Dear Cassie 

By Gabriella D’Italia 

August 2026 

Dear Cassie, 

I've been wanting to write, but I’m not sure to what end, but when we know the end in advance, doesn’t it falsify the beginning? So, if I just start, and keep to the moment, then everything will be as it should. 

Every year, I relearn the fact: January, the middle of the winter, is not a beginning, despite our claiming it as the first month. For that energy we have to wait for spring. Last year, I felt urgency, especially when the sight of "2025" conjured "book launch" even though my book didn’t come out until November, and that tumbled into holiday-season, and so it is only reasonable that 2026 is more actionable, more of a fruition time. And we faced wildfires, then, and now again. That, and you wrote about digression as a site for meaning. 

I work with a shaman. She told me years ago that my book, my work really, would "catch fire" and the "how" was none of my business. “Just keep doing the work.” There have been words over the years that have come to mean "catching fire:” constellation, momentum. Sometimes I catch myself saying "snowballing,” structurally similar yet so materially at odds that I stumble on the rhetoric. In our first phone conversation you said “momentum” and that felt important. 

Unsolicited Press received the first hard copy of my book and posted a reel using a fire effect; it looked like my book was engulfed. It was the week wildfires broke out in California and I made a mistake. I went looking for trouble. 

This is the kind of material that one would “braid” into an essay. A braid has three strands and they all come together as per the custom to make hair look pretty, especially female hair, and I’m not so into it. I don’t like crafting things so they come together because the meaning is already in the form. 

I knew I was looking for trouble as I was doing it, but I did it anyway. I found I had no pictures of my once-beloved schoolhouse in Maine. To see again what I had lost, I searched realtor.com, knowing they cache their images, and was sickened seeing the pictures. Especially taken as they were for that most bleak moment in time. At that point, the degradation had already begun, orange walls had been painted white, and other such interventions. 

Then, I went one step further: I clicked on "street view." The circular drive, as before, swept past the tall, double doors, once painted chartreuse, but now, instead of rounding a grand maple that seeded its confetti in the spring and showered its golden leaves in the fall, that circular drive centered a flagpole flaunting the stars and stripes. The front doors are now white, and the lawn, which I replaced with herbs and flowers fifteen years ago, was replaced once again with grass. In an acre of woods, in which I planted two hundred native ferns the summer I was forced to leave, now sits a large garage, dwarfing the house. The trees were removed, and of course, no trace of ferns. 

Twenty years ago, I painted orange walls and restored wainscotting in the entry. The small room glowed its welcome through giant panes of glass in the doors. There I hung an Italian ceramic chandelier, ivory with handpainted flowers in yellow and orange. It used to shine over my childhood dining room table in New Jersey. 

When I left Maine, I had only two days to pack what would fit in the truck, pre-paid by the squarefoot. Most of what I owned remained in a mountain of black contractor bags on the curb. The mound was larger than the back of the truck. The chandelier didn't survive, not in my life anyway. 

By that point, I’d already erased the color from the walls and so perhaps it was my fault: I called in people that were attracted to those white walls, who would then not see the maple tree, but instead a flagpole. They didn't see the woods, but instead a giant garage. Did they see the chandelier? How could I abandon it to them? Does it suffer under the neglect of misapprehension? 

I watch now as people lose their homes, engulfed, one after another. They stare at the eerie figure of chimneys and barbeque grills, trees that burned from the inside with husks left upright. The images can’t quite penetrate past the eyes and into the mind and heart. “I’m still in shock,” they repeat. It's the moment when they see more than they can metabolize and that means they can’t see. They talk about the love they poured into their homes, but all we can see is their grief, because with that we are all too familiar. In before and after pictures, we unequivocally agree that ashes are worse than homes and shopping malls and trees. Although a lot of people seem to prefer ashes in Gaza. 

What if we couldn't see it, though? What if we didn’t know how to evaluate the loss? We forget that evaluation is how we see. Hollywood, a prominent teacher of what to desire, of what to value, is burning down, collapsing under the weight of its own style. 

I listened to some reflections on Jimmy Carter, whose memorial service was the very same week, and heard the "malaise speech” for the first time. A speech ostensibly about energy in which Carter says: "Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose." I searched the text of my book because I knew I connected wildfires to our most intimate material relationships and sure enough I found the passages, and to my surprise, I used the word "malaise" (although Jimmy Carter did not.) 

I've said that now is the right time for the book because in it, I grappled with the existential implications of our material (often aesthetic) choices. When I see a garage instead of woods, I know “ugly” is a shorthand for a discernment anchored in the serious language of beauty, the language that communicates ethics without words and which has atrophied at the hands of conventions and algorithms. As the nervous system frays at its edges, so does our taste. I don't believe it's my ministry to explain to people that housing their guzzling machinery to keep up their lawns, to signal their national pride to the exclusion and at the cost of a hundred-year-old legacy tree is wrong. It’s not a metaphor. One ripple in a pond touching the next, or however physics works. It’s as embodied as Christ. 

I don't believe in facts, and we never should have. Admittedly, they are foundational to a consensus reality, to communication. But, they are a math for language, an oil and water mix. 

I write from a different locus. All systems, like language, refer back to underlying agreements about definitions or fundamental principles. Euclid's geometry starts with common notions—things to be assumed before moving forward. We don't have such substrates for human purpose. There are different religions, with different undergirding, but I doubt how many of the religious know what they are communally assenting to, as language appears to alternately inflate 

or contract beyond credibility in the face of spirit, and frankly, can you assent or consent if you don't know a first principle from a definition, from a proposition? Do you know which requires faith and which requires reason? Even science rests on epistemological and paradigmatic conceits, which are nothing if not profoundly perspectival. 

