for the lovely words regarding Sonia and her work. I’ll make sure she sees your note. Thanks again.

　
Nicholas DiSabatino

Publicity Assistant

Beacon Press

25 Beacon Street

Boston, MA 02108



Then there was a second e-mail:

On Jul 22, 2013, at 12:08 PM, Nicholas DiSabatino notsharinghisemail@beacon.org wrote:

Hi again Christina,

Sonia Sanchez was very touched by your message. She asked me to send you the following response (Ms. Sanchez unfortunately does not use email). Here is her message as dictated to me below:

Sister Christina,

Thank you so very much for your beautiful words and your beautiful haiku. Please continue to write. We need your young words. We need your beautiful words, moving in the light that is peace, love, and justice. I would love to send you an autographed copy of Morning Haiku and one of my other books. Please email us your address .

In love/struggle/peace,

Sister Sonia Sanchez

-
Thanks.



To this I responded:

From: CRod Online <info@crodonline.info>
Date: July 22, 2013, 1:06:32 PM EDT
To: Nicholas DiSabatino noyoucantsee@beacon.org
Subject: Re: Sonia Sanchez

Hi Nicholas,

Tell her thank you from the bottom of my heart. Her words mean more to me than you ever know. 

I can't stop saying oh my god. People in my office must think I am nuts. 

My address is: Omitted

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

---

Christina D. Rodriguez

Now I want to quit my job because Sonia Sanchez said to continue writing, haha. I kid though. This is such a humbling honor for me, for her to have sent that message. I know I will carry this with me for a while. I wanted to share this to prove that if you take a risk and put yourself out there (whether someone gently pushes you or not), that the return can be pretty incredible.

Let's start taking more risk together Write Queeners. The journey is going to be wild.

EDIT:

This evening I was listening to my voicemail as I (sometimes) do and I just discovered that she left me a voicemail!!! Ms. Sanchez wanted to make sure that I reached out to them with my contact information for the books! And she thanked me again for my words. Oh my goodness!

I cried for 20 minutes after I heard that. I am trying to find ways to save the voicemail now. I am in awe and incredibly touched. 

ANOTHER EDIT - 7/23/13:

I called the number she left this morning, thinking it was the number to the press. It wasn't the number to the press! It was hers! I spoke to Sonia Sanchez on the phone! We had a seven minute conversation (according to my job phone).

What we talked about, I would like to keep to myself because this last surprise in this adventure was totally unexpected and amazing. All I will say is that if I can be an ounce of who she is when I grow older, my life would be complete. She is a beautiful run-on sentence - that's the best way I can describe the experience of speaking with her.

Be blessed!

Dear Ms. Sanchez,

...or may I call you Sonia? I hope that you will call me Christina, if we shall ever have the pleasure to communicate. 

I have long admired you quietly, but thought it time to take the risk and reach out to share.  

I have heard your name for years among the greats. As a foolish, unwise lover of poetry, I did not always pay attention. One day, I was wandering in a bookstore and I saw your name. Attached to your name was the title of a book called Morning Haiku. Knowing that most haiku I have read lacked something I found in my own love of haiku, I proceeded with caution. 

I flipped to the middle of the book. And I was blown.

For the first time in my life, I saw part of myself reflected in a living, breathing writer. Most writers who I admire are no longer on this earth. Have you read Clarice Lispector's Stream of Life? That explains a core I am still trying to scribe everyday. Anais Nin's House of Incest? Scary and beautiful language. Similar thoughts without the whole incest aspect. But I digress. This is about you. 

...and what I have found in you, your writing. Your haiku. I was once told by a fellow writer that he did not care for my short pieces of writing. With this in mind, I've been scared to turn to the simplest form of thought. I thought to myself Who writes haiku these days, especially the way I write it, what I write about? Then I found Morning Haiku.

Your book taught me it was okay to be myself. I am a love poet. A haiku poet. Sometimes I am long and drawn out, but most of the time, I am flashes of light.

I turn to Morning Haiku when I need to be breathless, to study form and format for my own book of haiku, to share with a man who I may want to look into my soul.

