1. It’s possible your thinking will change if you believe that no one is a stranger.

2. Actions, too.

3. From Paul:

   

4. From Kathleen Raine:

   

   

   

5. From Toni:

   

6. From my mother, my whole life, in the latin: illegitimi non carborundum. Don’t let the bastards get you down.

7. You will break nothing open while closed. You will break nothing meaningful with your anger.

8. From Annie:

   

9. Write as much, and equally, in the direction of both your fear and your love. Each is a teacher.

10. From Chen:

    

11. Shift, shift, shift, shift.

I believed in writer’s block. Before, when writing was not the thing I did with all my time but the thing I did with my sometimes time. Writer’s block was an empty psychological space—if that is even possible in living time—but it was also just…part of it. Part of the occupation’s mythologies and also part of its reality.

But then, when I started writing all the time (or believing that anything that wasn’t writing could contribute to its eventual end), what quickly replaced the ghoulishness of writer’s block was urgency, this terrible feeling that I had to be doing something that leaned toward writing at all times. For what? To what? The supposed finality and validation of publication. A book with my name on the cover. I still walk through bookstores and think there are so many names here. So many people who have done what can feel impossible.

For a while, it also seemed that urgency was as necessary and as inevitable as being blocked. As if, no matter which direction I found myself in, I had to live within an extreme state in order to be living at all. As if being a writer is either starving for the work or letting the work starve you.

I even wanted to title this post “Urgency Reduction, Idea Retention” (ha! a background in marketing will do that to you), like I could place the issue of urgency pushing up against creativity within language that possessed a neat amount of certainty. Reduce your urgency and you will retain more ideas. Retain! It’s still in there, all that bullshit, even when I use the word in a different form. Except writing creatively for a career is not always about business, or production, or urgency. Its most confounding attribute is that writing is also about developing and maintaining a relationship to mystery. It’s the piece between the desire to create and the creation itself: that indecipherable boundary that somehow, somewhere, connects the two.

Last week, I listened to Valeria Luiselli on Between the Covers with David Naimon and she spoke about how we live with fiction in our lives. It had me thinking about the fiction of the everyday—specifically, my created fiction of urgency.

Luiselli said:

“We are inhabited both by our own personal memories of past events, but also our memories as readers. We have these two consciousnesses with us…[with fiction] we learn how to organize events in time through storytelling that is not our own. The better readers we are, the more varied readers we are, the better we can reorganize and constantly reimagine our lives and our world, the world we live in now, and the stories of those who live alongside us…to live life in a way in which we can find our life to be worth being told—not in a sense of greatness of a life, but in a sense of the care and attention we give to the mundane. How do we allow fiction to reconfigure our sense of attention, and therefore care for the world, so much so that our lives can feel like they are simultaneously being lived and written with the threads of fiction? That is, with the threads of observant care.

I think that, in many borderline events in our lives, events that feel like deep cracks in our souls, when we lose someone, when we’re sitting next to someone who is in agony towards the end of their life in this form, in this body, I’ve had many conversations with many writers, and friends, and also friends who are not writers but are good readers, who declare that they go into writer mode in their brain in this moment: a kind of observation that is deeper, that tries to hold onto a moment while making sense of it, documenting it in a deeper level of consciousness while also being present for it. I think that that’s something that fiction gives us, and autofiction becomes interesting to me when it is a vehicle toward that form of observation in our own lives.

In the same episode, she shared that her latest book, Beginning Middle End, took six years to write. This is not an unusual amount of time for a novelist to complete a work. So why am I rushing?

Most mornings, when my children are up early and are settled into whatever it is they’re doing, I sit on the porch with my current book and try to read a few pages. Inevitably, I’m not able to. There’s usually some screaming that comes between the two girls and I can’t focus, or I have to get up and reason with them, or teach them to reason with each other. Last weekend, when I felt that call coming—some background argument brewing—I looked up and noticed the trees were not moving. At all. It actually felt like the whole street was completely still. Deliberately so: the trees had nowhere to be but they would continue growing. They had all the means to do that and continue unruffled.

After taking a breath post-MFA (I finished officially in July), I realized there was some necessary urgency in my life as a student: reading excessively for deadlines, prepping notes, writing toward a level of completion required by the constructs there. Then, there was the other kind of urgency—toward the after of the MFA—that was a blank for me, an empty space, one that only caused pain, confusion, and fear. A tense hand always at my back.

I’m not perfect. I haven’t entirely shaken the desire to run out and do everything I can to publish. But I am trying to be still, to remold that hand so I can make it more like a thing that can hold me and the things I want.

Book things you’ll want to know about

Events, releases, and what I’m reading next

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I’m living in a recurring sickness that I can’t make a poem about; I’m just angry now.

The second or third return of this rotten head cold reminds me of the things we try to do with meaning-making or ideating. How it breeds itself. If a head cold can stick around for near months, turning over on itself, can’t an idea?

(Forgive the tenuous connection, my head is foggy with phlegm and with grief.)

This cyclical pull is what I love about Ali Millar’s 3am Things, not just for her prose, but for the lists she shares of notes on her phone. It’s proof of the root, the consistent backdrop of things we keep in our minds and then externalize and collect into a private realm. The what that keeps going amid all the other things. Hers is a level of vulnerability that awes me. A weakness of mine is to gatekeep ideas until I am sure of how I want to use them.

The truth is likely that if I stopped lingering on ideas privately, I’d share them recklessly, knowing—or trusting—that more would come. Because they always do. And I wouldn’t wish them away like this persistent coughing.

Insert poetry

This morning I searched for “ice” in my notes. I was trying to find a description I wrote of winter, something I needed to place back into a scene in my novel.

Instead I found different grocery lists I’d written over the years. Right now I’m so sick that I can’t make sense of anything; maybe that’s why everything reads like a poem. I am trying to find the meaning behind all of the disparate parts.

I suppose the best way to put it is that, in this time of grief—personal, deep, collective, sprawling—and in the cloud of head colds—foggy, tiring, consuming—I am obsessed with the work of poetry. How tight it is. How it presents a fog while also clearing it. I want to make a real thing and hold it. I want moments of lightness in recognition, like when you pick a perfect mandarin and peel its skin and the first sliver is sweet.

Book things you’ll want to know about

Events in Toronto

• MARCH 18 University of Guelph MFA Speakeasy Reading Series w/ Laurie D. Graham, Liz Johnston, Annabel Griffiths-Fitzsimmons, Zachary Tomblin, and Maria Giesbrecht. 7-9pm, Another Story Bookshop.

• MARCH 26 Gisèle Pelicot book launch for A Hymn to Life (Shame Has to Change Sides), 6pm, Trinity-St. Paul's United Church and Centre for Faith, Justice and the Arts.

• MARCH 31 McClelland & Stewart Poetry Night 2026 w/ Laurie D. Graham, Kaie Kellough, and Jake Skeets. Curated and presented by Canisia Lubrin. 7:15-8:45pm, Nancy & Ed Jackman Performance Centre.

• APRIL 9 Poet Lisa Richter launches Sublunary w/ readings by Hoa Nguyen and Cassidy McFadzean. Host Jim Johnstone. 7-9pm, Another Story Bookshop.

