Time for a Change

New name for Letter From The Villages, Florida

It’s time to rename and relaunch this newsletter. Letter from The Villages, Florida is too limiting in scope and subject matter to fuel a weekly newsletter that’s not only interesting to me but also of value to the readers who have found this publication.

After a great deal of thought, I’ve decided to reincarnate it as “Jacaranda.”

Why Jacaranda?

When I first arrived in Adelaide, jacaranda trees bloomed along the boulevard and jet-lagged me awakened to the beautiful world again. It was my first time seeing them, or at least noticing them in their full glory, rows of them standing tall on both sides of a wide avenue.

I’d travelled across the globe for a full 24 hours and on arrival at Adelaide’s airport I’d already begun to doubt myself. My presence on the very edge of the world, the southern end of the driest, least populated continent on the planet, not counting Antarctica, felt like the culmination of a depressed lunatic’s failure to comprehend reality. Guess who the depressed lunatic might have been?

And then the jacarandas came into view through the car window as I rode into the city. Their purple flowers contrasted with the clearest blue sky I’d ever seen, and I knew coffee and jacarandas would be enough for now.

That was all I needed to know.

Jacaranda trees in Adelaide, Australia. iStock photo.

Jacarandas bloomed in spring and fall in South Australia. In spring, their purple blooms heralded the start of a hot, restless season—one where laundry dried in five minutes under the blazing sun, and fires burned in the hills, often set by loons maddened by the crazy-making heat. The burning eucalyptus trees smelled like cough drops back in the northern land from which I’d come. Koalas waddled across roadways, fleeing the flaming trees.

In fall jacaranda flowers telegraphed the coming freshness, rain, and a time for red wine and fires alight in the pubs, where conversation and friendships blossomed too.

Jacarandas are associated with growth, renewal and resilience, common themes in this compendium of essays and other writings. It seems to make sense, then, to name the journal and its accompanying newsletter after them.

I’ve always been interested in questions about how to live in connection with the world and the people in it. Connection is why we’re here.

There are really only two questions posed when one enters a room of other people. Whether we want to acknowledge them or not is a separate issue, a story unto itself. The questions are: Who’s in charge here? And do you love me? That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame—power and love. Every story ever told involves these two elements. They are tied by the need for personal connection, relevance, being seen.

Writers like to tell people we don’t want to be seen, but this is a lie. We may be uncomfortable socially but we most certainly want to be seen by being read.

Jacaranda the newsletter and journal is a way forward, toward seeing and being seen anew every week in your inbox.

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The Big Picture - Why Write a Literary Journal at all?

The only answer I can provide was best given by Toni Morrison in her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature lecture titled “The Absence of Love” in which she discussed the role of the writer:

Passion is never enough; neither is skill. But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.

These lines call to writers, asking us to dig deep into our personal and collective histories, to bring forth stories that reveal the complexities of the human condition—stories that offer more than simple answers, but rather show the complexities, contradictions, and experiences of life.

My aim is for Jacaranda to add stitches to belief’s wide skirt through words that illustrate darkness and light; messiness and order; hollowness and beauty. None of this is about instruction but an attempt to evoke understanding, emotion and reflection. In short, to make meaning from the unlikely fact of your existence and mine in this vast universe and the amazing way we collide together against the page, reader and writer together in the arena of life.

I hope you stick with me in this evolving journey.

Yours,

Martina.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. - Morrison

Here is the link to the audio recording of Morrison’s speech. Trust me — it’s the most amazing thing about the power of language you’ll ever hear.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/

literary-arts.org