Art from life

More photos of snails, more essays

My kid and I are still taking daily snail walks. We count the snails each day and the highest number we have found on one walk is thirty-six. Recently he started asking me to take photos of every snail we find, so my phone is full of them.

One day, he told me that a snail only counts if you take a photo of it.

The next day, he told me a snail doesn’t count if you take a photo of it.

It’s the same way I vacillate on journalling and social media and other forms of real-time life documentation. I like the idea of journalling one sentence a day, but I don’t do it.

We’re planning to make a book of all our snail photos. Like most kids, he loves to make art from life, and this is not his first foray into bookmaking, but it will be his first hardcover, printed book. Proud mama.

This week in reading

I finished Also a Poet and They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (SO! GOOD!). I’m still reading Attachments. I’m rereading for the third or fourth time Little Labors by Rivka Galchen. Everyone is talking about All Fours by Miranda July, so that’s up next. And my friend Ananda’s story collection, Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, just arrived in the mail yesterday, so that’s also up next! Can’t have too many books going.

I’ve also been reading the homework from Chelsea’s class, including the essay A Collection of Losses by Laura Gill, which has the amazing line:

The art of leaving is a muscle one must build, and if you don’t, the ability to move forward, to leave, to choose to lose, will atrophy. 

This week in writing

Still working on essays! Not gonna change the name of this newsletter to The Next Essay or anything, but following my interests and intuition and will get back to the novel when it feels right.

My collection of working essays has grown to be almost unmanageable over the last month. I’ve got 21 half-to-mostly-finished essays going, plus at least that many beginnings and fragments, amounting to ~27,000 words. The challenge now is going to be finishing a handful of them and getting them published.

I’m focused first on finishing one particular essay for Chelsea’s class. I’m following her methods for drafting and revision. Trusting the process. This piece right now is about 5,000 words and every time I go to cut something I add back twice as much, which I’m taking as a sign that I haven’t fully reached the main idea yet. So I’m still going, not worrying about how long it’s getting, trying to get at the mystery that drew me in.

At some point very soon, I will have the final round of Leave edits to do, and until then, this is a good headspace to be in.

I leave you this week with a YouTube video that Lindsay Hunter shared on Instagram the other day and that I have been watching over and over because it has some serious magic in it. Enjoy.