BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Nynke Salverda Passi is a poet, writer, and teacher born and raised in the Netherlands. Her work has been published in literary magazines such as CALYX, Gulf Coast, Poetry Breakfast, Red River Review, Ilya’s Honey, Ink, Life & Legends, and elsewhere. Her poetry has been anthologized in Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (Glass Lyre Press), Pandemic Puzzle Pieces and River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the 21st Century (both from Blue Light Press), Conestoga Zen, Oxygen: Parables of the Pandemic (River Paw Press), and The Anthology of New England Writers, and elsewhere. Together with Rustin Larson and Christine Schrum, she edited the poetry anthology Leaves by Night, Flowers by Day. Her essay ‘Oom Ealse and the Swan’ was finalists in the category of creative nonfiction in the 2014 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize of The Missouri Review and her essay “Baby Jesus Daubed with Cologne and Crowned with Gold Paper” was a finalist in the same category for the same prize in 2022.
Her work has been featured on the websites of artists Toc Fetch and Ken Dubin. In 2014, she copied her poem “The Morphology of Compassion and Indifference” in graphite in oversized lettering on the back wall of the mezzanine at ICON gallery in Fairfield, Iowa, as part of the exposition “Bill’s Room,” featuring graphite drawings by Bill Teeple and Xerox art by Toni Dorr.
Nynke has more than twenty-five years of experience teaching creative writing, both at college and graduate level. She is co-chair of the English department at M.I.U. where she founded the B.A., B.F.A., and M.F.A. programs in creative writing. She is the director of M.I.U.’s Online M.F.A. in Creative Writing. The program uses trauma-informed, anti-racist pedagogy and is inclusive and diverse; it’s also innovative in that it teaches creative writing from a basis of creativity, focusing on the writer and the creative process before the creative product. It uses meditation and wellness as tools to open and deepen the creative imagination; unsilences the workshop, adopting alternatives to the traditional workshop model; uses a narrative evaluation method of grading that cultures meta-cognition and encourages experimentation and play.
With her mentorship, fourteen of Nynke’s former students landed in leading M.A. in Journalism or M.F.A. in Creative Writing programs, including at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, the University of Montana, the University of Northern Arizona, the Writers’ Foundry at St. Joseph’s College, Columbia College of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the University of North Carolina (Wilmington), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and Kingston University London.
Nynke holds a graduate degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University where she studied with Michelle Carter, Frances Mayes, Molly Giles, and William Dickey. She has also attended the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College, Vermont, and taken master classes with internationally known poets and writers such as Mark Spragg, Grace Paley, Sidney Wade, Donald Justice, Mark Jarman, Tom Jenks, Rudy Wilson, and more. For a number of years, she served as a board member for the New England Writers’ Association and helped put on yearly N.E.W. conferences (either in Windsor, Vermont, or on the Dartmouth college campus), featuring guests such as Helen Nearing, Rosanna Warren, and Rosellen Brown. She also is a former member of A.L.T.A., the American Literary Translators’ Association.
Nynke is the founder and director of Soul Bone℠, an online hub for poets and writers of all skill levels and in all phases of their careers. Soul Bone℠ is both a literary center and a literary festival - free, online and open to the public. Workshops, readings, and panel discussions encourage vulnerable, creative exploration and experimentation; approach spirituality, meditation, and self-care as tools to open up the creative imagination; offer writing as a healing modality while exploring all aspects of the craft of writing in-depth. Over the years, a global, authentically diverse, and inclusive community has grown around Soul Bone℠. Poets and writers attend the online literary festivals from all over the globe. Irish festival guest Mari Maxwell returns year after year; she says: “Soul Bone has been a life changing experience I treasure daily. I am thrilled to be visiting Soul Bone and anchoring myself among the most incredible tribe of authentic creative souls I’ve ever met!”
Valldemosa
When I was five, my family and I visited
the cloister gardens of Valldemosa, Spain, briefly home
to Chopin and George Sand, the romantic names still
clinging to vine and moss on old stone,
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My mother read me fairy tales before bed. I’d rest my head on the pillow of her lap and watch her upside-down-mouth as she talked until her lips lost context, blurring into pink paint blots on the pale canvas of her skin—foreign, fascinating. Her features distorted, disassembling like reflections in moving water. I studied the near-abstraction of her, intently tracing her disappearing form, allowing my mind to lose grip on her face as if it were a helium balloon sailing out of sight.
