Traveling

Revising and reading and writing on the road + three books I've loved this month

I’m in a season of travel, writing you now from a plane back to New York after a wedding weekend in New Orleans. The last time I was in New Orleans was 2011, also for a wedding, my little sister’s. Around that time, she and her new husband adopted a dog they found in a box on the side of the road and named him Charlie, after St. Charles Avenue, and last month, Charlie died. Also around that time, I ran a marathon in New Orleans. I no longer run marathons or even half marathons, though never say never. A lot can happen in thirteen years.

Last week, the kid had a five-day weekend, so I took him to Illinois. I will be back to Illinois in early April, and then we leave for our first international trip with the kid, to Italy. A season of travel.

During times like this, I try to hold the writing routine loosely. I make a lot of notes in my Bear app. I read. I collect things to think about later. I write short if I can. I don’t worry about making it to Morning Writing Club or setting aside a specific time. If I can wake early wherever I am, I do.

The arrival of spring almost always ungrounds the routine, but the tradeoff — the sun, the long walks, the reemergence — is worth it.

This week in writing

Leave is due to my publisher “spring 2024” and although I’m sure it’s fine if I send it any time during the season, I set a personal deadline for myself of March 19, the spring equinox. I have almost made it. I finished the latest pass on Friday and now I just want to read it through one more time before I hit send.

I didn’t change a whole lot. The book is made up of around 40 very short (some of them just a paragraph or two) chapters, and there were about 40 more that I cut in 2020 and 2021. I brought a couple of those back, cut a couple of others, and added a few new ones.

I’m excited to send the manuscript to Michael at Autofocus. It is a gift to be thoughtfully edited. I look forward to bringing someone else into this space where I have spent so much time that it actually does feel like a space, more like a house with 40 rooms than a book with 40 chapters. 40 cozy rooms, some the size of closets. By the time I write you next week, I will have sent it. And then what? I haven’t decided.

This week in reading

The books have been good this month, my friends. I finished Krys Malcolm Belc’s The Natural Mother of the Child on audio, only to discover that the physical book contains photos and other ephemera and so now I might just have to read it again! I also finished Lexi Kent-Monning’s The Burden of Joy which has themes of mothering/caretaking and features multiple hauntings by live people and dead animals. It’s a novel about divorce and codependency and still figuring things out in your mid-to-late thirties. I loved both of these books.

Now I’m reading The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan and it is an instant favorite. It reminds me of Sigrid Nunez at her most distilled, or Moyra Davey, and now I see that Moyra Davey blurbed it, and so did Amy Hempel and Kate Zambreno, so it’s not NEWS that this book is excellent, but in case you, like me, are sometimes suspicious of book hype, I am here to tell you that if you like any of the writers I just mentioned, drop everything and buy/rent this book now.

And this where I leave you, because there is an hour left on this flight and all I want to do is keep reading this book and eat the tahini blondie I put in my purse during this morning’s wedding brunch.

p.s. A special hello to all the new folks who found me this week via Pub Cheerleaders. I’m so glad you’re here. 🫶