Silvie Marchetti

Silvie published two small collections of poetry before she started writing about dreams, which she considers the same job. She covers the tender symbols — houses, water, people who have died, the dream where you can suddenly sing. Her entries read less like a dictionary and more like a letter from someone who had the same dream. She came to the lexicon through grief: after her father died, she dreamed of him for a year, and she went looking for writing that treated those dreams as something other than a symptom. She didn't find much, so she started writing it. Her entries on visitation dreams are the most shared pages on the site, and the letters she gets about them are the reason she keeps the job. Her method is a poet's method — she believes precision and tenderness are the same skill, and that the right sentence about a dream should feel like being recognized. She works slowly, drafts by hand, and cuts anything that sounds wise. The research is in there, held lightly; she reads the grief-dream studies and the continuity-hypothesis papers, but she lets the dreamer stay the expert. What she is really writing about, entry after entry, is the same thing her poems were about: the way love keeps talking after the conversation ends.

Writes about: dream symbolism, grief dreams, writing practice.

Elsewhere: silviemarchetti.substack.com