• APRIL 20 Book launch for Carrianne Leung’s Wonderland Road with Catherine Hernandez. 7pm, DROM Taberna.

• APRIL 23 Toronto Review Launch Party w/ readings by Claudia Dey, Furqan Mohamed, Claire Foster, Cason Sharpe, and Quill Christie-Peters. 7:30pm, Cafeteria @ 1650 Dupont.

Upcoming book releases: April

• Attention: Writing on Life, Art, and the World by Anne Enright,April 7, W. W. Norton & Company

• The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescot-Weinstein, April 7, Pantheon

• Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner, April 7, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

• Against Breaking: On the Power of Poetry by Ada Limón, April 7, Scribner

• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley, April 14, Penguin Random House

• Book IV: On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle, April 14, New Directions

• Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh, April 21, Simon & Schuster

• The Complete Works of Ricardo Reis by Fernando Pessoa, April 21, New Directions

Read My Recent Work

“Water Bird” published by The Ex-Puritan. It’s about ducks, The Sopranos, and not being able to write.

“ecological love” published by Pinhole Poetry. I did an interview with them that you can find here.

Last night, I went to the TPL’s Salon Series event, “What Is Imagination?” with authors Sheila Heti, Elif Batuman, Patricia Lockwood, and Gwendoline Riley in discussion. I felt quiet and calm on the subway. Ate sushi alone beforehand. Then, I arrived at a full room of people and noises and I did not feel the excitement I had expected. My grief over my father’s recent death came out from nowhere and had me wanting to leave, to burst into tears, and speak to none of the people I had so anticipated seeing. Grief this size is so new to me. I feel like an egg. Like a wounded animal.

I’ve been reading and re-reading James Baldwin these days—he was in my last post, too—and thinking about placing emotions in places we don’t expect them to fit. In Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin paints the conversion of his main character, John Grimes, as a terrifying experience, one that begins with him “like a rock, a dead man’s body, a dying bird, fallen from an awful height.”

John’s journey toward this experience is a complex one, and so it makes sense that he has a complex reaction. But I guess I considered a conversion to come with a release. While I knew Grimes expected himself to change, it doesn’t feel like a very human thing to await a painful experience. What Baldwin does is take the opportunity to place Grimes’ fear and shame into a single moment, tunnelling him through all his personal hells in a tight ten pages, perhaps to make sure that we, the readers, know that on the other side of anticipation is not relief, it’s just another perspective of understanding the same truths we knew were possible all along.

In general, I have been thinking more about emotional dissonance as a narrative convention, specifically in literary fiction, where a reader is more accustomed to psychological plotting, where the “story” hinges on interiority and emotional resonance as opposed to factual, worldly happenings. The experience within these fictions—maybe not all—is one of responsive, situational accuracy, so the reader can ask the question: Is this life anything like my own? Is this life a possible life?

When I’m writing a story, before I get out the flurry of words I feel I need to express, the tone of the fiction needs to be assessed. This is when I ask questions like what if

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Someone hugged me recently and said something hopeful about the new year. I was that asshole who said “I don’t believe in new years having to be new.”

I don’t actually think I’m an asshole, but I did seem to offend this person’s well wishes, and so I clarified that I think of January as a continuation.

I think of all things as a continuation.

But in some abrupt, world-rupturing way, my father died. A few weeks ago. And. The continuation is just that I keep being here. And he is not. And everything— from showering, to eating, to sleeping, to remembering where I am—feels impossible. I call “Mom and Dad” on my phone and he doesn’t answer. I leave a voicemail after hearing him speak his name: you’ve reached the voicemail of “Peter Brown”.

Out of privacy, I think I will say not much more about this. It was just a few weeks ago.I live with a little cloud on my shoulder and chaos in my head.

Not devaluing the thing in the moment

Maybe “devaluing” is a strong word. Maybe it’s because, like James Baldwin says of the creative process, there are instances that require us to be present and they are hard to do because they must be endured alone. The aftermath of expressing ourselves openly to another person, a stranger even, out of respect for something greater—say, telling someone I watched my father, Peter Joseph, take his last breath—might be a difficult thing to sit with. Did I have to deliver that news so dramatically? Did I have to say his name? Yes, and yes.

It feels like, in our lonely, singular ways, we have to be aware of what is required of us and not to turn away out of fear for the after. Place value where value ought to live.

“Nothing is stable under heaven” is something Baldwin writes in the essay linked above. Nothing is stable, not human emotions or responses to unkindly and unthinkable things. It’s okay if sometimes it’s the human thing to choose fear.

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Some housekeeping

Cloudgazing has needed to be updated for a while. My right mind tells me to wait until I’ve graduated from my MFA and have more time, but in the interest of continuing, I’ll set out some of my intentions for this space:

• More in-depth essays and experimental writing. So far, these have been more like “micro essays,” which I’ll continue to publish. But here, as well, I’ll be talking about books that are supporting my research efforts as I finish my novel. I like learning about which books authors are drawn to, how they organize their ideas, and where they find inspiration. Hope you do, too.

• Novel updates and scenes. I had a conversation with someone recently around the question “how do you have things to share online when you have a huge project behind closed doors?” And it’s true; it is odd to be working on a gigantic thing like a novel and have nothing to show for it except the statement that I am, I am working on it and it exists (promise).

• Book recs, DNFs, and progress/setback notes. Some of the things I love and the things that go wrong as well. Writing a novel and pursuing publication (on all sides) is not linear and takes a lot of inner work. It’s ugly. I’ll share that.

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Like this: is it completely insane to have a single post about both my father’s death and my plans for this space? Yes. Nothing is stable under heaven. Sorry, Dad. It’s chaos here without you.

Read My Work

“Water Bird” published by The Ex-Puritan. It’s about ducks, The Sopranos, and not being able to write.

“ecological love” published by Pinhole Poetry.

As I write this, I am finding myself aware of the distance between the words preparation and reparation. Again, as usual, my mind is looking for a path from something ordinary—to prepare or arrange—to something ridden with guilt—to repair a wrongdoing.

I think the relationship must have something to do with readiness.

• Am I ready for what is to come in the new year? Will I have to adjust?

• Am I organized ahead of time, in case something goes awry?

• Do I have everything arranged? Do I not?

These questions, I think, are ones that follow us no matter where we find ourselves in life: as we face down tasks and shifts, movement and change. This is the unending human desire for resolve, for us to have enough preparedness to not have to make reparations1 (but knowing that we might, because to be human is to move forward and make our plans, do our things, and then…double back, fix them, do them again in some kind of altered fashion that says I did it and it was the best I could do).

Stay with me: I post a decent amount about what I read online and sometimes I am met with the startling (really, laughable) experience of someone IRL saying: “but do you actually read all those books?”

Thinking of this in the context of preparedness and reparations: There’s being ready for the world—posting about the books in the interest of having a conversation about them—and then there’s whether or not you owe the world any kind of asterisk later (*yes I do read those books or *sometimes, no, I don’t finish them). What I love about the latter is how human it also is, this idea that yes, I read a lot but also I am discerning and don’t read what I don’t feel I can finish or I got busy or something else was more interesting to me or I read as much as I needed to at the time.

