May Day, Mayday, M'aidez

Chicago friends! I’ll be reading as part of Tuesday Funk on Tuesday, May 7, at Hopleaf (with the luminous Ananda Lima, Carmen Aiken, Connor Coyne, and Gina Twardoz!), and I’d love to see you there! Doors open at 7 p.m. and the event starts at 7:30. Get all the details here.

Welcome to the first of May, a day of many significances. It’s International Workers’ Day, and though the United States celebrates Labor Day in September, it’s due to ongoing May 1 actions beginning in the second half of the 19th century that led to the establishment of the eight-hour work day as standard (as opposed to the twelve-hour work day or whatever your employer wished to assign to you).

The irony of typing the above is not lost on me as I come out of my fourth consecutive weekend-with-no-weekend-in-it, unless you count my typical Friday evening behavior, which is to pass out on the couch the minute I sit down. Is unconsciousness leisure? I don’t think it counts. It’s necessary, though.

May Day is also a celebration of seasonal change with expressions across multiple traditions: Beltane, Walpurgis’s Night, Floralia, Maiouma. Though we had a frost warning a handful of days ago, May Day is heralded as the dawn of summer, an early jump on the official “halfway between equinoxes” marker in June—at least across the latitudes comprising Europe. Since Pennsylvania shares the 40° parallel with communities in Portugal, Spain, and Italy, which is to say it lies even more southerly than Britain and Germany, where Beltane and Walpurgis’s Night are especially marked, it seems fair to at least hope in that direction. And despite conventional wisdom around here that says only fools plant anything before Mother’s Day, we’ve got one small gesture toward May Day:

But for the majority of my life, now, May 1 has been part and parcel of the end of the collegiate school year. This year, for my campus, May 1 is the third-to-last day of classes, ten days from Commencement. I cannot help but hearing mayday, mayday, mayday, that international call of distress.

In another universe when I started writing this installment of Loomings, I could write was about mayday under regular circumstances, whatever “regular” means anymore, if it means anything: Mayday as in exams and stress and the pinch of procrastination and revision and the anxieties of moving out or moving on, what will be kept and what will be left behind. What’s next. But nothing is “regular,” and it hasn’t been, as atrocities mount and genocide by overt action and genocide by famine continue in Gaza and Sudan, and some colleges are responding with force to their own students’ peaceful demonstrations.

Mayday derives from m’aidez (help me, in French), as a nod to the location of its development in 1923: the English airport at Croydon, where communications needed to be intelligible to French speakers. It is not simply a declaration of emergency but a cry for aid.

The call is coming from everywhere.

An occasional part of a mayday call via radio transmission involves the quieting of all other radio traffic. This makes reasonable sense, of course; when there is an emergency, extra noise—non-urgent matters—can both needlessly soak up attention needed elsewhere or garble the important communications. The “seelonce mayday” (the Anglicized spelling of French silence) lasts until “seelonce feenee” (silence fini, silence finished) and normal communications may be resumed.

In that other universe, I was thinking about the “seelonce mayday” of the semester’s end, wherein everything that is not necessary falls away. The laundry piles up, frozen pizza makes too many appearances on the dinner menu, I have to say no to the things I want most, like an invitation to a bike ride on Sunday, the first properly warm and sunny weekend day in what feels like forever. I haven’t had my bike outside since the autumn. I could imagine it, the green-gold glow of sunlight filtering through maple leaves, the soft music of the freehubs. I couldn’t make it happen: the duties I have to my students, the ones right in front of me, are what they are (many and multiplying) and important to me. Those students don’t deserve less because of circumstances well beyond their control.

So what do we do when the urgency comes from everywhere? What do we do when we can’t actually imagine the call of “seelonce feenee” (silence fini, silence finished, when normal communications may be resumed) coming because of the enormity of the emergency?

This is something I struggle with: when should I mute myself to make room for others’ voices? (And who am I to think that the world will notice if I am being deliberately quiet? When the platform is neither very large nor very high in the air, who even sees what’s on it? The feeling of shouting into the void is stronger than ever.)

I don’t have an answer beyond doing our best to hear the call—m’aidez—and answering in any way we can.

