Earlier this month, I finally finished a very large spinning project: my 2022 Tour de Fleece braids. The result is more than 1.5 kilometers of fingering weight yarn in this gorgeous gradient dyed by Fossil Fibers.

I am not sure what I am going to make with this yarn. To be entirely honest, my primary motivation in spinning this was to experience the simple pleasure of the color changes, watching shade cede to shade as the fiber fed through my fingertips, and then chain-plying it all in order to preserve those changes. Whatever I make with this yarn will be something that makes use of the lovely, lovely gradient.

The last part of it, the cream-to-peach skein on the left, is also the last skein that my beloved cat Roo helped me spin. (And by helped, I mean lay in my lap and demanded pets and generally derailed in the most perfect and wonderful way.) We lost Roo heartbreakingly and suddenly December 15, and I am bereft without my constant shadow, my head of editorial, my #5amwritersclub companion, the smartest and most curious cat we ever had. This loss has overwritten the landscape of the end of the year, a time I never know how to deal with anyway, but I wanted to attempt something, if only to make the turning of the page into the new year a little easier.

So.

Of course, there is The Book. Heading North arrived in November, and I am immensely proud of the book that it is. The run-up to its publication and then the events I was lucky enough to have following publication certainly dominated my mental and creative landscape. It gave me the opportunity to do a launch at Midtown Scholar, my favorite bookstore, to give readings in three states and one Canadian province, to be a guest on several podcasts1 with wonderfully gracious hosts, to be interviewed in several places2, to write for Writer’s Digest, and to connect with readers and writing friends of all kinds. My new year’s wish is for Heading North to keep finding its way into new readers’ hands.

Join me at Riverstone Books in Pittsburgh on 1/25 for a conversation with Clare Beams! And if you’re planning to attend AWP in Kansas City in February, I hope you’ll check out this panel on debuting that I have the privilege to be part of: First Time’s The Charm.

There has been the biking. I’ve cycled more than 4,000 kilometers this year, and I got to ride a bike in France, rode 600 kilometers in 6 days for the Friends for Life Bike Rally to raise money in support of people with HIV/AIDS, and completed the Seagull Century in drenching rain, but faster than I did it last year.

There has, recently, been the baking. On Christmas Eve, I made two loaves of bread, a meringue roulade, a gingerbread and apple roulade, and a two-layer genoise cake with passionfruit curd and Swiss meringue buttercream. That was after making four pounds of roast pork, three dozen bao, and six dozen gyoza in the two days before, as well as a batch of scallion pancakes for the freezer. While I do tend toward the excessive in terms of food at the holidays, this was mostly a product of keeping my hands busy in light of the grief, which is entirely a matter of making do.

And finally, on the state of the Substack: given the properly horrendous response Substack offered after many prominent Substack writers offered a very thoughtful post in protest of the platform’s penchant for giving Nazis a place to spew their abhorrent views while censoring other creators’ works, I am looking for a new home for Loomings. I want to be sure that the process is seamless for my readers and that I’m not jumping from platform to platform.

(If any of you have insight into other options, I’m all ears!)

The next edition of Loomings will come in the first week of the new year, to put us back on schedule, with new aims and new purpose. In the coming days, I wish you much rest and peace.

Ceasefire Today

Just thrilled to absolute bits to be teaching in the Kenyon Review’s Winter Online Workshop! Applications for participants close on December 10, so get your application in and make some new writing with me and this amazing slate of faculty!

Recently I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Tease podcast for a conversation about Heading North and sports fandom, and I was interviewed for the massive and massively helpful late November edition of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing newsletter, where I get into writing habits, how being a gym rat helped me finish Heading North, and how everyone needs a little help from their friends.

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Reading Season!

Here in the northern hemisphere, as the days are shortening and temperatures dropping, it is reading season.

Most bookish folks have heard of the tantalizing world of Iceland’s Jólabókaflóð—the Yule Book Flood—and the premise of spending Christmas Eve curled up with hot chocolate and your newly gifted book. I appreciate this Smithsonian dive into Jólabókaflóð that offers a more thorough accounting, its historical context, and the material reality of this demi-holiday I pine for: Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood is a Force of Nature.

There are very few things I love more—and find more and more endangered—than settling onto the couch with a book that makes me forget time exists entirely. Better yet is to be in one of those rare particular moments when I’m allowed to forget about time and the day can just go sweetly and liquidly by while other worlds unspool in the imagination—it’s so magical. Bonus for some twinkle lights and a full teapot.

That’s the dream, but we’re not there yet. Because right now, it is also, for those of us who teach on a semester schedule, the reading season of hundreds of pages of student essays and portfolios and exams. Sometimes, when all of the final assignments are submitted, I will do a rough count of the number of pages I have to read and respond to and evaluate, and sometimes I try very hard not to calculate it. It’s hard to say what I’ll decide for this year; at the moment, I’m pretending I won’t count and I won’t spend quite as much time as I usually do making agreements with myself about how many things I’ll grade each day and then breaking them. What I need is a single-minded, efficient pursuit of the tasks at hand so I can have at least a day or two before the actual holiday crush to simply read for myself.

At the very top of that list is Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, and before I dive into it, I want to re-read Hild in preparation. Thereafter, I want to embark on a deep survey of novels written in the last 30 years with omniscient narration.

What are you excited to read on these winter nights? And do you have any favorite omniscient narration novels to recommend?

Gaza still needs help. Don’t stop pressing for a ceasefire and a lasting peace. Support Doctors Without Borders to provide necessary aid.

Events for Heading North go on pause a bit, but if you’re in Pittsburgh in the New Year, I’d love to see you at Riverstone Books on January 25, where I’ll be in conversation with the brilliant Clare Beams!

Also, I’m offering a giveaway of five print copies of Heading North to interested readers on LibraryThing! You can request a copy until December 26.

A little making & doing:

While I was on my whirlwind of a booktour, I had the delight of staying with two friends who make their own bread, which is something to which I have long aspired. In the summer, I get bread I really love at the farmers’ market, but the farmers’ market is not in session just now. So over the last two weeks, I’ve taken some stabs at a no-knead loaf baked in a Dutch oven.

Last week’s loaf hadn’t risen enough before I baked it; the kitchen was far too cool and I was impatient, and though it still made edible bread, the texture was dense, tight, and not particularly pleasant. This loaf—this is very much what I wanted: open and light and chewy. It’s a 100% hydration dough, 330 grams white bread flour and 70 grams whole wheat flour, done with four bowl folds across the first hour of bulk fermentation, a second hour on the counter, then three hours of resting in the fridge before the final rise and bake.

(The 15 minutes between each fold is ideal for this moment in time: it’s long enough to respond to a few small assignments or to do a couple of cleaning tasks or get the Duolingoing done and then it’s time to fold, which feels novel and exciting, and then there’s another little block in which to knock out the to-do list clutter, etc.)

Baking it in the Dutch oven really is an excellent process, though I will say that the round loaf is not my favorite shape, so next time, I’ll try a free-form loaf on the pizza stone with a bit of steam and see how it goes.

Readers who are good with bread-baking, I will totally take tips! But for now: I’ll toast to this loaf…with toast.

If you’d like to do something nice for the writers in your life this holiday season, some of the very kindest and most helpful things you can do are free: review their books on GoodReads, Amazon, or LibraryThing; add their books to your to-read list on GoodReads; request that your local library get a copy of the writer’s book for their general collection; and finally, simply tell your friends, enemies, and perfect strangers about the books you love because nothing is more powerful than hearing from another actual human being.

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I love a long drive. Not a drive of two hours—two hours is terrible—but five and six and even longer, if I’m feeling saucy. After the four-hour threshold, the trip itself becomes the only thing I am capable of feeling responsible for, and the nature of driving is that one shouldn’t be multitasking in any particular way for reasons of safety. Thus, it becomes a kind of enforced meditation: a separation from all other concerns of the moment, or at least as much as that can be achieved via the most singable tracks in my music collection. Of course, the time could be devoted to mulling over some important issue, but in mid-November, on the way to my first Book Tour events, in the midst of Everything, I had no thoughts, really, that I wanted to dwell with. So: volume up, EZPass equipped, attention to the present at the ready. A great deal of the trip—central Pennsylvania to Windsor, Ontario to western Massachusetts to Ithaca, NY, to following Interstate 81 back home—was through rural landscapes, and there was much to look at—more than enough to keep me well occupied for all 1550 miles. Deer, squirrels gray and black, various raptors I couldn’t identify, an eagle I could—and thankfully none of them on the road when I was. The barest sliver of moon hanging over the Ohio border, the long bridge leading into the Berkshires with a view of the valley below.

But today’s the start of my third day back from that trip, and I feel like I’m still moving.

I have mentioned Wendell Berry’s essay “An Entrance to the Woods” in a previous post, in which I talked a bit about changing locations geographically and temporally in my teaching from hour to hour, but over the past days, I was thinking of what he said about the ways in which our ability to rapidly change locations physically outpaces our brain’s processing of that change:

Once off the freeway, my pace gradually slowed, as the roads became progressively more primitive, from seventy miles an hour to a walk. And now, here at my camping place, I have stopped altogether. But my mind is still keyed to seventy miles an hour. And having come here so fast, it is still busy with the work I am usually doing. Having come here by the freeway, my mind is not so fully here as it would have been if I had come by the crookeder, slower state roads; it is incalculably farther away than it would have been if I had come all the way on foot, as my earliest predecessors came.

It kept boggling me: one morning I was in my classroom and the next I was pulling up to Biblioasis Bookshop in Windsor, a box of books under my arm. By the same time the next day, I was on my way across Ontario. My mind, too, was everywhere. I say I was busy having no thoughts, but in truth, I was having all of them at once and trying to head off at the pass the tendency to rehearse conversations or arguments I wasn’t actually having and the infinite uncertainties of sharing my debut novel with the world (or at least a handful of kind souls at a time who brought beautiful questions and great conversations). The shifting of tasks, of which person I need to be from hour to hour—author, teacher, mentor, friend, child, guest, host, public person and private—feels like a similar kind of movement, a similar kind of rapidity, even when they overlap a great deal.

