A Body made of eyes: contemplative essays

Contemplative writing, for me, is a process of discovery, and a means of exploring ever-evolving ways of seeing and sensing. Like yoga and meditation, I approach writing and reading as embodied practices—points of entry into new perspectives. My hope is that these essays may inspire your own contemplative and creative practices.

A Body Made of Eyes: Contemplative Essays was published in a limited-edition run of linen-wrapped hardbound books by the women-run small press Wisdom Body Collective, whose artists share my passion for body-centered, process-oriented, interdisciplinary writing.

Selected Praise For A Body Made Of Eyes

“A Body Made of Eyes understands the place where heart and mind align, what the Japanese call kokoro. In this writing “practice of permeability,” Marlie McGovern collages what she reads/sees/remembers/breathes. Channeling great-great-grandmother Lucinda’s quilting, these essays liken pen to needle: “Wrist flicks and pierces as stitches accrete in the form of letters, words, sentences.” The figure forms a mosaic—inside dreams, prayers, mother syllabary, unfamiliar waters, and sips of fire. As readers, we follow the horseshoe crab’s transformation, the river’s energy beneath our skin, the chickadee’s spring vocabulary and witness the “space between breaths, between thoughts.” The passage(ways) held by palms, tongues, hearts, and lungs cusp the “searing” ground beneath our feet. If we do not know without the body, then this collection offers both inhale and exhale—a world born of “intensifying pulse.”

—Michelle Naka Pierce, author of Continuous Frieze Bordering Red

“Open Marlie McGovern’s finely tuned essays and she tells you that each is a personal response to certain books. It is a modest claim for what are true assays. I think she is on the track of something not quite named, so in one piece she hazards a writing inspired by her grandmother’s quilt patterns; in another she searches out a “watery holding” that comes before analytic thought. “From the fertile riverbed of mind new thoughts arise in the forms of curve and current.” I love these—they are poems, meditations, philosophies, the great art of the pensée, given new life.”

-Andrew Schelling, author of Tracks Along the Left Coast

“The shape and movement of Marlie McGovern’s A Body Made of Eyes resemble a Möbius strip: at once curved and planar, its orientation unfixed yet everywhere. These essays achieve something I was told as a curious and imaginative young person was impossible and, if not impossible, dangerous—a reverence for the material world, so absorbed in its existence among other existences that it encounters itself awash in spirit. McGovern’s essays startle the reader with their imagery and voice, but they also offer a practice of reading and writing that I will simply call exemplary.”

-J’Lyn Chapman, author of To Limn/Lying In