In undergrad, we studied ancient Greek and French for the purpose of translation. The course of study was not called "Greek" for those two years, or "French" for the next two. Instead, the four year course of study was called "language." It was a study that allowed us to witness the structure, and the cracks in that structure. We move forward in structure, while we have vision through the cracks. Reality is a crack running though what we must pretend that we know in order to get to where we're going; a crack in the ego. We can't know where we want to go, except from the space of darkness, where paradigm shifts happen, and that’s never in the data. 

People love to talk about art and feelings. Everyone wants to feel the feelings or have access to emotional states, and they call it truth. But emotional states are only reality when they are pre-narrative, when they are still in the body. Aches and pains, flutters and palpitations. Once we say “sad” or “angry,” we've just dredged up the falsity of history, of conditioning, the substrate of causality which drags linear time along, invisible, but the most powerful tool in our unconscious writing-kit nonetheless. What if we let go of the conceit of linear time in our writing? Where do we get our sense from if we exchange that myth for what we know only in our connection to the world, through our profound mediation: our bodies and minds? 

When critiquing my writing, people tell me they don't like to feel unrooted in time, (isn’t that funny since “rooted” has to do with where not when), they want more "feelings," and they wonder why I can't just “tell them a story." But I’ve no interest in modes that elaborate the myth, romanticize, (if inadvertently), and re-stage the past, all for a wink of resonance. 

But in letters, in dialogue, stories digress. These stories come from dreams and juxtapositions without history. They've accepted our human death in this moment and have seeped into the rhythm, the metabolism, of the substrate. They’ve returned into the background, the landscape. The quilts that stitch one small piece to the next and then layer one french knot next to the other and then one running stitch to connect the layers and there is slippage that only handwork, (maybe dialogue and letters) can show. Its materiality is essentially rhythmic. Infinite. Change is possible in every small difference. (Science calls that mutation. Meditation calls it impermanence or alternatively, presence.) Exact repetition only exists in the imagination, not in the body, so if we re-stage old mistakes it is only because we imagine doing so, but our power is in the run-on sentence that goes somewhere completely different from where it started and no one likes that kind of story because they want assurances to exist outside, cradling them like babies in a familiar arc. 

My paintings, too: patterns in translucent layers, each coming from the last. And if you sit with slow patterns, a hand moving over paper, can you transform back into a human? These patterns are only slow when the rest of the world is racing by in text messages and jets. These patterns move at the speed of plants and animals, rather than the speed of progress. 

So yes, digression is 9/10ths of the law, and writing shouldn't be underwritten by our feelings, which are now obsolete. They are stories left over from a different place and they can’t protect us now. They've been burned up in fires and washed out by floods. Writing shouldn't be underwritten by our thoughts, and without facts we barely need words, they're irrelevant at best because we don't know anything and no one needs advice, only love. And love is of course only an action. 

I'm not going to circle back now. I love letters because they never end. Their wager is always provisional, a powerful engagement with fluctuation of meaning, relationality, presence. I hope, anyway. 

Writers often give the advice that if you want to be a good writer you have to be a reader and I think you can glean from the above that I disagree. I can't keep my vision clear if it's clogged up with everything else. I don’t want anything in the pipeline at all. I’d rather stare into the tall grass. 

Publishers, explicitly intending to embrace new voices, open up their disciplinary constraints, their word counts, their fee structures, their named implicit bias, but in closing, they always advise that you read what they’ve already published so you'll know what they like. Make sure you know the pipelines. Close with a snappy reference back to the beginning, make sure to finish the braid. Isn’t that just a matter of taste? Isn’t that the style of our flailing modern cognition? One that must be reframed as we grapple with the present and stop clinging to the past. 

The great conundrum is that people can't see what they haven't seen before. They even fall in love with their nastiest parent! Editors are no exception and maybe, as gatekeepers, they’re the worst culprits. And yet we desperately need visionaries as editors because new things need translators. Mother birds chewing up and spitting out bits of food and putting it right into the mouths of their babies. That kind of editing, of translation, by the mother, is just the sort of wisdom to save us all: gentle, patient, small. 

I write like a gardener, like a quilter, like a pattern-painter, like someone who carefully chooses the color of the walls to moderate the nerves of those who gather within—not like a writer at all. I write like a human who has evolved, untethered from the earth, into a pomeranian who sleeps in a king-sized bed, not a wolf. Maybe I write like a dead human, maybe it's a dead capital "H" Human, benighted by a suffering world. 

I would save nothing in a fire. Granny’s colored glass lantern, her etched golden bangle bracelet, the small, blue ink drawing of inlet pooling water, a tangerine colored Le Creuset pot, a woven snowman finger puppet, the silver Christmas tree brooch with most of its colored stones still shining in its boughs after so many decades, the quilt I made for my baby, letters from Cameron when we lived far apart for over a decade. A system of things that can’t be upheld piece by piece, that can’t be upheld outside of a rapidly failing dream. My new dream, our new art, is a forest on fire, a flood that pulls the ground out from under our homes with no refrain, no snappy reference back to the beginning, no rhyme. I reckon with us unraveling in the dark, not knowing what it means. Or even how it feels. 

Yours, 

G