I did this as long as I dared. At some point my stomach filled with dread bordering on terror. When I could not bear it a second longer, I jolted up, grabbing at the last string of recognition, roping her in so I could know her again. Eyes wide, breath suspended, I’d lift my face level with hers, clumsy hands steadying my weight on her fleshy thigh. To my relief, her dispersed features would fall back into harmony like shards of colored glass in a kaleidoscope: The familiar, unruly hair pulled back into a bun, a few gray curls falling across her forehead. The cupid’s bow of her thin lips pulled taut, then slacking. Crooked teeth ruined by war-time malnutrition and too much sugar. Tiny nose, narrow face. Dark glasses with sixties upturned edges, tortoise shell brown with rhinestone settings. And behind them her eyes, pale green like the wings of a Luna moth.
My mother’s voice had the cadence of water; it trickled and seeped into my soul. I heard mostly the sound of the words as they advanced one by one like crests of waves. Repeatedly, I’d put my head in her lap upside down, then jerk up with a start. She was my mother, she was everything to me then—my world, my own self. If I could lose her and find her back at will, nothing bad could happen. And yet every time I lost her in abstraction and distortion, my heart skipped a beat like a skimming stone. I remember this as one of the most thrilling yet anxious experiences of my childhood. With each disassembling, she became less predictable, yet with each new recognition, she was more deeply known.
Now that I look back, I don’t know what it was about the way her mouth hung above me, a pink half-moon out of context, the textures of her features foreshortened in my eyes’ fun house mirrors. I don’t know why I jerked up and down. Her reading filled me with strange energy. I did not understand myself or my own fascinations, which were secret, inchoate. I was small, four, five, six, seven, a slight wisp of a girl with straw-like hair, which my uncle said was white like washing powder.
I was aware of concealed things beneath the surface of the tales, whales of unknowability gliding by beneath the currents of the words, never quite visible or tangible, yet real and present. This was the birth of my love of literature, my fascination with the complex, inexorable webs spun by the spiders of letters. It was the birth of my love of sound, the first time I started tasting the flavors of words on my tongue. And it was also my first conscious experiment with loss: letting go of something dear for the mere joy of finding it back.
I shot up and fell down over and over, letting the stories shape my mind, letting my mother’s shape distort, then come back into focus. I went into a trance, completely mesmerized, dizzy, loosening and loosening the ties of cognition, the distance between her, myself, and these stories. All boundaries blurred; I knew less and less where she ended or I began. Terror turned to ecstasy. A laugh heaved in my chest almost like a sob, then barreled out of my throat, uncontrollable yet oddly shrill, the tinny pitch of a cheap penny whistle.
This was the moment my mother would eye me sternly, with half-amused annoyance, before slapping shut the leaves of her book. “Enough for tonight,” she’d say, kissing me goodnight on one ear as my face darted between her lap and her lips. But I knew that the next night she’d be back to read more.
I was a child growing too big for my frame, my heart, my bones. The small body I inhabited wildly distended with frequent, fresh infusions of imagination. I was satiated yet insatiable, always drunk for more. When my mother was done with one fairy tale, I asked for another. Usually she obliged, no matter how fidgety I was, how often I mussed her skirt, almost banging my impetuous head into her chin or the frames of her glasses, which I’d already bent out of shape more than once. She was kind, determined to be a good mother; she wished for me to be cultured and love books. I basked in the warmth of being her child.
I demanded to hear the same tales over and over like broken records. With each reading, the story lines wore deeper circular grooves into my mind. I did not know yet that the lines would preserve and last, maps etched into my unconscious. I did not know that I would need these maps one day to navigate my own tales of death and loss, to find my way home.
—Excerpt, Gospel of the Voiceless Wind
“I made my home inside death the way a scorpion lives
with its sting. I was afraid of nothing. Inside the cathedral
of my ribs, my heart prayed a lonely chant, vowels
and consonants seashells ribbing the seashore of my soul.”
Photo: Samantha Kelly
I Dreamed One Night
that I was a contestant on a TV quiz show. I stood behind a small glass lectern in blue space. Obama was the host. He asked me who my heroes were, and without flinching I shouted: "Flowers!"
Because in that moment it seemed fearless, the way flowers give all of themselves exuberantly, dramatically, without holding back—only to fade a few days later, rumpled, dropping petals, the stench of rot drifting up from stems jammed into a little bit of water inside a narrow vase. It seemed the ultimate bravery, to offer your splendor to the world for the sheer pleasure of blooming. To dare to give all of your glory, then wither and be willing to die.
When I woke up, I was satisfied with my answer. I remembered Obama’s head vigorously nodding and lights blinking on the stage, as if I’d hit the jackpot.