Recently, The New Yorker came out with a piece on performative reading and I suddenly understood the different set of constraints I was working with when it came to this question. Perhaps people thought I was performing. The author wrote of a distance between sincerity and authenticity on the internet, and our inability to conceive of online experiences beyond their performative nature. It makes me think of that rudimentary drawing of the iceberg illusion: that to only see the tip and read it as success is to see just a percentage of the whole thing.

When someone thinks of preparedness or being prepared, is there a misconception of how complete that experience is? I mean, I can say that I am prepared for the new year, but there is a grey area that remains within every experience. There are always reparations to be made since nothing is truly perfect or complete from the get-go. Everything is perception and comfort. Most everything is also some kind of performance, authentic or not.

Preparedness for what life has in store is overrated. Preparedness thinks it has all the information, and that in having all the information, we will be immune to having to revisit or re-evaluate. It is a performance of future ability, but not future’s ability, which really is the true test. The future knows what we don’t. We’re just performing ideas of what we think it will be until we get there.

Preparations. It makes up almost the whole word. The p is just an attempt at foresight before the whole concept slips into a back-step.

When someone asks me if I’ve “read all those books” or if it’s “just for the pictures”, I don’t really care if they think I do or not. The question likely has more to do with their perception of themselves. But what it does make me consider is the cycle of preparing, performing, repairing that has to be done in all contexts, real and “not real” (as some people think being online is). There is an inevitable loop to preparing for anything. We are never owed anything by our preparations, not even if we have photographic evidence.

Today I edited a spreadsheet I use daily, gave it a facelift: new column titles, new year category. Every day, I update this spreadsheet and think I am doing myself better for being prepared. Thinking the future me and the now me have coalesced and I am all around good. But I think what I might be doing, more than anything, is repairing it, patching it together, day by day, to a level of satisfaction that I can be comfortable with for a moment. There really are only reparations, and they, too, live endlessly in the loop.

“I will clamber through the clouds and exist.”

- John Keats, in a letter to Benjamin Robert Haydon

I am walking through Mexico City. “It’s very walkable,” everyone said when I told them I was coming here. Technically, I think, everywhere is walkable, unless you’re climbing a mountain, in which case, the degree of access is measured in mounting steps and not flat ones. Climbable.

I think what they may mean when they say it’s walkable is that it is seeable - there are many things to look at and maintain an upright curiosity over, things that sprout in a way that isn’t like my life but is also not jarring or previously unseen. They are familiar, comprehensible things: gigantic tropical plants that grow here naturally, crowding the city corners; graffiti, Spanish graffiti, about gringos (me); puddling little dogs; elegant windows; morning vendors; elders; smokers; kids.

Meanwhile, at home, the spider plant on my desk is appropriately desk-sized and dying, (my husband is trying to bring it back to life). Street art is a stain to wash away or otherwise, commission. Dogs are dogs everywhere, and thank goodness for that. Kids and elders, too. But last month I tried smoking a cigarette outside an event and never felt more like a millennial in my life. Everyone wants to vape, but no one wants to admit that smoking is still really fucking cool.

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I came to Mexico City to breathe. I only have four days, so I figured that was good enough amount of time for a reasonable amount of breathing. But in this city that is walkable, seeable, I can’t see. Everything becomes anxiety: not plane travel, or foreignness—those are fine with me. Happy good things become filtered into anxious things. The seen things become what won’t be seen later: sidewalk mangoes for 50 pesos in particular. The walk becomes a climb.

I recently read another writer express that they are insufferable when they are not writing. I’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that sometimes needing to write feels like a curse, because even your dental hygienist will say that they dabble in writing when you tell them you’re a writer and you can’t say back “yeah, I dabble in dental hygiene, too.”

The truth, I guess, is that this is my life, this is it, and it’s good and walkable and I am still walking. I am eating the mangoes and texting my friends about them. I just had to stop to write to keep moving forward.

“Meanwhile, the clouds are white and the sky is blue. Why so much God? At the expense of men.”

-Clarice Lispector, Hour of the Star

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I am in a pool of uncertainty.

I don’t know this until I open up my phone while waiting to order coffee. The first thing the internet shows me is a video of Cate Blanchett saying that there are only islands of certainty, and perhaps the place of not knowing—uncertainty—is the most consistent and reliable one.

She is quoting Clarice Lispector:

“…there are certain advantages in not knowing, like virgin territory, the mind is free from misconceptions. Everything I do not know forms the greater part of me: This is my largesse. And with this I understand everything. The things I do not know constitute my truth.”

I let this sink in and realize I am not really, totally uncertain—which has, up until this point, presented itself as intense anxiety and self-doubt—I am (or have been) on the brink of a new kind of certainty. Not a magical, life-altering answer that would solve next week’s inevitable problem, but enough of a solution to keep me moving forward.

The self-doubt I mentioned was telling me that I am not a fiction writer and I’ve chosen the wrong form and everyone can see it but me and who do I think I am to even try. My self-doubt is very unoriginal, I’m bored just writing this.

I think, even though this doubting is very, extremely uncomfortable, it is to some degree, comfortable. Oh! I’m human! I’m suffering! This is my plight. Not solving our plight is the thing we know best. Sometimes, though, there is a required slap in the side of the head that pushes you to take the thing that’s looming over you and just… figure it out! Figure. it. out.

(Just “figure it out” is basically what my husband said on the third night of me insisting we either watch old episodes of Top Chef or another Ghibli movie to comfort my sad head.)

Specifically, my uncertainty was about how I speak about my work, which I am usually quite confident in when I am talking to myself about my work. It’s the talking to other people and not finding their questions to be a total assault to my ego that’s the hard part. That—the feeling that I’m facing a confrontation and not just having a conversation—is what I realized I have to deal with: my own sense that their question is some kind of an affront, when really it is just a question, and usually a good/suitable one at that.

I was at a book launch a couple weeks back when an author advised me never to defend my work. OHHHHHH, that’s it. Clarity. That’s the action, or at least, the mindset. Don’t defend your work. She had said that the right people will get it, and the wrong people are not who you wrote the book for. Wow, omg, of course I won’t defend my work! because it’s true, I don’t have to.

A friend of mine who is going through something wildly different than I am (a plight nonetheless) put it this way: “don’t negotiate against yourself.” And I think that fits. Defending my work as valuable in the form it has taken would be negotiating with what I already believe to be true: my work is valuable in the form it has taken. Say it again! My work is valuable in the form it has taken.

Not knowing something, or having the solution figured out yet, is really just…how it goes. Walking around knowing everything all the time would actually make this whole life thing pretty pointless. It’s when the not knowing mounts to paranoia—loves to breed—that you kind of need to start paddling a little harder. Or find a good Cate Blanchett award ceremony speech, I don’t know.

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“If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub

against the sky.”

-Raul Gutierrez from the poem Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently

Monday, May 5

8:37 a.m.

Drop Hanni off at daycare. I’m through the first shift of family chaos; whatever it is that gets a family of four out the door clothed and fed—usually there are sprinkles of joy amid requests to brush your hair! and mainstays like no you can’t have any more orange juice.