I come out of this week—these past two weeks, really, of Heading North being somewhat in the world1—feeling grateful and exhilarated and like a lot of different versions of myself, and that alone is pretty interesting. And here, at the semester’s end and on the edge of lots of different things, there probably isn’t a “crookeder, slower way” toward or through any of it. Onwards.

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Work toward peace: contact your representatives to call for a ceasefire.

Some treasures:

“The Papermaker War” by Beth Kephart: Yellow jackets, paper-making, and navigating vulnerability.

Goalie goals! Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins goalie scores his second AHL goal.

“The Flamingo” by Joel Hans: a short and tender dream to break your heart, published this week at HAD. I first encountered Joel’s work at an AWP off-site reading years ago, where he read one of his “Endlings” pieces, about the last of certain species, and though that was almost ten years ago now, I still think about those pieces regularly.

I’ll be roving about with and for the book through November and beyond: the graphic below the start of things, and I am especially open to events in the new year! As always, the most up-to-date information on events can be found on my website. If you’d like me to visit your bookstore or campus or library or chat with your book club or students or offer a workshop, etc., please be in touch!

I’m excited, also, to share an article I wrote for Writers Digest: 3 Tips for Creating and Managing a Large Cast of Characters. Heading North has given me ample experience in doing exactly this thing, and so if a little practical advice in this area is of use to you or your students, I’m delighted to help. The strategies here could also be delivered in workshop form!

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Work toward peace: contact your representatives to call for a ceasefire.

Last night, after a podcast recording with the fabulous Anita Kelly of Lez Talk About Books, Baby! and a little publication day celebratory sushi, I settled in to be an audience member for one of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop alumni readings. These readings aren’t public, but rather are gatherings for the participants of the year’s workshops to stay in connection and to celebrate each others’ work, organized by Elizabeth Dark, Associate Director of Programs, and I can’t think of anything more wonderful. I’ve crowed before about the particularly close-knit nature of the KRWW workshop groups and the larger sense of community that pervades the experience, but to still be feeling that in November after a July workshop is something extraordinary. And the readings by the participants were just continuous three-minute bursts of brilliance.

I also get to share a publication week with Gary Fincke’s The Mayan Syndrome. Not only is Fincke a massively talented writer across all genres—The Mayan Syndrome is a collection of essays—he was my first creative writing teacher. Professor Fincke permitted me to take a pair of classes with him at Susquehanna when I was just a sprout in high school, including an advanced poetry workshop where I was definitely outclassed by the college juniors and seniors in the room. But in that room I learned how to workshop and, more importantly, be workshopped. And I got to experience independence—driving myself all the way across the river twice a week (only occasionally stopping for a cheeky doughnut and coffee on the way back to the high school). I bought my textbooks—collections of contemporary poetry that broke open my little head—at the college bookstore and paid for them with one of the very first checks I’d ever written. I sat at Tony Hoagland’s left elbow during class while he read to us from Donkey Gospel and felt a way I’d never felt before. You see, in high school, I think the most contemporary poetry I was ever assigned there was Edgar Allan Poe. And I loved Poe—still do—but I just had no idea what poetry could be like. The immediacy, the urgency, the experience of being slapped upside the head, frankly, with an image or a phrase that was deliberately unbeautiful. That class is inevitably why I turn to poetry to solve most of my prose problems. I am so grateful.

Some treasures:

• The Lidl-Trek cycling team play ice hockey.

  • This is one of those precious things wherein the universe creates something that feels like it’s just for you. My favorite cyclist’s new team does some start-of-offseason team bonding at the Trek headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin.
    

• The Finding Favorites podcast! Host Leah Jones has put together a truly delightful concept—finding new passions and interests through conversations with folks, rather than an algorithm—and I had such a lovely time talking with Leah about cycling and writing and Heading North. Do yourself a favor: check out the Finding Favorites episode list and find something to be excited about!
  

• Seattle Kraken Assistant Athletic Trainer Justin Rogers comes out and writes a tender letter to his younger self. I am heartened by this news—even in the face of the NHL’s constant tripping over itself in matters of diversity and inclusion. …and not to be That Guy, but if you’re excited about Justin Rogers’ story, maybe check out this hockey novel that just came out?

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If I could figure out how to make a Karl Projektorinski costume for Halloween, I would do that.

Who—what? you say.

Why, Karl Projektorinski, Human of the Year Awardee from the song “Human of the Year” on Regina Spektor’s 2009 album Far. The problem is that Karl, aside from his absolutely perfect name, is not otherwise described beyond shaking (with nervousness, one assumes). You see my dilemma in considering how I might manifest a Halloween costume from that, nevermind the difficulties of dressing up as a name in a song that was not released as a single from an album now nearly fifteen years old.

No one likes a Halloween costume that needs a lengthy explanation.

But this is all because “Human of the Year” is the only song I’ve listened to in three weeks that has managed to replace “Everyday” by Buddy Holly on the inescapable inner loop, and it did so with such fantastic thoroughness that I actually had to look up “Everyday” just now because I couldn’t remember the name of it nor how it went. [A blessed relief, to be honest.] “Everyday” features prominently in Good Omens season 2, which I loved, but I didn’t need a Buddy Holly song lodged in my brain for a fortnight. More to the point, Regina Spektor’s music is a workshop in character development and small details used with great effect (see also “Wallet”).

Regina Spekor’s work has been a touchstone for me through the process of writing Heading North, particularly the albums Begin to Hope, Far, and What We Saw from the Cheap Seats (the album immediately preceeding my work on Heading North, the album most in rotation at the start of the draft, and the album that landed in my lap as the first draft was completed, respectively). And though I don’t/can’t listen to music while I write, I’m frequently listening to music while I mull over my writing problems because I usually end up doing that while driving or working out. Both of those activities are spaces of relative isolation—alone in the car, alone in the sweet/sweaty bubble that surrounds a body in the gym, reinforced by the presence of headphones—which is also something I need for writing/thinking.

(All you folks who are able to listen to music—who have playlists for whole moods and particular scenes that keep you company, set the stage, bring the energy while you write—I am so envious. Or those of you who are creatively productive in the hum of a bar or cafe where someone else will bring you drinks and snacks—just pure envy. Right now, I can hear the heat pump humming and even that is a distraction, and my teacup’s empty and if I get up to refill it, I will be mobbed by cats and then there will be such a performance of the Saddest Kitty Serenade1 at my office door that I will bribe them with early breakfast just to get the quiet back.)

As a result, though I do have a soundtrack of sorts, a playlist for Heading North, these are not songs I listened to while writing. Also the same artists keep cropping up, so it doesn’t really fit the common playlist model of providing one song per artist. I have tried, but I can’t choose just one Regina Spektor song. I can’t even choose just one per album. So what I’m left with are more pools of artists: Regina Spektor, t.A.T.u. (yes, yes, I know, but listen, it’s important in context), Soul Coughing, Tegan and Sara, Ida Marie, a little bit of Hozier, and various other bits and bobs. It’s not necessarily that I listened to any of this music because of the novel; the act of working on this novel fundamentally changed the way I hear these songs and these artists and now all of this is inextricably linked to the narrative, to the characters in Heading North and how they exist in my head. These are the songs that play in the background of the novel itself, when I imagine the world unfolding, though none of them are named and probably only one is specifically identifiable based on context. (Read the book and then write to me! Where are you attaching these songs, to which scenes and characters?)

When you’re working on a long writing project, what’s your relationship to music?

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American readers of Loomings: if you have five minutes, I hope you will join me in contacting your representatives to urge for a ceasefire: 5Calls.org.

Actually making something:
For the first time in ages, I have something I made that I can show you:

This is one half of a pair of Knucks, knit to replace the pair I appear to have lost. This version is made from a commercial sock yarn; I unraveled about half of a sock2 before casting on for these. I make the fingers longer than the pattern calls for, so more of my hand is covered (for warmth), and these are knit in a smaller gauge than called for because this is the yarn I wanted to use. But this is an incredibly easy pattern to adapt because once you get the circumference of the fingers correct for your own hands (quick little test-knits, since you only have to knit about an inch of the tube before deciding if it’s going to be comfortable), the size of the palms is simply based on the size of the joined fingers. No matter how many stitches you actually have on the needles, the shaping is very direct: try it on until you like where the thumb would start, then add the little thumb tube. When it’s time to decrease for the thumb gusset, just follow the established pattern of decreases until you run out of stitches to decrease.

My first set of Knucks was also the first thing I knit from handspun yarn (some beautiful Blue-Faced Leicester dyed in fabulous blue and green jewel tones by Hello Yarn), which makes losing them all the more sad. I am living in hopes that once I finish this new pair, the old ones will somehow magically turn up. It is a time for magical thinking.

Below are my November Heading North events; I hope I’ll see you on the road! If you’d like to have me chat with your students or your book club or to visit your campus or bookstore, please be in touch.

November 8, 7 p.m., Harrisburg, PA: Heading North launch event & conversation with Curtis Smith at Midtown Scholar

November 16, 7 p.m., Windsor, Ontario: Biblioasis Bookstore

November 18, 6:30 p.m., Becket, MA: The Dream Away Reading Series, hosted by Kate Senecal and Rachel Lyon

November 19, 4 p.m., Ithaca, NY: in conversation with Jennifer Savran Kelly at Buffalo Street Books

November 28, 6:30 p.m., Annville, PA: Take-A-Break Tuesday at the Annville Free Library

November 29, 7 p.m., Philadelphia, PA: The Bricks Reading Series, sponsored by Blue Stoop, at H&H Books

Mine is an easy and bucolic commute; ten of the fifteen minutes of my drive follows a shoulderless two-lane along the Quittapahilla Creek. There are three places I look for great blue herons. Last week, one stood at a field’s green edge, the long, white feathers of its breast spread like some wizard’s beard. There are four places I slow down because I have seen cats in flowerbeds or barn windows or stalking the nearest fencerow or darting across the road. At any moment, I anticipate deer, squirrels.

(It’s not a place to go quickly. This is a thing I love.)

There are several places to observe cows along the way (as is the case along most roads in this part of Pennsylvania), but only one I particularly look forward to. The pasture sits on a southeast-facing hill, wide and sprawling so that it tucks back behind another hill. So it’s only on the westerly way home that I get to see them: a herd of longhorn cattle splashed in every color. There’s a white calf with dark circles around both eyes, dark interiors to his tilting ears, a dark muzzle. He’s so singular I can’t help but pick him out. Many are chestnut scattered with white. Some are black, pale-socked and flanked, some the same buckskin buff as the whitetails that flicker over the fences.

