Creativi-Tea Time

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.

Subscribe now

🍵 Creativi-tea Time: Nurture Your Creative Spirit

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My dear heart, no one tells you that coming back is its own kind of work. We speak often of the descent, the long dark night, the season when the soul goes quiet and even the paint dries untouched on the palette. But the returning? The returning is rarely spoken of.

So let me speak of it now.

You will not wake one morning restored. The light does not arrive all at once, and it is not supposed to. It comes the way dawn comes to a valley…first the edges, then the ridgeline, then, at last, the floor where you have been sitting all this time. You may not even notice it has begun. You will simply catch yourself humming. You will reach for a pen without deciding to. You will notice the color of a bright yellow lemon and feel something stir that you thought had gone for good.

That stirring is not small. That stirring is the whole thing.

Do not rush yourself here. Eyes long accustomed to darkness need time to bear the brightness, and there is no shame in shielding them. The dark night was not wasted time. It was not a detour from your creative life. It was the deep root work, done underground, where no one could judge it, and no one could interrupt it. What grows now grows from that.

So begin gently:

• Make one thing that is only for you, and show it to no one.

• Let it be undone. Let it be unfinished. Let it exist anyway.

• Return to a medium you abandoned, not to master it, but to greet it.

• Say thank you to the darkness before you leave it.

You may find that what you make now is different than what you made before. It may be quieter. It may hold more grief in it, and also more tenderness. This is not a loss. This is the deepening. The artist who has been to the bottom of the well brings back water the rest of us are thirsty for.

You did not break. You were being made larger.

And now, slowly, at your own pace, in your own hour…come back into the light and bring your work with you. We have been waiting for it.

May it be a blessing,

🦋 Emily Lupita

• 🍵 Creativi-Tea: Join a supportive group where we feature Guest Creatives, learn how they sustain their creative practice, and share our own projects and progress. If you are interested in being a Guest Creative, please fill out this Google Form.

  ---

🍵 Our Guest Creative Shares Their Creativi-tea:

Name: ✨ Sheri Handel✨

Links:

https://substack.com/@shandel

Bite-Sized Storytelling Boost

Boost your creativity and build more sustainable writing habits with my Notes2Post system for writing on Substack and the Writers Inspired by the Arts bi-monthly Substack Lives.

By Sheri Handel

🍵 Please tell us about yourself:

After a career of teaching, writing, and designing learning programs for higher education and corporate learning, I’ve chosen a more creative path. I’m telling my story and helping others to tell theirs.

🍵 What creative project are you working on now?

I’m working on building a virtual writing community called “Writers Inspired by the Arts.” The twice-monthly sessions feature guest speakers who share how they incorporate another art form—such as drawing, painting, photography, dance, etc.—into their writing toolkit. We’ve had multi-published and multi-talented authors visit with us, each one sharing their creativity practices and specific tips on what the audience can add to their own toolkits.

I have a companion group for my paid subscribers, called Writing in Companionship. We meet virtually every two weeks to work on our own projects, together, silently on camera. People focus on weekly writing tasks, or on pieces in other art forms after catching up and sharing intentions for the session. We finish with updates. I call that process “gentle accountability.”

Both projects are designed to help people build creative capacity together.

🍵 If you were sitting down to tea with another creative, how would you encourage their creative spirit?

I’m going to deflect a bit and say that I’m encouraged regularly by the extended community I’ve found here in Substack. I worked remotely for a large portion of my career (starting way before COVID), so I’m used to the types of friendships you can form at a distance but with strongly connected outlooks, purpose, or backgrounds. Communicating here through story is a huge gift. The community encourages me.

🍵 Do you have a favorite quote to share to encourage other creatives in the group?

1. “Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.” -Flannery O’Connor

2. ”To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.” -Susan Sontag

3. “I think it’s vital to keep discovering new delights in life. Sometimes that means going back to past loves and making them new. The passion that I’ve recently restored to my life is visual art.” -Aimee Liu

🍵 Share Your Creativi-tea

What creative projects are you working on these days? Share a favorite quote.

Leave a comment below, and feel free to include a link so we can support your work.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🍵

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina artist & writer. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Finishing Up Four Manuscripts After A Dark Night Of The Soul

Summer 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

This summer has been particularly productive and intensive for my creative projects. I am in the throes of finishing up four manuscripts that I’ve been working on since I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing at Iowa State University almost 20 years ago.

• I’ve posted several videos of my progress on Last Drop of a Holy Drink, my Mexico Memoir, on my Instagram and Facebook Page. I’m sharing my progress as I edit the current draft of the manuscript before querying.

• I have excerpts from The Poet’s Daughter and the first 12 travel letters from Artist Travel Memoir posted here on my Substack.

• I’m making videos now about the poems from Her Mexico Blurs, including explaining the background behind the MesoAmerican ancestral figures and motifs I use in the poems. Coming soon to my Instagram and Substack Notes.

There are several reasons I never finished my manuscripts. I was focused on a career in study abroad, an almost 20-year marriage, and staying busy as a mom after welcoming my two beautiful sons into the world, one of whom is profoundly autistic with an intellectual disability and requires specialized care.

Sure, there is legitimacy to the challenges these other worthy pursuits have presented to my writing progress. Like everyone, I made life choices and those choices had consequences for my creative projects. And other people made choices, too. And also, no one made choices. Life just happens in mysterious ways sometimes.

But it has become clear to me that the fundamental reason why I never finished before now is that I didn’t know myself enough to know why I was writing these books. I was writing in circles around the central issues. And those circles never ended. So I just kept circling, too afraid to go directly inward.

Then, over the last several years, I went on a journey right through the heart of that proverbial dark night of the soul. It wasn’t my first time in that heavy place, but it was the most extended and difficult time, by far. In that darkness, this time, I finally turned and faced the central issues I needed to face.

Doing so, I learned a great deal about who I am. I learned what I’m made of…to the core. I came to understand why I continue to work on these books, and what I want to say inside them. With great clarity.

I have a sense of gratitude for that dark time, now that I’m on the other side of it. Yes. But even more so, I’m grateful that I’ve emerged back into the light. It’s so much more joyful in the light. I’ve been getting so much more creative work done in the light. I hope I stay here for a long time.

I hope the brilliant rays of light shine on you, too, dear readers. Wherever you are on your journey…keep going.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Leave a comment

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

Subscribe now

🎨

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday for the rest of 2026, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #4, “The Journey Itself Is Home”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

Subscribe now

Writing Decision #1: The impossible choice

Letter #4 is built on a choice with no right answer.

Stay with my mother in Iowa, who has just had a stroke, who needs me, who I may not see again for a long time, or ever. Or return to my sons in Ankara who are young, autistic, and waiting for their mother to come home.

There is no correct answer. There is only the choice I made and the weight of making it.

I do not announce this impossibility. I do not say, “This was the hardest decision of my life.” Instead, I place the reader inside the physical details of the moment: the alarm code I punch in one last time, the cold concrete of the parking lot on an Iowa morning, the geese moving across the sky.

The impossibility arrives through accumulation, not announcement.

For Your 💌 Letter: Find a choice you made that had no right answer. Don’t explain why it was hard. Instead, write the physical scene. Where your body was, what your hands were doing, what the light was like. The weight of the choice will come through the objects. Trust them.

Writing Decision #2: Home as a moving, living thing

Letter #4 builds an argument, not through logic but through physical images, that home is not a place. It is something carried in the body.

Flexible hands that know how to pack a suitcase in twenty minutes. Hair bundled the same way in every country. A worn passport whose cover has softened from years of handling. These are not decorations. They are the argument.

By the time the letter ends, the reader understands that home travels with you. Not because I said so, but because they felt it accumulate across a series of physical images.

For Your 💌 Letter: Pick an abstract idea you’ve been trying to explain. Belonging, loss, love, freedom. And put it down. Stop explaining it. Instead, write five physical objects that embody it. A worn passport. A specific smell. The weight of a particular bag. Let the objects carry the idea. The reader will arrive at the meaning on their own.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: Writing in motion — the scene of departure

Letter #4 ends while I am still moving.

I do not stop and reflect. I do not look back at the nursing home window. I do not describe what I felt as I drove away. The letter ends with my body in motion, moving toward the airport, toward the plane, toward my sons.

Endings in motion keep the reader inside the experience rather than watching it from a distance. The moment you stop to reflect, you pull the reader out of the scene and into your analysis of it. Sometimes the most powerful ending is the one where the body simply keeps going.

“Lupita. It’s time to go.”

For Your 💌 Letter: Look at the ending of something you’ve written. Does it stop to explain? Does it reach for a conclusion? Try cutting everything after the last physical action. Let the body move off the page without looking back. See what happens.