Your words are water, sin, light, cupcakes, and kisses. I can dip into your writing and find a prayer to life every time. 
 
Before I was able to buy the book, I would make trips through train and bus to the bookstore and read random pages from it. Afraid to fall in love with something I could not have, I did not read it cover to cover. 

The day I was finally able to purchase a copy, I read the introduction, haikuography as I was slowly making my way to the register, and knew exactly what you were talking about:

from the moment i opened that book, and read the first haiku, i slid down onto the floor and cried, and was changed. i had found me.

I stopped for a moment and did just that.

Thank you for being the epitome of greatness.



P.S. Inspired by greatness and attached with offering & love:

Woman

i.

shy smile
tugs the hearts
of my lovers
 
ii.
curves dragging
eyes from door
to edges of seats

iii. 
caramel sticky
skin wished
for cupped hands
 
iv.
laughter of bells
down to earth
bangle adorned wrists

v. 
ease of lips
etch-a-sketched
in hearts instantly
 

vi.
warm fleshed out
rib cages heave
in tune to banter

vii.
coiled lock
& finger around
the base of your neck
 
viii.
balmy, loose
air of her comfortably
leans into your frame

ix.
i can see why she's perfection. i can nearly love her too...
if it wasn't for you.


Always,


Christina

---

This course is making me braver everyday. I would have never written something like this and then actually send it. I wanted to show you guys what I said. I like to share sometimes, sue me. 

Here's to digging deep and facing myself in more ways than one.

Hello my lovely Write Queeners,

I know the weekend bought upon a range of emotions from the news of the Zimmerman case.

For me, I had a moment of vulnerability where I have a heart to heart with my womb about the fear of having a son, especially a dark-skinned son (if you have seen pictures of my boyfriend, you'll see why).

From there I got into heated debates with people on Facebook. That was exhausting. The only thing I&apos;ll say about that is that some people will never be compassionate towards other cultures and will always have the "victim" mentality.

But I am not here to write about that today. I want to talk about how I have been 'digging deep and facing self'.

I have survived my first week of my writing course. In a short period of time, I have already grown fond of the beautiful ladies that I have been working with. We are all experiencing the pain and beauty of every day life and amazingly have been sharing it together.

The writing assignments have been challenging because I haven't been forced to confront such uncomfortable feelings in a while. I'm learning a lot about myself and some of it, I really want to change.

Today I am having trouble with our prompt. Not because of its emotional aspects, but of how I chose to do the previous exercise. They are related to each other and I actually have to use the previous one to do this one. Without revealing what I am learning from the course (not my material to give away), I have to say how you choose to interpret instructions in the begining will have a consquence if you have to do more on the topic or related to the topic.

You're probably like, "I don't know what's she's talking about since she can't tell me about the exercise." I will share the pieces when I finish the course and maybe give you a hint on how they came about. But if you really want to know, you should take a course with Caits - my awesome birthday twin and a fantastic writer.

I just wanted to share the thoughts with you. I promise that my next post will make sense.

Peace my loves. Till next time.

dear womb, 

as you tick tock with expectations, let me warn you - this is not the place

you want to be.

we both know that if you are filled with innocence, it would be the color of brown, an earthly shade with a dark past.

if you are filled with gender, it would be phallic and tender, with no true way to protect it from harm.

our daughters are put through the ringer and can be molded into pillars despite tragedy, 

but our little boys are expected to come out fighting with no mercy; the casualties swept up into a pile of statistics.

a man is a man in the eyes of a man, despite mothers who try to hold on to their little boys every time the street lights came on.

those little boys are always thrown into the path of men, who don't remember what it's like to have scrapped knees kissed by their mothers.

they only remember their first encounters with manhood and how they were told not to cry 

where childhood was dropped on the ground like a bag of skittles, spilling fast into a battle of survival of the fittest

pieces of rainbows spinning aimlessly on the pavement, coloring a war unwarranted.

experience will teach the power hungry how to quiet their demons by suddenly making a mother bend over in pain, 

feeling her womb drain out of life as she waits for her baby to come. 

when she gets that phone call, that visit to her door, her womb becomes devoid of stars. nights suddenly become her worst enemy.

i do not want you to feel that kind of pain womb. 

i'll quietly wait for this world to learn what it's like to give birth and to see death before your time,

because i do not want you to tremble at the thought of bringing a son into this world, where a bag of skittles is considered a threat. 

please forgive me for letting you tick on. 

Write Queeners,

I am going to share snippets of a journey I am taking. I don't know how often, but it will be for the next 28 days. I have gotten through Day 1, a private beginning for now. Day 2...well I already feel like running away so I can write this feeling everyday.

I will only share my thoughts. I will not break the sacred circle that has already formed with my group. But I also feel that you, my readers, deserve a sneak peek into my thoughts at least, because this is going to be a scary journey.

I believe it is my responsibility as a writer to share what I was never taught.

This morning I tried a method called morning pages, writing three pages right when I get up and then not being able to look back.

I shared this thought with the group:

Morning pages will be the toughest for me. I'm scared to be so ordinary. I have this notion as a writer that you must always be brilliant, even though I know it's in the ordinary where beauty can emerge. I am doing it by hand so it's even tougher. Technology has crippled my organic ability to scribe. I replaced methods a long time ago. I'm beyond composition notebooks. I need instant gratification through typing. 

I shut my journal right away, but the thought that has stood with me, which I don't think I wrote quite this way in the journal is:

Eye guck, no glasses, morning relief withheld until completion. 

___

I look forward to seeing how this challenge changes me. I will keep you posted.

Good morning Write Queeners.

Happy fourth of July Write Queeners!


What can I say about the month of June? What has happened? A bunch of disappointment and confusion! I have received rejections from every direction.

From a job that I really wanted to my manuscript, rejection was the theme of June.

But I am okay.

Why? Honestly, I don't know. 

I cried. I silently screamed why. I went through all of the motions of rejection. But I still feel okay and I'm willing to go on (with my work of course, don't think so dramatically!).  If this was a year ago, I would have stopped or beat myself up for months. 

I sit here and wonder why I am so cool, calm, and collected as a whole to such a high amount of rejections in one month. I'm used to getting rejections with my writing, but this was one after another. Most of these were paid submissions too, so it should seem like I threw money away. Yet, I felt only an ache after reading each one. 

And the job? A web editor for my favorite nationally recognized literary magazine (not naming names because of visibility reasons). My absolute dream job. Waited for a month to hear something, anything. I checked my e-mail obsessively throughout the day, I kept checking my phone for a missed call or voicemail. I kept picturing my life as though I had the job already. It sparked in me a motivation I have not felt in a while. 

Then one day, while I was sitting at work, I checked my e-mail. 

In my inbox was an e-mail from the editor of the magazine, an e-mail that has a fifty percent of being generated, saying that they have found their candidate for the job and wishing me good luck with my job search and writing. I sat at my desk at work, trying not to cry. Of course that wasn't working so I quickly darted to the bathroom to let out a good cry. 

I realized while I was sitting in there that I cried for two reasons. One was because I was hurt, but the second reason was odd: I felt relief.

Then I realized that relief came from finding out and learning that while maybe I was qualified, I still had to go through other things before I was given such a gift.

Rejection isn't just about not being good enough. The best of the best have all been rejected at one point or another. Rejection is also a way of the higher powers that be telling you that maybe you aren't ready yet. It would be amazing if every time we went for something that it would be ours instantly. But how would we appreciate that victory? Would we even put in work to get it? I think that we would have a lot of cocky people who would create equally cocky work if it was that way. 

I'll take my hurt and humble and continue to grow until the right opportunity comes along and we are ready for each other.

So reject me! Something better is coming my way anyway.

In other news, I just turned 27 two days ago. I think it's going to be magical age so world, look out for me!

In the meantime, check out the Late Night Feelings blog about my chapbook publishing adventures. I finished my second manuscript, Home Sweet Home this past month. Let's see what happens!