Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 8

Dried log on the woodpile, furry pearls of spider egg...

Dried log on the woodpile, furry pearls of spider egg sacks
tugged off the underside and flicked into the mulch. When pulled off the wood,
a cottony whisper of fabric ripping. A couple logs grabbed, splintery old oak,
a couple blank forms made, crude spoon shapes. I sat with my brothers months
ago in the last warmth of fall. We shared tools and I showed them how to carve.
The wood was not ideal, old and hard and dry. Curls collected on the floor of
the porch, on the table, on our laps, into our shoes. I didn’t think I’d ever
finish the one I started that day – too hard, too unforgiving – but last night, finally,
after months of it living in my freezer to keep inside what moisture it held, I
did the work and deemed it done, and massaged it today with beeswax and
flaxseed oil, which smells like honey and soil, which smells like the color
amber, which softened the skin on my hands, and all day kept touching the spoon,
rubbing my palm over the flat, smoothing my thumb against the smooth curves of
its bowl. So simple and so smooth. I could not get enough.

The light the last two days, iced and blue. Finally in a winter...

The light the last two days, iced and blue. Finally in a winter we can recognize. The almost-final finishing of a big project today, the clicking send, and the strange sense of loss that follows. Less relief at wrapping up a sustained state of effort and attention and more a version of grief. A void opens where weeks and months of concentration had been, and the afternoon expands into the question: what now? So a turn towards acts that serve as shelter, that form an order to exist in. Brain in the hands, precision without exactitude, oak and birch, a welcome state of languagelessness for all the things unsayable. There’s so much that’s unsayable. And there’s so much left to say.

In my youth when hangovers were events, day-destroyingcrises on...

In my youth when hangovers were events, day-destroying
crises on a soul and cellular level, what I most craved was putting my body in
water. It was not greasy food or another drink. Hangovers made me want to be
swimming. I’m not a great swimmer, but there’s little I like more than being in
water, diving around, blasting up off the bottom where it’s cold through the
surface into the air, floating so it’s just the water and the sky and me in
between, moving my body horizontally which is a little like flying. The thing I
like most about it is the giving my weight to it, surrendering to it, a
simultaneous being held and the possibility of drowning. That’s what I wanted
when a long night drinking peeled the layers back to my lizard brain, when all
the edges were jagged, each nerve-ending sizzling with cosmic static.

And that’s what I’ve been wanting these days, unhungover,
but peeled open. Along the Charles River late this afternoon, a shell of ice
covered the river, strong enough for geese to stand on. It reflected the
setting sun, glowed pink, lavender, gold, so many greys and blues. I thought
about the water underneath. The stillness atop, the movement below. I had
regular, predictable thoughts about how things move and shift and how sometimes
you know exactly what will happen, and it does, but that does not mean you know
what might happen after that. I thought about how much I wanted to give my
weight to water, to smooth the edges, to give bath to those layers that are not
so often accessed. “The swimmer lets himself fall out of the day heat and down
through a gold bath of light deepening and cooling into thousands of evenings,
thousands of Augusts, thousands of human sleeps,” writes Anne Carson in Plainwater. Those evenings, Augusts,
human sleeps, this is the condition I crave. The abandoning of thought, the losing
oneself, and the simultaneous staying whole. “How slow is the slow trance of
wisdom, which the swimmer swims into.” That slow trance, that gaining, that relief.

[Painting by Leanne Shapton from Swimming Studies]

I am so, so excited to share the news:My new book, WAKE, SIREN...

I am so, so excited to share the news:

My new book, WAKE, SIREN – a retelling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the female figures’ perspectives – is coming out this fall from Farrar, Straus & Giroux. It’s violent and wild and I’m so excited that it will exist.

Below, the official Publishers Marketplace announcement:

On Saturday afternoon, forty minutes north of the city, fourof...

On Saturday afternoon, forty minutes north of the city, four
of us walked through the woods. My young brother and I, ahead on the path, saw
a wingspan move above us in the trees. Oh hawk, I said, and we paused on the
path. It was not hawk. It landed on a bough and revealed itself an owl, thick,
wide-faced, wide-eyed, white specked with brown. It looked at us, right at us,
and lifted itself off the branch and flew off, feather barrel.

This afternoon at four-thirty, when the light comes from
other worlds, walking home from an appointment in the glowing dim, I turned
down my city street, and saw a flurry of movement. Across the street from me,
an owl landed on the sidewalk. I stopped. I stood. It stood. We stared. Owl on
the sidewalk, owl on the sidewalk, I thought, and tried to stop breathing to
still myself so it would stay. It was likewise white specked with brown, and
had we been standing next to each other, it would’ve come up to just below my
kneecap. A car passed on the street perpendicular and the owl launched itself
off the sidewalk and up to a branch above me and then moved on again, silent as snow, towards the river. How’s it happen? You go a lifetime only ever
hearing owls hoot around sometimes if you’re lucky on an owl prowl, but you never,
never see one once, and then, three days apart at the end of November, owls
stand close and you look each other in the eye. Was it the same owl? If so,
what’s it portend? If not, what’s it portend? Really, I ask, what’s the meaning
of this?

[Works by Leonard Baskin: 1) Yom Kippur Angel; 2) Raptors No. 7; 3) The Owl That Calls Upon the Night Speaks the Unbeliever’s Fright; 4) The Day Owl]

This spoon I made from the trunk of a birch tree that hadcome...

This spoon I made from the trunk of a birch tree that had
come down in my father’s yard. As I carved, sitting on the floor of my
apartment, letting the curls of wood collect around my ankles, the wood spoke
to me of bone, that I was holding and carving bone of tree. The blade I used to
carve was so sharp I didn’t feel it when it opened up the flesh on my thumb and
a bead of hot red blood swelled from the slice like the tiny bulbs on the heads
of certain pins. Before I knew, my blood had touched the spoon. The wood drank it
so deep into itself it disappeared.

A flock of geese honked their way over my apartment afterthe...

A flock of geese honked their way over my apartment after
the sun had gone down this evening. I did not see them. I only heard their
brass-throat voices as they moved southeast towards the river, but I imagined
their grey forms, winged and stretching, in silhouette against the almost dark.
What fell from the sky alternated between drops and flakes. It changed under
the streetlamp. Each month has its own topography. This is November’s now and there
is no return. The days are quiet, dim. It is a moment of pause. I wait for
everything to change. As the veer of fowl flew overhead, I wondered who heard
them with me. In the houses on the streets nearby my street, who’s home? did
you hear, too? From the sidewalk at four-thirty in these November-end days, the
glowy lamplight oranging the windows is the most inviting light I know. We are
past the mid-day of the month; the only direction is darker; so, come in, come
in, I’ll show you all of it.

The colors are different in Mexico City. Different thanwhat?...

The colors are different in Mexico City. Different than
what? Different than the colors I know in the city where I live. Different than
the colors I’ve known in every city I’ve been. A stretch of days there earlier
this month, and each walk it felt like my eyes were getting washed with
pleasure. The rose and golds and oranges, dusky and rich at once. The royal
blue, all cheer. Key lime pie, mango, plum. Every color saturated. Even
white looked richer, deeper, like it was made of the powder of the inside of
shells. As we moved along each street, my eyes seemed to feed, nourished by the
colors pouring into them.

It’s a good time of year for the colors. The papel picado strung
for Día de los Muertos swayed like prayer flags with

















silhouettes



of skeletons.
The marigold petals glowed, in heaps, in trails, in bunches hung outside of
doorways, helping souls find their way. For Day of the Dead itself, we traveled
south of the city a few hours to a town in the mountains called Tepoztlán.
Children dressed as skeletons, wizards, wolves wandered the narrow cobbled
street holding hollowed gourds like little watermelons with lit candles inside.
Adults held big cups of beer. There were candles everywhere and petals
everywhere and people everywhere and the drenching colors made me swoon. How often I found myself breathless, euphoric.

Back home, a Danish woman expressed surprise that
others went to places and tried to imagine if they could see their lives unfolding
there. “I thought I was the only one who did this,” she said to a small group of us. I
thought everyone did this. Do you do this? When you go a place? Do you ask:
could I live here? Could my life unfold here? The answer, for me, comes
quick and definitive. Could my life unfold here? Sometimes the answer is so
obvious I barely have to ask the question.

What does dawn smell like? Peach pit, licorice, bread, nests,...

What does dawn smell like? Peach pit, licorice, bread, nests, sparks, blood. What does dawn smell like? Anticipation.

For the Paris Review Daily, I wrote five essays about the senses of dawn, how those early morning moments feel, sound, smell, taste, and look. It’s a brief mysterious time of day, and being awake in the in-between made me realize that there might be no such thing as silence. Goodnight, good morning. You can find the essays here.

[Illustration by Jackson Joyce]

I sat on the floor of my apartment with an eleven-year-oldand...

I sat on the floor of my apartment with an eleven-year-old
and showed her how to carve a spoon. She took the small blade in her hand and
she pressed it against the oak with her thumb like I showed her, and the curls
of wood fell on her socks and the floor like the clipped toenails of babies.
She talked while she carved. She told me about her life. This small creature,
this cusping girl, this child who talked like a grown-up, whose face showed the
pure pain of childhood. Earnest eyes already. Already an astute meteorologist
of her own internal weather. I showed her how to place the blade and she,
candid, open, brave, showed me what it looks like to say the true, hard things.
And she asked about how best to know what parts of the spoon handle needed
still to be smoothed. “In this case, can you tell more with your eyes or more
with your hands?” she asked. We closed our eyes and felt the handle with our
fingers, and we opened our eyes and looked. I knew she knew the answer before
she asked it. And I knew she sensed it was a bigger question than best methods
with wooden spoons. What you can see versus what you can feel. Where do you
find the truth? We searched for the splintered spots, and found them, and tried
our best that night to make them smooth.