Rachel Lyon's Blog, page 3

A Quick Announcement

Taking a moment away from my regularly scheduled programming to let you all know that One Story, the absolutely terrific literary journal and writing community, has just extended the deadline for applications to its summer conference, three months from now, during the last week of July.

It’s a wonderfully warm and inviting conference, perfect for writers who are at that exciting stage when they’re starting to take their work more seriously, thinking about publishing, or, perhaps, just starting to publish, here and there. It’s also entirely online, which makes it available to everyone, anywhere in the world!

I’m honored to be teaching for them, and hope you’ll consider joining the fun. Apply here.

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Prompt 111: A Messy Business

My son will be three years old three months from now. He is still young enough that he is in diapers, and regularly drops huge portions of each meal on the floor, but he’s old enough that he’s taken to eagerly recycling many of the phrases we use with him. Thus he finds multiple occasions, every day, to use one of our favorite phrases: “a messy business.”

Soup is a messy business. Diaper changes are a messy business. Ink pads can be a messy business, if you use your hands instead of your dinosaur stamps.

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I love how my son applies this phrase to our various activities: accurately, and with the relish of someone who has only been speaking in complete sentences for a matter of months. I love his conscientious enunciation.

As you might gather, I also just love the phrase itself. It is, unfortunately, highly applicable to many situations. The last month or so, for instance, has brought to our home a whirlwind of calamities. Medical emergencies, childcare emergencies, last-minute cancellations and changes of plan. A major snowstorm, which felled a power line and cut our electricity for three days, in whose thaw our world — more specifically our driveway — has become one vast, rich, clumpy puddle of mud. Meanwhile, spring has sprung. Branches that were bare days ago have just burst with vivid new buds. A week ago we were in winter coats; now the children and I are all half dressed. Our feet are abominably filthy (except for the baby, whose feet are still like a couple of untainted Madeleines, because she can’t walk yet).

The body is a messy business. Parenting is a messy business. A messy business, these first mucky days of spring.

A couple of weeks ago, I emailed to my editor a Word doc of my forthcoming novel called “Fruit-of-the-Dead_final”.

How fatal that final “_final” feels! How nauseating to “accept all changes in document,” to “resolve” all comments, to watch the colorful tracked changes melt away, leaving only these ninety-thousand or so imperfect words, written and rewritten and deleted and rewritten again, in fits and starts, over a period of years.

As glad as I am to usher this document into its next stage of life, the stage during which it will be shared with its very first, official readers, one stage closer to being a bound and ISBN-having book, I am nervous, too. As I’ve said before, this novel is different from my first. Its narrative is looser. Formally it takes more risks. I put more of myself into it, and so I feel I have more to lose.

Luckily for me and my ambivalence, however, the publishing machine chugs on. This is also the stage when my book gets a cover. I cannot share that cover yet, but I have seen its final design, and let me tell you, it is clever, gorgeous, and dark. Giving the novel a cover is like putting on a dress and coat of lipstick when you’re feeling a little all over the place. It creates the illusion of unity, of coherence, of a singular self. It says, Within, I may contain multitudes, many of whom are incoherent, more animal than human, and in frequent disagreement — but thanks to my outfit and maquillage, when we attempt conversation, you may be fooled into thinking I am a reasonable, mature adult.

Unlike the self, which until death continues to grow and change, a book must eventually stop evolving — and, perversely, that’s when it comes alive. Eventually, if it is going to be published, it encounters a point of no return, wherein everyone involved looks up from her keyboard and says, All right, good enough! Time to move on. Which, for its writer, can feel maddening. You mean there isn’t time to keep swapping periods for semicolons? I can’t continue to noodle on the final paragraphs? Is this business fated to remain messy forever?

In the case of this book, at least, I feel like the answer is yes. It feels a little messy to me. I haven’t gone through it with a fine-toothed comb and removed every snarl and nit, the way I did with my first. I’m allowing it to remain a little raw, a little freewheeling. But, this book, it happens to be about a messy girl caught up in a messy situation, and the deep dark mess her mother becomes. So, you know, maybe, in this case, the mess is the message.

Halfway through my drafting of this note, my whole family came down with Covid. We’d managed to avoid it for three stressful years.

I’ll say this: it could be much worse. We are all vaccinated. My partner and I are multiply boosted. Even the baby has gotten two of her three shots. Doesn’t change the fact that we all feel like garbage, though — hot garbage, as the saying goes, given this week’s bizarre heat wave. What’s more, due to school cancellations and spring “vacation,” by the time my son goes back to preschool (fingers crossed) I’ll have done three straight weeks of unassisted childcare on top of teaching two classes (through midterms! via Zoom!) and fighting an often losing battle to so much as stay upright.

It’s tough. And I do complain . . . but also I am grateful. Grateful it took us long enough to catch the virus that we are all protected by science. Grateful for the freakishly beautiful weather, for the fun of exploring these great outdoors with my intrepid little guy; of gathering snowballs from those melting patches that are still hanging on, even in 80 degree weather, and throwing them at the budding lilac trees. Grateful for the friends who asked if we needed anything, then delivered two overflowing boxes of grocery store treasure, roast chicken and pineapple slices and fresh bread and Oreos and five, count them, five jewel-like containers of bubble juice. Somehow, soap bubble rainbows look even more brilliant in the quiet of magic hour, when the setting sun slants through the woods.

And it occurs to me that the messiness of life may ebb and flow, but life is never not messy, there’s always going to be some new shit show. The question is not, then, how to keep it all cleaned up and pristine. The question is not how to sweep the mess under the rug, how to hide it. The question is, just, can you remember to do something beautiful? Or, at least — if you’re very tired, say, or very sick, or just burned out — at the very least, witness some beauty?

