Headlong into the Future

I'm running and I won't touch ground

M. M. De Voe

Jun 22, 2025

Well, well, if it isn’t you!!!

Let’s skip the bathing suit competition and get right into the depths of art this week.

One of my favorite essays was just reprinted by requisition in the Museum of Names!

https://www.museumofnames.com/post/pen-name-guest-post

I really love this one.

And here’s the unexpected, delightful callback from the universe. Some of you attended the only in-person Pen Parentis Literary Salon I’m hosting solo this year:

scenes from LP Upstairs (the secret gallery where the Salon was held in Lower Manhattan) with V Efua Prince and Ethan Rutherford and a surprise appearance by authors Hoke S Glover III, Sergio Troncoso and others!

We had a fabulous time and I hosted two knockout authors who shared incredible intimate details of their lives quite humanly (i.e. not in some “authorly” way) - and we got to connect with them and with each other (as happens whenever people are in a room together with lovely food and art) —but get this, one of them (the glamorous and absolutely unparalleled V Efua Prince) and I shared a special coincidental moment over…of all things…our names.

Names can overshadow or create identity.

This will come as no surprise to people whose trans kids have deadnames. This will come as no surprise to women who have given up a professionally successful name upon marriage. No surprise to anyone who has ever chosen a terrible title for a book. To be honest, this will probably come as no surprise to anyone, because authors have had pen names for centuries for one reason or another, celebrities have names chosen based on marketing, and even the Pope has to pick a new name once ordained as The Servant of the Servants of God. (yes that is an official title - did you know that was one of the Pope’s official names?)

But the importance of names came as a surprise to me - I’m slowly coming to terms with just how much my name has evolved over time and what that means vis-a-vis my own identity.

I had such a frustrating moment the other day trying to guide a stranger to discover my official author page on Facebook (it is findable with the direct link: facebook.com/mmdevoe — but it is almost impossible to find organically unless you specifically search “M. M. De Voe” with those dots and those spaces exactly in those places among the letters.) As I was writing this post, I Googled some of the many spellings of my own name:

MM De Voe, MMDeVoe, M M De Voe, MM DeVoe, M. M. De Voe, M.M. De Voe, M. M. DeVoe. But also Milda Motekaitis De Voe, Milda Motekaitis, Milda M De Voe.

In the process, I discovered that my book apparently won something in 2022 something (Book&Baby) — that’s another book with a title that you can’t search. “Book & Baby” gives you baby books of course - and because the title officially uses an ampersand, reflected in the book’s illustrations by the fabulous June Gervais, the Google search completely ignores the “and” unless you put the whole title in quotation marks.

Anyway - it was fascinating to me to discover that each of the different spellings and spacings pull up a different facet of the many many things I do.

And adding to the facets, I will be appearing on stage this coming week! Dunno how many of you know I’m an Equity actress as well as SAG/AFTRA. Ah facets.

Point is, I have a staged reading of Godot Came (yes, they kept that name) on June 28th at 3pm at 152 Wooster Street, #2C NYC.

(I look happy yet surprised to be in this company)

Sparks of Artistic Fire

In addition to attending a magnificent screening and actor panel on Severance (which you may know is one of my very favorite small screen shows of all time), I attended the closing night performance in Brooklyn of a brand-new opera set in Oklahoma during the dust bowl. The singing and the musicians were outstanding. However, I can’t tell you anything about the singers because the digital program didn’t feature their bios for some reason - and the silly thing about online programs is that without the QR code, you can’t find it again unless you can remember the name of the show. I think it may have been called No Man’s Land. It didn’t seem to matter what it was called. Like all music plays about Oklahoma, it began and ended with a sunrise. I don’t know why anyone would do that, but no one asked me.

The plot was completely illogical and unsatisfying, but the performers were outstanding!! The company or possibly the space is called Irondale. (hard to tell without a program for reference, ah the vagaries of a digital world)

As a stark contrast, I also went to see Passengers at the Perelman. Here the plot was irrelevant because the thing was magic beginning to end. Circus! Poetry Magical moments! Ukuleles! Flying bodies! Strength! Crazy unexpected stuff~! I loved it.

They even bothered to make the audience excited by adding a couple of set pieces on your way to the show. I wish I had seen it sooner so I could make you all go - it was a mini-version of Cirque….and so gorgeous.

Writing

While I know this month that I took away felt like I took a vacation, actually what I was doing was celebrating the culmination of a lot of dedicated nonstop writing. Here are the things that came out while I was traveling:

Four Poems published in Lithuanian in this book;