Artist Series: Instructions for Traveling West

On Writing: A poem + essay by Joy Sullivan

I’m thrilled to be sharing the stunning work of

Joy Sullivan

with you. Her writing is both human and hopeful. Human in the sense that you can feel the rawness of a life that’s being lived, the pain that comes with following your heart, and the truth that’s revealed when we listen to our intuition. Hopeful in the sense that even the hard things have a way of bringing us closer to who we truly are (or who we’re meant to be).

The poem I’m sharing with you today strikes these chords so fully that it feels like a song I want to play on repeat. “Instructions for Traveling West” is a poem that holds so much power it became the title of Joy’s debut poetry collection that’s coming out next spring. The first line and the last line carry the kind of sentiments I need to tape to my mirror, the wall above my writing desk, and the inside cover of my journal so that I can remember to live, I mean, truly live; so that I remember that it’s okay to be happy. Read it and you’ll see what I mean. All of Joy’s work is gorgeous, really. Acquaint yourself. Settle in. Fall in love.

I’ve also chosen one of her recent lyrical essays to share with you. I read “Plums” when she shared it with her writing community, Sustenance, and then read it again when she published it to her Substack,

Necessary Salt by Joy Sullivan

. It’s about missing and memory and the ache that comes with a certain kind of love. She wrote it based on the prompt: Write a letter you can never send or will never send. I wrote something, too, and I’ll be sharing it here next month.

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Joy Sullivan is a Portland-based poet and the author of Instructions for Traveling West (forthcoming from Dial Press/Random House). She is the founder of Sustenance, a writing community designed to nourish your creative practice, and holds a Masters in poetry and a language arts teaching certification. For years, she served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts and has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford to Florida International University.

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What are you reading right now?

I’m obsessed with Lisa Taddeo. I’m currently reading Animal. I’ve also immersed myself in Aracelis Girmay’s Teeth.

What do you do when you're coming up against resistance, and you can't seem to get to the center of the thing—the writing, the living, the task at hand? How do you get to where you want to go?

I try not to define a piece before it’s found its shape. When I sit down to write, I try to write from my second brain, the creaturely one. I let the words rush out from the belly, not the brain. Nothing excites me like the concrete specific tiny details, a woman in a calico dress, hot pavement stained blue in the early dusk, a water snake cresting the pond behind my house. The more I can live in the white-hot details of the present moment, the faster I get where I’m trying to go. I worry about shape and form last.

Tell me about this poem. Where did it come from?

One morning in the middle of Arizona, I sat down with my laptop. A desert hummingbird—its whole body, the shape of a shining comma, hovered out the kitchen window. I told myself to write, really write —for myself. The poet, not the copywriter. No clients. No strategic messaging. No keywords or SEO. Just the truth of my life trembling on the page. I wrote it as imperative, as incantation. 

I wrote my life so I could find the courage to live it. 

Afterwards, the poem performed its terrifying magic. Within 42 days, I left a man who wanted to marry me, sold my house, finally quit my job, packed my two cats and all my books and drove west again until I hit Oregon. Two years later, Instructions for Traveling West became the title of my first collection of poetry. You can preorder it here. 

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A poem + essay
by Joy Sullivan

Instructions for Traveling West

First, you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart. Divorce yourself from routine and control. Instead, find a desert and fall in. Take the trail that promises a view. Get lost. Break your toes. Bruise your knees. Keep going. Watch a purple meadow quiver. Get still. Pet trail dogs. Buy the hat. Run out of gas. Befriend strangers. Knight yourself every morning for your newborn courage. Give grief her own lullaby. Drink whiskey beside a hundred-year-old cactus. Honor everything. Pray to something unnameable. Fall for someone impractical. Reacquaint yourself with desire and all her slender hands. Bear beauty for as long as you are able, and if you spot a sunning warbler glowing like a prism, remind yourself – joy is not a trick.

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Plums

I worry that childhood has been hard on you—in a way that will make it blur together. A smudge instead of a shape. The way spilled water spoils a painting. I worry I won’t be true memory, only disruption. A year where a woman insisted you clean your face and bought you books and practiced your months with you. How she stood in the kitchen, where your mother might have stood, and handed you plums.

You’re not mine. But I wanted you to know what it was like to have a mama in your house—in the hours it mattered. The lonely stretch of afternoon or late at night. When the school mornings came, heavy with terror, I wanted you to wake to a woman stirring in the other room. Her little sounds, a comfort. 

I know you have a mother. A real one. And at times, I felt almost real too. How rabid I was when she forgot to call you on birthdays and Christmas in New York. How you adored her in spite of it. 

Your father and I used to fight about you. We’d fight because we both loved you. His love was biological. Mine was something else—an ache without permission.

The truth is, I almost stayed. I needed to make sure you didn’t get cavities and that you remembered that January followed December. That you went to school and talked to Meg and brought the class valentines. 

Your papa is dating someone new now and I have questions. Does she read to you? Does she fix your collar and fight with your father about your screen time? Does she stand in the kitchen and offer you fruit? Maybe she knows a secret I didn’t. Maybe she can test a plum for softness without leaving a bruise. 

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Where to find Joy:
Website | Newsletter | Buy her book | Instagram