ready to launch

I’ve been out of sorts since I delivered the Sutherland lecture last week. At first, I was just tired and unprepared to tackle all the things I set aside in order to finish my *very* long paper. I woke with a migraine the morning after and took it easy for the weekend. I submitted a clean copy for the Horn Book and will share the YouTube link to the recording once I’ve got it. We had a very small crowd at the Harold Washington Library, which is about what I expected. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a paper for a whole hour…I worried that I was boring the audience, or that my tone wasn’t engaging…at least I had lots of slides so folks could focus on the photos if my narrative wasn’t riveting.

A friend who watched the talk on Zoom shared this screenshot; I’m glad my slides took up most of the screen! It felt good to piece my five Scotland trips (1991, 2018, 2022 x 2, & 2023) into a single narrative. I wore a new dress and my amethyst thistle brooch, and dug through my dusty albums to find lots of old photos. My cousin Carlene in Canada even sent me a photo I’d never seen before of her mother, my great-aunt Ellen, and “my Scottish granny” Nellie McKay. I’m in NYC right now for the PEN World Voices Festival and I was trying to explain to a friend earlier today that I feel like a rocket getting ready to launch. It’s strange being back in the city; my last visit here was in 2019, I think, a few months before the pandemic shut everything down. Yesterday in Chicago I thought about all my favorite places and I visited a few of them today…but it’s not the same. The bakery didn’t have my favorite cake, and the familiar, friendly guys weren’t behind the counter at the Indian restaurant I used to visit every week. We can’t recreate our former lives; the only way is forward. We outgrow relationships and routines and the only option is to replace them with new ones. I feel like I’ve been shedding a lot over the past few years; sometimes that makes me feel blue and other times I feel ready to let go of everything familiar and reach for something new. Not all rockets launch successfully but I feel the rumble building inside of me. I hope my launch doesn’t end disastrously like Elon Musk’s latest attempt to get to space! Though we do learn from every failure…