Jenny – SPARK

Jennifer Fendya and Jenny Forrester

Jenny — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 04:23:28 +0000

Jennifer Fendya
“Unmasked, and kisses”
(digital photo, 2020)
Response

Care and Concern in the Time of Quarantine
By Jenny Forrester
Inspiration piece

You ask, “Can I get you anything at Costco?” and I know I should let you believe you care, let you see yourself in this good way, but here’s how you can help.

Don’t talk shit about me behind my back.

Don’t undermine my confidence, my accomplishments, or my relationships.

But sure, I guess you could get me one of those big bags of chocolate chips.

Thanks.

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Jenny Forrester and Jennifer Fendya

Jenny — Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:59:54 +0000

Jennifer Fendya
“HIHOWRU”
(Digital Photo, 2013)
Inspiration piece

A Friend Flattened My Narrative
ByJenny Forrester
Response

We’re walking along the creek. He’s just had chemo. He never complains, mid-western, older white man. He points it out. I wish he would not use the word “complain” and I wish he would feel free to have his full range of human experience through it but also, he’s the one with cancer not me. We met while volunteering at the library. He brought me flowers on Mother’s Day, So thoughtful. Sweet.

He says, “I’ll try to get through your book (the memoir I wrote), but the first sixty pages is like all those B movies from the 70’s.” My book I had thought of as, “Trailer Trash Republican Childhood,” until I figured out how problematic that was as I wrote and wrote and wrote in and behind and under and through all the years of writing it. I wrote my memoir, scene-driven, about the idea of Womanhood, the definitions of things, about the idea of American, the idea of Republican, the ideas placed on our humanity, value, sexism, and in the end, racism through the lens and life of the only perspective I have. My own.

Anyway. Other than flattening my narrative after I’d so carefully created an arc of it, he’s been really kind to me.

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Jenny Forrester and Jane Hulstrunk

Jenny — Wed, 05 Jun 2019 20:09:50 +0000

Jane Hulstrunk
Inspiration piece

Jenny Forrester
Response

You should’ve seen me when I first bloomed. All the colors and the strength against the storm. I had it all.

And then time did as times does.

I regret nothing, though, the way I am now.

I’m not on display but still have so much to give, all that ultimate nurturing.

When you walk by, nose in the air, I smile, remembering the battles of wills, the way we banged heads in wind, wanting the sun and its people to see us but not wanting to be picked for their vases, claiming wildness and believing we were. You, with your nose, in the air, I know what you’re going to go through, and I wish you’d listen about it and move us flowers to some next level.

But it’s all just this. This cycling, this browning, this turning to other forms.

Do you see me? How I’m becoming a bird?

In the next wind, I’m going to soar.

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Jenny Forrester and Lené Gary

Jenny — Sun, 02 Dec 2018 18:09:48 +0000

Lené Gary
Inspiration piece

Tarot-Berry
By Jenny Forrester
Response

We’re all blueberries in time. We see we’re in bunches, hands reaching toward us…

We forget the lack of our being vast when we’re hanging in bunches and shadow and light. We’re supposed to want to be bluest or juiciest or highest or lowest or fastest or slowest to ripen.

I’m one of the first or last to fall. I can’t remember now. It’s all a soft blur, but I know I visited the tarot-berry on my way down.

She pulled The Father of Pentacles and started to explain, but the star in front of me was coming faster than light, as is the custom with stars. I grew rainbow antlers to precede me, hoping for the best.

I turned to The Fool dropping beside me, balanced and gripping some blossom. She was a gosling, quivering.

“I’ve never seen that blossom here before,” I said.

The Fool quacked, “Me neither. I’m glad to see it now.”

As we lay on the ground, a mother deer and her fawn, dappled and new, came by, a star shining above, and the last thing I sensed was her soft muzzle. I was grateful for teeth in the end.

We’re all blueberries in time. We forget the lack of our being vast when we’re laying in bunches and mud. Instead of feeling I failed at being bluest or fastest or lowest, I’m content to decompose, reborn from the seed in this darkness.

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Note: All of the art, writing, and music on this site belongs to the person who created it. Copying or republishing anything you see here without express and written permission from the author or artist is strictly prohibited.

Jenny Forrester and Victoria Nessen

Jenny — Fri, 07 Sep 2018 21:31:48 +0000

Victoria Nessen
Inspiration piece

There Are No Bubbles
By Jenny Forrester
Response

A tiny black dot moved onto the page I’d just turned to. It appeared at the edge, handed me a smudge, said, “It’ll help you wake up when you sleep,” then it rolled down the page and was gone.

When I was small, I dreamed of giant bubbles and walked through the house popping them.

My mother said, “There are no bubbles.”

I said, “The bubbles get me when I’m asleep so I need to wake up.”

She said, “Go to bed. Now!”

When I grew up, I lived in a green triangle with a black cylinder pen that wrote wide rivers. I had a family and we drove to the blue mass of ocean in a car that was Saturn. We looked for stars in the sky that was Eastern, everything left or right of the dividing line of mountains.

Now that I’m older, no green triangle, different way of family, no planet car, no white beetle, I’m surrounded by peaks and mountains. They’re bases and summits and topographic not-exactly-circles. They’re elevation rises and valleys with rivers and wells and springs, depressions, from time to time, gathering rainwater.

I bought new hiking boots – old school, brown leather, red top-stitching and laces. The boots and I hike red places – red paths of worn-smooth tree roots and scrambling red sandstone in-laid with quartz and creek beds, ankle-bending trails and smooth paths through aspen. The boots and I hike ponderosa pine dotted green-gold grassy meadows, other Rocky Mountain ranges in the distance – waves of volcanic sea change, zigzag trails and stone step ascents. I am wandering the bubbled landscape of dreams, a dream life, following the trail of the tiny black dot and its rolling.

Downhill can be hard on the toenails. They’re a thunderstorm, no safe place when there’s lightning. It’s pain. It’s vast. It’s potential last moment. Perspective.

I dream my toenails are loosey goosey. Loosey goosey says the dream. I think, It’s going to hurt to peel them off.

I’m ok, though.

It’s just a dream, says the dream.

Somewhere from behind the page, I hear the tiny black dot and begin to peel things away, peeling back the wounded parts. I put the boots back on and continue down the page carrying the smudge in my pack, popping bubbles, walking to wake up.