These cows are not overly large, their proportions more creature than product. Another herd of longhorns on a different nearby road are all bunch-shouldered; the black Angus at the very next farm are squares with hooves. It bothers me not to know more about them, some detail other than the length of their horns as a monikker. I did a little bit of research, but the most common breeds of longhorn don’t look like these, and this farm also raises other cows, the black and white and russet red of “regular” cows in these parts. Their hillside longhorns might be a home-grown cross.

Though I lack in knowledge, though, I surely brim with delight. The angle of their hillside means I have to look for them, and sometimes they’re in the hidden pinch where one hill cedes to another, so when they’re all there, spread like a spray of flowers, I see only them.

That’s the real gift: for that minute, nothing else exists in my brain. Then, each time, I think, I should tell someone about these beautiful cows. The respite, the jolt away from whatever I’m carrying home, is like a bell. I invariably end up back on the mental hamster wheel of worry and to-do, but for a while, I’m not. After that while, too, I work a little harder to preserve that electric quiet, which is another sweet boon, and something I aspire to do more often.

Some treasures:

• “Lawn Skeletons” by Tom McAllister

  This essay, recently published in The Sun, starts with the now-familiar giant lawn skeletons and an air of humor and follows seasons of observation through a poignant and vulnerable exploration of loss. Also, Tom just shared that his new collection of essays will be published by Rose Metal Press, so we all have something else to look forward to.

• Of course I can’t not share “Pied Beauty” today.

• If you’re interested in book publicity, Zoe-Aline Howard from Pine State Publicity wrote about pitching and promoting books that don’t fit neatly into particular categories—books that are Both/And—including Heading North.

• In honor of my Brit Lit I course and a recent pair of presentations on medieval music, I feel I should share “Paint it Black” by bardcore sensation Hildegard von Blingin’.

And now: ice hockey.

• The NHL season has begun! I’m excited and nervous about this season for the Pittsburgh Penguins; yes, the Penguins picked up Erik Karlsson, which is fabulous, but there’s an air of “last dance” hanging over this season as the superstar core of Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, and Kris Letang stand much closer to age 40 than otherwise.

  • The above is what I wrote on Friday, in anticipation of sharing this on Wednesday morning, after the Penguins played their first game of the season1. I’ve been looking forward to the start of hockey—basically the only thing I look forward to in any given autumn—and this season in particular for a long time. That was before Monday’s news that the NHL, after removing Pride Night celebrations from NHL arenas as of last season, is now banning players from even wrapping their sticks with Pride Tape during warm-ups. A completely voluntary show of the mildest form of support for LGBTQ+ people is not permitted, not even for fifteen minutes of a single night. Again, LGBTQ+ fans, friends, and allies are crushed between this sport that brings us immense joy and the administration of it that rejects us at every turn, to say nothing of the queer players across every level of the sport. When I started Heading North in 2012, the same year the You Can Play project launched, and Penguins defenseman Brooks Orpik was the first NHL player to use the word “gay” in his brief video in support of YCP, it felt like the book I was writing was not so far-fetched. That was the context of possibility that fueled the writing of this novel. To watch the league hurtling backwards—part and parcel of a larger international conversation about privilege, power, and false dichotomies, to be sure—is a profound sadness.

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But I also love it for selfish reasons: it’s one of the places I find writing community. Living, as I do, close to an hour away from the nearest independent bookstore and being hours and hours away from my closest writing friends, to simply be in a gaggle of writers is a delight. The day itself is a temporary community: here, this, us. A chance to form the small ties of “oh, we’ve both chosen all the same sessions” and “we’re nodding at the same places.” The held doors and book-bulged bags.

And there is the continued community of the conference, the kind editors of Barrelhouse who’ve supported my work and the work of so many others, and the local-ish folks that are brought together by this conference that shifts between D.C. and the corners of Pennsylvania. It’s a chance to see old friends I’d met elsewhere, and it’s all simply a glorious relief to exist in the shared shorthand of it all.

The night before the conference, we took advantage of being in Philadelphia to go to a Phillies game, which constitutes another temporary, shared community, another collective shorthand. My friend Jamie Nelson wrote a beautiful essay about the communitas of sports fandom for the late, great The Classical1 (which is archived, thankfully, via the internet wayback machine). I teach this essay not only in my baseball literature course but also in my medieval-themed first-year-experience class as a way to illustrate notions of pilgrimage beyond the explicitly religious, and to explore how quickly we might form alliances, connections, and shared experiences based on nothing more than laundry or a temporary geographical location. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims on their way to Canterbury, we’ve met at this waypoint because we’re going to the same place, and what is there to do, then, but tell each other stories?

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But though such connections might be formed easily and on potentially flimsy stock, they can just as easily be strengthened with relatively little effort because of the shared ground already established. A shared journey, in Nelson’s essay, to a Giants game is a chance for deeper connection; for writers at a conference, it’s the shared crucible of drafting and submission and rejection, I think, that helps. It’s a difficult process to try to explain to non-writing family and friends. So many of the steps are really labyrinths; we remind ourselves that if we’re going to succeed, the process itself must to be a large part of our reward.

But there are other rewards, and one of them is this shifting village of writers that holds its doors open in so many ways, even for those of us who don’t live close to cities and the beating hearts of Big Literary Events. In online workshops and classrooms and convention center spaces and even the conversation of books shelved and unshelved in our local libraries, we find a village that helps us welcome and raise the writing we come to share.

My debut novel Heading North arrives on November 7! Preorder a copy from Braddock Avenue Books or make plans to attend the launch on November 8 at Midtown Scholar Bookstore!

As I sat down to begin today’s installment, a soft brown blur flickered between the leaf-spaces at the edge of the yard: one late-summer fawn and then its twin, followed after by two doe. They walked the edge of the neighbor’s horse pasture, the early evening sun picking gold patches on the grass and bronze on their coats. The fawns are nearly free of their spots; they look like small deer instead of their own twiggy, excitable springs. Sometimes, seven or eight deer pass through the yard. Last week, a spike-buck with only one antler tagged along with the little herd. Tonight, though, only those four.

I watched them bend their muzzles to the grass—instead of writing—until something stirred them. They loped the long diagonal of the pasture’s near half and curved to run along the fence, looping back until they came to the spot they all choose to jump. Then over, over, over, over, four white tails in bright exclamation, before making another curling tour of the pasture’s southern half and exiting to the woods.

A dozen things might have startled them, but it might have been joy, or play. The fawns chased each other from honeysuckle to honeysuckle often enough this summer; they’re no strangers to a gambol. It felt like the right time for it, after a dim and storm-ridden Sunday.

This is the last Loomings of summer. When I write again, the seasons will have officially shifted, and sooner than I will be comfortable with, strictly speaking, my view of the pasture will be stark and clear, unbroken by anything but bare branches. (It’s too soon to think about how even those branches become invisible in winter’s gray, so I won’t.)

What I should do is learn from these deer. I feel well past due for a gambol as the semester gallops through its third week. I have a long list of excuses: grading, course prep, writing projects with rapidly approaching deadlines, a dozen other things because past-me thinks everything sounds like a good idea, and the good, varied, but ultimately ever-expanding tasks of launching a book in 8 weeks. Even one of my favorite pieces of leisure time—riding my bike—is not quite so leisurely because I’m doing another long ride in October (the Seagull Century, 100 miles on Maryland’s lovely eastern shore) and a very real and very important pressure is to make sure I’ve got enough miles in my legs that they won’t fall off somewhere on the bridge to Assateague, forty miles from the finish.

The unfortunately reality of all of this is that I haven’t really made much these past weeks, unless we’re counting my clumsy Canva graphics featuring novel events and blurbs that aren’t quite good enough to post yet. (I’m practicing. It’s a process.) I’ve spun a few meters of yarn here and there, woven some inches on my tablet weaving project, but there’s so much space between each instance. It’s not the continuous process of making that I love so (which is also a process that leads to the completion of something sometimes, which is especially grating at the moment).

But sometimes expectations have to be managed. Because I have been fortunate to have certain stretches in my life where I’ve been able to do things at a gallop—a certain summer or two where I could spend five and six hours a day at my desk churning out words, somehow insulated from campus concerns; the nights where nothing intruded on the rhythms of my foot on the spinning wheel’s treadle—some unconscious, powerful part of me insists it should always be that way. Insists that that is the only version of doing that counts.

It’s a foolish voice, that insistent one. I am trying not to listen. There are too many good things that are taking their place in those hours that used to belong to something else to give it credence.

And the deer. Deer don’t worry about should.

Some treasures:

• Sarah Cypher’s novel The Skin and Its Girl: The book begins with a fabulous premise—a girl born with blue skin—amid a very real late twentieth and early twenty-first century family history, and the combination is scintillating. This is also a novel devoted to storytelling; its narrative voice is one of the most magnetic and compelling I’ve read. And my campus is lucky enough to be hosting Cypher as one of our fall visiting writers; you can join us in-person or via Zoom for the reading on 9/25 (7pm Eastern, free, but Zoom registration is required).

• This year’s Vuelta a España1 has beena fireworks display and a reminder of why cycling’s third Grand Tour is my favorite Grand Tour, despite it receiving the least of the prevailing attention. And despite one team (Jumbo-Visma) dominating the general classification conversation, especially since Remco Evenepoel fell out of contention on a no-good, very bad day, every stage has been excitingly animated. (This includes the day after Remco’s very bad day, in which he absolutely bossed the entire stage and catapulted himself to a solo victory, which is the only real way to answer what seemed like The End for one of the race’s real favorites.) There are only a handful of days left in the race, and today’s stage ends on the very pointy Alto de l’Angliru, which is a climb of 13 kilometers that contains multiple sections of gradient between 18 and 21 percent and one vicious bit of 23.5% incline.