I head to a coffee shop to read the rest of Áqua Viva by Clarice Lispector before taking a long walk along the beach and, lately, through Kew Gardens to pick up the library books I put on hold. This week it’s Hilton Als’ White Girls and Maggie Nelson’s poetry collection, Something Bright, Then Holes. Truth be told, I don’t know if I’ll get to either of them before having to renew again.

11:15 a.m.

I text a friend the below. She’s asking about my family being sick.

This is what happens when you get the stomach flu, then your child gets sick and needs to live on top of you for days, then you get sick again with a head cold. I don’t necessarily want to die, I just don’t want this to be my present existence.

The funny thing is, today I’ve assigned myself the task of writing about hope. Might have to save that essay for another day.

1:23 p.m.

Look down at my to do list and I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean anymore. I used to have a diehard mentality about the to do list. Make one, love it, cradle it in all its glorious expectations, let doing be goodness, fulfill the things, be righteous.

Except, my life is so fluidly wild now that the to do list just laughs at me. It’s less of a list of things I can accomplish and more a thing representing the mishmash of my daily experience:

• prep for cleaner

• finish Áqua Viva

• arrange notes on readings

• finish story readings (5)

• update submission schedule

• meeting with CL (prep)

• AL essay draft

• novel - map next phase

• common sort drop-off

• library books (return, renew, pick up holds)

• pay tuition

• pay for daycare

• budget

• go to Service Ontario (Hanni and Nola health card renewal)

• climb

• groceries

• laundry

I’ve been thinking a lot more these days about what continuity looks like for a single person vs. a family person, and my continuity looks like a rolling to do list with tasks that are just as much a part of me as my children are (read: laundry, groceries).

3:14 p.m.

I’ve read and submitted decisions on five short stories sent to me via Submittable. One interesting thing of late is that I have taken up a volunteer position as a reader for a literary journal and damn, people are out there writing all kinds of things. It’s been eye-opening re: formatting, what makes a story a story, and what others are willing to have seen.

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5:26 p.m.

There is nothing inspiring to write about dinner today.

9:30 p.m.

In bed early (head cold, we know) catching up on some reading. Click on a Lit Hub one that’s been sitting in my inbox: Arianna Rebolini on writing about your kid. Like her, I’m wondering what I should and should not share about my family online.

Rebolini seems to land on the side of “sharing with caution”: acknowledging the impact it could have on your child’s future and removing identification (I don’t show my children’s faces online). She also mentions that there are inextricable parts of life she bears witness to thanks to her son’s perspective.

Like my sickness and to do list, my kids affect how life plays out. They’re why I want / need to write about hope. They’re why I do laundry every two days and why I’m going to bed before 10 p.m.

“The only life that matters is in your mind. The only truth is the one that lives invisibly, that waits even after you close the book.”

-Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

I started my MFA last year at the age of 35. It wasn’t until I arrived at my first class that I realized my age. I told someone shortly after that I couldn’t believe the number, that time would have happened to me without me knowing it. How is it possible to be both aware of the years as they pass and entirely shocked by them? I’d married, travelled, had children, bought a house…and somehow, everything felt new. There was still time, and then, with the number I held between me and the world, suddenly, there wasn’t time.

When I think of time and how we use it, my mind returns to a former coworker who, when we worked nights together, told me that she could never bring herself to do much in the hours leading up to our 7 o’clock shift. By 2pm, she was paralyzed. What would time offer her in this space, what could she possibly do that was worthy? She said she often just sat and waited, watched the piles of laundry go undone.

Years later, another colleague, a video producer, had his knuckle bent so hard on the clock that he knew exactly what a minute meant more than I could imagine possible. As his assistant, I’d often tell him “there’s just no time left for it”—it being another shot, another scene. But he’d insist. After the wrap-up, I’d look at the hour, and he was always right on time. If we’d have gone by my call, we would have ended too early.

Time and narrative. Time and narrative. I can’t stop coming back to the two. Narrative—an account, a collection of moments threaded by story—must live in time because it’s human made. We all live in time. But what about our individual understandings of our days, how we use them? My internal clock was so different from my colleagues’—before my night shift, I’d often read or take long bike rides, both activities I found fulfilling. I believed there was something I could make of that time. The video producer did too, with only minutes to work with.

What is time to a person who does more and a person who does less? I’m not talking so much about what we produce, more about what we believe is possible. If narrative is the things we actively do, in a kind of order of importance we choose, how does this play out in the hours and years we have before us?

I think the interesting part about narrative is that it has layers. While my fellow night-shift worker dreaded the 7pm work hour, she maintained some inner workings leading up to it: thoughts, feelings, sensations, however uncomfortable some of them were. Perhaps these were the same things I felt when pushing up against the final moment of long set days. Neither of us believed in the time we had, but it still affected our narratives.

We like to believe that time is linear. It’s something we have to work with, that we can control it and we know where it lives and where it is going. But the things that preoccupy us—how we sit in the world, move through it, think within it—are strongly related to what time means to us, not just that it is. We can choose to build a narrative that is filled with action, that uses up every ounce of time and energy we have. Or we can split off and just…exist, stand in front of a body of water and think.

One way or another, I’m not sure I would have applied to go back to school if I believed I was too old to do it. That time wasn’t on my side. If I had done something else, who knows what time would have meant to me. Now, I wake up at 36, very aware of it and my ageing. And sometimes I still forget, so I can move forward without concern about what I’m doing.

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“Along the paved path leading up to the greenhouse, benches face into the sun, and when the sun passes behind a cloud, the benches face into the clouds. On these benches, people sit alone or together, some playing cards, alone, or together. Others scream and flail their arms as if fighting off flames. It is always others who flail their arms.”

-Martha Baillie, The Incident Report

What do you think it is that makes us forget?

My friend asked me this question at an event the other day. We were both taking notes on the author’s talk—me in my notebook, her in her phone—and weren’t sure either of us would remember anything meaningful afterward. It wasn’t for lack of meaning in the words we heard, but more, I think, the excess of it. As if we were asking: how can we make space for more?

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This week I was reading about managing time in fiction and I left with some ideas—and some notes—but particularly with this quote sitting at the front of my mind:

“We write the scenes that are most resonant, then rely on summary to pitch us forward in time, until we arrive at another important moment.”

The author, Rachel Beanland, is talking about how we can work with the information between moments that strike the reader and move plot forward. It’s about where we place our focus. By “most resonant,” she’s saying that we can use time in narrative to leap from one meaningful moment to the next. It would seem natural to emphasize the things that are clearest to us, that reach a depth within us. Elements of a thing that ring true and require our attention.

Something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is how the writers I love are often exploring the same themes over and over from different angles. I consider Annie Ernaux and I think of intimacy, time, and realism; I look at Yōko Ogawa and think of how femininity can take a bend toward something cruel, or how the impact of history can live in the body.

At this very talk—the one with my friend and I forgetting and not wanting to forget—the author spoke of how she is always writing toward grief and transformation. Grief and transformation would always be in her work despite form, time, readership, or no readership.

