On living at the threshold between worlds.

I tend a garden of becoming. In semper femina I move between the analog and the digital, the ancient and the urgent, the intimate and the strange. Philosophy, literature, travel, food & wine, technology, and the ghosts we carry through it all.

Access my living library – digitally or via post

Sign up to receive essays, poems, lyrical essays, and the ephemera that lies in between. All subscribers have access to the entire semper femina archive, which I add to monthly. Paid subscribers receive an issue of my monthly zine, Epistolaria, in the mail, and access to the digital library of all current and past issues.

Starting points

For the chronically online, there is a heightened awareness that everything we share online will forever exist somewhere as hard evidence of who we are and what we stand for. We can be measured up against old photos and tweets that, while once true, may no longer resemble us at present. I think this pushes us towards one of two outcomes — to clutch tightly onto an established brand or identity through curation, or to embrace the inconsistency. [...] It requires conscious effort to extend myself and others grace when caught in a moment of inconsistency, but when I succeed, I am stunned by the beauty of its aliveness. Who would have dreamed the bird from the reptile?

– Notes on intellectual humility, good conversation, and foolish consistency: “Now, I learn like I tour a house”

I have to believe we are more than synapses and lust. In our interstices is evidence that our intelligence is irreducible to acronyms. Woolen matter so fine and delicate glitters there. Yellowed postcards and fields of rice are peppered with its strings.

– A lyric essay on mystery as a panacea to the machine: “Words of the dead, breath of the living”

For friction to occur, one object must be in contact with another. It does not happen in solitude. In an age of increasing isolation and individualism, friction has become an unwanted thing, but I realize now that in evading it much has been lost. The occasional commentary in between songs, once a feature I may have found annoying, is now a welcome breath of fresh air. A reminder that, while bobbing my head to a song, I am not alone.

– The first of my Exercises in Friction series, focused on music: “Surprise me”

Knowing how to push myself is important, and this I have honed through years of self-discipline, but knowing how to follow what pulls me is just as vital. It’s not as simple as following what I want; [...] The pull is much deeper, this energy that balances must and desire. It cannot be unheard once I hear its sound, cannot be unseen once I’ve gotten a glimpse. When I find it, I will want to do nothing else—but to feel for the pull takes another kind of practice. A focused openness to the world possible only with an unwavering sense of self. Finally, I think I am there, ready to be ferried forward by a force both from me and beyond me.

– Year-end essay and notes on my visit to South Korea: “I who love to be astonished”

How have I been failed and prepared by those who came before me? When the time comes for me to die, whose lives would I have touched? What ideas would I have helped ferry into the world? While I live, what can I do that is beautiful or liberating—essential? As I try to answer these questions I hope to find “the red thread of experience”, as Walter Benjamin calls it, that binds me to previous and future generations. “Where do you hear words from the dying that last and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious ring?”

– Notes on collective responsibility (and why the best thing we can do for the earth is to remember that we will die): “Memento mori”

Woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing

I borrow my newsletter name from Laura Marling’s 2017 album Semper Femina. She in turn borrowed the phrase from Virgil’s “varium et mutabile semper femina” which roughly means: woman is ever a fickle and changeable thing.

About me

My name is Lian. I am a poet & essayist, novice book artist, marketing agency owner, and printmaker from Manila currently based in a small town in central Texas.

Read my published poems or get a copy of my chapbook, Revelations.