Soma Land is a poetic inquiry that combines somatic attention, experiental anatomy, sound play, and a strange form of pre-apocalypic eco-poetics. It's all in movement right now - but the material emerged first out of an ongoing series of exercises I am developing with my art/life partner Stephanie Heit, responding to the curriculum of Andrea Olsen's Body and Earth book, inspired byFeldenkrais/Live Art work by people like Mary Armentrout and Margit Galanter in the Bay Area, the erotic body work of Amber DiPietra, by sound work in the Continuum Movement lineage and by Kundalini Yoga.
(During a Body and Earth exercise, creating a circle wave in Crystal Lake, Up North Michigan, 2015)
Some glimpses of where the material has been published so far:
The Factory Roof (developed as part of an Oakland Feldenkrais/Live Art summer workshop with Mary Armentrout)
Moon Botany (developed with Sharon Siskin, with her bringing found material to me from her walks on surrouding hills and alkaline lake beaches, at Playa Artist Residency in Oregon, a few published in About Place Journal, part of a longer series)
Almost Solstice, a collaborative poetic passage co-written on the shores of Lake Michigan with Stephanie Heit in QDA: A Queer Disability Anthology
Playa Song, a sci-fi-y eco story in Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction
The Nursing Home, a disability-themed Gothic story written while at Windward Community College on Hawai'i, published in Wordgathering.
And then, related to all this but a bit separate, there is a novel manuscript, currently slowly making its way around agents in its search for publication: Tree, a feminist shamanic mystery set in Wales, with lots of Lovecraftian citations, descriptions of art by Joseph Beuys, visits in Tate Modern, caves, and druid circles.
Soma Land has performance, site-specific art, and creative writing exercises and a curriculum (on eco-criticism, somatics, performance). It will probably transform into a bigger chunk of the Olimipas' 2016 offerings in the second half of the year, alongside The Asylum Project, both as collaborations with Stephanie Heit.
(from a poetry workshop with A Different Light Company near Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, above an inlet at Waikuku Beach, 2015)
For related explorations in more academic writing, initiated by the Native Women Language Keepers Symposium, see this essay I published in Art and Communities: Edges of water and land: Transnational performance practices in indigenous/settler collaborations. And see also this one, in the new Trans-Studies Quarterly: Trans-ing Disability Poetry at the Confluence.