De Nuevo

Good morning to you, and to the new year.

I don’t really do resolutions in a traditional sense, but I do love the cosmic pull toward new starts, and though I tend to organize my life by new school years moreso than by new calendar years, I am doing my best to Begin as You Mean to Go On. Rather than confining that to January 1 itself, which is a trick of a day, anyway, for those of us who stay up past midnight hopefully exactly once each year, I’m working on it all week. Beginning as I mean to go on includes working on my writing life in various ways, cooking good food, riding my bike, spinning and knitting and weaving, reading good books, and trying to remember my priorities.

Over on Instagram, the excellent Rebecca Ackermann was considering words for the new year. I threw daring into the pool. Though I’m generally rubbish at vision boards, manifesting, and the like, I throw the word daring at my own feet as a gauntlet. 2023 is the year my novel comes out. November is a long way away, but the process of publishing a book requires daring: after so long of the book living only in the space between my heart and the keyboard, known to a very few fond friends, it will come into the world.

It takes daring to let yourself be known. I don’t write autobiographical fiction—my own life has been most blessedly quite plotless—but to read the work is to read the writer in many ways nonetheless. All the choices I made, the details selected, the shape of the sentences on the page—that’s as intimate a knowing, I think, as I can imagine. It takes daring to seek out readings, reviews, blurbs, and the rest. (This is the part that scares me. This is why I lay the word as a challenge: I must pick it up or know myself to be a coward.)

What are you doing this year that scares you?

What I’m making: An uncharacteristically quick finished object!

This was knit from my own handspun, 1.5 Almond Joy batts by the absolutely always delightful Fossil Fibers. With the exception of my planned sweater spin, I almost never have any idea what I’m going to make with my handspun (the closest I get is deciding “lace or something thicker?”). So last week, when I was reorganizing, I pulled out various handspun yarns and went looking for a pattern to match one of them. A happy match, and I do love a gradient.

What I’m reading: One of the things I’m currently reading, Cyclettes by Tree Abraham, you’ll hear more about in a future piece for the Ploughshares blog, but on a somewhat related note, I just finished Mark Cavendish’s Tour de Force, his account of the 2021 season and his return to form after half a decade of struggle with ill health, overtraining, depression, and the particularly toxic whirlpool of those things feeding each other.

Confession: I have watched the 2021 Tour de France, in its entirety, at least four times now, with the commentary of two different broadcast teams. My emotional support television is Stage 1 (crashes notwithstanding), featuring Dries Devenyns’ little allons-y nod to World Champion Julian Alaphilippe1 to tee him up for the win, and Stage 4, where Mark Cavendish wins in Fougères and cannot stop weeping for joy. Stage 6, where the sprint train gets swamped. Stage 10, where the sprint train is perfect and he picks up and twirls the World Champion in gratitude. Stage 13, where he ties the record for most Tour de France stage wins.

So I know how this story goes, so to speak. But I read the book for the insider tidbits, for the accounts of what happens away from the cameras because I cannot get enough of this stuff. Cavendish is quick to point out where he feels he’s been wronged—especially when he finds himself subjected to greater scrutiny from the race commissaires—and he’s not above simply saying I don’t like that guy, but he is also mostly circumspect in separating out what story is his to tell. Over the course of 200 pages, in a book about a three-week race in which a team of eight riders and lots of assorted team staff are all living in each others’ pockets, I found this somewhat surprising.

I don’t know if this is an exercise in writerly judgment, editorial advice, or simply a product of ego. On the mountain stages, where he finished thirty minutes and more behind the victor, he sometimes doesn’t even mention who won. That side of the race isn’t part of his story; his story in the mountains is simply getting through. But even the various escapades of teammates are sketched only briefly and within the frame of their interactions with Cavendish; there is only one protagonist here, and that is reinforced in the voice. The whole book sounds exactly like Cav speaking—all his interview rhythms, favorite expletives, habitual turns of phrase. I remark on this because it’s so different from the vast majority of my reading. I was actually thinking about choosing the audiobook for this one (read by Cav himself), but I think the on-page experience, if one has listened to an interview or two, already does that work.

Reading this in context of what I already know has been very fun, and though I didn’t come to this book expecting much in the way of craft lessons, it is a crystal clear representation of voice. And the season it catalogs is a masterclass in daring.

What I’m writing: I submitted some short fiction for the first time in ages. I had almost forgotten the careful dance of specific formatting, the multiple submission managers’ quirks, &c.2 You have one more day if you’d like to submit to Kenyon Review’s “Luminous Gender Vessel,” which is being edited by the absolute dream team of Gabrielle Calvocoressi and Melissa Faliveno.

I am gearing up for Jami Attenberg’s #1000WordsofSummer (Mini Winter 2023 edition), Jan. 7-12, as a way of getting back into the other novel, too.