BUT I DIGRETCH

Gretchen is a contemporary fiction and poetry writer whose work explores the quiet mysteries beneath everyday life, those luminous, liminal moments when truth, tenderness, and transformation gently surface. Her stories move through loss and change, yet are always guided by an undercurrent of wonder, magic, beauty, and hope.

Her writing is character-driven and reflective. Across her body of writing, Gretchen returns to a central question: How do we transform, again and again, through love, and learn to recognize the extraordinary within the ordinary?

Themes like addiction, mental illness, intimacy, violence, romantic idealism, spiritual longing, are not treated as aesthetic ornaments but as lived realities, rendered with empathy and without sentimentality. Even when the stories turn bloody or dark, beauty has not been abandoned, just complicated. This tension between lyricism and violence, humor and despair, eros and accountability is what makes Gretchen’s writing defy easy categorization.

But I Digretch includes diverse LGBTQIA+ characters and themes that feel integrated into the narrative rather than tokenistic. These inclusions are naturally woven into the fabric of the stories, providing a sense of inclusivity without forcing the reader to confront identity as an “issue.” For LGBTQIA+ readers, this can be particularly meaningful, while for general readers, it offers an opportunity to engage with different perspectives.

Gretchen is also at work on an upcoming collection of transcendental surrealist love poetry, expanding her exploration of inner, unseen worlds and the sacred thread that unites all beings in love.

Poetry may be the prime allusive vehicle that uses the finite medium of words to reveal an infinite realm of sympathetic resonance and vibrational frequencies (we’ve come to know as the human experience) that lie beyond what words can ever capture. Swami Bodhananda: “Words are always the signifier and never the signified.” No one has ever gotten wet by the word “water” nor burned by the word “fire” and yet each word conjures an infinity of possibilities in one’s imagination, each as valid and unique as the imaginer. May Gretchen Astro’s fires and oceans inside be whatever you need them to be. Her only prayer is that her poems and prose offer you time spent loving, as if kissed by God HimSelf/HerSelf/ItSelf/YourSelf.