Writing Decision #4: The second person invitation

Letter #4 opens in the second person. As if to say, “You know this moment. You have stood in a parking lot like this one.”

I use “you” to pull every reader, regardless of their specific story, into the universal experience of leaving someone behind. Then I shift to first person for the specific nursing home scene. The second person opens the door. The first person walks through it.

Moving between “you” and “I” gives the letter both intimacy and breadth. The second person says: This belongs to all of us. The first person says: But this particular version of it belongs to me.

For Your 💌 Letter: Find a moment in your writing where you feel your experience might be too specific, too particular to your own life, for a reader to recognize themselves. Try opening that section in second person. You don’t have to keep it. But the act of writing it in “you” will show you what is universal inside your most personal story.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The Story Guide Mini Workbook PDF for Letter #4 is in my shop here.

Download it, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Think of a departure.

• A moment when you turned your back on someone, somewhere you loved, in order to return to someone or somewhere else that needed you.

• Don’t write the whole story yet. Just write the threshold moment.

• The exact place your body was. The door you walked through. The parking lot you crossed. The sky above you.

• Three paragraphs. No reflection. Just the body, moving.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🧿

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday for the rest of 2026, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #3, “Incantations”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

Subscribe now

Writing Decision #1: The recurring symbol

The tecolote (the owl) appears three times in Letter #3. First, in Chiapas, at a workshop called Taller Leñateros, where women transform garbage into sacred paper. Then, in a museum in Xalapa, I saw it again unexpectedly. Then years later, at Pamukkale, watching my sons wade into the healing waters.

Each time the owl returns, the meaning deepens. What I believed was a warning of imprisonment slowly revealed itself as something else entirely. I was being carried, not trapped.

I did not plan the owl. It found me. And once I noticed it had found me more than once, I understood that my memoir had a recurring image: a symbol doing structural work across years and countries.

For Your 💌 Letter: what image, object, or creature has appeared at significant moments in your life more than once? A bird. A color. A song. A smell. You may not have named it yet. But it’s there. Close your eyes. Draw the first time it appeared. That is where the letter begins.

Writing Decision #2: The confession withheld

Halfway through Letter #3, I write about a vision my traveling companion had…a tecolote appearing to him. He told me about it at the time. What I did not tell him, what I held back for the entire letter, is this:

I never confessed that I also saw the same vision.

That sentence held back until late in the letter lands with weight precisely because it arrives after the reader has been with me through the whole story. The thing I didn’t say at the time carries as much meaning as everything I did say.

Withholding a confession is a structural choice. It is not dishonesty. It is timing.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the thing you didn’t say in the moment. The truth you kept to yourself. The confession that never came. Name the place in your story where it belongs and hold it there until the reader is ready to receive it.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: The reframed symbol

For eleven years, I believed the tecolote meant one thing: a warning, a bad omen, an approaching darkness. At Pamukkale, watching my sons in the healing waters, I understood it meant the opposite.

This is the memoir arc in miniature: not just what happened, but how the meaning of what happened changed over time.

The first encounter with a symbol is never the whole story. The whole story is the distance between what you understood then and what you understand now. That distance, measured in years, in loss, in the people who arrived and changed everything, is the core of the letter.

For Your 💌 Letter: find a belief you held about a memory or a symbol that later turned out to be wrong. Write the first version…what you understood at the time. Then write the moment the meaning shifted. You don’t need to explain how it changed. Just place the two versions beside each other and let the reader feel the distance.

Writing Decision #4: Alchemy as metaphor

At Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, I watch women transform garbage into art. Molded can labels and old receipts become sacred paper. This physical act of transformation is not background detail. It is the letter’s central metaphor made visible.

Taking the discarded, the overlooked, the ordinary residue of a life and converting it into meaning. That is what memoir does. That is what the 🧿 Inward Eye Method does.

When you find a scene in your life where something was literally transformed (material turned into something new, broken things made whole, loss converted into language), that scene is doing double work. It is telling your story and explaining your method at the same time.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the moment in your own life when something discarded became something sacred. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It could be a recipe handed down. A photograph rescued. A language reclaimed. Write that scene. It is probably more important than you think.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The Story Guide Mini Workbook PDF for Letter #3 is in my shop here.

Download it, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Close your eyes.

• Think of an image, object, or experience that has returned to you more than once at significant moments in your life.

• Picture the very first time you encountered it.

• Draw it, large, at the center of a blank page. Add the scene around it.

• Where were you when you first saw it?

That drawing is your Scene #1. The second encounter is your Scene #2. The distance between them is Your 💌 Letter.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🧿

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Art & Writing Residency

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

Part 3 of 3 in my art photo series. 🌊

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

Leave a comment

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

Subscribe now

🎨

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Art & Writing Residency - Part 2

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

Part 2 in my art photo series. 🌊

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🎨

🧿 The Story Guide

Every other Wednesday, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

Read more

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Art & Writing Residency

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🎨

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #1 “The Birds Are Flying”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

Subscribe now

Writing Decision #1: The double timeline

Letter #1 is set entirely on one Good Friday in Ankara, 2024. But it points toward a second Good Friday, twenty years earlier. A story that isn’t told yet. Two timelines, one shared date. The date is the hinge.

This structure does something specific: it gives the reader a present moment to stand in (the balcony, the ezan, the mountains toward Karabük) while promising something from the past. The present grounds them. The past pulls them forward.

Here’s how it works on the page. I open in full sensory present tense — the mother in the black robe, the playground, the call to prayer eye-level with my balcony. The reader is standing next to me. Only after they’re grounded do I reach backward: One of the stories that has stayed with me, really continues to live inside me, happened on Good Friday about twenty years ago. I’ll start there.

That’s it. Two sentences to open a twenty-year reach. The reader can easily follow me there because they’ve already been placed in a real physical scene.

For Your 💌 Letter: find two moments connected by something: a date, an object, a phrase, a smell. You don’t need to explain the connection. Place them close together on the page and let the reader feel the distance between them. That distance is the story.

Writing Decision #2: Every abstraction has a physical anchor

Notice that Letter #1 never stays abstract for long. Every emotional statement lands on a physical object.

/ normally a paywall would be here, but this first Story Guide post is free for all subscribers. /

I write about the enormity of twenty-five years of travel, and then I’m in Lovilia, Iowa, running to Grandma Rosella’s house, her walkway lined with pink peonies. I write about the loss of my journals, and the sentence that follows is about trying to paint memories. Still no words.

The peonies aren’t decorations. They’re doing structural work. They make the twenty-five-year span emotionally available to a reader who wasn’t there.

This is the Inward Eye Method 🧿 in its simplest form: you close your eyes, you draw the scene, and what comes through is always physical first. Colors. Objects. Movement. The feeling follows the image, not the other way around.

For Your 💌 Letter: after every sentence that contains a feeling or an idea, ask yourself, Where was my body when this happened? What was I looking at? What was I holding? Go there. The abstract will take care of itself once the physical is on the page.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: Uncertainty as engine, not apology

Three times in Letter #1, I admit I don’t know something.

I don’t know if you would believe me. How can I know I’ve got it all right? Where to start?

When I wrote these lines, my instinct was to cut them. They felt like weakness. Like I was apologizing for not having my journals, for not being certain, for being a writer without her notes.

I left them in. And they became the engine of the whole letter.

Here’s why they work: the loss of my journals isn’t background information. It’s the structural condition of the entire memoir. I am writing without my notes. That uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve before the writing begins. It’s the writing itself. When I say I don’t know, the reader doesn’t lose confidence in me. They lean in. Because they also don’t always know. Because memory is uncertain for all of us.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the place where you’ve been apologizing for what you don’t remember, what you can’t prove, what you’re not sure about. Stop apologizing. Name the uncertainty directly. Then keep writing. The not-knowing, named honestly, is its own kind of truth.

Writing Decision #4: The short paragraph as breath

I don’t know.

Two words. Their own paragraph.

Single-sentence paragraphs function like rests in music. They slow the reader down, create weight, and signal that something just landed. After four paragraphs building toward the emotional core of the letter: the destroyed journals, the stopped journaling, the lost stories. That two-word paragraph hits differently than if it were buried mid-sentence.

For Your 💌 Letter: You cannot use this technique constantly. It only works because it’s rare. But when you have a moment in your writing where something genuinely just landed…a realization, a loss, a question you can’t answer…try giving it a paragraph of its own. Even if it’s two words. Especially if it’s two words.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The PDF for the Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 is free here.

Download it free, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Find your own balcony moment. A time when your body was in one place, and your mind was twenty years away.