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Prompt 110: A Temporary Matter

Recently I was on the phone with a dear friend, complaining about this conundrum which, if you have been reading this, you know I cannot stop thinking (or writing) about: the difficulty of attempting to remain in the workforce as a primary caretaker of little children.

I love teaching, I told this dear friend, but I really love my kids. I love being a mom, and I actually feel like I’m, relatively, you know, kind of good at it, and this phase that my children are in — between 0 and 3 years old — is, actually, objectively wonderful. And I miss them when I leave, and my breastmilk supply gets out of whack, and it’s true what they say, it costs money to make money. As we head into the third week of the spring semester, I am paying so much to be able to work (in time, if not in childcare dollars, and in the toll it takes emotionally and physically) that the work itself, though fun, inspiring, challenging, and sometimes even transcendent, is, possibly, not even worth it? On the other hand, I don’t want to stop working. Parenting can be magical and fulfilling but it is also, inarguably, repetitive, even stultifying, and the nourishment it provides, though deep and real, hardly qualifies as intellectual. (How many times have I read Cars and Trucks and Things That Go in the past week? A dozen? A hundred?) Teaching adults or near-adults allows me to continue to grow in a very specific way I feel I must continue to grow, to be what I want to be, in the world: a writer, a thinker, an adult in conversation with other adults.

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In fact, I’m afraid of what might happen if I stop working (I continued to rant, to this very patient friend of mine). My sense of self, my confidence and my identity, has been and (for better / worse) continues to be very wrapped up in this, like, go-get-’em, capitalist-feminist ideology that has oriented me in bristly opposition to the idea of “dropping out of the workforce.” I can’t stand the idea of being merely a mother (even as I recognize how diminishing of women’s work, indeed how sexist, that is!). If I drop out of the workforce, my deeply absorbed, highly linear, achievement-oriented ideology tells me, I will fall behind. My intellect will wither, my contacts will forget me, my writing — if I can manage to do any writing at all — will become dull and provincial, and I — whatever of me is left, by then — will devolve into no more than a hopelessly uncool, athleisure-clad, TV-addicted, Diet Coke-swigging, 40-year-old momstagrammer, who, if she reads fiction at all, consumes only the odd bestseller; who has, in other words, nothing more interesting to talk about than her kids.

And, yes, there is a whiff of “me,” as I am in the world, in that portrait. And, yes, I am going to be forty next month. And okay, maybe that has something to do with this.

Anyway. Eventually, I stopped spinning out and paused to take a breath, and this dear, patient friend was able to get a word in edgewise. And here’s one thing she could have said: “Rachel, for the record, we all contain multitudes. That supposedly typical, relatively well-adjusted, Basic American Mom? You know nobody is that simple. But also? She sounds kind of great. Like someone you’d enjoy being friends with.”

And here’s another thing she could have said: “Are you no longer a novelist? Because I hate to point out the obvious, but writing books is work, too.”

But here’s what she did say: “It’s great that you love being a mom. Not everyone does. I think it’s okay to honor that.”

And, also, “This phase is temporary. Try to be present for it.”

I mentioned last month that I was prepping for a literature class on American memoir. That class is in progress now, we have met twice, and one thing that has struck me about it is how funny it can be to teach memoir — particularly in the experiential way that I teach, with lots of creative assignments, etc. — to people who are only twenty years old, and often younger than that. The students I am teaching are, many of them, self-possessed young people with a lot to say on the topic of selfhood and memory. Ideas about performance and persona, identity and the “authentic” self, seem very much in the zeitgeist for this generation, so many of whom have rejected, wholesale, qualities that people my age once thought of as inextricably inherent to who we were: qualities like, for instance, gender. It’s been wonderful — poignant, even — to read some of these students’ short exercises. They are so much closer to childhood than most of the authors we are reading. Their evocations of it are so immediate. Meanwhile that their current identities are in active flux is a situation of which they are well and sometimes painfully aware. One student, who is maybe eighteen, remarked on Wednesday, “I think I become a different person every three years or so.”

Meanwhile, in my creative writing class this week, one of the texts I will teach is Jhumpa Lahiri’s heartbreaking short story “A Temporary Matter.” The story concerns a young couple whose first and only child was born dead. When it begins, they have been living together for three years in distant, often silent grief. Now, due to some repair of their local electrical grid, they have been notified that, each night for a week, between 8-9PM, their power will be shut off. In the dark, they find each other in a way they have been unable to, until now. They begin a game of telling one another something they have never confessed before. In this way, eventually, they are able to break through the wall their grief has built between them.

In one simple passage, describing the third or fourth day they have spent the evening this way, Lahiri writes,

When she came downstairs they ate together. She didn’t thank him or compliment him. They simply ate in a darkened room, in the glow of a beeswax candle. They had survived a difficult time.

That sentence, “They had survived a difficult time,” is one of just a few straightforward expository sentences in a piece that is largely written in scene, with very little editorializing. It arrives in the story as it arrives in the couple’s perception: clearly, spontaneously, after a few days of relieved reconnection; a final, conscious acknowledgment of their shared trauma, just six words, at once validating and wholly inadequate. For almost as soon as the couple have acknowledged their shared experience, even tacitly, it becomes clear that their experiences have in fact been vastly different — and the chasm between them will become, in the end, unbridgeable.

This short story specifically, and the short story more generally, as a form, is particularly good for this, I think. For reminding us that life is made up of phases. All of them temporary. All of them potentially meaningful.

