Some lightness for your summer

Hello and welcome, friends, family, readers, writers, and people seeking witticisms who stumbled here accidentally serendipitously. If you need wit right away, I can’t say I blame you, and you are welcome to jump to the boldface section called Funny Things. Otherwise, read on for my brief life and writing updates.

Jump!

As I write this, it’s the (Northern Hemisphere’s) summer solstice. The most lightness of the year! Hurray for Vitamin D! Hurray for summer! I’m planning to channel my inner child and find the unabashed joy of this season. It always surprises me when adults attest to hating summer. I mean, I sort of get it: school is out, so routines vanish; weather can be intolerably hot in some areas; travel can be a drag/nightmare since the whole world seems to be traveling. But on the plus side: fresh berries and stone fruit! Feet in sand! Sun and warmth! Reading outside! Shedding of jackets!

Spring, normally my favorite season, presented me this year with both lightness and grief. Lightness: my daughter graduated from middle school (and won a few awards). My sons finished their school years on happy, positive trajectories. We are all healthy. My husband finished making us a beautiful dining room table and has moved on to his next woodworking project, a bat box. I ran a very fast (for me) 10k, besting my old record by 2 1/2 minutes.

Grief: after years of battling multiple illnesses, Mom K, my stepmom since I was four, joined my Dad in the great beyond. They were both good Catholics, so let’s call it Heaven, shall we? She had fought relentlessly, to the point where we kids (and her doctors) had begun to believe that she was, perhaps, indestructible. I suppose that a mind can only triumph over matter but so far. We are all mortal, it turns out. As with my father’s passing, I’m reminded of how important it is to maximize¹ our days, since none of us know how many we’ll have.

Mom K with my youngest child. So much lightness in this photo.

Writing Update

I’ve just returned from my second MFA residency at Bennington College, where for ten days, prose and poetry writers gathered with accomplished faculty and guests for seminars, lectures, writing workshops, readings, and so much food. We learned about using nonstandard syntax and diction from Moriel Rothman-Zecher, about writing love poetry from Donika Kelly, about cultivating originality from Rebecca Makkai. I cried at Katy Simpson-Smith’s motherhood lecture and laughed at readings by Taymour Soomro, Melissa Febos, and Stuart Nadler. Visiting Robert Frost’s grave, I discovered that he outlived his wife and four of his six children.

Lillian was Robert’s daughter-in-law. His only two children to outlive him, Lesley and Irma, are buried separately.

A recurring theme of the June residency seemed to be: what if we all decide to turn the work into play, to enjoy the doing, to focus on input rather than outcome? Donika Kelly encouraged us to write whatever we wanted. “It’s not going to be a hit. It’s a poem!” Relieving ourselves of the pressure to write toward the market, we are free(r) to write what’s in our heart.

I met with Jai Chakrabarti, my advisor for the coming term, and together we decided that I’ll take a (brief) break from revising my novel in order to work on the short story form. This prospect both intimidates and excites me, since I’ve been focused on novels and flash fiction (short-short stories) since returning to writing in 2019. But I’m not leaving my novel behind; I expect to return to it in August or September.

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Funny Things

Because lightness.

h/t Second Breakfast

I have looked at the above image at least sixty times and laugh Every. Single. Time.

Next, some Goodreads reviews that entertained me.

A “premise that I didn’t see coming” feels like a koan, a Buddhist riddle to prove the inadequacy of logic. I will ponder this one as I try, and fail, to fall asleep due to my excessive naked upside down lotus posing before bed.

Another koan. If a reviewer “rounds up” to 2.75 but leaves her review at 2 stars, what, exactly, was rounded?

It’s such a drag when a book is “fairly okay,” also known as “okay-ish” or “low-key so-so.” But when the characters “really suck,” that’s the worst! You might find yourself giving the book 2 stars and rounding up to 2.5 stars.

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Interesting Links

1. Explore: This visual representation of human history, to see which famous people were contemporaries. Did I know that Galileo and Shakespeare were the same age? I did not, until now.

2. Read: “20 Ways You Should Be Using AI in Publishing.” A slide deck by a publisher at this year’s Bookworld about how they’re using AI. (Interesting primarily for fellow writers.) h/t Jane Friedman

3. Read: “Joyful Persistence,” a talk given to the graduating MFA class at UBC, about reframing creative endeavors as work (not unlike what we discussed so much at Bennington). Inspiring.

4. Geek out: Online Etymology Dictionary, for fellow word nerds. I’ve bookmarked this.

5. Listen: Wiser Than Me with Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve recommended this podcast before, but she just wrapped the second season with some incredible guests. You can’t go wrong, all of the episodes are fantastic, but I’ll name the Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett episodes in particular—two of Mom K’s favorite actresses. She would have loved these interviews.

   

   From Sarah Leavitt’s slides about Joyful Persistence in creative endeavors, see link #3 above

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Reading Nook

My favorite books of the past few months spoke to me as much as a writer as a reader.

Instructions for a Heatwave makes me convinced that I need to be a Maggie O’Farrell completist (the bookish term for a reader who reads an author’s entire oeuvre). Set during one week of a London heatwave in the 1970’s, the book follows a mother and her three adult children as they discover what happened to the husband/father, who’s gone missing. O’Farrell is, hands-down, one of my favorite contemporary authors.

The Girls From Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe is a fascinating, nuanced novel of female friendship. I couldn’t put it down. Her latest novel has just been released and I’m dying to get my hands on it.

Here in the Dark is a literary thriller by Alexis Soloski, a college classmate of mine. Set against the backdrop of New York’s theater world (the author is a theater critic for the Times), the novel is fresh and visceral. I loved the edginess of the language, the rawness of the characters.

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We’re off on the first of our big summer travels tomorrow. Here’s hoping I figure out how to write a short story while bike-riding through Belgium. I wish you all light-filled summers replete with temperate days, fresh juicy fruits, Vitamin D, and five-star books. If you feel like commenting, let me know what book you’ve enjoyed recently or which book you’re most looking forward to reading this summer.

1. I kind of hate the English word choices for this idea. “Maximize,” or “capitalize,” or “exploit,” or “leverage”- all seem to suggest a financial and/or sinister motive. Italians have sfruttare, a charming word (that sfr at the beginning!), which means literally to take the fruit from. Also approfittare, or the Spanish equivalent aprovechar, to take the profit from (eg to take advantage of). When living in Uruguay and later in Italy, I used these words all the time. Come on, English!