Breathing Lessons & Special
by Darlene Scott
darlene anita scott is a poet and mixed media visual artist. Her photography has been featured in Barren Magazine, Persephone’s Daughters, and The Auburn Avenue. Her artwork has been featured in The Journal, Star 82 Review, and The West Review. Scott’s recent poetry appears in the anthologies Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry and Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matters Era, a volume she co-edited. Scott lives in Virginia.
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What surprising, fascinating stuff can you tell us about the origin, drafting, and/or final version of “Breathing Lessons” & “Special”? They’ve lived multiple lives. “Breathing Lessons” began as a full-length poem called “Breathing Lessons 101” that I wrote while exploring the navigation of good girls of color. It was the first and title poem of the manuscript I was developing. For a while, a few years, the full poem lived as a photo book I shared with family and friends while I gathered material for the manuscript. The image in the piece was one I had taken in 2007. As my exploration of the “good girl” grew into a full series of collages called “Tropism,” I tried my hand at digitally coalescing the images with text—I’m a collagist at heart. So this iteration was born around 2016. “Special,” also first a collage in the “Tropism” series lived a long part of its life without text too.
Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.
Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.
Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.
Submissions
Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.
Upcoming
05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD