A Sound Like Silence

In my newsletter Scrivener file, there are no fewer than four aborted iterations of this installment of Loomings, dating back, in various guises, to February. Four versions I started writing and stopped—and that’s only counting the ones I started to compose in a concrete way. There are at least half a dozen others, existing only as stray and faintly guilty thoughts, given how long it’s been since last I wrote to you from here.

In the place from which my better newsletter ideas come, there’s an emptiness, and it is everything I can do to keep that emptiness from spreading to my novel-in-progress. At least the world is not supposed to touch the novel—not right now. Yes, of course, that project exists because of the me who exists now, the me in the world and of the world, but at this moment in the novel’s shaping, it’s allowed to be long-ago-and-far-away. When I’m working on it, I can take solace in that for a while, but working on it at all is taking all of my tricks: the early morning writing time, the ForestApp, the FreeWrite Traveller, the app that blocks other apps so I don’t get derailed before I even begin, the writing reflection notebook, the hand-written draft notebook, the novel-task-checklist, the questions-for-later checklist, the “research counts as writing” stacks of books, the “reading counts as writing” stacks of books, the “do not click out to the browser to look that up” notebook, the excoriating notes to self, the encouraging notes to self. Even so, the failure rate is high, higher than its been. Still, the failure rate is not total. That matters.

Each morning while I’m writing, the 100 Days of Creative Resistance newsletter arrives, and in it, some other writer tries to get their head and their practice around creating in this particular moment, tries to offer some hope, offer some compassion, offer some suggestion. Is there some comfort in seeing other people struggling in the same way? Yes, absolutely. It’s one of the few newsletters I get that I always read. But there’s also something that sounds like yeah, I guess? echoing up from that emptiness. It’s the place where the comfort and community collides with the anger, the numbness, the nothing.

What follows: I don’t know what to say. If you’ve voluntarily signed up to hear from me, I don’t expect I have any calls to action that would be new or different than the ones you’re already aware of. I don’t have any caution or hope or pleas to make that haven’t been better said by anyone and everyone else.

This is the emptiness: the prevailing feeling of what do I have to add?

As a feeling, it spreads. I find it everywhere. I can think of little to say to friends and loved ones. I am grateful in some ways that the spring semester is reaching its final month fever pitch because that comes with all of its own required conversations and tasks that stave off the bottomless pit of despair because they have to get done and so they do get done and I am grateful that they do because these things matter: the paper and project conferences, the responding, the advising, the nominations for student awards, the literary magazine to finish. My first-year writing students, almost all in majors outside of my program, some of whom have been in my classroom two semesters in a row now, are demonstrating their progress on the page; there is little that thrills me like seeing that incremental movement in their skill and confidence. So the work gets done and I am glad to witness it, to be part of it (even when it feels like I’m standing outside of my body, barely involved). I can write useful comments for my writers because those comments don’t come from me in this particular moment; they come from a timeless place of experience and gratitude and the teacher-self that gets things done because the things have to get done, and that self is not really the same self that writes this newsletter nor the self that works on a novel before the sun comes up. But: A former student had some poems picked up by a prestigious journal. Another student had their achievements recognized by a local chamber of commerce. There are things to look forward to, like the honor society inductions, the Lavender and Kente graduation celebrations to come at the end of the month, the celebrations of research, the campus gallery exhibitions of student work. The daffodils, the dandelions, the new-hatched gray fuzzballs that will grow into geese in the fields along the creek. So.

Here is a brief list of everything else I thought of writing to you about and didn’t: I set out a bowl of sunflower seeds (admittedly stale, from the back of the cupboard) and watched, but I never saw bird nor squirrel touch them. Someone else’s barn cat—petite, black & white—visits the porch from time to time. The bowl of sunflower seeds was overturned and emptied during the night, when I wasn’t watching. I spilled a whole mug of tea on my laptop during spring break. The way the black & white cat dove under the back patio and a rabbit bolted from the other side. The dandelions wresting themselves from a crack in the sidewalk outside of the local fire station. The way the magnolia trees are blooming beneath my campus office window. The laptop still works—well enough, anyway. The return of baseball. A little frog climbs the window-glass on certain evenings and seems to watch us play video games. A silly exchange between a driver and his engineers during a recent F1 race. A collage essay of some of these things. A meditation on not going to AWP this year. The bicycle fitting I got during spring break. The unpleasant understanding that my computer still smells a bit like old milk from that full mug of tea I spilled on it. Wishing I could experience certain video games again for the first time, though I don’t have this feeling about movies or books and I often re-watch and re-read when I love something. Imagining a garden more ambitious than whatever I’ll actually end up planting. Reading cookbooks while eating dinner. Days it’s been warm enough to open the windows and watch my indoor cats watch the world.

I had the absolute honor to be interviewed by Carlee Tressel for The Under Review. You can read it in the latest issue here: Interview with Holly M. Wendt.

Small, Good Things in Making, Doing, & Making Do:

• I’ve become a tinned fish enthusiast. I have the good fortune to live not far from the excellent, online-only purveyors of many, many tinned fishes, Rainbow Tomatoes Garden (RTG). (They also carry Kolsvart candy from Sweden, which are gummi fish shaped like actual fish and flavored with elderflower and black currant and such, and some specialty chocolate and wee forks for your fish-based enjoyment.) My favorite meals are “tiny assorted __,” in the tradition of tapas, mezze, pick-plates, bento, and the like, so turning some tins of trout & sardines into a seacuterie board dinner is exactly my jam. RTG is run by three people—three actual humans and none of them named Jeff Bezos—and their packaging is thoughtful, resourceful, and committed to being actually plastic-free and environmentally friendly. Their website is immensely user-friendly and worth reading, just to read interesting, amusing things. This isn’t an ad, but if you like things like this, maybe check them out.

• I have been reading a lot, some of which is for class prep (like the Henriad for Shakespeare and the new Norton Critical Edition of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando & Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein & a re-read of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition for Queer Lit) and some of which is for keeping me from doom-scrolling before bed (Andrej Sapkowski’s Witcher books), and some of which is because people are out here doing beautiful, beautiful things in their work and I am trying to remember that.

  Some recent highlights:

  The Dead & The Living & The Bridge by MC Hyland

  The Evening Hour by Carter Sickels

  Unlucky Mel by Aggeliki Pelekidis
  

• I warped my floor loom again, this time with linen, and my aim is a simple shirt. I’m weaving a simple twill, and the fabric will have vertical stripes of varying sizes, in a palette of peacock blue, charcoal, and ice gray. (For me, stripes on something I’m going to wear = really quite daring.)
  

• I finally finished the spinning project I started in the fall—the Roots & Froots Tour de Fleece fibers from Fossil Fibers—and now I have three skeins of a warm-toned gradient that honestly reminded me most of Trix cereal, which I mean in the cheeriest, most happy way. The yarn is chain-plied, and it’s a light fingering weight, which is essentially my default spinning practice. I can’t get enough of this Polwarth wool/silk blend; it glistens and it’s soft and spinning it is so, so pleasant. I’ve now spun at least six braids of this fiber in varying gradients. I have another batch—another TdF set—in a darker rainbow gradient to look forward to, and I can’t wait. …but first I’m going to spin three pounds of plain gray wool for a sweater. Pray for me.