• Over at JMWW Journal, Jen Michalski interviews Curtis Smith about his new novel, The Lost and the Blind, and I’m so impressed with and inspired by Smith’s discussion of his process of novel-writing. There’s so much to appreciate here—do take a look—but I love this phrasing:

  I find a lot of joy and engagement in the planning process, and it often takes me months. Things come to me in whispers, and I need time to understand the bigger picture—elements of plot but more so, my characters—what moves them, how they see the world.

  “Things come to me in whispers.” And Smith is clearly attuned to what he needs to properly listen to those whispers.

Heading North arrives in less than two months. You can preorder a copy directly from Braddock Avenue Books or preorder a signed copy from Midtown Scholar!

Sometime last winter, my two-year-old cat Roo developed a behavior in which he does not want to eat alone. We don’t know why. As long as he’s eating, the vet’s not concerned. Our pandemic brother cats have always been social about mealtimes; they make it a point to eat a little bit when we sit down to any meal. But while Gil will also eat whenever else he wants, Roo insists on company.

For a couple of months, that meant I was getting out of bed at 2 a.m. to stand beside Roo’s bowl in the kitchen and pet him while he ate six pieces of food. Then doing it again at 3 a.m. and 4. Then I became slightly more smart and put a bowl on my side of the bed, so I could just flop my arm over the edge of the bed and pet him without getting up1. Sometimes this also involves scooting to the edge of the bed so he can touch his nose to my nose before eating, which is very cute.

During the day, if we’re home, he’ll come get one of us for an escort to his bowl. If I’m away for the day, often I’ll be met at the door and he leads me to the bowl. I’ll sit on the floor while he crunches away, and I’ve taken to picking up a book to accompany those minutes, so he will eat his fill.

The book I am reading in those moments is Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. So much has already been written and said about this marvelous collection of essays that weaves together indigenous ways of knowing and interacting with plants and landscapes, contemporary scientific knowledge, and elements of personal narrative, but one concept that sits at the center of these essays is patience in the act of care. Kimmerer illustrates this in many ways, but one that recurs is her process of cleaning out and maintaining a pond at her home. She rakes out raft after raft of choking algae, tending to the plants and shoreline not only at her first desire for a place for her and her daughters to swim but year after year. And when her daughters are excited about the possibility of making maple syrup from the trees that grow at their home, Kimmerer is the one to sit up with the simmering sap because the girls are young and she wants to foster their joy.

The book is laden with these kinds of care. I am grateful to be reading it while sitting beside my inexplicably particular cat. Would he, when hungry enough, probably eat by himself? I expect so. He manages all right when we’re away and he has only our wonderful cat-sitting friends for a few hours a day. But there’s no reason I can’t sit with him when I’m home. It’s no hardship for me to wait and read a while, so why begrudge it?

Some treasures:

• A rare podcast recommendation from me: Finding Favorites with Leah Jones

  • Let me begin by prefacing this with a declaration of love for the very concept of the show: a way to get recommendations for things without an algorithm. To achieve this, host Leah Jones brings guests onto her show to talk about their favorite things. As a dedicated liker-of-many-things, this is catnip for me. I’ll point you specifically to this recent episode with poet and playwright Dan O’Brien, wherein the conversation constellates around British comedies—and we get a little information about the three books he has coming out this fall!—and this older edition with fiction writer Jen Michalski, whose favorite is S. E. Hinton. As a young writer who lived and died for The Outsiders, I found this to be especially important.

• “Resistance Song” by Jill Sobule:

  • “Resistance Song” is from her 1995 album Listen, which was something I listened to over and over again in college (where it was recommended to me by my excellent roommate). It happened to turn up on shuffle as I drove home one day last week2 and was reminded of how much I love it. Delightful whimsy factor and heart.

• “The Pub with No Beer” by Kevin Barry

  • The interplay of past and present in this story is handled in a fascinating way that is the story; to say the voices of the story’s narrative past intrude upon the text is too strong for the tone and effect, but they do arrive with a certain abruptness, sometimes wholly unannounced, in such a way that masks their pastness. It’s also a very subtly done pandemic story, a story of silences and solitudes—save those voices that fill the room and the mind, surely as bodies. No one is doing short stories like Kevin Barry.

• Some making:

  • In praise of summertime fancy toast: while the season holds, toast (or grill) your favorite bread or bread-adjacent item and top it with fresh, meltingly soft sliced peaches, crumbled goat cheese, some slivers of prosciutto or speck, a generous confetti of torn basil, and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar reduction or pomegranate molasses.

    ---

    Join me and a bunch of supportive, interesting writers at Barrelhouse Magazine’s wonderful and affordable Conversations & Connections conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 23.

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    Thank you for reading Loomings. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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I got my first worry out of the way early: while overcompensating for passing bikes on a very narrow bike path bridge over some wetlands because I am very much unused to riding in such close proximity to others, I got my shoulder into the barrier wall. To keep from wiping out entirely, I threw my arm over the top of the wall, which did keep me and the bike upright (thereby keeping about eight other people from either falling or running me over or both). The result was a pretty impressive brush-burn on my forearm, but that was the sum total of the damage. A bit of gauze and Polysporin and no worries.

As for the second worry: even before we’d finished affixing our name tags to our gear bins, we were made welcome. I have never, ever been in such an immediately warm and invested space that was clearly entirely intentional and still effortlessly organic. After packing bins, the team met for brunch1, and though it was a first meeting for many of us, it had the quality of a college reunion: boisterous, full of laughter, full of curiosity about what everyone’s been up to (even for those meeting the first time). That genuine warmth of spirit persisted for the entire six days of the rally, which also contained some gnarly headwinds, bone-jarring potholes, and three massive thunderstorm cells that seemed to be timed for the most tent-soaking hours of the day (one amid an all-night soaking rain, one “short but spicy” storm attended by gale-force winds that arrived about an hour after most of the tents went up, and one that lingered through day five’s afternoon and evening, forcing some folks to take hasty, impromptu shelter along the road or, in-camp, having a cozy little cower inside the box of a transport truck). Whole tents flooded. Sleeping bags sodden. And flat tires and broken spokes and derailleur gremlins and crashes and bee stings and sore bodies and a lot of other things that could really throw a damper on, well, everything. And yet, the prevailing feeling was one of optimism and good humor and persistence.

During the candlelight vigil, as some shared their stories, one of the speakers pointed out what a charmed and sweet space the rally is. Every day, someone is standing at a busy intersection helping you to navigate traffic. Every day, someone wants you to have enough nourishing, delicious food to eat. Every day, someone waits at the top of a hill to encourage you to keep going. Every day, someone serenades you with a tambourine when you come to camp. Every day, someone says, “Good morning,” and means it. Every day, someone, even as they’re passing you, tells you you’re going strong. Every day, a team of physios is ready to wrap a wound, tend an injury, treat the aches and creaks and cracks. Every day, someone turns up with spare hands or a spare tube when something goes awry with your bike. Every day, someone will share the bug spray or the sun block or the gummy bears. Every day, so many, many good things, born of care for each other.

There’s no reason to save this kind of care for a special event. These six days were special—a life-altering kind of moving and movement—but the real spirit of the Bike Rally lives in how it carries out and away from the particular days of the ride. It’s about how you meet the days afterward, which includes meeting those fears—whatever they may have been or still may be2—and doing that work of care for others as you go, because most of what I saw us doing was helping each other meet and overcome those fears. Each of those intentional moments of inviting someone into a conversation or asking a question helped someone else not feel like an outsider. Each of those moments when someone said, “You’re almost there!” helped someone else feel like they could complete the day. Each time someone said, “That’s just a daddy long-legs—it doesn’t bite,” someone sat a little more comfortably in camp.

One last time for the 2023 Bike Rally: if you’d like to make a little contribution to support people living with HIV/AIDS, here’s the link.

Links & making & reading recommendations will return in the next installment!

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My debut novel Heading North is now available for preorder! You can also join me and a bunch of supportive, interesting writers at Barrelhouse Magazine’s wonderful and affordable Conversations & Connections conference in Philadelphia on Sept. 23.

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Last week, I did a pair of long Bike Rally prep rides on the Pine Creek Rail Trail, a gravel rail trail that traverses the Pennsylvania Grand Canyon1. If you’ve never walked or cycled on a rail trail, they’re pretty great in many ways: no big hill-climbs, so they’re accessible to all kinds of fitness levels, and though they might be heavily used by walkers, runners, and cyclists, you usually don’t have to worry too much about other kind of vehicles, barring the occasional country road crossing. If you ride north on the PCRT, you will have to contend with a slight uphill grade—about 2%—for the entire northerly progression, but when you turn around and go south, you enjoy the answering benefit of that slight downhill slope. And the Pine Creek Rail Trail comes canopied by trees and bounded by the creek, which means relative shade and cool2.

The forecast for our ride days read hot, though, and the air was syrupy with humidity. The last thing I wanted to do was end up short of water under such circumstances, so on Thursday morning, I filled up my hydration backpack, put bottles in the two cages on my bike, and put three extra bottles in a rather generously sized bar bag I borrowed from my spouse.

Somewhere around mile 20 of our northerly trek, I started to slow down. By mile 24, I was feeling like I was going backwards. I didn’t have an odometer on me, but I can tell you I was going slow enough that a mosquito caught up with me and tagged the back of my arm. As though my dead legs weren’t insult enough.

I had to make mile 30 because that would mean hitting the mile 60 benchmark once we got back to the car and because I didn’t come all this way not to hit my benchmark. So on I trundled. Glacially. Slowly enough that the sweat stopped drying on my face and just dripped. The terrible part was the forward-casting fear: if I was struggling like this here, I’d never make it through the Bike Rally, where all except one of the days is a longer ride than 60 miles. I would be a sad little puddle that someone would just sweep into the St. Lawrence.

At mile 30, our turnaround point and lunch stop, I shuffled my bottles around because something about them was causing a squeak, and sometimes, when the gravel really jostled, the bottom of the bag dragged against my tire. My aggressive pre-ride tightening of the straps wasn’t quite enough against the bottles’ weight, so I problem-solved by pouring a full one into my hydration pack, putting the other full ones into the cages. Then, with that bar bag full of empties instead of several pounds of water, we carried on.

All at once, I had legs again.

The next day, on the exact same route, but with my spare bottles in backpack pockets instead and the bar bag left behind, I had no problems maintaining speed. Hope returned. All things were possible. I would not be left in a ditch in Ontario3 (maybe).

