c.r. glasgow was one of our Spring 2025 Digital Residents. As a part of this program, we do Q&As with our residents to feature them, their work, and their words. See our Q&A with c.r. below, and explore more Spotlights here.
TSW: Tell us about your work, writing, or project. What are you writing these days? How is your work changing, and how is it changing you?
c.r. glasgow: All intersections of the work centers the transformative process of collective wounds. When starting the TSW residency, it was approaching the middle of a year long publisher’s program with Anaphora Arts and my clinical career. It came at the perfect time to open my mind-heart and to be in conversation with other creatives. Even though it seemed we were all doing different projects, there was a beautiful threading that nurtured the seeds in my work (and feeling stuck within). The TSW cohort helped ask questions and provoked many lists that opened closer to the root of what the project/the work/life was really about. In moving closer to the heat of the work, new opportunities have opened in all areas of life.
Writing was something that i held tight and as free of institutional compressions and extraction as i could, but in that grip, it wasn’t growing. Now, in taking the principle of beginner’s mind, which i practice in other areas of my work, to the craft, an expansion into an unknown spaces is beginning to bubble, which is very exciting. Yes — excitement in spaces of unknown, even the unknown of oneself.
TSW: What is a question you’re asking yourself these days, and what is a question you or your work is asking of your reader?
cg: What if you stayed with it a little bit longer? What does it look-feel like from [undesirable, unconsidered, repulsive] point of view?
i am often challenging myself and those i work with, which includes the reader, to a quiet being with — a question, image, scene, feeling, etc — for a minute longer than is comfortable. What do you notice here? What does it evoke in you? How do you experience it — sensations, thoughts/emotions, energetically? Would you be willing to share your experience in a way you haven’t before?
It seems like such simple inquiry but, in these Times, it feels too easy to move from the richness of the present, and in doing so, there isn’t time for alchemy to naturally occur. It’s like overwatering a seed — it can drown before it has time to bloom. i would love to journey alongside others as we all engage in this kind of practice and inquiry.
TSW: What were you processing during our residency program? Did anything unlock for you? If so, what new entrance did you find for your work or for yourself as a writer in the world? And what caused that shift?
cg: What are you not saying? it’s amazing– i could think i was naming my experience in my work, but was meandering. Storytelling can have that element, sure, but i was still learning to see how landing and connection wasn’t happening in the work, but it was happening in my mind. Staying with the confluence of wanting to see the process, being unable to see, being blocked by old way of seeing, and the frustration of all of it repeatedly for weeks allowed an opening — many openings and i could better see how the openings were connected. What a gift to notice and learn! The process is really the unlock for me — what gets produced relaxes tremendously when i commit to this kind of practice.
TSW: What’s a mantra or motto that you have in mind these days when you are writing or creating? Is there a writing routine or ritual that keeps you beginning?
cg: Mantra: Small is all. It reminds me of the power of seemingly small things/situations as vital agents to unlocking paths to new worlds. The mantra continually renews the intention to turn to the work multiple times a day irregardless if a word or image lands on the page. The ritual of pausing before starting to state who this work is for and identifying one fun thing about the work keeps the work and intention fresh, personal, and outside capitalism.