• Don’t write the whole memory yet. Just write the present scene. Where you were sitting. What you could see. What the light was doing. Three paragraphs maximum.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

Subscribe now

🧿

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

This is my welcome gift to you. 🧿 The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

[Download Free → Here.]

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

Close your eyes. Draw what you see. Then write.

That is the Inward Eye Method 🧿.

🌸 May it be a blessing.

-Emily Lupita

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🧿

Artist Travel Memoir

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina poet & writer living between my hometown in rural Iowa & Ankara, the capital of Türkiye. Artist Travel Memoir is my memoir of spiritual travel (across 19 countries) that I’m writing one Letter 💌 at a time.

Subscribe now

Artist Travel Memoir 💌 Letters

The First Year: July 2025 - June 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

11 months ago, I was flat on the floor. I had been there for a few years. Then, one morning last summer, I’d finally had enough of that (pretty terrible) view. So, I sat down at my desk in Ankara and wrote the first sentence of the first letter for Artist Travel Memoir. I didn’t know if anyone would read it. I wasn’t sure I could sustain it. I had lost my journals, my confidence, and, for a time, my voice. What I had left was a single step forward. That’s it. Only the willingness to begin again.

Today, I’m writing to you from the other side of that first year, and I want to say it out loud: we made it. Twelve letters. Twelve hand-drawn illustrations. Stories I thought were gone forever, reconstructed from memory, emotion, and the stubborn faith that the stories were still inside me…waiting to be told.

This anniversary post is my love letter to that year, and to you, my readers…who have made all the difference. Thank you.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

Leave a comment

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

💌 The Letters

On Good Friday, from her studio balcony in Ankara, Emily Lupita watches a Turkish family picnic in the park below and reflects on how far she has traveled from a childhood playground in rural Iowa. She describes the loss of her handwritten journals, destroyed along with her online backups, and the long silence that followed. The call to prayer echoes across the city, and she finally decides to begin again without her notes: wrestling with memory, trusting the stories that lived on inside her.

As a study-abroad student in the Yucatán, Emily Lupita travels by bus to a small Mexican village to witness a passion play unlike anything she knew from her Catholic childhood in Iowa. The actor playing Jesus is tied to an actual cross in the blazing sun, and when he begins to struggle, she screams for someone to let him down (and briefly dissociates), watching the scene from a bird’s-eye view. Afterward, at the cast party, Jesus himself hands her a fish taco, and she understands for the first time that beginning again is always possible.

On a pilgrimage to the Taller Leñateros paper workshop in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Emily Lupita watches Indigenous women transform garbage into sacred paper…old receipts and molded can labels…pulped into art. A curandera burns offerings and fills the room with copal smoke, and one of Emily Lupita’s students later confesses he saw a vision: a two-headed owl carrying a woman in its belly. Emily Lupita reveals she saw the same vision. And that, years later, at the thermal pools of Pamukkale with her sons, she finally understood: she was not trapped inside the owl. She was being carried.

Sitting in a room of an Iowa nursing home, watching her mother sleep, Emily Lupita faces an impossible choice: stay in Iowa, or return to Ankara to her two young Autistic sons. She chooses to leave, a decision she has never regretted and never stopped grieving. Her father helps her up after she collapses on the cold parking-lot concrete and says what he has said so many times across years of departures. “Lupita. It’s time to go.”

Beneath her apartment building in Ankara, Emily Lupita discovers a marble octagonal hamam, and eventually finds herself welcomed into the weekly ritual of five elderly Turkish Aunties, the Teyzeler, who sing folk songs at the top of their lungs while scrubbing each other’s backs. One Teyze corrects her technique with a kese, another offers to scrub her back, and Emily Lupita pours golden argan oil into the upturned hands of each woman in turn…dissolving language, nationality, and loneliness in a cascade of steam. She still carries that fleeting feeling of sisterhood with her.

Two decades before the Turkish hamam, Emily Lupita was a young English teacher in the volcanic mountains of Miyakonojo, Japan, feeling adrift between future identities: traveler or mother, wanderer or settler. On Children’s Day, her karate Sensei and his wife whisk her and her friends up the mountainside to Sakura Sakura, a legendary mud onsen heated by the Kirishima volcano, where ancient grandmothers cover bathers in volcanic mud and invite them to whisper their greatest wish to the universe. Emily Lupita surprises herself: she whispers that she wants to have a child. Fifteen & eighteen years later, after a wave of infertility treatments, her sons Charlie and Archie were born.

Shortly after Charlie’s diagnosis of Autism (Level 3-Profound) in an Atlanta suburb, Emily Lupita meets a neighbor while pushing Charlie in his stroller, a woman who eventually invites her to a church “healing ceremony” to exorcise the “demon” she believes has taken possession of Charlie. Emily Lupita pushes the stroller directly into her house and locks the door, hiding upstairs as the woman rings the doorbell again and again over the following weeks. She addresses every person who has ever framed her children’s Autism as a curse or a punishment…and answers with absolute clarity: My sons are my biggest blessings. Full stop.

After injuring her ankle ligament while swamp-jumping in Louisiana at night looking for a blinded alligator, Emily Lupita boards a plane to Mexico anyway (on crutches) to meet dear friends in Mérida. On her friend Daniela’s advice, she visits a curandera in a small Yucatán village: a small, beautiful woman in a traditional huipil who examines the ankle, opens a jar of Vicks VapoRub, lights a candle, and prays. A wave of nausea overtakes Emily Lupita…and then something pops into place, the pain disappears entirely, and hours later, back in the city, Daniela asks, “Where are your crutches?”

At five years old, Emily Lupita fell from a two-story woodshop roof onto concrete…and was never taken to the hospital. Thirty years later, Atlanta neurosurgeons discover she survived a spinal membrane rupture that should have killed her, “without any medical intervention.” As a beginning Spanish teacher in San Miguel de Allende, she watches a man scale the famous Parroquia cathedral at night and install a string of neon lights. Emily Lupita writes a poem about his desperate act of faith, which leads her to wonder whether her childhood fall was an accident or a five-year-old’s version of plugging in a neon cross, just to see if God could still see her.

Careening solo across the top of an Ecuadorian cloud forest on a zipline, Emily Lupita tilts her head back and shouts, “Hey God! It’s Lupita! Can you still see me?” This letter weaves together three encounters with that same urgent question: a graduate philosophy seminar where her chronic back pain was used as proof that God doesn’t exist; the zipline flight; and the moment a train slammed into the front bumper of her tour bus in Puebla, Mexico, on her Golden Birthday. In a Mexican restaurant that night, her students singing “¡Feliz Cumpleaños a Lupita!” by candlelight, she recounts philosopher William James’s “Will to Believe” essay…and makes her choice.

In the grip of a quiet, corrosive despair…her marriage dissolving, her sense of self unraveling…Emily Lupita climbs the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque and sits on a ledge at the summit with her legs dangling over the edge, drawn toward what the French call l’appel du vide, “the call of the void.” Then a young Maya girl, no older than twelve, sits down beside Emily Lupita, takes her hands, and without a word hurls an entire bag of handmade souvenir dolls into the jungle below. “Todos somos soñadores aquí,” the girl says. We are all dreamers here. And Emily Lupita pulls her legs back from the edge.

After years in Atlanta, when Emily Lupita had given up on family travel, her sons’ severe Autism making even a trip to the grocery store feel impossible, the family moved to Türkiye, and on their first summer road trip, stopped at Pamukkale, the ancient Cotton Castle of cascading white terraced pools. Six-year-old Charlie leads them wordlessly up the hill and steps into the warm, mineral-rich water; Archie follows, giggling. The boys wear medical harnesses, which have drawn cruel comments in the U.S., but here, among ancient Roman ruins and the spirits of pilgrims who came for millennia, they feel only like wings.

Leave a comment

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

💌

The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Subscribe now

The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 3: “Blessed Be the Beast in Me” (Excerpt)

🌳 Caterpillars on a Gravel Road

There must have been hundreds of caterpillars in the grass lining the tree line, past the curved ditch and the pocket of wild roses. My brothers and I would set out early in the morning to rescue those extra adventurous caterpillars who had wandered out onto the gravel road that ran past the end of the long lane to our house. We wanted to get there before a single car came along.

We’d cradle each caterpillar as it wiggled in our palms and quickly set it back down in the grass a ways up the hill from the road. When the eventual car did approach, we’d run into the ditch and press our small bodies flat against the roadside bank so the driver couldn’t see us, just as Dad had demonstrated. Diego and I only emerged when John called the coast clear, since he was the oldest and knew best. We’d race to examine the damage from the wheels, telling each fuzzy-bodied caterpillar still alive that it was okay, that we were there to rescue it, that if it could just survive a little longer, it would do an amazing thing. It would grow wings and fly.