The best I can figure is that I managed to put just enough pressure on a brake cable to ride those first 30 miles under some (rude) extraneous resistance.

At least in this case, if that’s what I actually did, I had the luxury of not knowing I’d done it. But it prompts reflection on the number of different ways I’m riding the brakes while trying to move forward, too, metaphorically: picking up my phone and starting to doomscroll before #5amWritersClub begins; avoiding the most daunting e-mails for hours under the pretext of working on something more pressing, but not really doing that task, either, because I’m still thinking about the e-mail I really should just send; saying yes to things I really don’t want to do.

Important lessons, as the semester’s start looms.

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An announcement:
Thanks to the lovely folks who preordered Heading North in its first week of availability, we’ve raised an extra $200 for the Bike Rally! Thanks, friends!

Preorders remain available, of course! And if you’re not buying books yourself at this moment, remember that you can always ask your local library to order a copy of the books you’re excited about.

Some treasures:

• A recommendation for your #SealeyChallenge endeavors: A Mind Like This by Susan Blackwell Ramsey. It’s “Knitting Lace” that first brought me to this collection (and you can read here, about 2/3 of the way through the interview, about her process of making a lace artist’s book during her MFA), but I wanted to share a few lines with you from the title poem, which brings me immense delight:

When a mind like this
hears that Burleigh Grims was the last pitcher
to throw a legal spitball in ‘43,
you’d think it had spotted a sapphire in the gravel.
It’s saving pocket lint and bottle caps
while bread and diamonds thunder down the chute.

• “The Normal Force,” new fiction by Molia Dumbledon in The Sun, which is emotionally devastating in the most precise and understated way. And it has the most perfect depiction of grading first-year essays I’ve encountered.

• Periodically throughout the summer, a whitetail doe or two will decide our front porch is a good fawn-daycare spot: quiet, safe, shaded. A few years ago, in late May or early June, we had a spotty little buddy literally napping on the welcome mat for a day. Tuesday afternoon, one fawn opted for the grass beside the walkway.

• Some finished yarn! I’m hitting the homestretch with Fossil Fibers’ 2022 Tour de Fleece special. Looking forward to hopefully getting to the 2023 loveliness before 2024.

  

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I started writing this novel in 2012, and while I’ve imagined the book as a book for a long time, this step makes the whole thing feel entirely different. Real in a new and startling way. You can preorder it from the Braddock Avenue Books website. Preorders are incredibly important to authors and presses, so as an added bit of incentive, from now until August 1, I will contribute $2 for every preorder of the book to the Friends for Life Bike Rally to support people living with HIV/AIDS. (In three weeks, I’ll be pedalling my heart out on the 6-day, 660km Bike Rally from Toronto to Montreal for this cause, so you get two things: a book delivery in November & a little sense of doing good.)

But isn’t that cover lovely?

Let me continue to enthuse:

I write to you today three days distant from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, where I had the privilege to be the Peter Taylor Fellow for Cleyvis Natera’s fiction workshop and to work with and be among a staggeringly talented bunch of writers.

It is hard to quantify what it means to be so thoroughly immersed in a group of people that understands so well what it is you do. Perhaps other people live this all the time, but I largely don’t; I have plenty of supportive, lovely folks in my life, and I get to teach writing to many lovely students each year, but I’m the only fiction faculty in my department and there are only two of us who teach creative writing. In the summer, I mostly see my spouse and my cats, none of whom worry daily about plot1 structure. So for seven days, to be so much among that shared shorthand and understood at a gesture or a glance, was a proper gift.

And with such abounding, indefatigable glee:

My workshop organized a reading for our particular workshop after the twelve-hour day, after the KRWW-wide evening reading, so we could experience each other’s more polished work, our favorite pieces, in addition to the new work that is the heart of the Kenyon model. And for an hour, we read to each other in a room on the third floor of Ascension Hall, which features wooden paneling and detailing, leather armchairs, a dais with a trio of throne-like chairs, and a bounty of stained glass. What a grand, grand thing, this whole week.

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A few things:

• I will be rolling out many new reading recommendations that stem, in one way or another, from my Kenyon experience, but since I started reading Michelle Hart’s What We Do In The Dark pretty much the moment I got my copy, I will start here. The lucid, crisp prose style is easy to drop into, and its directness is a striking counterpoint to the complex layers of grief and longing evident in the narrator, Mallory. It’s a novel about complicated relationships (troubled and troubling, at times, which is very propulsive), and the authorial choices with regard to style and organization put the spotlight squarely on story so that Mallory’s experiences are foremost in mind. It’s incredibly moreish.

• The Tour de France is in full gallop, and the stage that will end after I send this newsletter out promises to be intense. And you may care about that or not. But here are a pair of photo galleries from the tour courtesy of Escape Collective—one of roadside spectators with some insight by the photographers, Ashley and Jered Gruber, and one of three days of images in the mountains that captures the entire race feeling: the athletes and the spectators and the stunning places Le Tour goes. If you’d like to go on a mini-vacation or do a little people-watching from your desk, go to these links and have an escape.

• I took my book charkha to Kenyon, put it on the desk in my room, and didn’t touch it again until it was time to pack it up. But I won’t say I wasn’t making anything that week; I was making friends.

A delight:

The hotelier who greets us on the first night—us, somewhat wilted from eleven hours of flights and four hours of trains and the jolt of six hours’ time change—speaks at least four languages with ease and at least three people’s measure of good cheer. We spend two nights in this place, which means two breakfasts and two dinners, and though the hotel itself is modest, road-side, and a full mile’s walk from the nearest bus stop, his particular bonhomie is like a sunlamp turned upon us during each meal. At dinner, when he checks on us and I am beside myself with joy at how good everything is and he is genially nonplussed with the praise, he deflects: “So far, so good!” The way it arrives—a little bit of a question to which he surely knows the answer—is also filled with pleasure at the phrase. He says he learned it while traveling in Australia. He says he loves this phrase. That he loves such a phrase makes me love him.

A challenge:

The bridge to Pont-Saint-Esprit is 700 years old, supported by twenty arches across the floor of the Rhône valley, and is 919 meters long, which is to say nearly .6 miles. As architecture, it is impressive: it supports a very busy run of cars every day, despite its age. Its beauty is a workmanlike kind: mostly plain, dark stone, sturdy and unadorned. But 700 years old! And the first day of the cycling part of our trip ends somewhere on the other side of it, in the chateau where we are scheduled to sleep.

With my feet on my pedals, I am fearful of every centimeter of this bridge. I don’t mind heights, but this is one of the very few places we encounter with no bike lane and a sidewalk so narrow and overgrown it makes walking its own precariousness. The wind buffets in excess of forty miles an hour—more than enough to swat me sideways into the stone wall or into the Friday midday traffic—and I lose my nerve for riding. I have never biked in wind like this, and I have never biked in traffic like this. I walk the bike across, fighting to keep my shoulder from smacking into rearview mirrors when the gusts are worst. I’m glad enough to have made it without being hit by a delivery van that the sting to my pride is almost blunted.

Another delight:

At the Abbaye Sainte-André, cloistered behind the 14th century walls of Fort Saint-André, a quintet of wildflower beds spread across an Italian garden like a fan. A silver gnarl of olive trees filigree the slope below the 11th century chapel to Saint Casarie. Koi circle in lilied fountains mere steps from the thousand-year-old cemetary between two churches now visible only from their unmistakable footprints. A fantastical grotto filled with more than a ton of brightly glazed clay plants and creatures, sculpted by an artist in the 1990s, bubbles with water, while a small garden of medicinal simples line a pathway that leads to cactus and cypress. The abbey, the roots of which date to the location of the hermitage of Saint Casarie in the 6th century and the formal establishment of a monastic community in 999 AD, has undergone many transformations in its history, including several kinds of destruction. Its present guise as a living garden both modern and ancient owes to the vision of Elsa Koeberlé and Génia Lioubow, a pair of poets and artists who lived there following World War I. Koeberlé, and later her goddaughter Roseline Bacou, devoted themselves to restoring and reimagining the space.

During a week wherein we saw many very old things that were preserved, as much as possible, in their original state, to see this space that carried such reverence for its holy roots while also daring to think intentionally about other conventions of beauty and retreat (and environmental sustainability) was its own revelation.

Another challenge:

I say sí when I mean oui so many times I lose count. In Mornas, I say gracias to the barman as he gives me my change, and my French is just good enough to understand when he says, “You speak Spanish? I have family in Spain, near Valencia.” This is an inordinately kind way to approach my brain’s wonky unconscious choice to reply neither in the language that was spoken to me nor in my first language. I don’t have much time to be embarrassed; it’s time to get back on the bike, which consumes all of my processing power as I am in charge of navigating us back to our planned route after this stop for lunch and a(nother) ruined fortress1.

Delight the third:

In Orange, the proprietor of our bed and breakfast, Seline, explains that the lavender bloom is short-lived: a week or two at most. That we are here, in Provence, to see it is a matter of very good luck. Every deep purple field we pass thereafter, then, is like being washed in a censer’s sweet fog.

A question, with an answer:

In the morning, when the wind has died down a little, I make myself ride back across the bridge from Pont-Saint-Esprit instead of walk, so we can continue on our way. I hunker low and pedal as fast as I can, and I am still scared, but the meters pass, and I am breathless with the air and the traffic and the sight of the distant trees bending. The bridge ends and our route slides us gently to the right: the designated greenway awaits. A hare darts across the path, long-legged, and disappears into some soy beans. Sun breaks on our shoulders and the wind cools them. The ViaRhôna unwinds like a ribbon and the water is never far.

So far, so good?

So far, so good.

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The Miscellany

• Here’s a fascinating article on the way languages interfere with each other in multilingual people, which at least reassures me that there’s a reason for my silly slip-ups.

• Next week, I am off to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, where I will serve as one of the Peter Taylor Fellows in fiction for Cleyvis Natera’s workshop. I cannot wait; I was a participant in Nick White’s workshop last summer, and it was life-changing. You can read more here.

