Hello. My name is Aleathia Drehmer and I am a very lazy blogger.
As you can tell, I never really made it through the poem a day in April this year, but for good reason. I had some health issues that required surgery in May of this year and I just wasn’t feeling up to much of anything to be honest. It was work, eat, sleep, repeat…though sometimes that sleeping part wasn’t really working. I did my best to maintain daily functions and maybe squeak out some art here and there, but it was lackluster at best.
Since recovering from surgery, I have been a very busy lady. We are full swing in garden season and the wild weather made for slow starts but we are definitely about to be drown in 6 kinds of tomatoes. When the Cherokee purple, Bid Daddy, and Yellow Pear decided they probably weren’t going to grow, I went to the farmer’s market and bought 4 heirloom tomato varieties. Well…EVERYTHING is coming up. I will soon be begging people to take tomatoes from me. This is a great problem to have I realize in the age of parasitic veggie infections and the price of food in this country. I have been giving away extra to family, friends, and neighbors because that is the type of life I want to live. Not everything needs to be monetized in life. Being a good neighbor feels nice.
I would love to say that I have been writing up a storm, but I have not. This is possibly the dryest writing spell of my life, but I am not stressing about it. I think the way I am writing these days is more in book form rather than one offs. I often wonder if there might come a time when I feel I have said all I have to say. That feels really sad to think about, but the more I let go of the traumas of my past and live in the moment, the less there needs to be said. The poems have always been love letters to the damaged child inside me, trying to help her grow up and see the world through a different lens and sometimes those poems have helped other people. I continue to love writing and part of me has been thinking about the first novel I wrote and how I want to re-write it through a different lens that I could not see through when I first wrote it. And part of me is also thinking about finishing the second novel I wrote. I got about 7 chapters in and couldn’t figure out how to pull of my wild ideas so I put it away.
Currently, I have a beautiful book of poetry out called Quiet Underpinnings from Roadside Press. It has stunning artwork from a friend, Anastasiya Fluegel.
Prior to surgery at the end of May, I went to Connecticut to my old hometown for some inspiration to finish a book about my parents. I write about them a lot and not always in a good light because my childhood was less than pleasant, but I felt that carrying around this pain was so heavy that I started to forget the good times. The book is nearly finished if I get around to it, but in the making of it, I was able to really see what life would have been like for them as young parents in a time when women couldn’t have credit cards and men were disenfranchised from life after the Viet Nam War. It changed my perspective on what I thought was a life without very much attention or affection. They didn’t have it to give, they didn’t know what they were doing. I was able to stop and see one of my remaining uncles that still lived there and found out some other truths I had not been privvy to. I was also gifted the one item I wanted from my grandmother after she passed. They had saved it for me for nearly 10 years because they didn’t have my address. Communication is the most important thing in the world people. No one alive is reading minds like we think they are, they need to know things out loud.
We also went down to the coast of Connecticut to see our friend we like to call “Festival Dave” because we only ever saw him at festivals. It is really something special when a once in awhile friendship turns into something special. I have been meeting up with Dave at festivals since 2017 and it wasn’t until 2022 that we actually exchanged phone numbers. We started sending each other postcards after that point and though we can text anytime, the postcards are a sentimental touch to art and friendship. Dave let us stay over his house a few nights and we got to meet his family and tour where he lives. We ate together and made art together. It was a nice next step in friendship. Since that time, he has stayed at our house and we went to another festival.
Through most of this year I have just been making art. I am currently teaching myself needle felting wool and macrame. I am trying new media all the time and really honing into what I think my style is. I have a knack for putting patterns together and I find every new thing I learn, my imagination grows. I can’t say that I’m a master at anything and at 53 I don’t think that is what I am looking for. I just want to create daily in some form and hope to have someone see my vision in a way that helps or informs them. I show work at the local art gallery when they have member shows and I did get accepted to Clemens and the Pen again this year. Mostly, I just love color and texture and beads. All the beads. It is soothing and fulfilling to create and finish pieces.
Ultimately, the time away from this blog has been filled with living. Hanging with friends at The Fabric Chicken, attending book club with my girlfriends, making art with my lovely boyfriend, gardening, cooking, napping with cats, editing poetry, slush reading book contests, and working. Life is full and wonderful. Having said that I am going to do my best to sort of use this blog I pay for. Trying to make time for everything I love to do is challenging but I won’t beat myself up for it. Life is too short for that. I hope to gain some readers back if I can keep this going. Thanks for reading.
Be kind. Share your thoughts and abundance of things with people. We are all struggling out here in some way. Make art. Read poetry. Don’t let the AI overlords melt your brain. Mix in some analog to your life!
Aleathia
Aleathia Drehmer 