The ocean always feels like coming home, like my pen to the page. The setting for the act of writing matters inside and outside of the words. There is an art to finding the right place to create, what land, what ancestors, and what stories that live inside the rock and by reproduction, sand—will reveal themselves.
Costa Rica ’05
I have a history with beaches and oceans across the world, a history still in its infancy when I think about how many more my soul wants to visit. And places I choose to write, to draw inspiration in sand, like the images that indigenous man drew in the dirt for me in that dream of fire and horses and the cave that would become my Inipi lodge for years, sitting in circle with women in prayer.
Women have always played a prominent role. I like the nurturing ones who mother me where my biological madre never could. I fall in love with those women in their deeply welcoming hearts.
I went to the ocean with the one I loved for nine years more times than I could ever account for. That’s where it started: we fell in love there in the kissing tree, we slept on the beach all night in that rare Fire Island safe gay haven and woke to the sun rising over the surf. I later learned that’s how Frank O’Hara died right there on the same beach—a dune buggy ran him over in the dark, didn’t see him in the sand. She and I always talked about going to Hawaii but we never made it. Sometimes she’d have that look on her face and I’d ask her what it was. “That one is for me,” she’d say. I’d smile out of respect for her sovereignty.
Fire Island ’07
I have longed to write for women, but I’ve hesitated. Men were always simpler. When I decided I was ready I knew it had to be a sexy place. “Do I want sexy city or sexy country?” I’m writing about sexual people: I will go to Paris.
I had a three-week semester break. An apartment fell into my hands. I booked a flight on Christmas and I was in Paris the first week in January.
Each morning I’d choose an arrondissement to explore, find a café, drink espressos and write. In the afternoon I’d adventure in Montmarte, following Hemingway, de Beauvoir, Sarte, Morrison and Picasso through cemeteries and cobblestone and old haunts. It was a writer’s pilgrimage across a well-worn urban journey, like an old book with rounded corners fraying and bent from the love of so many readers who came before.
Mexico ’10
I don’t understand French so I just observed Parisian sexy while I wrote, immersed in my desire to write to women without knowing exactly what was going on around me. It was a different language, one of seduction and play and I could voyeur from my cocoon while life happened without my needing to be much involved. I wrote the last chapter on my last morning in Paris. The attitude, the beauty, the allure of pan au chocolate and warm baguettes, wine and an old city supporting the ideas I unhinged.
Then the book sat for two years while everything in my life changed. I moved to the desert mountains in wine country and found myself in a beach trip famine. I longed to go back to the sea. I knew the homecoming would help me find the poetry and stories that will inspire connection and expansion to a more universal narrative. I let my period of life reclamation eclipse my writing life over that two-year span.
Hawaii ’14
I kept remembering that time the summer after the breakup when I foolishly listened to Sarah McLaughlin’s Tumbling Towards Ecstasy in its entirety as I drove to the Fire Island ferry, crying hysterical tears the whole way. When I finally arrived on the beach and I heaved my grief into the sand, my yoni opened to the water, making love back in her familiar bed. I plunged my fingers into my own swollen rubyfruit flesh, aroused and plump with grief and release, right there on that beach. Sex is like that sometimes.
Maui was an island I’d never seen. No distracting human memories, no prior story. I don’t know which part of her called me home, but I knew it was time to bring in the dancing light on water, the cloud walk in the heaven of Hanelakela, the leaning windy palms, the sun on my face; the natural eroticism of beach and the spirit of women who could hold and nurture me as I birth.
I have waited too long too many times. This time there would be no waiting. There would be dreaming and lust and new experiences that open my writing like lovemaking, like a fantasy, like a sovereign journey that is “just for me.”