Sudan Relief Fund & Doctors without Borders

The Writing Life

In a week, Heading North will have been out for six months! (My Tuesday Funk reading lands on the actual six-month anniversary of the release date, on a Tuesday and everything.) In that time, I have had the good fortune to give readings at several beautiful bookstores, visit with students in person and online, have conversations with some of my best and most admired book-friends, complete interviews with the best interlocutors, have the best AWP I’ve ever had, be a guest on exciting podcasts, hold an event at my local public library, carouse with book clubs, meet new book-friends, and experience a trove of insightful reviews of my work that made me feel like the novel found exactly the readers I hoped to reach most. Everyone says that publishing a book won’t be like whatever you think it will be like. While that has been undeniably true, I’m proud of this novel that is as much about love and queer identity as it is about ice hockey.

(If you don’t have a copy yet, now’s a great time to get one! What else are you going to do during those hockey playoff intermissions?)

& if you want to help this little book—or any little book you love!—in the world, it’s always a kindness to tell a friend about it, request your local library get a copy for their collection, suggest it to your book club (& ask the author to Zoom in!), leave a review, add it to your online reading lists, or get a few copies to leave in the unsuspecting neighborhood Little Free Library.

Make(r)Space

I just got word at the beginning of this week that I won a small campus grant to create a fiber arts workshop—the Process & Production Studio—in an empty office in our department! The goal, to complement our small 1930s printing press, is to create art collaboratively: some current aims are a handmade book with hand-woven covers and handmade endpapers and hand-set type for the title pages and special sections; a tapestry diary, in the style of Tommye McClure Scanlin’s gorgeous tapestry diaries, created by many different hands using handspun weft and personal embellishments, &c. I’m so thrilled that this was one of the projects selected for some funding, and I really hope the students are excited as I am!

So over the summer, I’ll be looking for a spinning wheel, some supported spindles, a table loom or a smallish floor loom, a tapestry loom, and all the various accoutrements. For reasons of both budget and sustainability, my preference is for used equipment in good condition; that will allow us to stretch our modest resources further. (If you have any equipment or supplies you might like to donate, too, please reach out!)

& then at home:

There's a new project on my loom: my first assay with handspun warp. It’s actually a combination of three different spinning projects, which comes as something of a relief, as my penchant for simply spinning for the sake of spinning frequently leaves me with awkward amounts of yarn. The good news is that, unless I have a very specific aim in mind (which is, as I’ve just admitted, not very often), I usually end up spinning something that ends up at a fingering weight once it’s chain-plied, and most of the things I’ve spun fit into the cool end of the spectrum, so it’s relatively easy to find skeins that work together all right. So.

My loom is now dressed with three wool warp yarns in alternating colors: a variegated dark blue/green from HelloYarn, & an icy white/blue and a black with generous amounts of silver, gold, and blue accents, both from FossilFibers. This warp will be woven plain weave with a white weft speckled with the occasional bit of pale blue and buff. The weft yarn is a hand-me-down from one of my grandmothers, and though none of it has the ball bands, I’m sure it’s acrylic of some kind. That’s the only thing she uses beyond crochet cotton. Acrylic isn’t my favorite, but these skeins are a solid complement to the other yarns I’m using, and, most importantly, I already have it in the correct quantity for this project. This is the current thrust of everything I’m planning to make this summer: using what I have.

The project: the Autumn Blaze Shrug from Simple Woven Garments by Sara Goldenberg and Jane Patrick. I wasn’t actually planning to do this particular project—I’d been calculating a long warp for a bunch of tea towels so I could play with twills again—but then this book came in from interlibrary loan and I saw a project I could make quickly.

To be honest, much of the impetus came from the likely mistaken belief that I could weave this fast enough to take it with me to Italy in mid-May, where I’ll be teaching nonfiction to students from my campus for five weeks. I’ve got about ten inches done of two yards and no spare time to think of, so I’m not holding my breath. (I’m so excited to be going, but I was not prepared for the intensity of finishing up four classes while planning a new one and organizing my life to be out of the country for more than a month, which will be the longest I’ve ever been abroad.)

We’ll see how it goes.

Brief Annotations

 The Garden by Clare Beams

As in all of Clare Beams’ work, you’ll find a visceral unsettling at the heart of this one, wrought with stunning sentences. I just cannot recommend it highly enough.

“My Grandma’s Doilies are Not a Joke” by Elena Kanagy-Loux

As you might imagine, this one is important to me. On craft and the prejudice against home goods (like quilts and lace table-runners) in the arts.