“Residency Brain” and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative

One week into my residency at Vashon Island, I feel my brain change. I recognized the feeling around the same time into my last residency in March. I love this part, the part when my brain has emptied all thoughts from life before I arrived here, and now the only thing left to process is the creative process itself. The switch feels almost psychedelic. “Residency Brain” feels a little like being some kind of high all the time, thinking in a way so different from the kind of thinking I do in my normal life. I don’t exactly know what’s happening to me here, but I know that something is happening. A richness of experience that I can’t often find outside of these spaces.

While here, I begin a ritual of picking one tarot card each morning as a prompt for what I’d write about next. I noticedI keep pulling the Hermit card, and this feels right. I feel lonely here as the only woman of color in my cohort, isolated on a small island with an 87% white demographic (notably, also 0% Black, and only 6% Latinx/Asian/Native combined) and a median income of over $100,000. And yet, I also know I just couldn’t imagine myself being anywhere else than at a residency right now, processing and digesting my life, reading, reading, reading, lost in research and stories and thoughts.

Still, needing some sort of QTBIPOC company, each week I call my queer Latine writer friend C, and we write together for hours over the phone. Before arriving here, I had just finished the book C had recommended: Gloria Anzaldua’s craft book Luz en Lo Oscura, where she writes in depth about her own writing process, which she calls “The Coyolxauhqui Imperative,” named after the Mexica goddess of the moon. In the legend, when Coyolxauhqui’s brother kills her, he throws her body down a mountain, where it breaks into a thousand pieces. The fragments reassemble themselves in the sky and become the moon.

Anzaldua uses this legend as a symbol for the writing process. “The Coyolxauhqui Imperative” is “the physic and creative process of tearing apart and pulling together; “a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos that tear our souls apart, split us, scatter our energies.” She names her book Luz en Lo Oscuro – Light in the Dark – to remind us that just like Coyolxauhqui, who lights up the night sky through her shattered pieces, the creative process can help us do the same: we can take the parts of us that feel broken or scattered and make something that helps us see our lives more clearly.

Later, another writer friend tells me that “Residency Brain” is best for this kind of intense process: not always for generating hundreds of pages, but for beginning to make deeper connections between stories that used to feel isolated and unrelated to each other. That all that time and space enables us to get to closer to the core level of feeling we need to finally put the pieces together.

I ended this residency, just as the last one, struggling with how little I tangibly have to “show” for my time here: no finished essays, still no book. But C reminds me that this is what residency time is also for: gathering the fragments, beginning to assemble them into something that may one day shine a light on everything that right now still feels dark.

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Needless to say, it was also a whole thing trying to focus at a residency while also witnessing the results of our election, and the continued genocide in Palestine (Sudan, Congo …). Some links I wanted to uplift:

This doc of resources that many of might need in the upcoming months/years:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18S0_oky8UZ1J71eFYWnYjYgUIYhnVPp6MIe1HKxB3Fk/edit?tab=t.0

This poem by Clint Smith captured for me the specific grief of these last few months:

https://readwildness.com/19/smith-people

This essay by queer Palestinian writer and editor George Abraham, about how to exist within the literary industry right now in times of genocide:

Toward an Apocalypse of Letters—Foreword to 25.1: Catastrophe

And as always, please consider donating to this fundraiser a friend is organizing for their friend Mayar in Palestine:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/from-war-to-hopehelp-move-my-family-to-safety