Creative Doctrine

I believe that inheritance is a theology learned long before it is understood.

I believe that girlhood is a form of devotion taught through observation, silence, obedience, and hunger.

I believe that family is the first church, and that many of us are wounded at its altar.

I believe that resentment and love are not opposites, but siblings raised in the same room.

I believe that what is buried is never finished speaking.

I believe that the body keeps commandments memory forgot.

I believe that survival is not a virtue, but a consequence.

I believe that naming a thing does not destroy it, it only removes its disguise.

I believe that devotion can be both holy and cannibalistic.

I believe that softness is not weakness and sharpness is not corruption, but adaptation.

I believe that women are taught to become vessels before they are taught to become beings.

I believe that mythology is simply memory that refused to stay private.

I believe that art is not confession alone—it is record, liturgy, and witness.

I believe that what we inherit does not define us completely, but it speaks through us until we answer it.

I believe that the work is not finished when it is published.

I believe the work is never finished.

The Making of a house

Most people think a poetry collection is something you move through in a straight line. Page one. Page two. Beginning to end. But The House That Eats Its Daughters was not built to be traveled that way.

It is a structure, not a path.

Every reader enters through a different room. Some begin in girlhood. Some fall first into inheritance. Some open the book and immediately find the door.

What you recognize determines where you start.

This book was shaped intentionally like a place rather than a story because that is how memory works. You do not remember in sequence. You remember in space. You return without warning. You avoid without deciding. You get lost inside something you swore you escaped.

When you open this book, you are not being told a narrative. You are being allowed to wander a ruin that is still standing.

You are not a visitor. You are a witness.

If you’re here, the threshold has already opened.

-JN