Back to the Garden

Back to the Garden is a carefully curated selection of the authors favorite poems, essays, and letters from her first four published works, accompanied by brand new botanical illustrations. It borrows its title from a line in the song "Woodstock," which Joni Mitchell first performed live at the 1969 Big Sur Folk Festival.

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

A message from the author:

When I wrote my first book in 2019, and published it in early 2020, I was an entirely different version of myself than I am now. The same, of course, can be said for each subsequent book, as we are malleable creatures in perpetual metamorphosis. Each book is a time capsule of who I was when I wrote it, with a personality and energy of its own:

This is Just What it's Like Sometimes is raw and hopeful-an exercise in processing grief and healing through heartbreak. Many of the essays are about personal growth and autonomy. Writing this book helped me reclaim myself in the face of great loss, and I am who I am today because of it.

Three Whiskey's Deep was written during the most isolating months of the pandemic, poems spontaneously punched out on my vintage typewriter and later fleshed out into their final form. It is existential and cosmically inclined. Writing this book helped me navigate the deepest depressive state of my life thus far by serving as a constant reminder that no one is alone in this uncertain place.

In the Fullness of Time is tender, nostalgic, and luminous. I wrote about my childhood and about being a single mother. And I wrote letters to men I have loved, letters to help me forgive and say goodbye. Writing this book helped me heal parts of my inner child, and led me home to myself.

The Spectrum of Visible Light was born in the dawn of my 40th year and written throughout its various stages as a reflection on my own experience of aging. It is, at its core, an ode to slowness and softness as ways of being. I published this book after spending close to a year sitting in daily meditation; it is my first and only published work that does not contain a single piece about a romantic interest, and as such, feels as though it is the most me of all four.

Over the course of a year, I combed through these books and pulled out my personal favorites, compiling them into what will bookend this era of my expansion and writing career. Each written work is accompanied by an illustration, inspired by nature and drawn either in my art studio in the Sierra Nevada foothills while listening to folk music on vinyl, or in the treehouse during my morning rituals. I am honored that you would bring this collection of my work into your libraries and sacred spaces.