I’m a day late with this newsletter because last week was “midwinter recess,” i.e. the week off school that New York kids get in addition to spring break in April. (Yes, I did find myself Googling “wtf is midwinter recess” because this is not a thing where I grew up. I always assumed it was because wealthy New York families of yore wanted a week of skiing before the snow melted, but this is not the case! Apparently it started as an energy-saving measure during the 1970s oil crisis and was codified in the 1990s as part of a cost-cutting deal, allowing the city to defer teacher wages for a week to avoid midyear layoffs. The more you know.)
Anyway, we were doing the childcare/work juggle last week and then took off early on Friday to visit friends in Vermont and upstate New York.
We went snowshoeing! We were cold on a mountain! It was beautiful and fun!
And now I am happily back to my morning routine of Ungodly Hour Writing Club —> school dropoff —> Morning Writing Club —> work.
Last week in writing
These are my steps when revising a manuscript:
Print the whole thing and read it on paper, marking it up along the way but not stopping to fix anything.
Go back to the digital draft with the marked-up paper copy in hand and work through the edits, page by page.
Keep a running list of edits that are too big-and-sticky to figure out without seriously slowing down momentum.
Using the list as a checklist, go back in again once all the easier edits are taken care of.
I’m currently about halfway through step 2. My checklist of big-and-sticky things is 13 items long, but, to be fair, only a couple of them are truly big-and-sticky. Most of them are on the list because they require consulting another person’s memory, which I can’t do at 5:30 in the morning. All of this to say: the work progresses.
Last week in reading
On Friday, I finished The New Animals by Pip Adam. I picked up this novel from the Dorothy table at AWP because Danielle Dutton, Dorothy co-founder and editor, told me that it takes a turn you’d never expect and then added, “Joy Williams called her ‘dangerous.’” Sold.
The novel takes place in New Zealand over one night during which a group of essentially coworkers (though it’s not a stable employment situation by any means) is trying to prepare for a fashion shoot. There’s a lot of interpersonal work drama, which I love in a novel, and the perspective jumps around from character to character so you get all their opinions and some of their backstories.
Because I knew it took a turn, I was trying to guess what it was the whole time I read, and Danielle was right — I would never have gotten it. I won’t say any more than that, but if you like dark experimental novels, this is one.
Over the weekend, I read Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality, poems about the loss of her baby. I went to a panel at AWP where Niina read one of her poems — “Urine Season,” which you can read in Granta — and was struck by the way she handled the subject of grief with frankness and even humor. I bought the book immediately and have since been reading other things she’s said and written about it, like this conversation between her and Sasha Fletcher (whose novel Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World I also loved).
Wading around in the aftermath of these two books for a day or two before I pick up anything else, but I think it will be more poems.