Do we really need to worry so much about making space for more, when it seems we are already chasing what is inevitably most resonant to us, making that where we find our attention?

“I already forgot half of what I wrote down,” my friend lamented. "You probably remembered the parts I didn’t, though,” I said. Because what’s also notable about the exchange is that my parts could complete hers, and vice-versa. What she remembered could be different from what I did, and that creates a communal experience of memory. A communal experience of resonance.

I think we often get caught up thinking that someone else is has abilities or strengths far beyond ours. That we are the ones that can’t make enough space. But what if this actually meant that those around us just have complementary parts, and we’re making space for more…together? That it’s a collective act? I can’t be bigger than I am. I know that. I can’t will my brain to be more engaged than it is—because it is, it is already engaged. What I can do is make space for the meaning I make of an experience, and be curious about how someone else experienced the same thing. And if they overlap? What a joy. There is always room for more joy.

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Read My Work

“Fighting With God,” published by Paloma Magazine.

“I Wish I Could Go to Costco With My Parents,” recently published by Funicular Magazine.

“The Clearing,” in issue four of Archetype: A Literary Journal.

“Everything Belongs,” in Prairie Fire’s 2023 Summer edition.

“Little clouds are free. They just float around and have a good time. Very free. Maybe one of the freest things in nature.”

-

Bob Ross

A few months after I started my newsletter, my dad—not a writer—teased me, said “Cloudgazing? More like navel-gazing.” Oof, the way this comment has lived with me! Is that all this writing thing amounts to? I’ve wondered. Rancid, rotting self-indulgence, that takes us nowhere but within ourselves, where surely there are no answers to the questions we have in the face of life? Is it ever enough, or is it just an effort of epic singularity? On my worst days, I succumb to this, when the life I’ve chosen makes me feel lonely and uneasy.

Except…isn’t that what searching feels like? Lonely and uneasy?

Because when this writing life is not a wrestle between me and the page, I read and read and read and read other people’s accounts of their lives. Certainly there are a lot of these interiors available. There is an overwhelming amount. Except that, when you cut to the core of what you like and are looking for, there’s Lynn Steger Strong practicing and succeeding, Fariha Róisín’s reality in dreaming beyond the enclosures we know, Catherine Lacey doing it all in 144 words, Amy Lin as the softest gut punch I’ve known. All of them, similarly, searching for a way outward from within.

I think that what I fear is not just how much I yearn to be outside of myself, but how much I want others to know that I think of them in this experience as well. That any expression I make here is not just for my own end. It’s for expansion: the kind that poses questions and says I’m not the only one asking. Expansion that questions the shapes we take in the world and says I’m not the only one hoping to make a different kind of shape. (Because the one I take now is so uncomfortable sometimes.)

How do we find expansion, if not by moving in some direction, any way that we are able?

I think expansion—growth!—comes from finding different paths toward a narrative truth. It’s not an explosion of things (something excessive and obviously outward) but rather a digressive pointing back to a single thing.

Narrative truths are the big truths about being human, not shallow truths like “pain exists” or information swapping like “here is how you settle the pain.” It’s something that’s committed to and has stakes in the future, and deliberately not a future where I am more fit, better dressed, more intelligent…but one where my truth seeps deeply into yours, where they are bound and extended past me and you and into a future whole. (If you want to think more about this, I’ve been reading Byung-Chul Han’s The Crisis of Narration; would recommend.)

Following the accounts of other people’s modern lives may sometimes seem shallow. No, none of us are special. Why does everyone think they’re so special? is probably a question we have all asked ourselves in this moment in time. Because I don’t feel more fulfilled when I learn about someone’s new smoothie recipe or watch their dance routine or go through a day in their life. These are all momentary aspects of living: they don’t take us anywhere beyond their singularity. A great workout routine or organized closet is helpful at best, stagnant at worst, and truly amounts to only piles of itself when multiplied. Nuance has no place in our forced replication of moments: even if those moments appear beautiful and perfect and organized and aspirational, they only stack, they don’t merge.

Maybe some of my gazing is too inward. But there is always a throughline I find when I spend time with other people’s written accounts of their lives, accounts that connect us to one another on a conscious level of engagement: where we seek truth and not just facts. Something real, not just something we say is real. Where there’s one big net waiting and able to catch us, and it’s not (ironically enough) the internet.

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“Experience has fallen in value…a generation that had gone to school on horsedrawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.”

-Byung-Chul Han, The Crisis of Narration

Monday, February 10

11:21 a.m.

My body is resisting the story I have to write. My elbows do not bend right; I feel them stiffened under winter layers. The silent sound of no. I don’t want to be sitting at this desk but I need to be sitting at this desk. I push the chair away and roll it back again, marrying the wood and my sweatered belly. I try to force the resistance into a shape I know can mean something.

I scroll through Instagram. Someone I went to high school with (who now offers services in medicinal mushroom trips) just posted something online about the types of resistance we feel in our bodies. She says there are ways to follow the negative physical charge of resistance to a growth path, or to follow it to more discomfort; also growth path. Either way, she wants the audience to know that the path you take with resistance is one of growth. It’s just a matter of knowing what resistance feels like in your body and what you do with it.

Grow I will myself. The funny thing about writing about trauma is that, ideally, you’ve healed to some degree before having to face it down again on the page. I thought I already grew I say to the words that do not come. I do not move from my desk.

1:15 p.m.

I’ve moved. Hallelu. 1,641 words worth of surprise movement. I discover that I’m back in the drafting stage that requires me to question nothing and just write.

Do not question whether or not the words are good words

Do not question where they fit in the story

Do not question whether the story is a story

Do no question whether you need to tell the story you’re not sure is a story anymore anyways

Do not question anyways

12:41 p.m., the next day

My novel is the first thing I touch each day. That’s the best way I’ve found to stay on top of it. Another surprise 1,314 words later (my daily goal right now is 1,000) and I am on to reviewing my classmates’ the novel excerpts.

Because the writing life is kind of a shitty one, I have had to train my brain to be nicer to me. This means that when I read the stunning, gut-wrenching prose of one of my classmates, I tell myself all the reasons not to spiral into self-doubt:

1. It is good for other people to be good.

2. This person has a unique perspective. This does not mean that you do not have a unique perspective.

3. You can’t tell their story. They can’t tell yours.

As I write this, I can tell you for sure that I feel it reveals a level of self-absorption (also the writer’s plight) that I am uncomfortable with. I also feel I should have learned these things a long time ago. Both of the above are pretty harsh self-judgments, not the point of this exercise. We’re training our brain, not fixing it.

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6:26 p.m.

I’m covered in pasta sauce. It’s almost bath time for the girls and I am eager to isolate: not from them, I am simply exhausted and don’t know any other way to feel these days. 1,000+ daily words of reliving deep-rooted shame will do that.

I try to think straight while mothering two young children. Not possible some days. In general, I find I’m having difficulty recalling memories to put into a book of fiction, because yes, I am that kind of writer. I met Sheila Heti at an event last week and asked her about that whole business—the writing from life bit—and she just shrugged and said (not her exact words) it’s just kind of how it is. People experience life and equally, people write about it.