A few weeks ago, I heard from an old high school teacher of mine. She taught a playwriting seminar, in which, as a senior, I wrote what was then probably the best work I’d done in the medium of language, a one-act play about a woman with two kids in the midst of a divorce, and in the early stages of a new but temporary love affair. How I landed on that premise at the age of seventeen, I couldn’t tell you. But my former teacher wrote to say she’d found it in her papers, and would I like her to send me a copy. I wrote back with thanks and enthusiasm, and pretty soon the package arrived: a Xeroxed and typo-riddled Word Perfect document, written in the year 2000 by a version of me that I am but barely, anymore.

What I do remember: laughing in her class. Typing it out as a series of homework assignments on my teal iMac G3. The thrill, on the night my play was performed, of feeling how it touched people: the hush in the audience after the last actor quietly left the stage, the applause. A girl I barely knew gave me a hug. To say the event was formative would not be an understatement. It was one of those first, early, affirmative experiences that helped cement my self-perception as a writer.

You will not be particularly surprised if I tell you that, reading it now, more than twenty years later, I was not exactly impressed. It is by a 17-year-old, after all. The grown-up characters are, predictably, not very. The scenes escalate from zero to impassioned rather quickly, and remain there, at an eleven, for far too long. It borrows liberally and embarrassingly from my own childhood life. And boy, is it dated! The year 2000 was a lifetime ago. Literally. The Bennington students I’m teaching now were not even born yet when I — teenaged me — wrote this thing.

So I wasn’t moved by the play itself, but I have to say, it was somehow moving to me to revisit it. Not because it was good (it wasn’t, very), but because it gave me the rare opportunity to reconnect myself-as-I-am with a past version of me. As an adult, and especially in the past few years, what with Covid and having kids and moving to another state, I have tended to experience my life as a series of Lahirian phase states, temporary, all. Thus the person I was before having kids feels totally unrelated to the person I am as a parent; the person I was before the pandemic feels like a stranger to the person I have become since; etc. Getting to read this work I wrote when I was a kid, during a period of my life when I also happen to be teaching people who are not much older than I was then, I had an unusual sense of my self as one, linear, if meandering, being, having grown over time from Rachel-then into Rachel-now, not at a constant rate of change, but remaining, somehow, constant, despite what has felt like a great deal of very dramatic change.

Anyway.

Here’s what I’m trying to do, now, with my own, talky-talky, perseverating mind. I’m trying to detangle the capitalist from the feminist. I’m telling myself that my own, personal feminism needn’t mean having it all or staying in the workforce continuously. It can mean choosing to live, for a phase, as, primarily, a visiting faculty member at a college; for a phase as, primarily, a caretaker; for a phase as, primarily, a novelist — and these phases can be temporary, they can pass, and they can cycle. It can mean — must mean? — in other words, retaining the ability to choose how to live.

Meanwhile, I can embrace cozy stereotypes, if I want to, if they have some value to me, for a period of time — and then break them, and remake myself, indefinitely. Identity itself can be “a temporary matter,” even as, meanwhile, contrariwise, the self is inescapable.

How sweet, really, that we are who we are, despite it all, until it’s over.

Your prompt, this time around, is to consider the temporariness of whatever phase you are in, and its relationship to the phase(s) that have come before. Perhaps this means connecting your current creative project, thematically or otherwise, to your larger body of work. Perhaps it simply means — and this, I think, is how I’m understanding it today — staying present with the stage you’re in, and appreciating it in the context of all the selves you’ve been.

Is that a prompt? I don’t know. I have been using the idea of “prompts” pretty loosely, these days. Is it too close to last month’s prompt? Forgive me. I am working something out, here — albeit one-handedly, while nursing. I hope it helps you work something out, too.

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Prompt 109: Memoir Madness

I have been hard at work, these last few weeks, figuring out the syllabi for the two courses I’ll teach at Bennington College this spring. One of these is a 4000-level creative writing course. That one, I feel, I hope, I have to trust, will be a piece of cake. I’ve been teaching creative writing since I, myself, was a graduate student in creative writing, more than a decade ago. I feel like, when it comes to creative instruction, I basically know the landscape, and have experience guiding students through it.

The other class, though, is more on the outer edges of my comfort zone. It’s a 2000-level, but it’s a literature class, not a creative writing seminar, and I’m realizing now, rather too late, probably, that it’s kind of an ambitious project. I’m calling it “A Collective Portrait of America: Literary Memoir Since the Civil War,” setting the stage with St. Augustine and Rousseau, moving into Frederick Douglass and Henry Adams, proceeding into the twentieth century with Twain, Stein, Hemingway, and the Fitzgeralds to Angelou, Dillard, Baldwin, Didion, and Gornick, stopping briefly in Vietnam with Wolff and O’Brien, getting into the 90s with Wojnarowicz and Patti Smith, and concluding with the likes of Laymon, Chee, Febos, Maggie Nelson, and Tommy Pico. I mean . . . whew. We’ll see how it goes.

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Meanwhile, the challenges of getting literally anything done while parenting two young children, even when one spends four days a week at a truly heavenly little pre-pre-school, remain real and taxing and troubling. I have spent literally months querying daycares and sitters in our area. Every day care has a waitlist; a few have closed due to untenable new state regulations and guidelines. Recent au pair laws in Massachusetts make au pairs an option for only the state’s wealthiest citizens. Local nannies and sitters are few and far between. I have only just, finally, with the help of, count them, three generous friends and neighbors, cobbled together a patchwork of childcare to cover my absence during the two days a week I’ll soon be in Vermont, teaching. That’s three people for approximately fourteen hours, including the commute; the work I will do outside of the classroom — reading, grading, meeting with students over Zoom, designing assignments, writing letters of feedback, etc. — will have to happen during naps, after kid bedtime, and on weekends, when my partner can “take the babies,” as we put it in this house. 

