Jane-Jack Morales has always loved to write and has worked at it on and off over the course of her life. She is an occupational therapist specializing in the therapeutic art of Myofascial Release Therapy who is now semi-retired and very happy to finally have time to practice writing.
You can read Tantoyuca in the January 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
My husband is native to Tantoyuca, Veracruz and we brought our eight year old daughter Anna Delfina to live and go to school here for fourth grade so that she would be truly bilingual. We wanted her to be firmly connected to her grandparents and extended family. In the mornings I walked her to school and then took long morning walks up into the hills. I was a little bit lonely and the women and children walking to work, or to school, or to market greeted me and were friendly, but I think we were a puzzle to each other. Writing this poem helped me find a sense of belonging to Tantoyuca.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
It had to be a poem because it all hit me all at once. It took me years to get it on paper but the event changed everything for me in the time it took to walk down that hill.
If you didn’t write poetry, how do you think you might access the same fulfillments that poetry offers in your life?
There are several things that come close. First, I love to take and share pictures. Second, myofascial release comes close to poetry as well. It a therapeutic art, a form of body work that I have practiced for twenty years. It requires safe, connected touch, generates resonance between me and my client and facilitates release of restricted tissues. I will add, as a fulfilling practice, a form of prayer that I learned reading Anne Lamont. She wrote that you only need three prayers in life: Help! Thanks! and Wow! Most of my poems have all three tucked in somewhere.
What are you working on now?
I am just learning to write. In a few weeks I am moving permanently to Tantoyuca with my husband and will have ample time to practice writing short stories and poems. I hope to write a novel.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
For me it begins with noticing, with longing and with curiosity about the mystery of life on earth. It almost always begins with that feeling of wanting to grasp and hold a moment, an idea or a feeling while life demands simultaneously that I let go.