4:10 p.m., the next, next day

In the back of an Uber. It’s February, snowy, and that’s all I can tell you. The days blur from Monday to Thursday in a cycle that looks something like this: feed the kids, care for the home, read, write, feed the kids, care for the home. Read. Stay on top of the laundry. Live at a reasonable, emotionally manageable pace with the news. For now.

4,000 words came through me this week. Perhaps I’ve effectively resisted resistance, also for now. Perhaps it will visit me again next week.

“The details of what we call our lives go sometimes to form patterns of meaning not unlike those to be found in our preferred sort of fiction.”

-Gerald Murnane

Did you know that drinking water helps regulate your body temperature? I think about this as I finish a glass that has been left on the kitchen counter by a past me. My husband is annoying about water consumption for the whole family—it makes everyone happier he says. I leave the glass full for a future me. There is another one on the bathroom vanity.

The thing about consistent water consumption is that it does improve some things. I feel more emotionally in control, less hungry for sugar. I begrudge the argument for science a lot—there’s more to life, I’m telling you—but the thing about this particular science is that it’s helped me, so I’ll take it. I’m a hypocrite after all.

Is this part of what you’re trying to achieve? With that whole embodiment thing you’re on about these days? This thought rolls into my head; I’m interrogating myself—because I wonder if embodiment is simply about physicality or if I just have to accept that I will always feel slightly uncomfortable when I am pursuing change.

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I think, then, if there’s such a thing as metaphysical embodiment (oxymoron? maybe) and if the thing that I am after—a fluid experience of myself through all parts of my life—is possible if I think of embodiment on this level.

Metaphysical embodiment, as I see it:

• Being able to put my imagination into words. I’m so tired of people being confused with what I have to say.

• Maintaining elements of my physicality when confronted with sharing parts of my thought process. I don’t want to shake when I talk, or go red, or let fear of being wrong render me silent.

• Trusting what is available to me through me. I no longer want to be vulnerable to the parts of myself that I don’t like.

This entry was intended to be about why I hadn’t written my 2024 Year in Review yet, something I do every December to track what I did and did not accomplish in the previous 12 months. But then, what is fluid about that? I am more than a year of my being. A year is more than a day in December when I am run down and looking for relief.

The truth is, I was so many people in 2024: a mother, a grad student, an ex-friend, a woman who didn’t trust herself, a woman who did. A wife. Countless others. I don’t know where they start and end, if there will ever be a stop to how they blush, or worry, or yearn to be understood. But, one of them bought a new hat in December that no one likes and she doesn’t care. One of them danced hard when everyone else was dancing sheepishly. They all tried, in one way or another, to do their best. They all drank water.

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“A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.”

-Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

Monday, August 19

8:43 a.m.

I woke up this morning and knew that it would be a day I couldn’t write. My body hurts: my feet, like they have been trapped too tight in shoes for too long; my knees, always a small crack with the bend; my shoulders tell me its muscles need more air.

We spent the weekend just about everywhere with the kids. These days my heart is so filled with love for them that I don’t want to leave them—they are independent and playful and fun, so I spend the weekend on the floor, hoisting them above me, swinging them on swings, wrapping their wet bodies around my hip at the wading pool, bending in all kinds of directions to see that they are fed and have their toys.

I am tired, it’s a gloomy August day. I just want to sit and know that I can do that; I can rest.

10:14 a.m.

These past few years I talk to people online more—probably because it’s been A Very Long Time since I had a job that required me to be social, available. This weekend I asked other writers if they, too, get to the point of writing when they can’t read anymore. It could just be that you’re burnt out from the written word one person said.

I think they may be right.

11:50 a.m.

I fold and accept that I am not going to be able to move forward with my novel right now. I need reprieve—even though that was technically scheduled for next week when we’re on family vacation.

I realize that, if this is burnout, it doesn’t look the way it used to for me. Before my children it was a lot of kicking and screaming until I finally had it—enough, had enough—and started crying and couldn’t stop and had to spend a few days in bed as a result.

I guess I should have known that the anxiety my reading habit started to bring on wasn’t normal—not for me—and that the solution wasn’t going to be “just keep going.” Books are a really big part of my day-to-day, and not having a book to read in the morning or at night before bed has felt very alien.

1:10 p.m.

“Rest,” when I am still wound up and eager, looks like this:

Change into comfy clothes and try to read a book, because that feels productive and by definition should be restful. Get three lines into the book and feel terrible about myself. Remember that I can’t read right now and that’s the problem. Right, okay. Scroll on my phone in the interim. Also stressful. Post something online about what I’m experiencing, because of authenticity, right? That’s why we do that? …Is it? Ultimately it still satisfies something—I tell myself that it is human and good, when really it is likely that I am experiencing satisfaction from the productive feeling of it and the humanity alike.

Make coffee. Make toast. Wrap myself in a very soft blanket that is stained with yogurt and peanut butter. Ignore that part. Pour a glass of water because water is good for healthy, reliable amounts of dopamine throughout your day (not just good skin!). Put on The Kardashians. I love trash television when I need to stop thinking but I am still distracted. Scroll and eat and chug the water in a brief moment of resolve that I can handle, before, inevitably, I succumb to sleeping it off—this feeling that I can only explain as my brain becoming so tight under the pressure of nothing being quite right, quite done enough…

8:43 p.m.

My daughter is still awake. The children know I am unsettled and so they are unsettled, too. (Literally, they are not sleeping, they keep each other up because they share a room and the little one likes to chit chat with her sister even though she does not have words yet.)

Would it be true burnout if I finished this newsletter properly? I think I can muster a bow to wrap it all up, but I can’t even stay awake through Kim going to visit a prison with Khloé. I am only, presently, available for sleep, a welcomed undoing, long hugs. I tell my husband I need to go to bed. He can deal with the girls.

“Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don't want to hold it together.”

-Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

A few weeks ago, my family and I went on a short road trip to visit my mother-in-law. I popped into a Starbucks on the way out of town; I’d ordered a couple coffees beforehand to make the process go a little faster. When I arrived, there were two hot cups waiting. I quickly grabbed them both before stopping to see if they were mine. A few feet later it donned on me that one of them did not look like the other, and I would have to return half of the order and wait for my rightful drink to be ready.

A few minutes later, a girl—maybe 13-years-old—did the same thing, except she got farther than I did, and when she returned, she was sheepish, not knowing to whom she should admit her mistake, or whether she should acknowledge it at all. I watched as she placed the drink back onto the counter and looked around self-consciously. Instinctively I said to her '“don’t worry, I just about did the same thing,” and she smiled a grateful, still shy smile, and, oh my goodness, I realized I knew her.

I knew her because I was her.

I remember those days of being so painfully, unrelentingly shy that I could barely move without thinking twice about it, and how it felt to have an adult be kind to me. When I had no idea how the world worked or what it meant to be a person there.

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The weirdest part is that I still feel this way sometimes. I forget that I have come so far. I think this is because I mistake my own tenderness for that childlike self-consciousness, or the instinct to observe and be quiet, for shyness. When, in truth, I am not a child any longer, and I am the doting adult, and this, where I am, is actually what rooted feels like. That even though I often feel like I have jumped into a giant body of water, water I can’t swim my way out of, I have in fact done this jumping on my own—something a younger me wouldn’t have even thought to do.