(Though, I have to say, even when he does take over, the children — like, famously, life — will find a way. Let me sketch you a quick illustration. A winter Sunday. I am attempting to type one-handed while nursing. Attempting to ignore the baby’s intermittent, blood-curdling scream sessions after I give her back to her dad. Attempting to explain, kindly and lovingly, to the toddler who breaks into my office every fifteen minutes — “Hi, Mommy!” — that I’m trying to concentrate, before he is corralled away again by Dad. Attempting to ignore his tantrums.)

Anyway. I am not saying anything anyone, including me, hasn’t said a million times before. I’m just saying it’s bananas. I have huffed and puffed and fumed and raged about the childcare crisis in this country, and structural misogyny. I am also aware that I am lucky: I have a spouse who can help, and adequate resources, including neighbors and friends who are willing to help out. I have the proverbial village it takes. But even I, privileged as I am — even I, for whom “going back to work” is a choice, and will actually mean clocking in less than two days per week — have found the scarcity of childcare, in this wealthiest of countries, enraging. I spent $50 for the time it took to draft this Substack post. It will cost me approximately $250 per week to go back to work at a job in an industry that famously underpays, and that is not counting the $150/week we already spend on childcare for the other kid.

Meanwhile, as I prep for my class, deep in memoir madness, I have been marveling at how the America in the memoirs I am assigning has changed, during the last 150-200 years. One of the texts I’ve become interested in — though it is not generally considered “literary,” given all that loaded word implies — is the autobiography of workers rights activist Mary Harris “Mother” Jones. From a contemporary perspective, even for someone with a (very) general understanding of American history and the labor movement, Mother Jones’ stories about working conditions in the Industrial Era United States — particularly for children, who were routinely paid between $3 and $6/week — are shocking. What shocks, and continues to shock, even on my second and third and eleventh read (and particularly after revisiting the Narrative of Frederick Douglass), is how human bodies have been used, abused, and disenfranchised, by our country and other empires, in the name of industry. (Have you watched Andor?) What shocks is how, in this capitalist system, those of us who possess the least capital have been routinely reduced to nothing more than bodies, and disposable bodies at that.

Take Jones’ chapter “The March of the Mill Children,” which describes, essentially, a publicity stunt she undertook in the summer of 1903, when she paraded a bunch of little children, “some with their hands off, some with the thumb missing, some with their fingers off at the knuckle . . . stooped little things, round shouldered and skinny . . . [many] not over ten years of age” from Pennsylvania to New York, with stops in between, to show people the toll that factory labor had taken on these kids:

I put the little boys with their fingers off and hands crushed and maimed on a platform. I held up their mutilated hands and showed them to the crowd and made the statement that Philadelphia's mansions were built on the broken bones, the quivering hearts and drooping heads of these children. That their little lives went out to make wealth for others. That neither state or city officials paid any attention to these wrongs. That they did not care that these children were to be the future citizens of the nation.

The officials of the city hall were standing in the open windows. I held the little ones of the mills high up above the heads of the crowd and pointed to their puny arms and legs and hollow chests. They were light to lift. . . .

The children carried knapsacks on their backs in which was a knife and fork, a tin cup and plate. We took along a wash boiler in which to cook the food on the road. One little fellow had a drum and another had a fife. That was our band. We carried banners that said, “We want more schools and less hospitals.” “We want time to play.” “Prosperity is here. Where is ours?”

. . . The children were very happy, having plenty to eat, taking baths in the brooks and rivers every day. I thought when the strike is over and they go back to the mills, they will never have another holiday like this. . . .

[At] Twentieth Street [in New York City]. I told an immense crowd of the horrors of child labor. . . . The next day we went to Coney Island at the invitation of Mr. Bostick who owned the wild animal show. The children had a wonderful day such as they never had in all their lives. After the exhibition of the trained animals, Mr. Bostick let me speak to the audience. There was a back drop to the tiny stage of the Roman Coliseum with the audience painted in and two Roman emperors down in front with their thumbs down. Right in front of the emperors were the empty iron cages of the animals. I put my little children in the cages and they clung to the iron bars while I talked[:] . . .

“In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone? . . . I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator. . .” The people sat stone still and out in the rear a lion roared. . . .

The march of the maimed and malnourished children. Their delight at stopping to splash in a cold stream. The image of them holding mournfully, theatrically, to the bars of the animal cages at Coney Island, while their ringleader gives her impassioned speech to the crowd. The soundtrack of miserable animals. It is all so evocative. So cinematic. Jones concludes that “the president refused to see us . . . but our march had done its work”: soon afterward, Pennsylvania passed a child labor law that kept children “from entering the factory until they were fourteen years of age.”

Fourteen. Progress!

Slavery had been abolished only 38 years before.

