In between

Hello from the surface.

I like having several different projects going, but transitioning from one to another sometimes creates these pockets of time in between. I find it hard to emerge from the depths of one project and dive into another the very next morning, and that’s fine! Just floating between all of them for a little while, breathing air. How far will she try to take this metaphor?! I don’t even really know how to swim.

Writing, lately

I sent my latest revision of Leave to my publisher right around the spring equinox. The fact that I know I’ll soon have edits to work through is perhaps a good reason to stay in the space of this project. I have begun six essays about pregnancy, postpartum, and the writing of Leave, and I have ideas for five more. I could just hang out here for a bit, but first I felt the need to dip into the other projects, to be reminded of them and give each of them a chance to call me back.

I did a little work on my children’s book. I’m writing it in iambic pentameter because I have found in my personal experience that books that make good use of meter are helpful for calming the kid at bedtime, and any book that calms the kid at bedtime is a favorite around here. This project is a pleasant puzzle that I turn to when my brain needs scratching.

Then I did some thinking about next steps for the pond novel. No conclusions yet, but more on that soon, maybe.

I opened the glass house novel, which I hadn’t touched since briefly revisiting it last summer. I had an idea for a scene, and I began writing it, until halfway through I remembered that I had already written it… four years ago. I let out an silent scream, closed the document, and resolved to reread what I have before I try to add anything else.

Then I remembered that I have 14 short story beginnings from last year’s 1000 Words of Summer, and I still haven’t even read any of them!

So: knowing that Leave edits are coming soonish, do I want to work on essays, short stories, children’s book, pond novel, or glass house novel? I am leaning toward trying to finish some of the shorter pieces so that I have some new things to submit this year. And until I decide for sure, I’ve been reading.

Reading, lately

Sometimes finishing an excellent book is like finishing a project and you sort of cast about listlessly for a while afterward, but that hasn’t been the case for me lately. I have been moving from excellent book straight into excellent book.

I finished Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test. Every sentence felt perfectly placed. I want to read this book forever. I want to pick it apart and see how she did it. (Maybe I will?)

Then I read Sabrina Orah Mark’s Wild Milk, stories that play around the edges of what one might expect stories to do.

Then I finished Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. It’s part memoir, part social and cultural criticism dealing with how we think about art and artists. It starts with Bernstein Sycamore’s relationship with her grandmother, an abstract artist who encouraged her grandchild’s creativity until it became too “vulgar,” and it goes so many other places from there. I loved how Bernstein Sycamore incorporated — and imagined into — the biographies of other abstract artists and the poets they hung around with. I loved how she contextualized her grandmother’s life with Baltimore history, art history, feminist history, American history. This book is its own kind of loving tribute to a complicated person and also a reclaiming of the things that person took away.

From Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Now I’m reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. It’s the book that grew out of Dederer’s essay What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?, but it doesn’t just focus on the men! It’s about, so far, our relationship with art in “the accelerated endgame of the age of mechanical reproduction” when, thanks to the internet, we know more than we’ve ever known before about the artists we love and discover that they are, disappointingly, human. (I’m only a few chapters in, but I hear from friends who have read it that it covers a lot of other ground, too.)

This is the perfect book to read alongside Touching the Art, where Bernstein Sycamore explores some of the same questions from the point of view not of a fan but of someone who knows the artist personally. And I’m a big fan of Dederer’s prose and the way she allows her points to be nuanced; she doesn’t over-explain her argument, just trusts that you’re on her level and can follow along.

The books are good! My plan is to keep reading and reading and reading until one of my projects pulls me back in. It’s always worked in the past…

Recs

• I can’t stop listening to the new Waxahatchee album, Tigers Blood. I keep choosing new favorite songs on it, and right now my top pick is 3 Sisters.

• I’m working my way through a backlog of podcast episodes and ones I’ve found especially helpful and/or enjoyable were this episode of Common Shapes, this episode of Lives of Writers, and this episode of Search Engine.

• I recently recommended Sarah McColl’s Substack LOST ART, and now I’m linking to her latest essay. It begins with a quote from Monsters with which she takes issue — “art-making and parenthood act very efficiently as disincentives to one another, and people who say otherwise are deluded, or childless, or men.” She goes on to write about Vanessa Bell’s life of domesticity and art-making, and while I don’t think it’s a great example to refute Dededer’s point (Vanessa Bell, after all, had a level of wealth that meant she didn’t have to worry so much about disincentives), Sarah’s writing about her own domestic life as spring arrives is lush, the juxtaposed photos of Vanessa’s work and home are fascinating, and I am here for any hopeful attempt to reconcile artistry and this stage of motherhood. (As now, at 5:45am, my child from his bedroom calls, “Mama.”)

Love to you all.