I think I’m learning that there will always be fear. Fear is not just for the young who don’t know any better. There is fear that we will remain who we always thought we were. Or the fear of doing something different. But where there is fear, there is also growth, and jumping and knowing—somehow, somewhere—that we will be caught.

When the fears circle in and out of my head, my response, lately, has been: what if you released it? because that is an option I can tell myself that brings forth a very physical response: lighter shoulders, softer eyes, a smile, and perhaps even a little laugh.

So, the next time you feel fear, could it also just be a big lake in front of you? With all the same trappings of a summer day? And it could be scary to jump from that high of a rock, or jump into the dark, cold, wet, unknown. But you could also release all of that and just jump, and then, just swim. Swim and enjoy the water and how it feels on your body: calm, central, immersive, warm.

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“So, like I said, I’m fighting with God. I just wish they would do what I wanted every once in a while. They made me a woman, and women can do anything. Doesn’t that count for something?”

-Fighting With God

Read My Work

Last week, my piece “Fighting With God,” was published by Paloma Magazine for their one-year issue.

“I Wish I Could Go to Costco With My Parents,” recently published by Funicular Magazine.

“The Clearing,” in issue four of Archetype: A Literary Journal.

“Everything Belongs,” in Prairie Fire’s 2023 Summer edition.

“Outside the summer clouds are drifting by, all of them with vague and beautiful faces.”

-Mary Oliver, I Own a House

Monday, July 15

9:17 a.m.

The baby is home from daycare today so I’m getting some work done while my husband takes the morning shift with her. I don’t really want to say why she’s home—that information is not mine to share—except that it has something to do with other people suffering greatly.

So much suffering continues.

If you read my last post, you’ll know that this isn’t unlike other things I’ve witnessed recently. These events are frightening. Selfishly, it feels like something in the world is coming for me. But then I wonder: Am I in this place because I am meant to hold their pain? How do I do that?

A woman I admire—online, from a distance—recently gave birth to her fourth child. While in the throes of natural childbirth, she said later that her mind was not on getting through it, but focusing on the pain, asking how do I soften?

10:47 a.m.

I spend the morning falling in love with Substacks like Amy Lin’s At the Bottom of Everything and Rachel Schwartzmann’s Slow Stories. They are a reminder that there are other people in the world who are soft like me and are trying.

I responded to one of Amy’s posts earlier in the week, entitled what does it feel like to be you?:

Lately, I’m the strongest most surest person I know. But I still feel like a very tiny child, like I need to curl up and hide from the world. I don’t know how I can be both so strong and so constantly vulnerable.

11:21 a.m.

I walk home and try to get some steps in before I have to be inside for a prolonged period of time. It starts to rain, heavily, so I drop into Value Village for cover.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the place I’ve found myself in life right now: not working the traditional sense of the word, but working nonetheless—on writing, going back to school, becoming something I have not yet been. It’s a lifestyle similar to one I’ve had for years as a freelancer, where I make my own schedule and maintain clients, except my only client now is myself. Or, my future self.

I fear people in my life are taking it for granted—that I am actually working. That, or I am not totally secure in my choice to pursue this. I know it’s probably the latter but sometimes they are mixed.

I do believe this life is for me and I have to take it while it’s happening. I can’t be anywhere else. I’m learning that as long as you believe that the things you want—success, happiness, freedom—are for other people, they will be. As long as you believe that not trying is the easier path—in order to avoid failure—you will successfully avoid the pain of failure, but you will also go without the benefits of living the life you could have lived.

1:26 p.m.

The baby is napping and I’m working on the administrative side of my novel project. I have yet to dive back into the 11K+ words I wrote last fall.

Things I am doing to prepare myself for this next step:

• Do not judge what I’ve already created

• Create a mood board (see above) - emotional / visual mapping of the story timeline, plot, themes

• Compile my resources - books for historical context, books for inspiration, etc.

• Do not get in the way of myself:

  • Editing as I go (no, never do this);

  • Judging myself as I write;

  • Believe harder;

  • Work harder.

5:47 p.m.

The day has quickly become disappointing at worst, uneventful at best. My husband needs to stay late to work so I am home alone with the girls. There are a lot of things I did not get to do today.

I wish I could leave the to do lists behind. All of them, they are everywhere: what I’m supposed to do for myself, my children, my husband, my home. I wish I could settle and just be for a while. But that is not really in my nature.

I make dinner. Feel moderately guilty that their dinner is in front of the TV. Rationalize that it is okay that sometimes I have to mail it in. I clean up dinner, let them play. Interrupt the cleaning and play to help them make peace with one another. Vacuum. Charge the vacuum. Read them books during bath to get two things done at once. Sing. Get them in their pyjamas. Put away laundry while they chase each other around their bedroom.

9:10 p.m.

Early to bed. Thinking again how do I soften when that itself seems like another task, another thing to be?

Writing this now, there is a necessary softness that comes from being with children—singing (!!!), tending, removing worry momentarily, being an example of calm.

I guess I am focusing on softness because I’ve seen a lot of hard things happening. I’ve seen friends harden in response to their lives. Hardening is sometimes necessary, maybe a means to a softer end, but hard can’t be the end. No one is comfortable or growing when hardened.

I’ve just finished Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and was struck by much of it, but this quote in particular:

I think I value softness. Because I also value—and require—openness…

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The hum of my window air conditioner unit is so loud I cannot think as I write this, or try to write this—me, sitting at my desk not three feet away from the off button, my head wrapped in a fresh towel after a long bike ride that ended in this same me jumping into the lake and then promptly falling in the sand. A nice man told me I had a cool design on my leggings. I had to tell him it was just dirt.

Life has been odd lately. Strange and tragic events have rippled in and out of my periphery: sickness, heartache, missing people, sudden death. I’ve understood times of my own tumult—being in the thrashing grip of life—but this season is different. It is punctuated by the losses others are experiencing; losses I must stand by and witness. Where, lightly, gently, I am called to act (join in mourning) and react (comfort), observe (what do they need right now?) and serve (what do you need right now?).

I look around and wonder, to no one in particular, what is it that you see? I know each day that I see life and opportunity and vibrancy. Gratefully, I see the calm of summer. I smell its haze. I feel its splendour. I make time for sitting with it.

But, then, too, many parts of my life are still blurry. I am venturing into a new career path. I’m shedding parts of myself that once made sense but no longer do. I’m taking a step back from ways of being that rooted me in the place I was, but aren’t a part of where I’m going.

And it’s odd, this being in the midst of rootlessness when, so consistently, the terms of finality are so present for those I love and those I know.

Why am I here and not them?
What does it all mean?
Am I awake enough to life?
Is that what it means?

There is a knowing for me. Deep, somewhere—that this is where I’m supposed to be. And that I am changing because I am awake to life. But then, if I must be so insistent—I am, I am!—what am I missing? What am I not seeing?

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“Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters?
Old person worry: What if everything I do does?”

-Jenny Offill, Weather

Read My Work

“I Wish I Could Go to Costco With My Parents,” recently published by Funicular Magazine.