I am not a historian. I’m barely a college professor. Really I am just a novelist, with one book out and another in the works. To the extent that I am a reader and analyzer of texts, I tend to approach such work from a creative perspective. That said, I’ve found, in the process of designing this syllabus, that against the historical backdrop of stories like Jones’s — or, even more so, Douglass’s — contemporary personal narratives, even those that recount traumas of the body, such as, say, rape narratives, or narratives of physical abuse and addiction — feel . . . very different. Not less powerful, exactly. In fact, the rhetorical power, literary quality, and formal inventiveness of memoirs and personal essays has generally soared, right?, in the decades since, say, Maya Angelou, and the idea that “the personal is political”; and then Mary Karr, and the proliferation of memoir in the literary marketplace; and then, well, reality TV, and social media, and the rise of the so-called “MFA industrial complex,” and the complete saturation of personal stories, perspectives, opinions, and beliefs in publications, news, and entertainment, online and otherwise, today.

As sophisticated as contemporary personal narratives have become — by necessity, I’d argue, in such a crowded marketplace, where we are bombarded, what, weekly?, with the publication of memoirs that nobody asked for, with biopics about randos we barely know, but love to hate — they have also become increasingly apolitical. Or, more accurately, their political concerns are no longer their raisons d’être. In academic contexts we learn to read them through various “lenses,” among which the political are only a few (e.g. feminist lenses, social justice lenses). In a broader, cultural context, we consume so many personal narratives, daily, many times a day, that we have become experts at analyzing the performative. We are all, now, connoisseurs of the authentic.

Sometimes, during college admissions season, I volunteer to do alumni interviews with young people who are applying to my alma mater. In that context I spoke last week to an impressive young high schooler, a native of China who has lived in the US intermittently, but, all told, for most of her life. She is interested in social justice; she wants to be a writer. In the course of our conversation, she described how strange it was to have watched Black Lives Matter protests on television (she must have been fourteen or fifteen), and to have read in the news about anti-Asian hate crimes here, while she was in China during Covid lockdown, planning to return to the States. Gently, she said she’d become worried, then, that when she returned to the US it would not be a safe place for her mother and sister. I asked her, more out of curiosity than for the purposes of our interview, how politically engaged her peers are, generally speaking. She described a tendency to focus more on “raising awareness,” which is to say posting on social media, than on taking concrete action toward substantive change.

This performative engagement she described felt, to me, like a liability not only for activism, but for storytelling more generally (and for memoir, by extension). For truth itself — whose subjectivity has become such a topic of conversation, these last few years.

At any rate, even as I recount, above, my own small story, which is of such minor significance, generally speaking (but major significance to me!), I have been reflecting on its (perhaps tangential, perhaps substantive) relevance to this larger American narrative I’m hoping to explore with my students this spring: a narrative about work and selfhood, about structural failures and exploitation, about what it means to pursue happiness as an individual in this wealthy, democratic, capitalist empire — and, of course and always, whose stories get to be told and heard, and published and considered “literary,” and why. After all, we are all in this together. “The Rebellion is everywhere, and even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.” Wink, wink.

So I guess your prompt today, if that’s what you came here for, is to consider your own story in the context of the larger narrative(s) of your environment. Maybe that means the country you live in, maybe it means your family and ancestors, or your city, or our planet. Whatever it is, however big or small your context, don’t let it dwarf your personal story — or, on the other hand, infuse it with undue self-importance. Let it inform and be informed by. Let it, simply, connect to the larger whole.

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Prompt 108: Book Babies

Well, friends, it has been over a year (!), since I last wrote. I’d like to say the long break was intentional, but in fact I’ve been intending to write again for months. I have been busy, I guess. I had a second baby and wrote a second book. But it is 2023 now, and early January, a time for resolutions; I have graduated from TinyLetter to Substack; and I deleted my Twitter account, but still feel the need to communicate, online, with friends and strangers; so it's time, I think, to start writing these letters again. 

My first book has been in the world five years now, which is long enough that, at this point, it feels very far away, like a text written by a different person — a less experienced and younger writer — which, of course, it is. In topic and theme it reflects what was on my mind in my early thirties, because of course it does: questions, mainly, of ambition and loyalty, honesty and art, the beginnings of adulthood, and love. My second book is still in the nascent stages of publication, but because I started working on it shortly before the first one came out, it reflects the concerns of the second half of my thirties: motherhood and daughterhood, family and independence, addiction and sex, and the ways a woman might begin to make — or, later, reexamine — her place in the world.

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Of the many changes I and my life have undergone between book one and book two, the most significant is parenthood.

Having a second child — by which I mean gestating, then giving birth to her, then beginning to guide her, through infancy, into consciousness — while also raising a toddler, has been, let’s say, consuming. Literally: the babies have been consuming me, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Here I am, though. More or less. Here part of me is, anyway. What was once I . . . is no longer. What is left is something else: part human mammal, part existential octopus, holding on, if barely, with one weak arm, to all my old identities — among them writer, citizen, friend — while my seven other tentacles all grasp at and wrangle two small people, both of them tumbling, racing, wiggling, frequently screaming, catapulting themselves and me into the unknowable future.

The absurd unbalancing act that is holding all my life and work at once has brought to mind a certain phrase that writers of my general generation use sometimes. That phrase is “book baby.” As in, “My book baby comes out in spring/summer 2024!”

I mean. No judgment, really. I have found it as hard as the next guy — hilariously difficult, really — to find the right balance between humble and brag when tasked with talking or writing about my own work. But. I also find this specific metaphor . . . grotesque.

So I was going to write — or, more accurately, rant — here about the phrase “book baby” and how, by implicitly comparing babies and books, we do disservice to parents and writers, at once undermining the infinitely difficult work of caretaking (a favorite activity of our capitalist-misogynist society!), and infantilizing the complex work of writing (book baby? Please. Book hydra, maybe. Book Sphynx!).

