Into new seasons
In which I should pay more attention to the deer
On September 23, join me and a bunch of your new writer friends at the Conversations & Connections Conference, hosted by Barrelhouse Magazine at Temple University. I’ll be teaching a hands-on workshop on metaphor, and there are many more excellent sessions to enjoy.
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!
Three week bicycle race, like the Tour de France, but in Spain. There are three Grand Tours: La Vuelta (Aug-Sept), Le Tour (July), and the Giro d’Italia (May).