Then, as the months wore on, the butterflies emerged.

I did not chase them like I did the caterpillars. I sat in the tall grass at the edge of the field, and I waited. I waited the way my father had taught me to wait in the forest for the rabbits. I sat completely still and fuzzed out my eyes until the light caught my eyelids just right, and there came a moment when I was no longer looking out but looking in. Looking in toward a large black space with windows of refracted light, what Mama called meditating, and I called floating in space.

I sat cross-legged with my right hand lifted, palm facing forward near my shoulder, my left hand at the center of my chest with the wrist bent and the palm dropped open. This was when the butterflies came. They sat on my fingers and let me lift them close to my face so we could look at each other, eye to eye.

“Of course, they remember you,” Mama told me when I asked if these were the same butterflies I’d moved off the road when they were caterpillars. “You rescued them, and now they are thanking you for it.”

Dad had a different explanation. He said the butterflies were attracted to my aura. “Auras are the essence of a person expressed through energy. It creates your protective sphere.”

“What’s a protective sphere?” I asked.

“It is the field of energy that surrounds you,” he answered. “Like-minded entities are drawn to it. It is very important, Lupita, to learn to tell the difference between like-minded and opposite-minded energies. Pay attention.”

“Opposite-minded energies,” I repeated, so I’d remember.

“Yes,” he said. And then he gave the warning in a poem:

listen

our language encircles us

with prisms of knowledge that break clear light

into pyramids of color and threads of darkness.

by the hand of our faith together with truth

these words are woven into lies on the loom of desire

until we are wrapped in a silk of unbroken reflections

against which our fresh and untried wings

push!

🌳 Fresh and Untried Wings

I have thought about this poem many times over the years. What it was trying to teach me, and what it cost me to be taught it at such an early age, in that way. The teaching was real. The world does contain things that would wrap you in silken webs if you let them. The modern world, in particular, according to the poet, is very good at manufacturing the silk of unbroken reflections on a loom of desire, using language to encircle you with something that looks like knowledge but is closer to a trap. My father was not wrong about this. He was simply very early.

I was probably around five years old. I was learning to tell the difference between like-minded and opposite-minded energies, to guard my protective sphere, to trust the butterflies and distrust any stranger on the gravel road. This education had consequences I could not see yet, consequences that would take years to understand and more years to unravel. I had to learn how to replace it with a version of caution that was true for me, that left room for the embracing parts of the world rather than shutting it out almost entirely.

But on that particular summer afternoon in a field in Iowa with a yellow butterfly on my fingertip and the clover flowers sweet in my mouth, the warning felt like secret knowledge, the poem like a code only my father and I could understand. It felt like the kind of thing a father says to his daughter when he believes she is treasured, worth protecting, worth preparing carefully for a world that will not be careful with her. Not careful with her at all.

I looked at the butterfly on my finger. I looked out at the field. I looked up at the sky. I recited the section of the poem I’d memorized immediately, as soon as the poet said it, I repeated it over and over in head until it was mine. The part about how my how my fresh and untried wings push against the dark web of lies.

I said the lines from his poem aloud to the delight of the poet, and we sat out there together in the field for a while meditating and attracting like-minded energies. I decided I was the luckiest little girl in the whole world.

Leave a comment

🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🌳

The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Subscribe now

🌳 The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 2: “Off the Grid” (Excerpt)

🌳 Fire in the Wood Stove

Out on the hill in winter, heat from a wood stove is irreplaceable.

There is no other warmth quite like it. Not the radiators of apartments I lived in later in the Middle East, not the gas heat of suburban houses in Atlanta, not even the fireplaces in the fine homes of people who have fireplaces for the look of them. A wood stove you depend on for survival has a different kind of warmth. It warms the bones. It warms the specific cold that has gotten all the way inside you and settled there.

Dad called this genetic memory, knowledge we remembered from our ancestors sitting around wood fires for thousands of years before us. In this dimension and in others. I don’t know about multiple dimensions, but I do believe I was born with a primal understanding of how to receive this warmth.

The work of the stove started long before winter. The heat started with finding a dying tree, if possible. One that was close enough to the house that John, Diego, and I could all make the journey on foot. Finding the axe. Making sure there were no cracks in the handle. Flying axe heads were the greatest danger when cutting wood.

“Be careful,” Dad said whenever we cut wood. “Be careful.” He didn’t say it very often. He reserved the phrase for moments and things that could actually kill you.

Dad was the only one who handled the axe until John was old enough. Then Dad took the saw, and John took the axe, and Diego and I picked up branches and put them in the sled. Once the tree was cut up and the pieces were all loaded, we pulled the sled over the ground toward home. It didn’t matter if there wasn’t any snow. Our sled worked all year round. We pulled it over dry ground in September, full of kindling, and we pulled it through January drifts full of happy dogs.

At home, Dad stacked the big pieces of wood in carefully organized piles. I always thought these were such fancy piles, because there was a particular architecture to the way he stacked them, alternating the direction of the splits to let air circulate, the way a person who has thought deeply about a thing organizes it.

We kids stacked the branches in rather less fancy piles nearby. Each morning and each night, we brought armloads inside and stacked them behind the stoves. The smell of freshly chopped wood is one I still carry in my body, the way some people carry the smell of a particular perfume or a certain food. When I smell it now, I am immediately, involuntarily, back on the hill.

Even in the middle of the night, someone needed to get up and feed the stove. This was the most important discipline of winter: the vents had to be adjusted so the fire burned hot enough to last toward morning but not so hot that it became a danger. Fire was the greatest danger inside the house. Dad said it twice, the way he said on the very few things that were urgent enough to need repeating.

“It is much easier to make a big fire from a small fire than to start a new one from scratch,” Mama would say, asking us to remind her when the fire got low. She said this the way she said most practical things, as a statement of fact that was also a rooted philosophy that guided her daily life.

Diego and I were not supposed to touch the big stove. Ever. There were thick windows on the square door, and we stood and watched through them as the flames ate the wood. The smoke got sucked upward through the chimney and was released into the winter air. I could spend so much time watching this.

The fire was company in a way that is difficult to explain if you have not been dependent on one. It was sometimes the only light, and it was always the only heat. It had a personality, a responsiveness. The fire told you things.

Scientists have studied what happens in the brain when a person looks down at fire. It activates a part of the brain that nothing else does, connected to memory, story, and our deep ancestral past. My father has always known this. Intuitively. He has always known that fire is living.

🌳 Handmade Tortillas

When we had visitors, they gushed.

The few extended family and the few friends who did come to visit us out in the countryside (a rare thing, a special thing, a thing we prepared for days in advance) would arrive and often gush at how wonderful it was. The handmade house, the wood stove warmth, the old-fashioned tranquility of a snowy evening in the country.

They were people who lived in town with grocery stores within a few minutes’ drive. Or at least in houses with thermostats, carpet, and hot showers. Often, I felt that our life was for them a kind of theater, a performance of an older, and perhaps perceived as somehow more honest, way of living. They sat in the creaky wooden chairs in the lamplight and breathed it in.

Dad would say his poems if the mood was right. If not, he would take the opportunity to comment on the over-consumption of natural resources to heat modern homes, complete with lights in every room, that was killing the planet.

“Seven generations past are weeping for this tragedy,” he’d say. “And seven generations in the future will surely weep.”

He walked around the house shaking his head and saying, “Moneymaking extravaganza,” whenever the subject of Christmas came up. It was his characterization of what the holiday had become.

I repeated these words with as much disgust in my voice as possible. “Corporate machine!” I’d rant, pounding my feet around the living room, causing him to smile. I did not fully know what a corporate machine was, but I knew it was the opposite of us, and being the opposite of us was the worst thing possible.

While Dad talked with the visitors, we kids gathered around the cook stove to watch Mama flip handmade corn tortillas with her fingertips. She cooked them directly on the stovetop without a pan, then added a touch of butter that seeped into the masa just right, without burning. It never failed to impress. The crisp, hot corn felt like magic to them. The taste of it caused them to lean back in their creaky chairs and close their eyes for a moment of stillness and peace.

I watched this happen, this closing of eyes, this leaning back. I watched it with the particular attention of a child observing adults moved by something they don’t fully understand. They were tasting the homestead. What they couldn’t taste was what it cost my brothers and me to live there. Our life had been sweetened by my mother into something they could consume with delight and then leave. Leave us be.

Leave a comment

🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🌳

The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Subscribe now

The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 1: “The Poems Arrive” (Excerpt)

🌳 A Childhood in Rural Iowa

The poems arrive in my father’s dreams.

