by Analyn Revilla

Today, I stand on soil that I stood upon as a nine-year old, more than 50 years ago.  That was my age when I left the Philippines to immigrate to Canada with my family.   I have  reconnected with the mothership after a very long absence.  What have I got to report? or is it the other way around?  What am I to be informed of OR transformed into?

After 14 hours of a direct flight from LAX to Taipei, followed by another 2 from Taipei to Ninoy Aquino International Airport, I was a cocktail of fatigue, anxiety and curiousity.  I cleared customs and immigration easily, then I walked through the parted sliding doors into the zone.  This zone is beyond order, though it’s not exactly chaos either.  Chaos is a state of mind.  I began to see this land through a different set of lenses.  I am no longer a child, but an adult that has weathered some of life’s experiences.  Though I had perspective, I chose to let go, and allowed myself to be immersed in this water, a baptism into a new beginning.

I saw the faces and I was reminded of the haiku by Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro”.  

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

I settled into my new bubble with little resistance. It helped that I anchored myself into a routine of going to daily mass, exercise, journaling and practicing guitar.  No matter how busy the day or slow the day unfolded, I made time to do these activities:  even if only 5 minutes of practicing scales, or 5 or 10 sun salutations, or a couple of lines in the journal, but definitely, I made time for the rosary.  

Foremost in my mind was the “goal”.  I travelled somewhere between 7416 and 7833 miles from LA to Manila to see my Mom. “To see my Mom” is loaded with meaning.  The goal is not only to see her, but to be with her.  I came to spend time with her, because she turned 95 years old very recently.  I wanted to make the time special and meaningful, but would I be forcing these expectations rather than letting it go as it’s intended to be?  Do we repeat old destructive patterns, or can we allow the weathered years of living mellow-out the cemented resentments and failed hope and expectations?  Can we just be and stop doing?

The efficient flow of traffic in Manila is hard to describe, because to do so would be to lock it into form. It is not a form, but a fluid choreography of intricate dance steps of rubber on pavement with the cars, trucks of all sizes, buses of all kinds, two-wheeled and three-wheeled motorized vehicles, four-pawed cats and dogs, bipedal young & old, professionals and street hawkers, lovers and widows.  They all share the streets and side-walks without collision and very little aggressive horn-blowing.  They are just being and not doing, because to do would break the flow.  They float along in the river, going for the ride to wherever their destination and destiny may be.  I was in awe and am in-love with the Filipinos.  Their silent talk of intentions with their eyes and  gentle sing-songy intonations of call and response, always delivered with genuine kindness.

Whenever I step into the retreat of the mothership, my Mom’s condo and the womb of her bounty, she is waiting and offers me food.  Food is one of the currencies of her love.  Sometimes, the currency is a mild criticism, especially when she has longed for my safe return from my escapades of exploration.  These explorations have been the open markets, feeding homeless dogs, shopping in the air-conditioned malls with its familiar offerings, also found in the West, but with the Asian flair and flavor.    

How have I been transformed in the midst of this visit?  It’s a re-awakening of what’s always been inside of me.  The renewal of my baptism in the river of the milk and honey that my lips suckled upon as a young babe in my mother’s arms.

by Kitty Felde

When I started my little publishing company Chesapeake Press, I gave myself the title of Managing Editor. Little did I know that that’s exactly what I’d become: the person who helps my authors polish their literary masterpiece. Even more surprising: I’m pretty darned good at it!

Likely the skill has been instilled in all of us after all those years of weekly playwriting group meetings where we listen to other people’s work and offer feedback. We’re good little playwrights, learning to bite our tongues instead of honestly telling our colleagues that it was the worst play ever put to paper. Instead, we offer friendly observations and helpful suggestions.

I now offer those friendly observations and helpful suggestions to the writers I’ve hired to create 10,000 word biographies of “heroes of American democracy.” These former journalists and PR executives send me their chapters and outlines and I send back notes. Hopefully, kind and helpful notes (although I still haven’t heard back from a writer I’d asked to rewrite her first chapter and am fretting about her throwing up her hands and walking away entirely…)

But what do I know? What makes a good editor? How do writers work with editors to improve their work without losing themselves in the process?

I’ve asked the experts:

Jane Friedman, the independent publishing whisperer, says it’s not the job of an editor to fix someone’s work. An editor’s job is to help the writer fix it. A good playwriting group will outlaw suggestions of specific rewrites of plot or dialogue. Jane suggests an edit starts with praise, followed up by questions. A useful phrase is, “this just isn’t working for me.”

But how do we as writers use those suggestions? Which ones do we keep? Which ones do we ignore? Writer and editor of the small press Atthis Arts E. D. E. Bell say she has two rules: Consider all edits with an open mind and after a day or so of consideration, only make the changes you like.

Jessica Huang at The Playwrights Center has an editing mantra: Doubt yourself; trust your play. She says our scripts contain two things: our ego and the play that found us. Editing means identifying which is which and eliminating the things we love about our work that don’t serve the play. The challenge of course is identifying which is which.
When editing my own work, I look for the things that make my teeth hurt. These are the lines or bits of drama that I know in my heart aren’t working, but it takes me months to come to terms with ripping them out of the work. I need that time to come to the conclusion that those things must go if the piece is to survive at all.

What about you? Do you have editing mantras? How do you attack your own work? How do you ingest editing notes from others? I’d love to hear your editing mantra.

Kitty Felde’s newest volume in The Fina Mendoza Mysteries series Home of the Brave will be published in June 2026. If you are interested in writing for Chesapeake Press, contact us through the website.

by Chelsea Sutton

I am writing this at 3:11 a.m. on Sunday night/Monday morning. I just got home after spending the last 48 hours+ participating in the LA Immersive Invitational, co-presented by After Hours Theatre Company and The Immersive Experience Institute. It’s a 48-hour theater “competition” where immersive theater companies are tasked with creating a new 10-minute piece over a weekend. I led the Rogue Artists Ensemble team, and it was the first time I’ve been able to participate myself, even though Rogue has been involved as a company for a couple rounds.

The general breakdown of the day is not unlike your typical 24-hour or 48-hour theater festival. It generally looked like:

1. Getting together Friday night to get assignments (location, emotional beat, prop, and a storytelling restriction or challenge that we gave ourselves).
2. We get to work Friday night and all day Saturday.
3. Saturday night we play test with other teams — meaning we are the audience for other teams; with immersive theater, the audience is an important character and variable that is hard to plan for without actual bodies in the room.
4. Sunday we started performing at noon for audiences through 9pm.

Unlike a typical 10-minute festival where you might get the play performed 1-3 times, we performed ours…25 times.

There’s a brilliance in being able to create something and not have the luxury to be burdened with a desire for perfection. To let a project find itself in repetition. And to not assume this HAS to be a bigger, fancier project down the line.

I find myself getting stuck in cycles of production — I seldom write without an agenda and expectation. Free writes and journaling spark immediate irritation for me (even though I understand the WHY of it all). But this kind of cycle only serves to burn me out. It sucks the joy out of a process.

(Pictured above – the “backstage crew” i.e. me and John waiting with Carlos to hear what the audience decides, which triggers one of three endings.)

This weekend was a joyful process. Did we hit some snags and clashes? Yeah. Was it a perfect show? No. Did we create the seeds of something that might turn into a bigger THING? Maybe.

But most importantly, it made me remember how fun all of this is. And somehow in the big scheme of trying to have a “career” I’ve gotten in the loop of constant production and have forgotten how to play.

Sometimes forcing ourselves to play, to not be precious, to let your collaborators in, to be okay with not knowing all the answers…that’s the way to break out of your patterns.

Fittingly, the play was about folks who try to break a man out of a time loop he’s stuck in. We made three different endings that the audience helped choose–their actions in the story had three different outcomes. One progressive. One tragic. One psychedelic.

But every ending can also be a beginning. And every writing/creation exercise strengthens the muscles.

So, do you have permission to come out to play?

Think about that while I take a week-long nap.

by Cynthia Wands

A footprint in the sand along Moonstone Beach near Cambria that I found last summer.

A year or so ago I lost something – and I keep looking for it.

When he was making his glass art pieces, Eric made me a small ruby red glass heart, embellished with a gold filigree. I loved it, and kept it in a small crystal dish on our bedside table. After he died, I would look for it, pick it up, watch it glimmer in the light, and then return it to the same crystal dish. And one day it was gone. I was stunned. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it. I live alone, with occasional company, but no one knows of this particular object. I’ve looked everywhere for it.

It’s been over a year and I keep looking for this red heart. I’ve looked behind furniture and in drawers, on shelves, in a box of keepsake mementos, and on top of the refrigerator. It’s gone. But I keep looking.

A few years ago I lost a notebook I kept at home for a writing project – I used it for spontaneous scribbles I wanted to corral together for a new script. And it too, suddenly went missing. A small black notebook, something I used frequently, and it just vanished. I have no idea where it is. I’ve looked at all the usual suspects, the desk, the office, the bookshelves, also the top of the refrigerator. It’s still missing.

This spring I decided to investigate this idea of the Disappearing Objects Phenomenon (DOP) and the idea of “jottles”. This is the in-explicable vanishing and sometimes unexpected reappearance of items. There’s some humor in this subject: ghosts, cats with extraordinary powers, a glitch in the matrix. And there are some interesting stories. I especially love the idea of items that unaccountably just appear again. Rings, keys, a beloved plastic cup. They just show up right where they were lost.

The research on “jottles” led me to other authors and research I knew nothing about. So I did find something new in all of this.

There are groups online that pursue the attending ideas around these “in-explicable” disappearances: worm holes of time, multidimensional beings, vibrations of “fae energy” and parallel realities where the lost objects gather together in the matrix storage room.

There are also discussions about behavior with an absent minded focus given stress, medication, aging or that second glass of wine. I’m interested in all of that. But I’m still looking for that glass heart. And that black notebook.

And I especially do love those stories of things that are suddenly “found”. I’m reminded of the story of my mother’s ashes. When she died after a long battle with cancer, she left conflicting instructions on where she wanted her ashes scattered. It was decided that a small group of family would sprinkle her ashes in the Spokane River, which was roaring along with record levels from the recent snow melt. We mixed rose petals with her ashes, gathered by the river banks, and scattered them in the furious water. We watched the ashes and the rose petals disappear. It was a strange and powerful reminder of loss.

Years passed. When my grandmother died, my sister Susan and I went to her funeral in Upstate New York. My grandmother had a poignant service at the small countryside church, with a beautiful white coffin covered with roses. She was buried in a small private cemetery, surrounded by the graves of our grandfather and other relatives. I hadn’t been in that cemetery in many years and as we walked over to the open grave for our grandmother, we stopped and stared at a new graveside marker.

In loving memory. Joell Dolan Wands. 1933-1997. My mother’s name appeared.

I flashed back to the day we tossed my mothers ashes in that roiling water, and for a moment, I wondered if that really happened. Because my mother’s name was now on this marker in this private cemetery. For just a moment I hung between the reality that I knew and what I was seeing. Susan squeezed my hand, I think mostly so I wouldn’t yell something, and we stumbled along to the rest of the graveside service for my grandmother. We found out later that my grandmother was so furious that my mother wasn’t buried in the private family cemetery that she put together a graveside marker for my mother and had it installed there, because it was the right thing to do. She didn’t want to tell us about it, because, well, that’s the way my grandmother wanted it done. That is some fierce “fae energy” from my grandmother. And really, surprisingly, it was lovely to find my mother’s name again.

This assignment of looking for something, paying attention, trying to make sense of loss – is very much akin to my life journey right now. This morning I gathered a bowl of rose petals from the garden and was reminded of that day by the river, where we tossed my mother’s ashes into a furious river, accompanied by a scattering of rose petals.

And then I laughed when I remembered that day at the cemetery, and the “found” marker for my mother’s name. Joell Dolan Wands.

April rose petals, now ready for the next transformation.

by Ayesha Siddiqui

There is now a bird feeder outside of my kitchen window. Every morning I refill it with spicy birdseed. This was supposed to prevent the squirrels from eating it, but in fact, they sit on a branch just below the feeder and eat like they’re at a picnic table  (I should have known Los Angeles squirrels would be just fine with spicy food, but I digress). It’s been a joyful moment each day to watch the birds appear in the feeder. Most of the birds share the space and food, though the lone scrub jay who comes by once a day prefers a solo dining experience. There is one type of bird who visits that always captures my attention.

I have always loved spotting the lesser goldfinch on walks around my neighborhood. This tiny little resident pompom of a bird has a nearly fluorescent yellow belly, and the males wear a little black cap of feathers. They are always a welcome sight on an overcast day in the winter, a reminder of color in the life that sits dormant around us awaiting spring. 

Within a week of setting up the feeder, I spotted the first lesser goldfinch. Then another. Now there are six at a time who visit, emptying the feeder so often that I wonder if they’ve taken up permanent residence there. The first time I sat outside near the feeder they chirped at each other, at me, but didn’t venture closer. The second time they hopped along the branches, observing the distance. The third time, they came straight to the feeder, and I was able to watch them up close as they ate. The other birds remain somewhere nearby, hopping from branch to branch, quietly waiting for me to leave. But the brave little lesser goldfinch does not fear me. 

“Perhaps they just aren’t smart enough to fear you,” a recent visitor said. I disagree. Perhaps instead it is that when you’re so small, you have no choice but to be brave, over and over in the world around you.

I won’t say much about the world around us beyond this: the way life operates now is a nonstop churning of opinions, thoughts, news, cycle after cycle of emotional overload that almost feels like it is purposely meant to break and distract. The path of survival I walk is one where I observe the birds outside my window. The choice I will make when I feel small will be that of the brave lesser goldfinch. Over and over. Nature is where I put my attention. It always has the lesson.

Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness… Were it otherwise he would never have been able to find those words. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke (from Letters to a Young Poet)

Has it really been a week now since the President of the United States, Donald Trump, announced “Epic Fury” on Iran?  The night before that, Friday, 02/27/2026, the LAFPI Blog editor sent me the reminder that it’s my week to blog.  Meanwhile, it’s also Lenten season, and Ramadan at the same time.  I decided I will not be blogging about any leading headlines. With the weight of world events, I’m feeling quite tired and sad in every sense of the word. 

Right now, I choose to just attend to what’s necessary.  Cut back on social media, cut back on texting, cut back in general on unnecessary noise.  The simplicity of putting one foot in front of the other, rather than one word after another has been my steady gait.  I mean this literally.  I’ve just been hiking in the nearby park and criss-crossing the trails.  Words escape me.  I have images juxtaposed upon another.  

I am deadheading the faded blossoms and the accumulation of non-sense.  This spring cleaning has awakened my consciousness of the joy I’ve been robbing myself of.  I miss writing poetry.  There was a time that writing a poem came to me so innocently pure.  The high states of being in-love prompted expression of the bursting ecstasy.  The “mean reds” and deep blues flowed like spilt fountain pen ink all over the page and onto the table; the stain taking shape, come what may.

The theme of yesterday’s homily was the importance of faithfulness and accountability for what has been entrusted to us from the divine.  Everyone has a talent, and yes, some are gifted with more than one, hence more is expected from those with more talents to offer.  I felt the priest was speaking directly to me for not being faithful and accountable for my writing.  It’s been on my mind a lot, for quite sometime.   

A couple of weeks ago, I had the inkling for “diving into the wreck” of poetry.  I carried around a book of poems, but not really burying myself into it.  Then recently, I had thirty minutes to spare before the 5:30 PM mass, and I ordered steamed dumplings at Northern Cafe Dumpling House.  While the order was being prepared, I crossed the Figueroa Street to peruse the books at the Goodwill, and I quickly found a paperback of a collection of essays and poems by Adrienne Rich.  I felt fortuitous, and guided to be on the right track. I’ve been absorbing her works I hadn’t read before. 

Tonight, walking under the canvas of stars and moon, in its waning gibbous phase, I recalled a bible book from the old days at The Imagined Life acting studio with Diane Castle.  One of the required reading was “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.  When I got home, I quickly found my copy.  When I opened the book, a couple of pictures fell out.  They were of my beloved Bruno Herve Commereuc.  One picture shows Bruno, in front of a stove,  holding a sauté pan with one hand while the other is spooning something into the pan.  The other picture shows him relaxed and thoughtful, on a chair, surprisingly holding a Coca Cola can (and not a glass of wine).  I remember he told me this was the upstairs of Angelique Cafe, his first restaurant in Los Angeles.  During this time in his life he looks like a young poet.  There was a sweet mien in his gaze and deep passion in the set of his jaws.  

The pictures were inserted at the end of “Eight”, the eighth letter of Rilke to Kappus, written on August 12th, 1904.  This particular letter addresses the sadness that Kappus revealed to Rilke in a prior letter. 

Rilke advises the Kappus on the poignancy of his sadness. 

I believe that almost all our sadness are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living…

And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad:  because the apparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future sets foot in us is so much closer to life than the other noisy and fortuitous point of time at which it happens to us as if from outside.  The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much the deeper and so much more unswervingly does the new go into us…

At 2 o’clock tonight, I will adjust my wristwatch one hour ahead to “spring” forward.  This perhaps is a jump start on getting out of the quagmire that I feel anxious to get out of so I can get on with life.  But, I know it’s not the way through.  I need to be more still, and more patient and more open to this sadness and let it run through me, without hanging on to anything.