• While traveling, I read Helene Wecker’s The Hidden Palace and started Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk. The Hidden Palace took the characters made familiar by her previous novel, The Golem and the Jinni, in intriguing directions; I was thrilled to be proven wrong about how I thought their stories would turn out. H is for Hawk, a memoir of grief but also a book deeply knowledgeable about falconry, is wholly engrossing. It reminds me, of course, of Rebecca K. O’Connor’s Lift, which I mean as deepest compliment: in both works, the world of falconry, in all of its wildness and specificity of language and action, anchors the books’ personal and interior journeys in apt but not obvious ways.

• Presently, the Tour de France is underway, which also means that the Tour de Fleece is underway, wherein spinners undertake an especially concentrated effort in creating yarn for the duration of the peloton’s adventure. (They spin their wheels, we spin ours—or our spindles, etc.) For my own efforts of yarn-making, I’m taking a pretty relaxed approach this time around and spinning whatever I feel like in the moment. So far, that’s meant some time at my wheel with a fine gradient spin and a little turn on my book charkha for some very fine silk and my first attempt at a cotton puni I blended myself on hand-cards, which is pictured below. I’m not showing you the resultant cotton thread because the fineness of it resists my poor photography skills and the blended colors muddied a little, rather than creating little runs of color. Live, learn, etc. But look at that wee soft snail of fiber!

  

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To compensate, most fields will create a blank, dark backdrop in straightaway center to allow the batter a better view of the incoming pitch. On the local level, that might simply mean plain plywood or vinyl in some dark color fixed to the fence. A good hunter green is popular. If the field has the resources, that backdrop—called the batter’s eye—might rise well above the level of the rest of the fence, too. At Coors Field in Denver, there’s a rocky fountain ringed with evergreens and native plants sitting behind the center field fence, and that’s all backdropped with a deep green wall covered over with ivy. Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park has a red brick wall, also covered in a rising blanket of ivy, behind a modest collection of shrubbery.2

Why all this painting and landscaping beyond the actual field of play? Because it’s impossible to do the work if you can’t see the work. In this baseball example, it’s a literal consideration. Against a white sign in the outfield or a sea of multicolored t-shirts, an incoming pitch is as good as invisible; a swing is as good as a guess. A clearer mechanism for sight allows the hitter to make a better, more considered decision about swinging (even in this split second, it’s a choice), which is to say when and how to expend their effort and when to make the most of their circumstances.

The same sentiment applies to writing. Sometimes a clarification of the workspace is what’s needed: reducing the piles of books and notes around the laptop or the notebook so that there aren’t physical distractions from the task at hand. Those physical objects can also be a mental distraction: it’s hard to concentrate on revising your own chapter if you’re also staring at the book you’re supposed to review or blurb or prepare for class.

It’s not a case of letting one task erase the other, but rather simplifying the backdrop for each thing. When it’s time to read for the blurb, don’t also leave your own chapter sitting open on your screen. The constant push-pull of “Oh, I should do X” leads so swiftly to doing shockingly little, and without even the pleasure of deliberately skiving off and treating yourself to the hammock nap or the pie-baking or the Diablo IV3 binge.

The reason I’m thinking about all of this right now is because I am in dire need of a batter’s eye of my own.

I’m even experiencing it with my spinning. I generally spin quite fine, and I often struggle to get a good view of my fiber against my own leg or against the dark wood of the floor and the lighter wood of my spinning wheel and the splay of whatever else is sitting behind it all. At the spinning wheel, though, this is a problem solved easily enough with a pair of old pillowcases, one light, one dark. I choose the color most different from whatever I’m spinning, and then, draped across my lap, the fabric both hides the visual noise of other textures behind the fiber and creates a clear enough contrast that I can keep the consistency of thickness and twist.

At the writing level, I’ve tried clearing my desk, tidying up as much of my in-room sight-line as possible. I’ve tried methods I’ve never had success with before, like doing the small tasks first in hopes that the little boost of serotonin from making some incremental progress will fuel the larger and also making the total number of things on the to-do list smaller, which should theoretically lead to seeing the bigger pieces more clearly. It doesn’t and it hasn’t.4

I’ve gone the self-care route, opting for sleeping in and then letting myself putter. The hope that letting myself think about nothing of note will give everything a chance to settle has thus far been futile. Brain as a jar of shaken-up puddle-water feels apt, but if the metaphor was accurate, the method would work better.

I have to go back to the batter’s eye: it works because the batter in that moment, looking at that backdrop, is only looking for one thing. There is only one task, and if the batter is going to be successful, each at-bat must be completed in the present moment. Worrying about anything that came before—the strike-out, the would-be home run foul by inches, the failed bunt attempt—or anything that comes after—a win, more playing time, a contract extension—interferes with the present moment, and the present moment requires all of the self.

As a writer with a novel forthcoming, I’m so bound up in the past and the future, the what-ifs and the maybes, I’m missing the present. (Better put: I’m wasting the present.) So I’m doing my best to center myself with small things: responding to two other people’s amazing manuscripts has reminded me of the wonder of the process. I properly studied the responses a friend had to one of my stories in progress and saw its path more clearly. I’m turning to paper and jettisoning screens as much as I can. I’m turning on my Forest app and letting my love for these stupid pixel trees keep me off of Twitter. The view’s not clear, but maybe it’s clearing.

What do you do when you need to simplify your own view of things?

Some small good things:

This sentence by Ursula K. Le Guin, from Lavinia:

“The poet made him live, live greatly, so he must die. I, whom the poet gave so little life to, I can go on. I can live to see the cloud above the sea at the end of the world.”

This is my first time reading Lavinia, and I’m so taken by Le Guin’s approach to the story: a character aware of herself as a character and aware of the blank space made of her by Virgil’s Aeneid. It adds a vivacity and charm to the narration; it also works in the same way formal constraints might. By being aware of certain boundaries she faces as a character—what is already known of her—what she does inside of those boundaries feels all the more pointed. So when there are long passages of world-building and careful considerations of more minor characters even within that defined space, it seems all the more deliberate. Of course it’s all deliberate—Le Guin wills it so—but in the first-person voice of Lavinia, there’s a considered texture to it that invokes the reader’s need to trust the teller of the tale.

The Wigleaf Top 50 is out! This is a fabulous festival of flash fiction gems that includes many writers I adore and some names that are new to me. Delight in these reading pleasures; since each piece is so short, keep the tab open in your phone for when you’re in line at the post office or waiting for your toast to pop.

The black raspberries5 are ripening here in central Pennsylvania, and I found a new patch of raspberry brambles on the edge of our property, surrounded by a thicket of multiflora rose, and growing over the old brush-pile left by the linesmen cleaning up around the power lines. This is to say one must tread carefully and dress heavily, but the rewards are tremendous.

But the places the shade lingers, the brush springs bright. In every lower-lying seam, a greener thread. The rabbits make their way from one to the other or follow the curve of the hedgerow, where the trees and brush make a place where the grass can rise still lush.

two
Each night, I comb the internet for different iterations of the same guide: Order like a local in a French restaurant; Ten essential phrases for dining out in France; How to decipher a French menu. How to, how to, how to. I run through exercises on an app and cringe at the times I fumble a pronunciation. I roll my eyes at the way my brain thinks that supplying a Spanish word or phrase is helpful. What I do take heart in is that, though the last time I seriously used my twenty-year-old Spanish minor was 15 years ago in a Spanish literature class at Binghamton, that learning lodged itself gratifyingly deeply. So perhaps there’s hope for my French eventually.

Every version of this, for me, is a version of how not to look like a tourist, no matter how futile that must be, given that I’ve got a scant year of Duolingo1 practice under my belt and can only interact in the present tense—nevermind whatever is happening with my accent, which comes and goes like the weather. And yet, the desire persists: to want to seem accomplished, comfortable, somehow seamless.

I know, of course, that this is futile. The ruse will last until whatever comes after “Bonjour!” as I discovered the last time I was in Montreal. (I can’t help it: if someone says hello in their language and I recognize the greeting as such, I will always try to reply similarly.) And I don’t mind too much making gaffes in the actual moment; this is what language learning is like. Most folks around the world are inclined to be generous and helpful; I’m also not worried about not being able to communicate or get what we need. The 21st century traveler has a lot of resources at their disposal. And still, I’ll try so hard to try to get it “right,” whatever that means in the moment.

All of this in the context of an upcoming cycling adventure, wherein we’ll be navigating small villages along the Rhône River for a handful of days. I can’t wait.

three
Three pounds of hand-kneaded dough becomes twelve individual balls, twelve possible pizzas. While my parents watch, I feed slivers of honey locust my dad has brought me from his woodpile into the fuel pan of the little pizza oven. The flames are bright and eager; they roll across the oven’s low ceiling like unfurling ribbons. Dough after dough stretches in my hands; dough after dough slips with unexpected ease from my makeshift peel. Mozzarella makes sweet, stretchy pools we strew with basil slivers; the edges of three kinds of mushrooms crisp even further under their slivers of fontina and bed of caramelized onion. My favorite—fig and goat cheese and prosciutto—hides beneath a mound of arugula, peppery bright. We make eight pizzas, save four balls of dough for another night, and have leftovers planned. We eat the other five, chasing the slices with watermelon and strawberry pie. The neighbors’ donkeys snort at us from behind their screen of maple and multiflora rose.

four
The blue cream I comb through my hair smells strangely sweet. I reuse the blue vinyl gloves that protect my fingers from the dye as many times as I can, but I despair at everything else: there are blue splotches on the tips of both ears, a smudge halfway up my forearm, and, for the first time, a stray gob on the counter. Though the dye dregs leave blue speckles in the sink that fade only with time, it thankfully doesn’t stain the countertop. In my hair, where the dye is only visible on the gray strands, the color will only last two weeks. What begins as a deep sapphire sheen thins to an icy blue. It’s my favorite shade on days two and three, when the contrast between my naturally dark hair and the proper blue is highest. The tinted strands catch the light, and sometimes, when I’m feeling most whimsical, they seem to glow.

five
The pharmacist was maybe concerned, maybe nonplussed about the fact the needle left no mark. My very recent Covid booster shot, pinched into my left arm, didn’t seem to hurt as much, either, as the other ones. This was the only one without a little bead of blood forming at once at the injection site. But she held the Band-Aid—unwrapped, in readiness—for a while, waiting. I don’t want to ruin your outfit, she said. I’d been wearing a blazer when I came in (because I’d just come from my book talk), with a sleeveless shirt beneath (because I was getting a booster shot directly thereafter), but the day was warm. I could just leave the jacket off, and I said so, as the blood did not rise to the surface and did not rise. I don’t think it’s going to bleed, she said again, and folded the adhesive tabs over the little pad. And then she waited, a little longer, looking and looking, until maybe there was the tiniest little mark—like the heart of a mosquito bite—and she unwrapped a new bandage, pressed it on, gently. There. In case.

