Reminding Myself

Pittsburgh-area readers, I’ll be giving a reading from Heading North with a Q&A at the Carrick branch of the Carnegie Library on Saturday, January 18 at 2 p.m.! Come hang! And, as always, you can get your own copy of Heading North in e-book format, or in print from Braddock Avenue Books and that other place! You could also request that your favorite local library add it to their collection, or ask your favorite local bookstore to stock it!

The turning over of the year is a rich time for making and doing. After the end-of-semester flurry of grading, I spent most of the second half of December cooking or baking something (my favorite of which was my near-annual bûche de Noël, this year inspired by the flavors of café de olla—chocolate cake with coffee-cinnamon cream and a thin layer of dulce de leche). I love making a bûche, or any manner of rolled pastry, really. I made a mango curd & meringue roulade for another holiday gathering. The particular charms of the rolled cake have to do with the delight of choices: what kind of cake, what kind of filling, what kind of finish? A dusting of icing sugar, strategically placed berries? Fondant or meringue mushrooms to bring the tweeness of the Yule log all together? (The answer is meringue. Meringue all day. This year I did fondant ones, thinking to save some time, and I spent something like an hour kneading together melted marshmallow and powdered sugar, trying to get the texture right, and they’re not nearly as enjoyable to eat, in the end, as the meringue ones, which can be turned into a kind of one-serving Eton mess, using all of the other leftover components from assembly or the stray pomegranate seeds and berries remaining from the cheese plate.)

These kinds of choices bring me great happiness. Planning a menu, imagining what might make one or another person eating this dish or that one happy, imagining my enjoyment of the assemblage together—it’s incredibly satisfying. It’s also like the best parts of research at the beginning of a writing project, the kind where you’re just tripping along, source to source, learning for learning’s sake to see what sparks and then following the little trails of fire, back-tracking because something becomes relevant all at once.

I am presently reading Daniel Mason’s North Woods and delighting in his choices. If you haven’t read it, do. It’s a novel organized along the life of a very old house in the woods of Massachusetts, and as the book carries forward in time, each new section tells the story of another entity tied to the house in some way. What this means is that the narrative structure is full of magnificent freedom: at any point, Mason is free to decide the house has changed hands and engage with new characters. Or, because of the nature of the story, he can dip backwards and pull old characters forward, or animate the voices of unexpected entities (such as a beetle). It feels like it was a joyful book to write. It feels like the author took pleasure in the making and the choosing: whom or what next? How will it taste with all the rest?

(I am deliberately not reading anything about North Woods and its composition at the moment, since I’m not yet finished with the book, and maybe when I am finished, I won’t read about it, either, because the thing is such a pleasure that I’m not sure I want to fix an answer to the process.)

Then, before most of the dishes were even done, it was time to do: all of the spring semester prep.

But in between stirring risotto and selecting readings and designing assignments for four new courses this semester¹ , I did some finishing of things. I sewed up the hems on some linen kitchen towels I finished weaving actual years ago. I wove a sequence of what I’m calling party napkins: napkins all woven in the same colors on the same warp, but each one in a different draft, so guests might have an easier time keeping track of their own napkin throughout the event. (I haven’t even cut these apart, let alone finished the edges on those yet, so forgive the untrimmed wefts.)

Since it’s nigh the middle of January, it’s clear I’ve missed the end-of-year recap time and the heady spring of resolutions. I’m always too flattened by the end of fall semester to do any of the year-long look-backs, and I’m more inclined toward the “fresh start” mentality at the start of my year, which is always August, thanks to now having basically all of the years of my life that I can remember run on the academic calendar. But I’m not immune to those pricklings in the universe, and so I’m starting the year with some resolution-adjacent things.

Keeping in touch with the work,

which is to say (mostly), keeping in touch with my novel manuscript. Writing, for me, is much like exercising, in that I find it enjoyable and steadying and I note, on a near daily basis, how much better I feel when I am doing it. But then when something interrupts that flow for two days or more, it is hell to start up again. So, especially for my writing, finding some way to touch the work every day, even if that’s only re-reading already written passages or chipping away at some other texts I marked to read as related in various ways or making two two notes about something I thought about. Even if I’m only picking a bit of lint from the book’s proverbial sweater or noting an eyelash on its cheek.

Remembering the world is not inside my phone,

which is a phrase I owe to Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s project, Forces of Attention, and a whole host of makers and artists I admire. How we spend our days, of course, Annie Dillard says, is how we spend our lives. So I’m in the constant process of trying to limit the amount of time I spend on the Anxiety Rectangle; me staring into the abyss doesn’t do anything about anything. Making myself reckon with the daily screen-time metric helps; using Forest to plant my silly little trees helps² .

Writing things down,

which is a peculiar thing to say as a writer. But, honestly, I don’t write many things down. I mean, I write, and I keep diligent to-do lists, and I have a plethora of places³ where I am jotting down ideas and scraps of things, but I don’t record much. It is not my general inclination to pause at the end of my writing time and reflect on what I did, and though I always mean to keep a good reading log and a commonplace book full of quotations I love, I seldom do.

But thanks to some compelling rationale from Julia Skinner and inspiration from Roland Allen’s endlessly fascinating The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, I’m trying to at least take three minutes each morning after my writing time to say something: how it went, what I’m thinking about next time, things I intend. This is part of the keeping in touch with the work, too. Even if I don’t add any words to the actual novel file, I have a place to think about it. I have a way to show myself that I did, in fact, keep in touch, which is also important, because I am fantastic at showing grace to and having patience with just about everyone except myself.

None of these resolution-adjacent items are new or even particularly fresh. I’ve hoped toward all of them before, and sometime after the spring semester is over, I will state them again, maybe here or maybe just to myself. Nothing about it is groundbreaking; I just find that I have to keep reminding myself of the truth of them from time to time.

What are you reminding yourself of as we move into 2025?

Put the annual Conversations & Connections Conference on your calendar for Saturday, April 12, at American University! The excellent folks of Barrelhouse magazine have crafted another wonderful day of craft talks, panels, and camaraderie. I’ll be contributing a workshop—Containing Multitudes: Working with Large Casts—that is applicable to writing projects in any genre, alongside workshops from the fabulous Avitus B. Carle, Hannah Grieco, and others!

1  When I said I loved making choices, I didn’t say my choices were smart. I’m excited about all four of these new courses, and the independent study I’m also teaching, which is why I did this to myself, but check back with me in mid-March to see how I’m feeling about all of this.

2  If I accidentally kill a tree in Forest by engaging with one of the blocked apps, I feel actually bad. Jeff Winger is speaking directly to me.

3  Too many places. Too many different notebooks. But if I have to go get a different notebook than the one that’s at my elbow, I just won’t. So. There’s scraps and whatever everywhere.