This marks my final editorial for Segullah literary magazine.
For nearly two decades, I’ve served on these pages—curating essays, editing poems, crafting author interviews and podcast conversations, and offering reflections through blog posts and my own poems. We have created printed magazines and books that I am so proud of. Segullah staff, contributors, and readers have met in person at retreats, community gatherings, classrooms, and at one memorable writing conference I had the privilege to lead. It has been, in every sense, a long apprenticeship in listening to women: to their language, to their silence, and even to that energetic tremor beneath a writer’s voice when they risk saying something true. I have witnessed women on the Segullah staff going through every conceivable life situation and been deeply humbled by their strength and grace. Most of all, I’ve read your words and witnessed the art that pours from this community. What an unexpected privilege it has been!
I personally feel the fullness of a season coming to a close. It’s tender to write these words. Segullah represents a creative lifeline I needed from maidenhood to motherhood to crone. This community has been a place where my voice was shaped and reshaped, again and again, in the company of so many brave and luminous others as we witnessed each other’s lives. Over the years, I’ve come to see this work not simply as literary labor, but as a spiritual pilgrimage. How fitting, then, that this final issue is threaded through with the very themes that have meant the most to me over the years: the sacredness in the ordinary, the longing to connect with God, the fierce vulnerability of language, and the courage to ask spiritual questions without needing answers.
This issue gathers poems that do not speak from pulpits but from church pews, hospital beds, kitchens, forest floors, and starlit roadsides. Here, God is not distant or dreadful—but near, enigmatic, and sometimes heartbreakingly quiet. What unites these works is not simple faith, but reverent wrestling—with divinity, grief, ritual, silence, and resilient embodiment. Because, isn’t that what we do, as women? We remain. The poets assembled here create space for questions to breathe. They ask what holiness looks like in a world of broken things, and many of them find it—in the crook of an arm, a field of fire, a meteor’s blink, or a church full of fidgeting children. These are not poems of certainty, but of seeking.
Throughout the issue, one hears a shared longing: for God, yes—but also for sacred embodiment. This, too, has been my urgent quest the last two decades. How does God manifest through me? How can the Divine Feminine live in me and how can I offer this light to others? Anya Horman writes of the rediscovery of women as spiritual seekers and guides, “women who anointed… loved ones with olive oil / and blessed the receiver / for a life’s purpose / only they and God knew.” She writes that “God could uproot you,” even as you remain rooted in God. That is the Christian life experience. We are broken. These poems bless cracked vessels. They carry grief with reverence. They hold language to the light, turning it slowly, watching what glints. They linger in the ache between divinity and dailiness, in what Sarah Colby calls “the altar of flames / where they shall make of their burdens / an offering.”
Whether invoking mountains, everglades, meteors, kitchens, pews, or fire, the writers in this issue trace the contours of the sacred within the ordinary. And it is questions, not conclusions, that echo throughout this issue. Lorraine Jeffery wonders, “Will teaching love be enough / to prepare them for / an uncertain future?” Susan Jeffers stands at “the water line, / paralyzed, squinting,” caught between what to embrace and what to leave behind. Even the voice in Anne Thomas’s poem finds sanctuary in a moment of surrender, when “the alcove in your chest / [comes] calm, raw but free now to be filled.” Theirs is a liturgy of broken things, as Sharlee Mullins Glenn so beautifully describes, and of holy ambiguities.
In these voices, I recognize my long path with this publication—the practice of bearing witness to truth and wisdom, the slow alchemy of revision, and the way poems can hold a moment so perfectly. To edit poetry is to kneel at the altar of language, not to perfect it, but to tend it. This tending reminds me of how to relationship with God – as fellow gardeners growing a life that is beautiful and meaningful. These poems point to a God who is found not only in scripture but in scars, not only in temples but in tomato gardens, in whispered prayers, in absence, and in the layered silence between two people looking at the same sky. Each piece offers a glimpse of what it means to be human and holy at once. I think God would like that. Sometimes the most sacred thing we can do is show up, ask the question, and stay in the mystery. Segullah has been a perfect venue for me to do that.
I am grateful—for the writers who entrusted their words to these pages, for the fellow editors who shaped and sustained this space with care, and for the readers who, like Alixa Brobbey’s stargazer, “breathed and breathed” until at last “a thin warm strand of light” revealed itself. I’m grateful, most of all, for the quiet miracle of artistic community: those rare places where questions are not rushed to resolution and where beauty is allowed to bloom in the soil of the creative act.
Thank you for letting me walk with you, my friends—through essays and poems, beautiful art, questions and conversations—for all these years.
I am a witness to your lives and you mine. That is, in my mind, a kind of holy church. May we continue to write, to read, and to remember.
And now, welcome into the liturgy, the song, and the seeking of August’s poetry.