A few other highlights2:

• Huge thanks to Sarah Tollok for this in-depth review of the April 2023 Conversation & Connections Conference hosted by Barrelhouse. You can read more about this wonderfully kind and supportive conference in Sarah’s review, but allow me the indulgence of sharing what she said about my session on metaphor:

  The session was a superbly effervescent glass of champagne, bubbly and light at just the right moments but with hidden depths of flavor. It left me with the perfect buzz humming inside of me.

  Sarah’s Bookstories is forthcoming in Spring 2024! Put Conversation & Connections on your September calendar, too, because it’s coming to Philadelphia!

• Rita Chang-Eppig’s new novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, is a rich and marvelous feast for the senses. The narrative, inspired by historic events, is deeply compelling and filled with memorable characters. For me, though, it’s the language that steals the show. Chang-Eppig’s skill with figurative language throws up sparks on every page in ways that are fully connected to the world of the novel and illuminate the protagonist from every angle.

• Some great work at Defector this week, including “How One Dumb Woman Got on HRT in 2010,” by the fantastic Casey Plett, who talks about HRT, trans health care, and process with candor and humor, &, in a completely different vein, a David J. Roth profile of pitcher Noah Syndergaard and his present decline, “Twilight of the Thunder God.”

• In small “This is what it means to me to have made it” news, an attendee at my Tuesday book talk at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mt. Gretna on All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel came up to me afterward to say she heard a podcast about Bea Wolf, the middle grade graphic novel retelling of Beowulf by Zach Weinersmith and thought of me. I gave my talk on J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf in August 2015, and she remembered after all this time! I’m just so delighted to be that person’s Beowulf person.

• Thanks to the amazing resource that is Twisted Threads, I’ve embarked on a new tablet weaving project!

  

  I’ve woven a kivrim pattern like this before, but thanks to TT, I was able to customize that draft to make it much wider. Its purpose is presently somewhat secret, but I’m delighted with the way it’s turning out, now that I’ve got my threading in the correct orientation. (Rough going at the start, when it was literally upside down and backwards. But sometimes these things happen, and they can be corrected, and on we go.)

While I worked at my desk, Roo sat in the window and lashed his tail at the rabbit that’s often in the front yard in the morning, and then Roo hunkered closer, pressing to the screen, jaw vibrating in silent chat. The rabbit wasn’t simply cherry-picking the dandelion stalks from the yard, but rather carrying dried grasses into the astilbe1 beside the front stoop.

Nest.

For two minutes, I allowed myself to imagine the adorableness of egg-sized new buns bopping about the yard, right where I (and my indoor cats) could watch them all the time.

Then I remembered the rabbit who, three years ago, built a nest beneath the nearby hose reel so stealthily we didn’t notice her doing it. The carnage when the neighbor’s roving outdoor cat found them.

An astilbe would make a very beautiful home, but its soft stalks and low leaves would not make a protected one at all. So Bill removed the existing nest-bits and put a stone over the place where she’d started to dig. It appears to have been an effective deterrent, at least at time of writing.

***

When the sun had risen enough to warm up the driveway, I carried my breakfast outside2. As I was scraping up the last bites of strawberry-rhubarb crumble, a rabbit burst from the underbrush at the lower end of the yard, pursued by a red fox. The rabbit safely made it to the ditch full of black raspberry canes between our house and the neighbor’s, and the fox turned back, rather than expend effort in a game it couldn’t win. It trotted easily back the way it came, tongue lolling but body language spritely enough. That instant: the closest I have ever been to a wild red fox. For all their numbers here, they’ve remained smart and shy, loping across the pasture in the distance, maybe taking a little shortcut through the yard, but never when we’re outside. The tip of its tail disappeared beneath one of the banks of honeysuckle and I stood, marveling for a moment.

A heartbeat later, another rabbit broke from the brush, toward me, and the same fox tore after. This time, the chase took them past the fallow raised beds and into the tree-lined fence row between our house and the fields that house more distant neighbors’ mouthy little donkeys and the big brown gelding who has to be coaxed in at night. The rabbit immediately disappeared; I watched the fox slow again and trot along, a copper flicker between the green and shadow.

Two lucky rabbits. One pragmatic fox.

In the evening, another rabbit—or perhaps one of the same—lay lounging on the concrete lip around the Bilco doors to the basement, as though there were no foxes at all in this world.

What I’m making:

Labor of love, for sure. The last 10 inches of this, even though the rows get shorter and shorter as one decreases, felt like they took forever. That said, this is a blissfully easy pattern3 that will give you a perfectly square blanket at the end of it. Peak “my attention is elsewhere” knitting. Again, great way to use up bits of things if you want some stripes, but it also looks nice if you go with a single color. This is made with three strands of wool in various colors held together. It’s going to be a perfect stadium blanket: squishy and insulating.

What I’m reading: The Thicket by Kasey Jueds
This is a collection I feel especially glad to sit with, or rather rest inside of, given the way it recreates spaces on the page.

These are poems of precise details rich with implication. From “The Tool Shed”:

[…]inside that room that was never
a room, I offered my clavicles, my soft heels

pale as milkweed silk, to the trowels, the shears
dulled with rust. It wasn’t enought. And after,

outside, released into heat and the bright net
the barn swallows kept threading with their flight, the warped door

finally pulled shut behind me—even then that smell
stung my throat, my lungs, lingered in the hollows of me

like a shame I could never tell.

I am especially enamored of the natural details here—poem after poem crisp and true in its evocation of place and time.

What I’m writing—or rather, what I’ve written: From Bestiary, a chapbook project dreamed into being as part of a book-making independent study by Isaac K. Fox, one of my lake monster sonnets. The kernel of this piece, and the second sonnet, and a short story I’m grinding along on, comes from one of Nick White’s Kenyon Review Writers Workshop prompts.

And my monster, sweet left-handed creation:

But beyond making me rather unsentimental about all of my desk drawer detritus & that loose leaf tea I purchased while I lived in Wyoming (yikes, self, yikes), the process has foregrounded a lot of things. My work office, and therefore all of the books I am leaving on the shelves, will be entirely unaccessible until August. Thus, anything I might want for course-planning for fall 2023 or spring 2024 has to come home with me now. And since my home office is also in its usual late-semester state of disarray, all of those books are Gathered Unto Me in piles beside the piles of new books I haven’t shelved because I want to be reading them immediately if not sooner.

All of this is somewhat overwhelming, but there is also the giddy hope of soon curling around these edges. The start of summer is Second New Year for me; though the feeling of summer vacation has long since flown, this fleeting time away from the classroom means different considerations for my days and a lot to look forward to: visits with dear friends and some travel and a writing workshop I will tell you more about soon and a grand adventure or two that will certainly end up on the page. There are the smaller pleasures: not only time to read, but to finally finish weaving the poor scarves that have been sitting on my loom for an eternity; to try making English muffins and croissants; to replenish my stash of freezer bao and dumplings; to finish spinning last year’s Tour de Fleece yarn before this year’s Tour starts; to get really extra about my Bike Rally preparation. To rethink my fall classes and begin the process of crafting those days; to start dreaming a little bit toward the spring classes because I expect December and January will be somewhat more distracting than usual because of the other bright dream on the horizon.

This summer, I will be getting ready to launch my novel, which will arrive in November. Last week, I sent some requests for blurbs. This week, I’ve been working on my publicity questionnaire. In the weeks to come, I will be working on companion pieces and final proofs and likely a bunch of things I don’t even know about, and I feel giddy.

What are you looking forward to these days?

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What I’m making:
I made, somehow only for the first time, the Browniest Cookies from Smitten Kitchen for our end-of-semester department hoopla1. Judging by the empty container at the end of a scant two hours, they turned out well!

The dough comes together in a single pot (the same one in which you melt your butter and chocolate together). The only delay is a bit of chilling time, but that also means you can make the dough when it’s convenient and bake the cookies when you want warm cookies. My only modification is that I used half milk chocolate and half bittersweet chocolate for my chocolate bits. These would be a good choice for picnic-type events; there’s something very welcoming and unfussy about a dish of cookies, and because of the intensity of the chocolate, these are not especially sweet. …if you were to warm up one of these cookies and top it with a scoop of ice cream, I would think you very clever and correct.

What I’m reading:
I have started sneaking pages of Rita Chang-Eppig’s debut Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea. I have been looking forward to this novel ever since I saw the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement for it. Very much looking forward to the moment I can just devote my whole brain to it.

What I’m writing:
I don’t currently have any new writing news to share with you in these grading-centric days, so please forgive me for a re-share, but it’s for good reason: Hernan Diaz’s fascinating novel Trust won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction! I had the pleasure of writing about it for the Ploughshares blog last year: Authority and Trust. If you haven’t read it before, please be aware that my essay discusses the book’s structure in depth, which also gives away some of the novel’s best turns.

That part of the instructions was in the original invitation e-mail, but somehow, I’d forgotten that detail until the poll came around for when we’d get together and draw. I whined. Audibly and inelegantly.

I shouldn’t have done. The original instructions were there; it’s on me for blanking on that part. Or rather, probably repressing it, hoping (somehow) I could get it to not apply to me.

The scheduling portion was a difficulty I couldn’t resolve, which was just as well, since the last thing I wanted to do was do a bunch of drawings that could not, by definition, be my best in front of other people. But it’s the latter part that was the real problem: I didn’t want to do something quick, chaotic, silly. (The absolute point of it was to lean into the chaos of using the non-dominant hand, and then also attempting to color the images in, with colored pencil. The intent was to let it be fun and free and improvisational, and I love that idea, so much—for other people.)

