If you need to get your head out of your ass.

If it’s time you reacquaint yourself with the moon.

If you forgot Grandma’s heirloom toiletry bag (a bleach container with its head cut off, paisley cotton superglued to the bottom, the excess fabric pulled up and hand sewn around a pink, shoelace drawstring to hold it closed).

If you want that old transformation spell, requiring nothing but a low-slung powerline to walk under, every day for five years.

Well, here it is, in Chris La Tray’s One Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large.

I’ve been grasping at the reins of writerly control lately. I’ve gotten too precious. Writing scared and scarcely, holding a mean, imaginary audience too close, cutting lines from poems after barely eeking them out. Sometimes, I’ll annotate their problems in the margins. On this paragraph, for instance, I want to write a great big WOMP. Another MFA student with writers’ block. What is this? Reddit?

Looking back on the notes I’ve made next to my poems, they’re all similar. At the end of my poems, I’ve written things like predictable or badum-tss when the last image falls like the clumsy punchline of a bad joke. Recently, I found a note that I don’t remember writing at the top of a poem about a day on the Bitterroot River that just says, haven’t I written this poem before?  

While plenty of writers become hypersensitive to any trace of triteness in their work, I think there’s something specific lingering under my concerns. This fear of stagnation, small-mindedness, and overall incapability. I’m really insecure about the fact that I’ve spent much of my adult life in the small Montana town where I grew up, even though I am quite proud of the community that I’ve found there since I moved back from college. When I came to study at the University of Idaho this past fall, I felt confident and ready to keep building on those foundations of relationship-centered living, community, and love of art that I learned from my friends over the past five years. But something—I don’t know quite what—punctured that feeling, and it’s been leaking out ever since.

Maybe it’s cumulative. Maybe all the smart-rural-kid-moves-to-the-big-city-and-becomes-real narratives I’ve ingested have piled up in my system and reached a new toxic height. Maybe it’s the other side of the representational spectrum, a pervasive small-town-positive Hallmarkery that flattens communities into little, idyllic tintypes. Maybe I bought into the tintype, idealized my own experiences, and actually learned nothing. Maybe I’ve gotten confused, hearing my home and places like it colloquially described as “nowhere.” Maybe I’m just adjusting. Maybe it has nothing to do with adjusting and I just can’t get over that one time a friend who moved to my small town from a big city drunkenly let slip that they thought it was “a miracle” someone “like me” could have grown up and stayed in a “place like this.”

Deep in this spiral, I initially planned on writing this essay on a book I thought would prove my versatility: a deeply surrealist, experimental, translated work with a neon cover. See? I wanted this conditional to say, Karissa can be modern. Like big city lights. And, it is a great book. I read it cover to cover, made notes on its ‘moves,’ spoke some of the poems aloud to friends. But after getting up early the morning before my first deadline, it became clear that I didn’t really connect with it, and had nothing to say.

My partner woke up to find me laying on the living room floor, scrolling Instagram, the neon book propped open on my chest. How’s it going? he asked, and I groaned at him in response. He suggested taking a break, which annoyed me, because I was. Couldn’t he see? I showed him the screen: shapewear ad, comedy clip, crackling slime.

To avoid writing even further, I worked on cleaning up my university email, and once that was done, moved on to the larger task of my personal Gmail account. It’s full of sales promotions I never use and unread Poems-of-the-Day. A few minutes in, I find a shining little subject line: “A Few More Sentences-16.” It’s the Montana Poet Laureate Chris La Tray’s monthly subscriber newsletter, a continuation of the One Sentence Journal project he began almost ten years ago, one of the only things in this self-inflicted trash chasm I’ll actually open up and read.

The series’ unassuming subject line is a relief.  “A Few More Sentences,” La Tray humbly titles his thirty or so absolute bangers. Allergic to clickbait, he uses the pre-header to orient the reader in time and history, framing the sentences with the Ojibwe word for the month’s moon. The one I read that morning was Namebini-giizis, the Sucker Fish Moon.

I find myself reliably soothed by La Tray’s brief preambles. I know it’s parasocial, but it feels like catching up with a friend. “There is magic to be found in the practice, if one is diligent,” he encourages at the section’s onset, only to admit his own procrastination: “it seems I slacked off in February posting-wise. You should see my drafts folder! But yeah, sorry; I’ll get it together eventually.”

The sentences range from moments of deep gratitude to angst. Sometimes, they are revelatory, and sometimes, they let the reader into La Tray’s recurrent struggles. Early in the month he records “Everyone smiling in the signing line, and so is my heart muscle,” during an event for his new book Becoming Little Shell. Later, he describes, “a day carrying a burden of hurt and indignation that I could so easily clip out of if I could only reach the clasp.”

A Few More Sentences brought up tears as I laid on the floor. My orange tabby, Dewdrop, crawled onto me as I read, purring hard, as he often does when there's some dense, hot emotion finally unfurling from my chest. After a while, I pushed him off, and moved to my bookshelf to find the book of collected One Sentence Journal newsletters.

In this version, La Tray compiles daily sentences from five years’ worth of journaling, along with several longer poems and essays, all of which are organized by season. Throughout these sections, images begin repeating and shifting, building a world connected by moments of tender noticing. It’s refreshing to see the place I grew up in rendered with such nuance, in the sounds of winter chains on the road, propane tank drama, and encounters with fellow Montanans that range from heartwarming to gutting. La Tray avoids the common tropes of American Western writing. This book does not deal in fly-fishing narratives or cowboy mythology. Its focus on the small and cyclical undermines the power of state lines and constructed boundaries between rural, suburban, and urban spaces. It gives power back to the deep, slow-forming relationships that are made when we show up to witness the world again and again.

Chris La Tray’s sentences and essays, in both his newsletter and book, invite you to open. They are transparent and generous. They remind me of  some of my most formative relationships. Of my Grandma Nancy, forever collecting the strands of loose bailing twine in her pockets. Of my old boss Jamie, who’d budget paid time for tea, pleasant chatting, and check-ins on our shared goal of  “doing something weird” every month. Of my mom, who, each time I visit her in the summer, first takes me to see how the hops vine is surviving with the aphids, and where the vole holes are, and the progress the momma crab spider is making on her nest.

I don’t think I can promote One Sentence Journal as a prescription for writers’ block, because, in the world of one-sentence journals, writers’ block might just be another muddy driveway or gnarled fencepost or bluebird morning. One Sentence Journal is a reminder to notice these feelings of blockage, frustration, and shame, and simply say, “I’ve seen you before.”