He has told me this my whole life, in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses to report on the weather or the condition of a fence post. The poems arrive. He does not reach for them. He does not sit at a desk with a dictionary and a yellow legal pad, coaxing language toward meaning the way most poets do. The way I do. He goes to sleep, or he goes into the forest, or sometimes both at once. And the poems come to him in the way that weather comes, in the way that dawn comes, with no particular concern for whether he is ready.

This is what he told me. This is what I grew up believing. And for the first thirty years of my life, believing it meant simply that I lived inside it, the way you live inside a house without thinking much about the walls.

My childhood home had no running water. It had limited electricity, often cut due to nonpayment, and its use was strictly regulated by my father. It sat on a hill in rural Monroe County, Iowa, surrounded by forest and field and the particular silence of a place that has deliberately set itself outside the modern world. I did not know, growing up, that this was unusual. It was the only house I knew.

🌳 The Dream. My Father’s Version

In the dream, the poet walks out of our house on the hill. He walks in silence until he is standing in a field of tall grass down in the valley past the bass pond where the bullfrogs have gathered to sing at dusk. He remembers the lucid dream precisely: there’s a rock path leading to a far-off forest of pine trees, a stream filled with flowing water, another hill in the distance. It is springtime. Now it is night. On the distant hill, there is a fire. As the poet approaches the hill, he can see that around the fire sits an old man holding a book.

“Speak,” the old man says.

The poet opens his mouth, and bees fall out. Not metaphorically, not as a symbol he will interpret later, but bees, actual bees, tumbling from his open mouth and flying off into the darkness of the dream. He is not afraid. In the poet’s universe, bees falling from your mouth is not alarming. It is a benediction.

“Speak,” the old man says again. He holds the book out toward the poet, who takes it, opens it, and begins to read the words aloud:

I believe in seeds

I believe

in seeds planted in wild places

in the taste of river mist

in the smell of sages

I believe

in mountains while crossing the borderline and

bridges in the desert spanning the depths of time

In the dream, the poet reads on. The old man listens. The bees are somewhere in the darkness now, flying out, out beyond his vision.

When my father wakes, he is not in his bed.

He is deep inside the forest behind our house on a small hill in rural Iowa. It is winter. Just before dawn. His beard is frozen to his face. He cannot feel his hands or his feet. He does not know how long he has been out here. Hours, certainly, and probably most of the night. The forest in Iowa in January is not a forgiving place. The temperature has been dropping since sunset. The kind of cold that sits inside you and makes you question, in a slow and clinical way, whether you will make it back to the house.

A deer walks past him.

My father is so close to it that he can feel the deer’s breath on his face, a small warmth, the only warmth in the dark world around him. The deer stops. It looks directly at him. In his eyes, in this moment, the deer and the old man from the dream are the same. He has said this to me many times over the years, and I have never known quite what to do with it. He is not a mystical man in the way people imagine mystics. There is nothing ethereal or vague about him. He is precise, physical, alert. When he says he recognized the old man from his dream in the face of a deer in an Iowa forest in January, he means it as a statement of fact.

My father lifts the bow to his shoulder and releases an arrow into the deer’s heart.

The deer runs down the hillside. My father follows. He jumps on the deer, wrestles it to the ground, and slits its throat. He wraps its hind legs with a rope and begins the long pull across the frozen ground toward home. The distance is considerable. His hands are still partially numb. As he walks, the poem continues to come, words arriving in the cold air with the same authority the old man’s voice had in the dream. The poet recites it aloud into the dark:

I believe

in the journey of a soul

in destinations made manifest

by the dreams and visions we hold

I believe

in a spirit life fashioned by design

stretching across a threshold

created by leaving autonomy behind

I believe

in sunlight filtering through green leaves

in the shadows of untold winters

hugging branches of trees

I believe in an open gate and radiant splendor

in engagements ongoing which struggle to surrender

meaning to solitude and the ability to engender

space without time empowered with the impulse to remember

human beings as children and pure light as the great defender

of a faith that is defined until finally freed

by a mind which accepts then releases

this paradigm creed.

From this moment on, the poet will never forget these words.

I don’t know what it is like to carry a poem that way, to wake with one fully formed, stitched into memory before you have lit the stove or found the feeling back in your hands to hold your coffee.

I have tried to understand it. I have read. I have taken courses in literature. I studied literary theory. I went to graduate school for poetry. I have notebooks full of drafts and second drafts and third drafts of my own poems, filled with the accumulated wreckage of revision.

That is not how the poet writes poems. He does not write poems at all, actually. The poet wakes in forests with poems cascading from his mouth and pulls a deer through the snow to bring his family their winter food. He does both of these things simultaneously without finding it strange.

Yes. It is strange to many, perhaps to most. I have spent a lifetime finding it quite extraordinary. And lined with sorrow. And beautiful.

Leave a comment

🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

Subscribe now

🌳

The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Subscribe now

The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

“I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.”

— William Stafford

Prologue: “It Is Not A Dream”

🌳 Then. My 30th birthday.

I am thirty years old. It is the morning of my birthday. My father has used his calling card to phone me from a gas station somewhere near the small cabin in the forest where he lives without running water or electricity. I know this before I pick up because there is a pause on the line before his voice arrives, the brief digital nothing of a prepaid card establishing its connection to the world. My father does not have a phone. He has never had a phone. He reaches the world by calling card, by postcard, by appearing without warning in a gymnasium or a grocery store, or sometimes by walking out of a forest you didn’t know he had gone into.

“What did you dream on your birthday morning, Lupita?” he asks.

It is his usual question. There have been birthdays when we didn’t speak at all. Birthdays when he tried to contact me, and I refused to talk to him, or birthdays when I searched for him, and he was nowhere to be found. On the birthdays we do connect, this is how he begins. He is not interested in my new job or my research. He is not interested in the summer I spent traveling or the city I have recently moved to. He is more interested in my dreaming self than in any of the selves I have worked so hard to construct in my waking life.

I normally just tell him whatever I dreamt. I go on with the conversation without thinking much about it. Dad takes note of my dreams. He will bring them up again, word for word, the next year or the next time we talk, to make a point about how my decision to join the modern world has led me away from my true self, toward a life that is out of sync with the natural world and my spirit destiny. I know this. I tell him the dreams anyway. In some part of me, I have always wanted him to find in them something I cannot find on my own.

But on this birthday, something is different. Something I cannot explain is different. I can feel it before either of us speaks.

He knows about the heads.

“I dreamt of rabbit heads on a hillside,” I tell him. “They were torn off the bodies. Blood everywhere.”

“And the heads were lying on the ground in the shape of the stars above,” my father says. “In the shape of the Big Dipper.”

“Yes.”

I do not ask him how he knows this. Or rather, I do, but not yet. First, I sit for a moment with the fact of it. The morning light is coming through a window somewhere above the Chattahoochee River, in a city that is not Iowa, a city I have chosen precisely because it is not Iowa, and my father is at a gas station near a forest, and he has just described a dream I have not told him about. He has described it accurately, in great detail. Not the general shape of it but the specific, private image at its center: the heads in the formation of the Big Dipper, the stars mapped in blood onto the hillside. The same hillside I grew up on in rural Monroe County, Iowa. The same stars I learned to name as a child lying on my back in a field with my brothers, the Britannica Encyclopedia illuminated by a flashlight, open to the letter S.

“How did you know that?” I ask him.

“I was there, too,” he says.

Astro-surfing. That is what he calls it. Sliding into someone else’s astro-plane and accessing their subconscious states. My father has been trying to get me to believe in this for years. He has claimed it as fact in our phone calls, in letters, and in conversations held at coffee shop tables in small Iowa towns, where we sit across from each other because, at times, neither of us can quite figure out any other way to say what needs to be said. I have spent most of my adult life treating astro-surfing as a metaphor for something else: his wish to remain part of my inner life, his refusal to accept that the distance between us is real. But it is my thirtieth birthday, and he is at a gas station calling-card phone, and he has named my dream before I described it.

“You were saying a poem,” I tell him. “Blessing the heads.”

I was standing in moonlight, just beyond the darkness of the forest surrounding us. My father’s body swayed as he chanted poetry, walking back and forth on the hillside. I was keeping watch over the rabbit heads, moving my hands stained with blood in circles above them, then lifting my arms up to the moonlight, almost dancing.

“Pretty strange dream,” I say.

“It wasn’t a dream, Lupita,” my father says. His voice is calm, the way it normally is when he says the most extraordinary things. The calm is not performative. It is the calm of a man who has always found his own beliefs to be ordinary. “It is a memory.”

I don’t know what to do with this. I don’t know what to do with it when I’m thirty, and I don’t know what to do with it years later, and I still don’t know as I write this sentence eighteen years later, at 48. I believe in facts and science. I believe in the things I can hold and measure. I grew up in a forest in rural Iowa without running water, put myself through school, earned a graduate degree, and built a life in the mainstream world with deliberate, daily effort. I am not my father. I have always known I am not my father.