But doing it is something I said I would do, and the project would look out of kilter if exactly one person stamped their foot and said no, I am allergic to this kind of fun, so I did it. So I found 75 minutes (and a piece of scrap paper to at least make a test-shape) and borrowed the set of colored pencils everyone else was using, and did the thing.

(You know what’s coming next.)

Doing it was pretty all right. I won’t share any of the project before its proper debut, but maybe at a later date you’ll see my Nessie rendition here. When I was a kid, I doodled sea monsters—this particular silhouette of Nessie, especially—with my right hand, so I had a shape in mind. The irregularities were not as many as I thought there would be, likely because I chose something with more sweeps and curves than tight, precise angles, though left-handed coloring and shading chucked me out of my outlines in a way that infuriated the ten-year-old that still apparently resides inside of me, with very strong feelings about how coloring should be done. The more shocking in thing in all of it was that my left hand showed more dexterity in the process than I thought it would. I am in no way functionally ambidextrous; left-handed, I cannot even wield a spoon confidently in a bowl of cereal without wearing a fair bit of milk. But maybe because of all of the arts and crafts, which at least require the participation of ma main gauche, my left hand could do something, as long as I didn’t expect it to do it in exactly the same way as my right.

I simply had to manage my expectations. I’ll keep working on that.

What I’m making:

It’s the end of April. Next time I write to you, it will be in the middle of finals week. A cup of tea is mostly what I’m making just now, and I get to show you my new mug, which I did not make.

My favorite piece of opinionated tea-writing: George Orwell’s “A Nice Cup of Tea.” I disagree with most of what Orwell says, particularly the level of adamancy that he deploys, but I also love the clarity and directness of Orwell, and while he surely loves a more astringent brew than I prefer, I have always found the particular astringency of his writing magnetic. My favorite tea, however, is Assam, and I prefer milk with it, not cream or half-and-half, so we share that, if very little else.

What I’m reading: I’ll be honest: until final grades are done, all of my serious reading is off the table. So it’s more re-reads of the bedtime variety, and now I’m on to The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

What I’m writing: Grindingly, two or three hundred words at a time, I’m nearing the end of a brand new short story. As with all of my short work, I feel wildly in love with it in the moment, as I’m writing, then am convinced it’s absolute rubbish once the clear light of day lands. But I’m excited to have something new to share with the workshop group for the first time in ages.

Substack Notes:

You can also find me now on Substack Notes!

Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions.

Go to Notes

How to join

Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Loomings, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!

You can also share notes of your own!

I’m writing to you from the sofa, where I’m enjoying the first generally pain-free days of the past six weeks. At some point at the end of February, I did something to my back—not entirely sure what, as I never had a sudden pang or twinge, but rather a stealthy, tender stiffness that progressed rapidly to the kind of spasming pain that saw me spend two weeks pacing and panting like a caged thing and mostly unable to have two coherent thoughts in a row1. There were four (mostly inconclusive) doctor’s visits over the next full month. I’m still waiting for the results of an MRI; I’m in the midst of my first-ever bout of physical therapy. At least something has improved, and I’m trying not to question it too much.

And yet, I wouldn’t be a writer if I wasn’t interested in questioning things. And since it’s not presently in my own power to know, definitively, what the problem is, what spurs me now is the question of awareness.

I teach on a college campus, where we do so much around the topic of awareness for a multitude of causes. Student groups sell pins and ribbons and ribbons you can pin onto other things. We hold workshops and educational sessions and invite guest speakers because problems have to be identified before they can be solved. We try to decrease stigma; we try to increase dialogue.

All of this awareness-raising is organized around pain points: the pain of diseases without cure, the pain of people without the resources they need. We do what we do because we live in hope that when we know better, we do better. If we are aware, we won’t simply ignore the issue.

(Five minutes of current events casts a sobering shadow on all of that, I know.)

That same sense of awareness lodges in the body: a response to pain. The body is trying to send a message of stop x or start y. (Or the pain is some secret third thing, which is beyond my scope here.2) But, broadly, by lighting up those nerves, the body makes one aware. And when there’s an injury, that awareness lingers, even after the healing may be registered as complete.

In August of 2021, I developed Achilles tendonitis after what seemed to me an incredibly average bit of running. I spent a month in a boot and a few months doing specialized stretches and strengthening exercises and decidedly not running (this is, coincidentally, when I fell face-first into cycling). Even now, though, when I exercise, I am constantly in a state of monitoring the way that part of my body feels. Because it had hurt, because the hurt came so suddenly and again without a discernable root, because it took a long time to feel “normal” again—is it really back to the way it was? Whether it is or isn’t is no longer a simple judgment; the memory changes it.

So I am thinking about my back. So I am thinking about the way traumas of many kinds lodge in the body, and the body has its own way of remembering, even if we might like to forget.

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What I’m making: For the reason above, I haven’t done a whole lot of making, but I did cobble together this meringue roulade, which I made as my own birthday dessert.

I very loosely followed this Mary Berry recipe for making the roulade itself. It’s filled with a blood orange and passionfruit curd, plus some whipped cream. Next time, I will try the meringue with slightly less sugar and might try a Swiss meringue so the sugar is entirely dissolved in the meringue. (Mine was a smidge grainy.) I do very much love a meringue, and I’m sad that I was nearly 30 before I’d even heard of a pavlova. (But I will do my best to make up for this.)

What I’m reading: I don’t usually read before bed because it is a well-noted truth that when I read before bed, I think “just a few pages” and then it’s 1:27 a.m. and I’m saying things to myself like, “Well, you might as well finish it now.”

But sometimes I need to replace the hamster wheel in my brain with the hamster wheel in someone else’s, so I turn to re-reads of old favorites, particularly fantasy novels I’ve read so often that I’m not really reading so much as I am reminding myself of where things happen on the page. Right now, while the vast majority of my reading is student work and I’m constantly drinking from the fire-hose of ambient anxiety, I’ve returned to Scott Lynch’s Gentleman Bastards series. It’s historical fantasy, though relatively light on the fantastical elements; the real joy of it is the premise: lifelong thief and confidence man Locke Lamora gets himself into truly horrifying trouble and then has to get out of it. This means that all three of the novels are layers and layers of elaborate schemes and heists, audacious gambles, and a palpable feeling of delight in the invention of new characters and settings, which are designed to throw up sparks when Locke is scraped against them. The second book, Red Seas Under Red Skies, is my favorite. The series has its shortcomings, but it is phenomenal at raising the stakes.

What I’m writing: “Searching for Answers in the Enormous” is my latest for the Ploughshares blog, focused on Jeannie Marshall’s All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. My recurring feeling as I was reading? A bit like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek but for art history, which is essentially the highest praise I can offer. I’ll also be presenting on this illuminating book at the Pennsylvania Chautauqua in Mt. Gretna in June.

Baseball’s Opening Day is most often for me an occasion of sheer optimistic whimsy: anything is possible on the eve of a new season. Back in 2016, when I was a guest on the Effectively Wild podcast to talk about the Phillies’ chances for the upcoming season, I think I made some kind of absolutely ludicrous prediction that they might win 85 games. That would have been at least sniffing the playoff hunt that year. Instead, they went 71-91, finishing fourth in the NL East. (In my defense, I firmly owned up to these considerations as being made only in my heart.)

This year’s Phillies are rather a different bunch than the 2016 team, beginning their 2023 foray on the heels of a 2022 National League Championship instead of 2015’s excruciating 99 losses, and though Rhys Hoskins’s torn ACL on a routine stumble late last week has dampened my spirits a bit, I’m willing myself toward as much magical thinking as I can muster. It’s a little sleight-of-feeling against another heartbreaking week of gun violence and book banning and attempts to legislate hate against trans people: when I really need that glinting coin of hope and escape I find in sports, I’ll pluck it from behind my own ear. Maybe I can even teach myself to apply it to dreams beyond the diamond or the rink. On my birthday is a good day to do it, right?

Because this is going to be an important year. It doesn’t quite feel like it yet, still on the far side of preorder links and cover reveals as I am, but before the calendar rolls over the next time, before I’m in my “the meaning of life, the universe, and everything” year, I’ll have a book out1. If I am lucky, it could even be a big year.

And because writing isn’t like being a professional athlete, I can imagine myself a better writer in the future than in the past; I am certainly a better one in this season of my life than in the previous. Maybe this is why the Hoskins injury jars me so; every athlete who misses a season on such a terrible bit of bad luck—amateur or professional—knows they’re on a different kind of borrowed time. For the majority of athletes, the years in which one gets better are fewer than the years in which one gets worse. These are the limits of the human body, wonderful and fragile as it is. But one doesn’t have to have the fastest reflexes, the keenest sight, the most well-behaved cartilage in the knees to learn more about story structure, to find and consider more ways of approaching the sentence, to be open and listening for those character voices that surprise and delight. That’s a relief. Something to look forward to, something to strive for because it doesn’t have to be about hope, which I tend to reserve for things outside of my control. I have to hope that the Phillies rotation will be functional past the third starter; I have to hope all those things I can’t specifically change (like people liking my book). But I can choose to attend to my craft, can choose what I read, can choose to want to keep doing it, and that’s not nothing.

What I’m making:

A little while ago, I backed a Kickstarter for the EEW Nano 2.0, a very small, affordable e-spinner. It’s been a treat of a thing to use, especially for spinning various bits of fiber from the HipStrings Base 12 set. The fawn batt here, Beige Mastic, contains 5% flax, and though that’s a very small percentage, it changes the feeling of the whole thing. It’s my first time spinning bast fibers. The shine and crispness is very intriguing. (The blue-green is a blend of Merino and Shetland wool, plus tussah and sari silk.)

What I’m reading:
I just started Matthew Salesses The Sense of Wonder and the sharpness of the prose is so good.

What I’m writing:
Just finished up my essay on Jeannie Marshall’s All Things Move: Learning to Look in the Sistine Chapel. Look for that in the not-too-distant future at the Ploughshares blog!

Since tomorrow is my birthday: if you feel so moved, please consider making a donation to my Bike Rally fundraising efforts. In August, I’ll cycle from Toronto to Montreal (600 km!) & every dollar raised goes to supporting people living with HIV/AIDS. Or help the Annville Free Library—my local public library, on whose board I serve—write its next chapter and complete a much-needed expansion and renovation project.

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