Tamlin Orion Day (he/him) is a graduate of MIU’s BA and BFA programs in creative writing. He has worked as an editor at iPhone Life Magazine, as a sensitivity reader, as an editor, copy-editor, and freelance writer, as a founding member of Fairfield Speakeasy, as a slam poetry coach, an artist, as a daycare provider. Tamlin is an LGBTQ activist, who strongly supports underrepresented voices. He is the father of two cats, LiLi and Miles. Besides creative nonfiction and hybrid, Tamlin writes poetry, some fiction, and is an artist, a graphic designer, and a cartoonist. Below you can sample some of his work.

Tamlin published in The Rio Review and the MIU blog. Breathe Free Press published his essay, “A Study of the Blastulation of Purple” under his pen name, Tamlin Thomas. This is the lyric essay’s opening:

The Study of the Blastulation of Purple
by Tamlin Thomas

1.
All people start out as a blastula. The root of blastula is Greek for to bud or to sprout. Some sprouts are green but humans begin at purple. Blastulation starts with the number two, but our cells expand at multiples of four until the molecules add up to human. All life is divisible by four; that is, we can be reduced to infinitesimal quadratic equations whose points of origins all point back to purple.

2.
I cannot remember my father ever touching purple. His hands are wide with long fingers like a garden rake, always bent to scrape at keyboards stiffly. He has touched brown leather billows of antique cameras, the gray fur of a seven-toed cat named Miles, and the orange copper circuitry of model rockets, but never purple. Maybe that is one reason I wore purple so often as a child. I think I was hoping he would hold me.

3.
The teeth of the Rocky Mountains are purple. The Rockies extend into Las Cruces where I was born. The desert around me was burnt orange but the mountains and I were born purple, erupting from the center of the earth where purple things melt into magma. I inherited three things from my mother; blue eyes, which are Dutch, small hands, which I think might also be Dutch, and Jesus, who was not Dutch but might have been Turkish. Nothing she gave me was purple. Still, I came by my purple naturally by way of the mountains and my constellation, Aquarius, whose birthstone is the purple amethyst.

4.
There is a mollusk in the Mediterranean which bleeds purple. The shellfish are squeezed until the color is rendered, a shade which Moses referred to as Argaman. Tekhelet was also purple, but the modern Bible erases that color and calls it blue. This is important because tekhelet is closer to Cerulean, which is like blue but also like purple. Since purple is not primary, transcription altered the god tongue to say blue. In the Talmud, tekhelet is still sacred. In the Crayola Crayon Box, tekhelet is one of seven shades in the family of blue.

5.
Purple lives in middles. Blue is for boys and pink is for girls, but purple is transgender. I was born purple but dressed in pink. I think pink is fine, and blue is nice also, but I prefer the transient nature of purple, the way that purple cannot be forced to make a decision. I like how purple lies on the horizon line on the tops of mountains or oceans and how, when the sun is setting, purple marks the dusky places on the sky map between the land of indigo night and lapis day.

6.
There are many names for purple. Here are some of my favorites: Lavender. Amethyst is the stone of the star I was born under. Mauve. Heliotrope is a hairy bush that produces the tiny fronds used for kings. Mulberry is a type of berry used to make the fruity syrups served out of orange bottles at IHOP. Orchid. Pomegranate is often more red than purple, and the seed is pulpy white, but the middle of the kernel is purple. Pomegranates have a million tiny hearts that look like my foster mother’s toenails.

7.
The translucent membranous filaments of bat wings are purple when they are stretched in flight. Some butterfly wings have purple spots like bird plumage or the skins of poisonous snakes. When my dog plays outside, she morphs into purple. She slips down hillsides and her back muscles fold like waves under a black coat that shimmers purple in certain shades of daylight. Many animals turn purple when you aren’t looking, like cats, who carry secrets in their paws to lick when they are bored or when people quit paying attention.

8.
The underworld is purple. Hades is purple, and the River Styx. Caves absent of light are purple with drops of water like glow stars. In some caves, there are shrimp which have no eyes because they see by hearing. These cave shrimp branched off their sister shrimp which live just outside the caves; bejeweled eyes developed for sight. The two species of shrimp used to have offspring, but then they differentiated. The two families, separated by a rock wall, have mutated away from one another so that one lives in a world of blue sun and the other circles a purple moon pool.

9.
I used to own a corduroy suit made entirely of purple. I wore it every day, and when the suit was dirty, I made sure to carry something purple. A button, or a piece of paper in my pocket, so that I would always be a prince. The overalls I wore were purple, and the silk button up shirt underneath. I had a pair of purple boots that I would march over the sidewalk and sing these boots are made for walking. My sister would dance with me. We purpled up and down the hill between our house and the deli counter where we purchased the following items; salami, which is pink, and blueberry flavored rock candy, which looks blue on the stick but paints lips to match my boots.

Tamlin Thomas is a Creative Writing and Graphic Design student at Maharishi University of Management. As a trans gender man, Tamlin’s hybrid pieces often focus on themes of gender and sexuality as well as family life, science, and religion. Tamlin has previously been published in the Austin Community College literary journal, The Rio Review, as well as the Maharishi University blog. Tamlin is a member of Soapbox Speakeasy, a spoken word group delivering topical poetry in the small Midwestern town of Fairfield, Iowa.

Tamlin’s Outreach event:

Some of Tamlin’s graphic narrative work:

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