I was going to say that, in my experience, anyway, gestating, giving birth to, and then caring for babies is way, way harder than writing books. I was going to tell you, also, listen, if you’re a parent — hell, if you have parents — or don’t! — you’re already doing the work of living, which, if you're awake for it, is way, way harder than writing. Because, I was going to say, what is fiction, after all, but a sideways and two-dimensional approximation of life? What is fiction but a version of life that is shapely and often satisfying in ways real life rarely is?

But then, after much typeage and deletage, I ended up feeling like, who cares? And, also, who am I to say what's hard? All of us, I’m sure, find some things difficult that seem to come easily to other people. For me, lately, it's been overwhelmingly hard to make dinner. Baffling, even. More frequently than I'd like to admit, the very concept of dinner-as-such leaves me at sea, disoriented, in a fog of discouragement, asking unanswerable questions: What is . . . dinner? How does one . . . dinner? 

The truth is it’s all hard, and deeply dull and draining, and exquisitely joyful, too, if you let it be.

The truth is, the most salient difference between babies and books — and a reason, I think, that the dumb phrase “book baby” so rankles me — is that, once a child is out of its parent’s body and in the world, it continues to live, on its own terms and in its own language. It grows away from its parent, becoming itself, beginning and sustaining a multidirectional dialogue with its world, a dialogue in which it has agency, and in which it can and does change its position constantly. A child may become antagonistic or acquiescent, sympathetic or psychopathic, curious or apathetic, sensitive or numb to the world around it — and more, and all of the above, and multiple times a day. A book may incite dialogue, but — even it is very lucky, and attracts a lot of attention from scholars and critics who keep its text alive by engaging with its ideas and advocating on its behalf — it cannot participate in the discussion it kicks off. It is only ever a reflection of its writer’s past, her memories and thoughts, opinions and positions, that have since evolved or been abandoned. And both these sets of defining qualities — those of babies and those of books — can be frustrating; disheartening, even.

When SELF-PORTRAIT WITH BOY was accepted for publication, the advice I was given was: start something new. That way, the theory went, I could channel all my kvetching and perseverating into productive, career-affirming work. I took it to heart. I started a version of FRUIT OF THE DEAD in the late spring of 2017, several months before SELF-PORTRAIT came out, and though it would be many years before it became anything like the book it will be in 2024, working on it helped me keep my head down, my creative eye on the future, and my sanity intact. In fact it was delicious to work on something so different and new, while speaking and writing publicly about the old work. It was like having a fun little secret.

Now, a year and a half before the release of FRUIT, when I’m not working on edits or prepping for my spring classes or taking care of these two (thousand?) demanding babies — in the fragments and slivers I am barely able to carve, in other words, from my poor, compromised slabs of time — I have, again, started something new. And though it will be years, again, before this nascent, unnamed project becomes a novel or, fingers crossed, a book, I’m enjoying the process, in all its imperfection, of writing a sentence here, a paragraph there, collecting and jotting down ideas. As work on FRUIT OF THE DEAD comes to a slow halt, and its many continuity errors are uncovered and fixed, and my sprawling Scrivener file becomes a 311-page Word doc, which becomes, eventually, a bound and ISBN-numbered book — as the queries in tracked changes are resolved, and this dynamic project becomes a static object, and there can be no more futzing with sentences, and there is no going back — I find a certain, private, delirious freedom in beginning again.

I started this newsletter years ago with a particular conceit. It was meant to be a series of writing prompts. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep that up forever, but for now, I guess, let’s indulge. Your prompt today, should you choose to accept it, is to start something new, in intentional drips and drabs. Carve out your slivers. Chip away your fragments of time, here and there. Use your Notes app or a small pad of paper or maybe a whiteboard, whatever. Don’t let yourself — or, worse, force yourself to — work on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Don’t draw in the lines of any constellations. Just allow the small pieces to accumulate — faraway, unrelated points of light — and let yourself imagine, vaguely as daydreaming, how dazzling it may look, someday, years from now.

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Prompt 107: The Internet is a Megalopolis

Well, another eight months have gone by since my last prompt, and I'm not exactly sure why it's taken me so long to write again. There is the baby, of course, there is always the baby, who is now a walking, talking, goofing, hugging, occasional-tantrum-throwing toddler. There was our gradual move from dense loud Brooklyn to the spacious silence of Western Mass. There have been other consuming projects, too — for instance, I'm nearing the end of a third (?) draft of my second novel. But I think, when you get right down to it, none of these were factors, not really. I think I write these letters not because I feel I ought to, or because I feel you need me to, but because I need to. Because some idea is buzzing around in me, and I need to pin it down, for instance; or because I'm feeling far away from people; or because I am feeling very small amidst the vastness of the world and/or the internet.

Today, I guess, happens to be one of those occasions.

I published a story last week in The Rumpus. It's called "What Wasn't." It's about death and love and sharing a loved one's grief, and the irresistibility of trying to imagine how a terminally ill person's life might have gone, had they been lucky enough to escape the illness that killed them. It's a story that is deeply personal and important to me — more so, in fact, than any of my other published stories — and it took a long time to get it out into the world, onto a website where (theoretically, anyway) anyone can read it. 

If you're not a writer or in the writing world, let me give you a sense of the painfully glacial pace at which these things tend to move. I started working on the story in October 2020, after the death of my husband's father. I shared an early draft with my writing group in late November. After getting notes from those first readers, I embarked on the revision process. I tend to revise in fits and spurts, often as a distraction from other projects that have stalled, say, or become emotionally or intellectual unwieldy. At the time I was working simultaneously on my second novel and a longform personal essay about reckoning with identity in early motherhood (still unpublished). 