“The Clearing,” in issue four of Archetype: A Literary Journal.

“Everything Belongs,” in Prairie Fire’s 2023 Summer edition.

“The clouds appeared and went away, and in a while they did not try anymore.”

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Monday, June 24

9:08 a.m.

I’m at the beach with my book. Most mornings when the family departs from the home, I come here to regroup. The waking at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., day after day after day—to make their little bowls of cereal, their yogurt, cut their fruit—is a motion that can feel impossibly relentless. But the older one still looks up at me without thinking and says “I love you” or “you’re my best friend” and the pain of being ripped from my bed is gone.

“I’m learning to tend to when I think I will be most vulnerable,” I told someone last week. So, while I want to call my parents as I drive to the lake, to ignore the feeling of being immediately and completely alone, I know better than to allow other people into a time when I need to feel peace.

I sit at the beach in the summer feeling (soft wind through trees swelling with leaves; hot squares of sun; soundless, present air) and think, very deliberately, it’s summer now, and I try to remember which flowers I will see over the course of the next few months and wonder What in nature can survive this heat? What does such a thing look like?

I also think of a quote I heard recently: “Nothing in nature lives for itself.” This settles my worry. Nature looks after the needs of its own.

12:13 p.m.

I have just successfully darted between several tasks, feeling halfway through everything that must get done today. I sometimes let myself think that halfway is enough but *there is still a full list for tomorrow.* I wonder if my halfway is passable and if I can throw in the towel for the day. I also wonder if my full-way is even good enough, so I decide to keep working, just in case it is not.

Things I got done this morning:

• Washed my floors and cushions

• Submitted two short stories to two of my Big Five Literary Journals In Which I Would Like to Be Published (working title)

• Edited one of those stories from 4,200 words to 3,500 words because of rules

• Wrote my to-do list (counts)

• Read a very good short story that made me laugh

• Ate breakfast (also counts)

2:46 p.m.

It’s post-lunch break and I have stuck to my to-do list, the rest of which included continuing a short story I started in my notes app last week. I get 1000ish words down and it looks like things will be done full-way today.

Lately I’m not sure how descriptive I need to be about what exactly I’m writing (all this sharing of “I’m working on a story today” feels flat). This one is about a mysterious online woman, and I wish I could say more, but where I’m at right now as a person is to be protective of my ideas because I might feel too vulnerable later if I give away any meaningful details.

I read what I’ve written out loud and it feels right. It feels true.

4:56 p.m.

I should be leaving to pick up the baby but I’m still on my laptop, writing this, because isn’t it funny that I would detail my day as a writer without mentioning one of the things I am actively, presently writing? The composition of this newsletter comes in spurts, like everything I do—by design or by the force of my life’s nature.

8:26 p.m.

Someone I’ve admired for years has followed me back on Instagram. I add this to my pile of small, incremental wins.

The hockey game is on but I go outside to read in my pyjamas. I need silence. I can’t help but feel followed by this quiet irritation, like I can only stand so much disruption in my life. Is this ageing, or am I just more willing to give voice to my needs?

These days I feel as if I’m in a perpetual state of transformation, like it’s taking years to grow into who I am becoming. Sometimes I attribute this to parenthood—like, of course it’s taking time to evolve to carry this load. Other times, I just don’t know. I know I am firm in my resolve for change. That I need to be seen, heard, and respected. But I am so tender. This evolution has made me so tender.

10:46 p.m.

The older one has just interrupted my frenzied evening typing with cries from her bedroom. “I’m scared, Mommy, it’s scary.” I put my laptop away and let her into bed with me. It’s comforting, too, because the game is still on and I don’t realize I would like the company until she is lying next to me.

I saw a video online the other day of a child explaining the deep connection she felt with her mother. When I heard that quote about nature, how fluidly it is bound, the person who said it also spoke of how humans are the only ones on earth with the ability to live for themselves. But then, it’s silly to think we can be so independent of one another.

Yes—I change and transform and I do this in myself, for myself. But I also do it for them. Tenderly, for them, and because of them, I am tender.

“Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.”

I found this quote, by Goethe, on a photo my husband took of me the summer before we were married. I’m standing in a patch of June sun looking happy, carefree. Except this picture was taken during a period of my adulthood that I’d rather not return to, when my working life felt like it was going nowhere—and I was content with being me, but it seemed there was never anywhere I could find that I would fit. And so, I was also deeply discontented, and the question of who I was supposed to be in order to find belonging was always at the forefront of my mind.

I have a friend going through something similar now: this where do I go, who must I be sensation that takes hold of every part of her, of us, when we cannot see the soft sides of the world. When reality is too hard, too harsh, and we are at the mercy of The Things That Matter Least: work, politics, pettiness, keeping up appearances, sharing opinions loudly and online. There were times during my own experience of trying to find my way that it felt my sensitivity was always right under the surface of my skin; someone could have looked at me the wrong way and I’d have burst into tears.

It was easy, is easy, to be engulfed by the bigness of life, to not know which direction to take, and which, at what time, is a Thing That Matters Most or a Thing That Matters Least. What’s difficult to remember is that the unimportant things can often blur with the important ones. Work: matters. Because having a livelihood matters, and for some, their identity is tied closely to what they do each day. Then, it also does not matter what you do for work, if it is just work that has to be done and there is something else that fuels you.

These days, though I feel I’ve found my rightful place, I get rejection letters at least once a week. I never know when they’re coming—sometimes, it’s the first thing I read in the morning (thank you for your interest in our magazine but we are going to pass this time)—these relentless, unsavoury responses pertaining to the thing I do that I love most, that I work hard on. I live in a silo of two consistent sounds reverberating back at me: the anonymous and loud NOs beaten off by my silent YESes and all the things I must tell myself to just keep going.

But. I get these responses enough that they are swiftly categorized into The Least pile. Because what matters to me is not just being successful, it’s being able to grow and learn as a writer, and to connect with other people in a meaningful way. It’s learning to not just be content with who I am and where I fit, but to pull back on myself, to love her and care about how she’s doing, to tend to The Things That Matter Most: not letting the NOs get too loud, or feeling the world too harshly, or worrying. Definitely not worrying.

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Book Recommendations | Cozy Summer Reads

Out East: Memoir of a Montauk Summer by John Glynn

Author John Glynn retells the story if the summer of 2013 and his experience living at a communal cottage along the Atlantic, “The Hive.” A nagging sense of loneliness has followed him here, where, at 27, he falls in love with a male roommate. Beautifully written, relatable—themes of unrequited love and longing—and easy to enjoy.

The Pisces by Melissa Broder

At once ridiculous and absorbing, The Pisces is the story of a woman who becomes romantically entangled with a merman while house sitting for her sister in Venice Beach. It’s weird, fun fiction that will keep you hooked from the first page.

Outline by Rachel Cusk

A woman travels to Greece to host a summer writing course. Outline is famous for essentially detonating the concept of character in a beautiful, magnetic way. While Faye is our main method of transport through the story, the reader understands her experience primarily through the people she encounters and the stories they tell her. Read for the mood of travelling abroad and deeply human interactions and insights.

“Nature is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same.”

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, History