Oaxaca
Writing

In Oaxaca they build altars to the dead in the street and leave them food and mezcal.

The death culture · Zapotec roots · Mezcal and marigolds

Oaxaca's culture has a relationship with death that European cultures have mostly lost or buried. The Día de los Muertos tradition is not morbid in the European sense — it is celebratory, participatory, an insistence on the continuity between the living and the dead. The cemeteries fill with marigolds and candles and families who have brought the favourite foods of their dead relatives. This produces a quality of attention to the present — to the living — that the writing tries to capture.

"In Oaxaca the mezcal costs less than the water, which seems like an arrangement made by someone who understood priorities. The smoke is in the spirit. The spirit is in the smoke. The Zapotecs have been making it this way for three thousand years."

Tumbleweed Words — Oaxaca

The Oaxaca pieces are the furthest south and the furthest from the minimalist-European tradition that most of Tumbleweed Words operates in. They are louder, more colourful in the literal sense, more concerned with community rather than individual interiority. They are also some of the most formally interesting in the archive — the pressure of a different literary tradition produces different formal decisions.

David — Tumbleweed Words Flash fiction and poetry written on trains, in hostels, and in city streets. Published in Litro, Adelaide Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and The Dundee Anthology. Pushcart-nominated. Five years on Substack.