So it was five months later, in April 2021, that I felt "What Wasn't" was more or less ready to send out. I submitted it to two publications from whom I'd received kind rejections in the past, and requests to see more work. Both passed on it. I sent it to another publication in May, and to another in June. Getting antsy, I submitted it to two more publications in July, including The Rumpus, which accepted it seven days after receipt, to my delight and relief. The assigned editor would turn out to be an absolute dream to work with, but did not have the bandwidth to begin working with me on edits until three months later. We finalized a draft in late October, and it was published a month later, during Thanksgiving Week, illustrated with original artwork. By the time it was released into the world, more than thirteen months had passed since the death of my husband's dad — whose memory, to me, is the heart of the story. 

The internet is like this infinite, overcrowded, capitalist megalopolis. There are bazillions of people here, all of them hungry, many of them talking — yelling, even — constantly! There are many thousands of corporations, and there are scams, big and small, from well-strategized corporate pyramid schemes to sly little con jobs. Just the other day a friend of mine, up here in the hill towns, sent a screen-grab of an ad she'd been served. The image was what looked like a candid photo of a minor 90s movie star. The caption reported — speciously, of course — that this movie star had left Hollywood to settle down right here, in our small town. There must have been a wee wicked location-tracking bug embedded in the ad code. God only knows what would have happened if my friend had clicked on it. Her personal information might well have been gobbled up by Russian bots. The streets of this megalopolis are crawling with filthy gobbling bots! Meanwhile, tucked away in a relatively quiet corner of this jam-packed, deafening landscape, TheRumpus.net is like some nice little out-of-the-way Bay Area café. A quick web traffic check reveals that it gets approximately 32 site visits per day. For a small, independent web journal, that's actually not too shabby. But how many of those kind visitors chose to sit down and spend twelve minutes reading my 3600-word story? From texts and Twitter messages I received after I shared it, I know of exactly five.

Look, I know I'm not exactly in a position to complain. I live a life that is devoted to the people and activities I love, namely my family and close friends, writing and teaching, and otherwise working with words. I am proud of this short story, I respect the publication that accepted and published it, and I had a beautiful experience working with the editor who took it on. In the grand scheme of things, I am grateful. And yet? Sometimes it's hard not to feel like not much more than earnest little carnival barker, begging passersby to read my mad pamphlets, on a remote street corner in some depraved, congested neighborhood, deep in the neglected digital underbelly of an apathetic universe. 

But that's just how it is, now, isn't it.

Here's what I tell myself to cheer myself up about it all. I say, maybe, someday, the story will end up in a book. And maybe because the book will be an object of substance, an object one can hold — and dog-ear the pages of, and, once in a while, fall asleep with — it will feel realer, more enduring, and more meaningful. The kind of love that we naturally invest in physical objects, I'm convinced, is a very different kind of love than that which we are able to invest in abstractions. It's older. More innate. I witness it in my toddler, the way he latches on to various physical items in his small, ordered world. These are his comfort objects: A pacifier with a pig attached to it. A doll in a bear suit. A counting book, a couple of Sandra Boynton books, our decades-old, spine-dented copy of Goodnight Moon. The moon itself, for that matter — which, this morning, was just a glowing sliver hovering among the bare black branches of the forest — and which he named, looking up and pointing, in his imprecise and perfect baby voice: "Moon. Moon."

Your prompt, this time around, is to make something real. Something that can be held and handled. It's the holidays, right? So maybe make someone a gift. Or, if you're feeling like you need a comfort object of your own, right now, maybe go ahead and make it for yourself. Maybe it will be a letter, handwritten in differently colored inks. Maybe it will be a journal, sewn together with thick thread. Maybe it will be an embroidered companion, stuffed with cotton. I don't know. If you do choose to make something, though, take a picture of it. Send it to me. Let me know. 

Yours, 
Rachel
 

Prompt 106: 1 Year Later

In pandemic time, the day I drafted and sent Prompt 105—the most recent in these newsletters, though I can hardly believe it now—it was still early Sourdough Era. Those of us privileged enough to have time on our hands were gritting our teeth and smiling through the fear and daring ourselves to find productive ways to spend it. We planted seedlings. We baked. We banged pots and pans. We read the news. We made macabre jokes. We grieved. 

George Floyd was living, working, getting through it, too, out in Minneapolis, alongside us but unknown to us. We were all just living, working, getting through it. Together, apart, . Small lives in an incomprehensibly large, unjust, and sometimes brutal ecosystem.

I was still thirty-six, pregnant, still living full-time in Brooklyn. Yesterday I turned thirty-eight. I have a nine-month-old baby. I am living mostly in the Berkshires. These are three ways my own small life has changed. 

Though in fact so much has changed in the year and three days that has passed since then, I can hardly remember what it was like, except in the way I remember a dream: a few static images, a generalized gestalt. Sunlight in my small office, in our Brooklyn apartment. The constant sounds of neighbors, helicopters, sirens. Increasingly beautiful weather, which seemed more and more like a mean joke; swelling ankles, belly, breasts, loneliness, hopelessness, fury, despair. Then: summer. Murder. Fireworks. Protests. Back yard parties. A feeling of nihilism and abandon. Pervasive rage. The baby was born: cesarean. Recovery was long. Sleeplessness made me stupid. Love made me fearful. Reluctantly I gave up my small office so the baby could have his own room. Eventually: fall. A death in the family. The election. In the winter we found a house we loved on a mountain, where we could have space, quiet, beauty, time. 

I don't need to tell you the many ways our collective lives have changed. I don't need to talk about George Floyd. You know him as well as I do. We almost certainly met him the same way. Either of us could have been witnesses in his murderer's trial, though neither of us was called to the stand. Maybe, like me, you followed that trial so closely that when the news of conviction came, like me, you yelled aloud and even cried. I don't need to talk about him but I want to say, briefly, think of that: you and me, getting that news, together, apart, having gotten through it, largely unknown to one another. Paying attention. 

I was born and raised a city girl. I've never spent a season-change in the country before. In Brooklyn the spring tends to happen suddenly. One day: boom! Jean jackets, cherry blossoms, wow! But here in the Berkshires it is slow. It took a month at least for the winter snow to melt, the soil to thaw and the old brown leaves on the ground to be revealed. Tiny buds appeared on the bare branches weeks ago but the leaves are still reluctant. A few daffodils have popped up though to nod, vigorous, yellow, in the still-cold wind. Amid all this I am learning how to pay attention. From decay and rot, rich soil. From soil, life; then death again.

I am learning, but I don't really know. I am learning that part of learning is learning that I don't really know. 

One thing I do know is long long ago, in another life, on April 20, 2020, I invited you to participate in what I called Amateur Sonnet Club. I had this nerdy, maybe Pollyannaish idea that writing sonnets together, apart, might help us all feel less alone. At least, I guess, I thought it might help us pass the time. My intention was to collect your sonnets over the following week or two, draft Prompt 106, and send it out with a couple of your poems included. Maybe after that I'd offer up another prompt, another project, and share that in turn. I didn't know. 

Now that it has been over a year (and what a year it's been), your sonnets read almost like the contents of a time capsule. Recall, if you will, the Sourdough Era. Isolation was still new to us. We were still disinfecting our mail. The US death toll from Covid-19 had just passed 40K. One year ago today the President, such as he was, suggested that the citizens of the United States try drinking or injecting bleach, or perhaps exposing their innards to ultraviolet light. 

Isolation Sonnet
Nicole Zhu

Today's the same day as the one before:
I work, I Zoom, I scroll through the Bad Site,
I rarely set a foot outside the door.
To order takeout is my week's delight.

The numbers climb with every passing day.
To donate never feels like it's enough.
"I hope you're doing ok" is all I say
To others. We all know the times are tough.

The ways I stave off the uncertainty —
Do crosswords with my partner, missing him.
I FaceTime friends, read books, and whip coffee,
Watch Netflix dramas while the sky grows dim.

I know not where these things will head towards,
I count myself so lucky to be bored.

This next, untitled sonnet is by my friend Al Brown.

If I listen close I can hear them talk
As I reach the creek in my neighborhood
Jabbering on like the world’s not on lock
Down. Complacent, like everything is good.

Bright orange feet paddle through the water
And create rippling waves, forcing change.
Green heads bob, tail feathers shake, no bother.
How don’t they notice the world is so strange?

My loop each morning, my own hamster wheel
Shoes slowly eroding grooves in concrete
Days so monotonous it’s hard to deal
Missing my friends, wishing we could all meet.

But each day I pause to watch the ducks swim
With a smile, I let my new day begin

Our last sonnet comes from Greg Benson, who wrote that the first line of his was what he told his wife when she urged him to submit one.

Don't tell me what to do, my sweet darling—
I can divine how to season the sauce!
Although my methods to you seem startling,
Our kitchen's too modern to have a boss.

In our enlightened home no one's in charge;
Egalitarianism's our tonic!
Please remember that when I call you "Sarge,"
I'm merely and merrily ironic.

If you wish to assist me in sauce-making,
Kindly tell me where the hell's the pepper.
I know you didn't use it for baking
Those pies that weren't fit for a leper.

Don't bludgeon the one helping with preppin'!
(A pepper-grinder's apt as a weapon.) 

Intimations of matricide aside, I am grateful to those of you who entrusted me with your sonnets, and sorry that it took three hundred sixty-eight days for me to share them. Then again, though: how differently they read now than they would have, then. The death toll today is 570K: fourteen times what it was then. The loss of life is so enormous as to be incomprehensible. And yet our fear is subsiding. 25% of the country is fully vaccinated. Our President is no longer a raging moron. A murderer has been charged with murder. Things feel a little less irrational and threatening, maybe, than they once did.

Your prompt today is to watch something change slowly. Whatever that means to you. Me, I am taking pictures of the same window, every day, after I meditate in front of it for fifteen minutes. Maybe when I'm done I'll make a digital flip-book of these pictures, and watch the buds on the branches turn into foliage. Maybe I'll share that flip-book in another of these letters, someday. Maybe that will be another year from now. Maybe it will be sooner.

Novel-Related Google Searches, April 2020

I took some time off from writing in March, mostly due to coronavirus-related anxiety. But in April I got back on the horse.

Hekate

mullet (fish)

ferrets

Stony Brook University "Imagine Wednesday" Shop Talk Panel up on YouTube

One silver lining of having our Shop Talk rescheduled and the event having gone virtual is that you can watch it now any time, at your leisure, on YouTube or below.

"Plot Roulette" Craft Talk/Writing Prompt Up Now on Sackett Street Writers Workshop YouTube Channel

A creative home to more than 7,000 writers since 2002, Sackett Street offers in-person writing classes in all creative genres to NYC writers, and online classes to writers worldwide. To support writers (and soon-to-be writers) stuck at home during the COVID-19 crisis, Sackett has launched a series of free videos on the craft of writing, including writing prompts and reading recommendations to inspire and inform. Browse all the videos here, and see mine below: