writing wild. writing holy. writing free.
mai cortez doan is a writer, facilitator, and grief worker.
mai writes and teaches writing as a creative and contemplative practice to deepen self-connection and affirm our inherent belonging to ourselves, our stories, and the earth. She facilitates community offerings for processing grief and teaches how the natural world can support us through loss, death, and change. mai works with grief, writing, and storytelling as fertile and necessary ground for strengthening our personal and collective capacity to engage with the most potent callings of our rapidly changing times.
She lives in Albuquerque, NM with her dog, Story.
water/tongue
A 2020 Lambda Literary Award Finalist in Poetry
“A compelling examination of the diasporic body in an uncertain landscape, water/tongue enacts the ancestral, the matriarchal, and the ritual by way of witnessing the self. Through a critique of the ever permanent and devastating effects of colonialism, water/tongue gifts the reader with a resilient voice seeking out truths in the historical to question why ‘the dead are more alive than the living.’ These carefully crafted lines embody a language of remembrance that becomes a way of holding space for the living and for the dead, ‘until the dead is swept up / until the dead is not / dead anymore.’”— Mai Der Vang, author of Afterland