And yet.

There are the rabbit heads. There are my hands, stained with blood in the moonlight, lifting. There is the dream that was already in his mind before I told him about it. There are the poems that have been arriving in his dreams for over sixty years now, the poems he recites from memory in forests and libraries and community centers and the kitchens of strangers. Poems that were never written down until I finally convinced him to let me write them down. Poems that he says come to him from entities living in other realms. I do not know what to do with any of this. I have spent my whole life not knowing what to do with it. Until now. Today, as I write.

This book is what I have done with it.

🌳 Now. Nearly two decades later. My father’s cabin in rural Iowa.

The cabin my father built is a kitchen salvaged from an abandoned farmhouse. A handmade bridge of scrap lumber crosses the ditch to the well. There is no electricity. There is no running water. He is in his early seventies now, and this is still how he lives, in the same deliberate relationship with the Iowa forest that he has maintained since before I was born. Some things about him have softened. On some things, he has not budged an inch.

I am sitting across from him on a wooden stool he made himself. My phone is in my hand, the recording light a small red point in the cabin’s dimness. Outside, the forest is March-bare, the trees gray and waiting. A pot of water hums on the wood stove. I am in my late forties. I have flown here from Ankara, Türkiye, where I live now with my two sons, and I have come to ask my father the questions I have been carrying for most of my life.

Before I ask anything else, I want to ask him about the rabbit heads. About the dream on my thirtieth birthday. About astro-surfing. About what he meant when he said it was a memory.

I want to ask him: Do you still believe that?

I press record.

Leave a comment

Leave a comment

🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🌳

Creativi-Tea Time

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.

Subscribe now

🍵 Creativi-tea Time: Nurture Your Creative Spirit

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My dear heart, do not believe for a moment that your art is a luxury, an extra thing for when the world is calm. No. In times when the world splinters, the artist is the one who picks up the pieces and shows us they might still form a pattern.

I see you there, brush in hand, wondering if painting matters when the news shows only destruction. I hear you, voice trembling over a line of poetry, questioning if beauty is an escape from reality. Let me tell you what I’ve come to know as truth. The artist does not escape reality. The artist confronts reality and then reshapes it.

Peace is not merely the absence of bombs. Peace is the presence of understanding. And who teaches understanding if not the storyteller who lets us walk a mile in another’s shoes? Peace is the presence of beauty in the midst of rubble. And who plants that garden if not the painter who finds the one wildflower growing through concrete?

When you write that poem about forgiveness, you are not being naive. You are drawing a map to help hearts find their way back to each other. When you sing that song about home, you are building a shelter for the displaced. When you sculpt that figure of embrace, you are showing bodies what they almost forgot…that we are made to hold, not to harm.

This is the sacred work. This is why you must continue to create.

The opposite of war is peace. The opposite of destruction is creation. Because every act of making something beautiful is a refusal to accept the ugliness as final. Because when we sit in a circle and share what we have made, a song, a story, a gorgeous homemade loaf of bread…we remember we are a community, not just crowds of strangers.

So continue to make the thing that only you can make. Not despite the chaos, but because of it.

Let your art be the small boat that carries someone across the flood.

May it be a blessing,

🦋 Emily Lupita

• 🍵 Creativi-Tea: Join a supportive group where we feature Guest Creatives, learn how they sustain their creative practice, and share our own projects and progress. If you are interested in being a Guest Creative, please fill out this Google Form.

  ---

🍵 Our Guest Creative Shares Their Creativi-tea:

Name: ✨ Kristin Fellows ✨

Link:

https://www.astoryboardlife.com/

🍵 Please tell us about yourself:

Educated in the US and England, I have worked in the storytelling business for decades as a documentary film consultant on more than 200 films for PBS on a vast array of topics. I am also a published writer, illustrator, and street photographer.

🍵 What creative project are you working on now?

I have been writing books for nearly 3 decades and have just published my first one (which is actually my third one). “A Storyboard Life” (Octopus & Garden Press, February 2026) is a memoir about the adventures that can happen when curiosity becomes a compass, and creativity becomes a way through uncertainty.

🍵 If you were sitting down to tea with another creative, how would you encourage their creative spirit?

I'm uncomfortable if I'm not being creative. I don't know any other way to be. I have been drawing and taking photographs and writing since I was nine or ten. During the mothering years, there wasn't enough time to do as much of any of that as I wanted and needed. I had to work. And so I worked for and with other creative people. Looking back, I realize I should have prioritized it more rather than sneaking it in around the edges. I'm making up for that now!

🍵 Do you have a favorite quote to share to encourage other creatives in the group?

• "I have learned, as a rule of thumb, never to ask whether you can do something. Say, instead, that you are doing it. Then fasten your seat belt. The most remarkable things follow."
  -Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

🍵 Share Your Creativi-tea

What creative projects are you working on these days? Share a favorite quote.

Leave a comment below, and feel free to include a link so we can support your work.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🍵

Creativi-Tea Time

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.

Subscribe now

🍵 Creativi-tea Time: Nurture Your Creative Spirit

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My dear heart, creativity is not decoration. It is the original survival technology.

When the map no longer matches the territory, imagination can draw a new one. When the words fail us, poets & writers can find new language for what we are living through. When grief makes us mourn, painters know that blue can speak what words cannot.

This is why your creativity is important, now more than ever:

• Because to imagine a different world is the first step toward building one.

• Because the mournful who sing are weaving each other back together.

• Because those who despair while painting can include a flower of hope.

So pick up your instrument. Your camera. Your clay. Your trembling voice.

Make the joyful, beautiful, hopeful thing that did not exist before you made it.

This is how we remember we are still creators, not just consumers of catastrophe. This is how we practice bringing light into darkness in real time.

Be the light. Be its maker.

May it be a blessing,

🦋 Emily Lupita

• 🍵 Creativi-Tea: Join a supportive group where we feature Guest Creatives, learn how they sustain their creative practice, and share our own projects and progress. If you are interested in being a Guest Creative, please fill out this Google Form.

  ---

🍵 Our Guest Creative Shares Their Creativi-tea:

Name: ✨ Connie Taylor ✨

Substacks:

The Life and Times of a Midwestern Girl

The Life and Times of a Midwestern Girl takes you into the magic of what it's like living life in the Midwest.

By Connie Taylor

Grandma's Recipe Box

A place to share treasured family recipes and the stories behind them.

By Connie Taylor

🍵 Please tell us about yourself:

I live in Des Moines, Iowa, in the U.S., and have for most of my life, with brief stints in Illinois and Wisconsin. I have a husband, two daughters (one of whom lives only about 10 minutes away and one who lives in a neighboring state), and five amazingly wonderful grandchildren. I cannot wait to find out who they will become.

My passions are writing, reading, gardening, baking, the Iowa State Fair, my family, and my two cats. I combine some of those things by being a food judge for competitions at the Fair, writing about what happens in my life, and spending as much time as possible with my family.

🍵 What creative project are you working on now?

As a writer with two Substack columns, I always have a stash of projects filed away on my computer. For The Life and Times of a Midwestern Girl column, I think my next feature will be about my obsession with Lego projects, with photos of past and present projects, because it’s just about life in the Midwest and the little things that happen. For Grandma’s Recipe Box, next up will be a story about peanut butter cookies, including information on why we make that criss-cross design on top of them. I'm also relearning to crochet, and I always have a scrapbooking and coloring book project going.

🍵 If you were sitting down to tea with another creative, how would you encourage their creative spirit?

First of all, I ask myself:

• What do I want my reader to know?

• What do I want this reader to come away with?

• How do I get them to feel that they are part of the story – that they were there with me?

I write as if I’m talking to my friends because I do consider my readers to be friends. I also tell myself that if I touch only one reader – only one – I have accomplished something important. We all have stories to share, and I’m sharing mine with friends. And I hope that encourages them to share theirs.

🍵 Do you have a favorite quote to share to encourage other creatives in the group?

• “Find a bit of beauty in the world. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days, this may be hard to do.” – Lisa Bonchek Adams via Suleika Jaouad’s newsletter
  

• “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere.” - Anne Lamott from her book, Bird by Bird
  

• “Write from who you are.” – Dr. Robert Leonard

🍵 Share Your Creativi-tea

What creative projects are you working on these days? Share a favorite quote.

Leave a comment below, and feel free to include a link so we can support your work.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🍵

Artist Travel Memoir

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina artist & writer living between Iowa & Türkiye. I’m writing my memoirs one letter 💌 at a time here on my Substack.

Creator of 🧿 The Inward Eye Method, I guide others on how to begin writing their life stories. And how to keep going.

Subscribe now

Take the Traveler Type Quiz →

Creative Life 💌 Letter #13

In The Story She Tells

(For David. Rest in Peace.

With thanks to our college professor for writing “Crying Angel,” a favorite poem, which inspired this essay.)

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My story of Mexico does not begin in the warm silt of the Río Grande or in the shadow of a majestic Mayan pyramid. It begins in the cold, spring-fed clarity of White’s Creek, a small tributary of the Des Moines River that runs through the back woods of Monroe County, Iowa. On a map, it is a thin blue thread stitching together cornfields and patches of wild prairie. It is the primal artery of my life, the first border I ever knew, and the site of my baptism into the blurred, double-named reality of my identity.

The story, as my mother Juana María tells it, with wide gestures and a deep-seated passion in her voice, is my own origin myth. Mom stands forever in my mind on that mound of sand on the bank of White’s Creek, where she led me years ago, a figure both grounded and monumental against the cascading vastness of the endless Iowa sky. Her finger points not just to a spot on the bank, but to a fissure in the timeline of my memory. This was the moment before I nearly drowned at seven years old.

“¡Allí!,” she yelled. Over there. I scrambled up the clay bank, my small hands grasping at roots, and looked down. There it was: a flint arrowhead, a fallen star of the Iowa earth, its edges still whispering of a hunter’s breath from a thousand years ago. It was here I wrapped my thin fingers around its delicate point, not with fear, but with recognition of its sacredness. I held it up, a tiny gray spear against the blue vastness, and gave what Mom calls “a deep, roaring cry” before leaping into the water.

Then came the leap: the commitment to that unknown element we call faith. We didn’t know, my mother reminds me each time she tells the story, that in autumn the swimming hole had no end. That at this very spot, the water was bottomless.

This is where time becomes a distant memory for me, the child plunged into an infinity she could not comprehend. The water was my unconscious. The water was the past and the future at once, that I could not rationally know, the genetic memory of other bodies of water: the Gulf, the cenotes, the rivers whose names I had not yet learned. In that space, without her, as my mother watched, motionless, from the shore, I learned of love. Not the gentle kind, but terrifying, all-encompassing love: the kind that is a surrender to something greater than your own breath.

The giant fish gathered around me, their scales windows of light. They still visit me in my dreams, those translucent souls, ancient and indifferent, showing me flashes of a hidden world that existed in parallel to the sunlit one above. I was becoming lost in the infinity of myself, shedding the small, singular name of Emily and dissolving into something neither less nor more, something infinite in its namelessness. Lupita.

Then, a second mother, Jane, a woman with a name in two languages, who spoke the practical, saving tongue of the Midwest. It was Jane who saw my motionless body, pale against the dark mud, and did not hesitate. She plunged into the bottomless place and pulled me out. Her mouth on mine, breathing air back into my waterlogged lungs. Where the creek had claimed me for the infinite, she claimed me back for the finite, the human, the beloved. Our mouths intertwined, our spirits immersed in that gorgeous midwestern season when leaves let go, take a journey.

In that moment, caught between the mud and the breath, between Juana María’s watchful gaze on the bank and Jane’s desperate embrace in the water, I began to understand my life’s shape. I was a child of two forces: the leap into the ancestral unknown, and the fierce rescue into a particular love. One mother gave me the story, the myth, the pointing finger toward the abyss. The other gave me the breath to tell my own version.

White’s Creek was my first border. Not a line of division, but a seam of fusion. On one bank stood my heritage, a history of journeys and survival embodied by Juana María. In the water swirled the infinite, the dangerous pull of identities yet unformed. On the other bank, pulling me out, was the solid, loving presence of Jane and the English-speaking world. I was born in that creek, not once, but twice. First to mystery, then to love. My baptism was not in one water, but in the tension between the two.

Every poem I have written since is an attempt to navigate that creek. That I was raised on the banks of White’s Creek is both a literal and figurative reality. I honor now, with these words, the bottomless plunge, the embrace of the indigenous self, the drowned memory, the fearless roar. And I honor the saving breath, the love that demands I live, that pulls me into a specific time and place and body, even if my body feels stretched always between worlds. The arrowhead I found is the first artifact of my digging toward myself. It is proof that I come from a lineage of hunters walking the land. The breath Jane gave me is the voice that sings on the hunter’s long journey.

In this story my mother tells, drowning and salvation are the same event. Being lost and being found are inseparable. The infinity of myself, I’ve come to see, is not a void, but a womb. And the love that found me is not a single language, but a conversation, a dialogue sometimes spoken with a roar, sometimes whispered, between two names that together spell my own self. Emily Lupita. All my borders, all my blurrings, begin at that water’s edge, with one mother tongue crying out from the bank of White’s Creek, and the other taking a deep breath, diving into the dark waters to pull me back into life.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 Blessings,

Emily Lupita, MFA

Leave a comment

Get the 🧿 Story Guide for Letter #1 free →

1. Read the next Letter 💌 Here they all are, in order. Read the Letters →

2. Try the Inward Eye Method 🧿 Browse individual Story Guides, Get the Full Course bundle, or try Letter #1 for free. Browse my Stan Store →

3. Join the full archive 📚 Become a paid subscriber and unlock every 🧿 Story Guide — a complete memoir curriculum. Become a Paid Subscriber →

4. Bring art into your mailbox 🌸 Join the Portrait Postcard Mail Club — my original art and a writing prompt, delivered to your door every month. Join the Mail Club →

Subscribe now

🧿

Creativi-Tea Time

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.

Subscribe now

🍵 Creativi-tea Time: Nurture Your Creative Spirit

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My dear heart, do not despair to find your inner garden overrun with such fierce and weedy vines. The choking bitterness of anger, the sharp, quick-sprouting thorns of anxiety. I feel it, too. They have been seeded by the wild, untamed storms beyond your gate…yes. But we must remember: we are the keepers of this soil. We must remember that this rage can be composted, turned back into dark, rich Mother Earth, nurturing Goddess, who will transform it into a stronger, more resilient bloom.

Our anxiety is not a blight, but a frantic signal from roots sensing a drought; it tells us where to pour the healing water of our attention. So…yes…we must continue to pick up our trowels and our pens, our brushes and our chisels. These are the tools of the future we want to create.

• Begin by tending to one small square foot of peace.

• Uproot one tangled thought and lay it aside.

• Plant a single, perfect line of prose.

• Sketch the hopeful curve of a single leaf unfurling.

In the deliberate order of your creation, you will find the first solace: the proof that somewhere, something can still be planned, and nurtured, and grown. The proof that each movement toward peace matters and makes a difference.

May it be a blessing,

🦋 Emily Lupita

• 🍵 Creativi-Tea: Join a supportive group where we feature Guest Creatives, learn how they sustain their creative practice, and share our own projects and progress. If you are interested in being a Guest Creative, please fill out this Google Form.

  ---

🍵 Our Guest Creative Shares Their Creativi-tea:

Name: Emanuela B

Substack: The Inclusion Room

The Inclusion Room

A newsletter that helps people living between cultures transform self-doubt into awareness through intentional choices, turning difference into bridge.

By Emanuela B

🍵 Please tell us about yourself:

As far back as I can remember, two passions have always guided my path: a curiosity for what is different from me, and the pleasure of telling those stories. Driven by that curiosity, many years ago, I left my home in the deep south of Italy and began to explore the world.

I’ve lived in various European countries, learned different languages, encountered diverse cultures, and realized that the way we interact depends on the context we’re in—and on each person’s background.

A year ago, The Inclusion Room became my little corner of the internet where I share reflections on how to navigate the challenges of diversity and inclusion, offering real-life stories, practical tools to value differences, and insights from my readings and research.

So many people joined the room this year, and it makes me incredibly happy. 💛

🍵 What creative project are you working on now?

My creative journey started years ago, when my international classmates finished their PhDs and left—and I found myself alone in France, starting my career in a French company. I began to believe my Italian accent was a problem, as if I were just “the migrant,” reduced to grammar mistakes.

Then one day, I decided to act. Literally.
I joined a theatre group.

I thought: if an audience could laugh or cry because of my words, then I was getting through. It turned out to be one of my best decisions. Theatre became my passion and my place of belonging. My accent is still there—softer now—but my voice has been understood for over a decade.
In twelve years of amateur theatre, I performed in a dozen plays in French and English across two countries, joined international festivals, and built friendships that lasted. Those early doubts? They didn’t shrink me. They pushed me to grow.

This year, I’ve been involved in a writing project with two of my friends. One of them was mistreated during her childhood, while the institutions around her stayed blind and silent. She wanted to bring stories like hers to the stage—to raise awareness among adults, young people, and institutions, and to remind them that children’s words matter just as much as their parents’.

I decided to pick up the pen and write this theatre play with her. Our group will perform it with the support of associations—in schools, theatres, and anywhere people want to hear these stories.

We’re writing from her lived experience, but through our different sensitivities: three artistic perspectives, three ways of choosing words, three backgrounds.
And that mix makes the project incredibly rich.

🍵 If you were sitting down to tea with another creative, how would you encourage their creative spirit?

My fuel is the confrontation between my inner world and other people’s perspectives. Writing with my friends—erasing, adding, cutting, pasting—this whole creative process puts me in flow.
When I’m on stage, sharing those emotions and knowing they’ll stay with people for a while, it feels like they’re carrying a part of me back home with them.

Theatre, for me, is like stepping into someone’s life.
And when I write my newsletter, I look forward to the comments more than the likes or any other kind of appreciation.

So I’d say: keep going. Keep creating. Art is a bridge towards others.

🍵 Do you have a favorite quote to share to encourage other creatives in the group?

There’s something I learned in high school from a Latin author, and it has stayed with me ever since. It’s become a kind of mantra I repeat when I’m not sure how to reach “the other”:

Tene rem, verba sequentur.

It means: “Hold on to the essence, and the words will follow.”
In other words: if you’re clear about what you truly want to say, your intention, your message, your truth, language will come. Maybe not perfectly. Maybe not elegantly at first. But it will come.

For me, it’s a reminder that connection doesn’t start with flawless vocabulary. It starts with meaning. And when the meaning is real, the words eventually find their way.

🍵 Share Your Creativi-tea

What creative projects are you working on these days? How’s it going?

Please leave a comment, and feel free to include a link so we can support your work.

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

🍵

“Wading in the Healing Waters of Pamukkale”

Subscribe now

(🌿 Content note: profound autism, elopement, suicidal ideation)

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

After nearly giving in to the call of the void at Palenque, I stayed away from high places. The next time I found myself somewhere truly high up was about nine years later, standing on the white cliffs of Pamukkale in Türkiye.

At that time, both of my sons were small and still in the throes of severe elopement behavior. The elopement begins not as an act of defiance, but as a magnetic pull, a current in the blood that I simply cannot see. One moment, their small hands are warm, fluttering birds in mine, and the next, the place where they stood is empty, and a silent alarm screams through my body. My sons are called by something beyond my understanding…the shimmer of a distant puddle, the hypnotic spin of a fan, the siren song of an unlocked gate leading to a world of textures and spaces I have not yet learned to perceive.

It is a flight toward a sensory truth so urgent that safety becomes an abstract concept, a whisper lost in the roar of the need to “run.” When they run, my Mama heart becomes a wild drum against my ribs as I scan the horizon, my voice a desperate, breaking thing on the wind, calling their names into a silence that feels both vast and intimately connected to the beautiful, untamed labyrinth of their minds. Charlie and Archie have both eloped into other people’s homes, into traffic, into the water.

I traveled extensively before having my sons. And I thought I knew how to measure the length of a journey. But my sons taught me that distance is relative and goes beyond mere measurements. They taught me, for example, that the steps between my front door and the car, a short distance when measured in feet, could sometimes feel like an entire continent.

My two sons, my beautiful, joyful boys, are both diagnosed with Autism, although they are on very different areas of the spectrum. Their minds are intricate, brilliant constellations, perceiving the world with a sensory intensity I try to imagine. I do relate intimately with some of their experiences, as I was also diagnosed as neurodivergent as an adult.

When both boys were small, the simple act of walking from our house to the car could become an impossible trek. We have abandoned trips to the grocery store, turned back from playgrounds, and surrendered before even reaching a neighbor’s door. There were times when their bodies would simply give up, folding to the ground in a storm of kicking and screaming, a cycle of frustration that left us all breathless and exhausted.

And then, life, in its mysterious way, unfolded a new map. My (now ex-)husband, who is Turkish, received an opportunity in his hometown. So we sold our cars, our home, and nearly everything we owned. We packed our lives into a few suitcases, strapped the boys into a double stroller-wagon, and flew across the world to the capital city of Ankara.

That first summer, we drove south to visit the boys’ Turkish grandparents, Babaanne (father’s mother) and Dede (grandpa), on the Turquoise Coast. The journey took two days, and along the route, as we emerged from a wild ride on a shortcut over the mountains, a white shimmer appeared on the horizon, gleaming like a lost city. Pamukkale. In Turkish, “Pamuk” means “cotton” and “kale” means “castle.” The “Cotton Castle.” Taking our boys there felt like a pilgrimage we needed to attempt, a test of our new, fragile hope that we could show them the world.

Their father and I are travelers by nature. We can walk for hours with a backpack, then find contentment in a dusty bus station with a protein bar, our souls fed by the promise of a beautiful view. But this was different. This was a journey with our two young autistic sons…and I was worried. How would we even begin to climb up there?

Charlie, who was six at the time, had no such worries or questions. He immediately jumped out of the car, fixed his gaze on the gorgeous cascading terraces above, and began walking, our fearless leader. The path to the travertines was steep and white under the Anatolian sun. This landscape, this miracle of calcite-laden water from the hot springs, has been cascading down these slopes for millennia, creating the petrified, terraced basins. The Romans, seeing its divine power, built the spa city of Hierapolis atop this “castle of cotton,” a place of healing that drew emperors and citizens from across the empire.

We bypassed the famous Cleopatra’s Pool, its warm, turquoise water shimmering above a sunken forest of toppled marble columns, relics of a great earthquake, that now lie submerged like the ruins of a sunken palace. They say the pool itself was a gift from Marc Antony to Cleopatra. I watched other tourists floating over the ancient pillars, and while the boys weren’t ready for that particular immersion, I felt the echo of its history, a whisper of silk and power and ancient heartbreak in the ruins.

Charlie led us onward, a small, determined guide, up the hill, and finally into the dappled shade of swaying, enormous trees. Reaching the edge of the first thermal pool, perched on the cliff where Hierapolis begins, he naturally, wordlessly, slipped off his sandals and stepped into the warm, milky water, the same water that has flowed since before the Romans named it a sacred place.

Archie, three years old, followed his brother into the water, their giggles bubbling up like the sacred springs themselves, a sound of pure contentment. I sat there, my feet on the warm, calcified stone, and tried to absorb this moment. This fleeting, holy moment…as I absorbed the sun’s rays. Just thinking of how my precious boys were communing with a place that has drawn pilgrims for thousands of years.

We were prepared, as we must always be, as Charlie and Archie’s parents. Both boys wore medical harnesses, attached to our backpacks by a spring tether. This was a necessity for their elopement, a word that, I admit, sounds like a gentle wandering but is, for a parent, a nightmare of vanished seconds and sheer terror. At any moment, for any reason, they can run, their bodies propelled by an impulse I could not predict.

But here, on these white cliffs, the harnesses were not a mark of confinement, but a key to freedom. They were our literal lifeline. Because of them, we could all swim. We could all soak in the healing waters, rich with minerals from the same volcanic source that once fed the great Roman bath complex and Cleopatra’s legendary pool. We drank fresh-squeezed orange juice, the sweet tartness a celebration in our mouths after all the walking.

As the sun began to set, painting the sky in shades of rose and gold, we walked back to the car a different way, our new path this time taking us past the ruins of Hierapolis. I could feel the spirits of the place. The ghosts of Roman legionaries, Byzantine priests and artisans, and the countless anonymous mothers who once brought their children to these springs. They felt like ancient grandparents, their energy woven into the stones of the grand theatre and the crumbling temples, their history now part of my sons’ story.

And in the pink, fading light, I felt them guiding my sons’ steps, welcoming them home. There was no shaming here, no heckling from these guardian entities of stone and history. Only a profound, ancient acceptance, and a silent wish for a good journey ahead, for all of us.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

Leave a comment

Artist Travel Memoir

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina poet & writer living between my hometown in rural Iowa & Ankara, the capital of Türkiye. Artist Travel Memoir is my memoir of spiritual travel (across 19 countries) that I’m writing one Letter 💌 at a time. I’m also creating a Lupita Memoir Portrait for each travel letter from my original hand-drawn Lupta artwork series that I started in 2004 while living in Japan and have been adding to for the past 20+ years.

• Follow me on Instagram / Facebook / Substack Notes

• Check out my Children’s Books and Coloring Books

• Get Story Guides for all Travel Letters in My Stan Store

• Receive a hardcopy Lupita Art Print delivered to your door with My Mail Club.

Subscribe now

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

💌