The Week Between

Christmas is a nice quiet holiday, but the Winter Solstice brings my dreams back to me and New Year's is my favorite Day (that isn't Valentine's Day or my birthday).

I'm intensely grateful for my singleness during late fall and early winter. My mind roams, and I go whole days without changing out of my pajamas. It's a mental and spiritual reboot before the fun of over-thinking what I'll write to myself at the New Year. Also the annual game of not remembering if I should read last year's letter before writing this year's letter, or am I practiced enough at this to know what it is that I actually enjoy reading without the prep time. I'm not quite in a place to know which of the previous letters I don't like reading. Probably it doesn't matter. I ought to read them all anyway. That's why they were written, after all.

(It should be noted that this game is actually far more enjoyable than the games of 2003-2008 :the Did I Even Write One Last Year and Where Are All The Other Letters Hiding, because part of the ritual of the New Year's Letters for several years was that I would write a letter in January, tuck it away somewhere and then hope that some time in November I would find it. Usually I did. But the game got old, so in 2010 I collected them all into a box. 2 years ago I put them in a scrapbook. 18 months ago I decorated all of the pages, so each letter gets its own frame. Games change.)

Seems to me that last year, I tried to outline the thing. Like. A Letter. To Myself. That I will not remember writing until I read it, and even then it's a toss up. I outlined. I found quotes from books, I think. Or did I write a story. Something that needed prep work. There was a draft. And I did, in fact, have anxiety dreams about it. Artists, whew.

This year I have a short list.

Therapy has me thinking again about what it is that I love about writing. So, that's on the list. Also train travel. There's something else. I can't remember what it is. I'll find it eventually.

Train travel. Wrote the beginning of a very short and sweet holiday ensemble romance that tinyletter decided to flag for abuse, so instead of finishing it, I sent it to my friend for her thoughts and will work on it in some other way. It takes place on a train. It makes me happy to imagine.

The week between the holidays is frequently a morass of bloat and leftovers and a house still reeling from days of madness and noise and people and music and the smells of family and history and tradition. I will be eating my holiday meals for another 2 days. PS: the chicken I roasted with lemon slices, olives, onions, garlic, and potatoes was ridiculously good, you're welcome. Also, thank you to my roommate for finding the original recipe because, yes.

I'm taking a break from the noisier bits of the internet for the week. The tradition of a considered and thoughtful letter for myself is important enough.

Please be thoughtful to yourselves. Find your healing silences or noises where you can.

xoxo

Happy Week Between

3) The Other Side of the Tiber

Wallis Wilde-Menozzi ran away to Rome while still in her twenties. She lived there for a while before running back. Many years later, she married an Italian man,settled in Italy, and was eventually encouraged to write about her experience of navigating a new city, new consciousness and new self. The result is this incredible book; a combination of ancient, recent and personal history that is poetic and pointed.

A lifelong obsession with the Tiber begins the book, which is sometimes worrying - there is only so much of Ahab that the world needs. But it never stays, this obsession. Her intense and emotional focus shifts almost casually between that river, Etruscans, a hundred year old man, teaching English, living in a community not of one's making or even really of one's choice and actively choosing to witness a new kind of Original Sin. She sees that every person, by no act or agency of their own, (particularly in the western world) contributes to a culture of oppression and abundance. She wonders again and again about how to live with and mitigate that. It is a question dropped almost casually into the flow of this tale. Its passing ripples far beyond what is physical.

Can you even with this cover? Drama!

I discovered that my love of travelogues went much deeper than I'd supposed when I found and dove in to this book. (the paperback cover is atrocious. FSG is great at content. Sometimes the covers, though, I mean guys...) Wilde-Menozzi's language is like cobblestones or a gravel road on a sunny day - solid and directed and far-reaching. She revels in her culture-shocks, particularly as so many of them helped to crack open the shell of marriage and class expectation that she'd been failing at growing in. While she is, as most good travel writers are, the Observer, she participates in the place and sees, some thirty-odd years later, how the path of her life has changed because of it.

There is a massive amount of privilege in published travel narratives - there isn't a currently viable way around it. That she acknowledges this and asks difficult questions of herself and the world in which she lives is part of what makes this book still relevant on my shelves after almost 5 years there. 

It's a bitch to handsell, though. There's nothing comfortable about it. Like, you don't curl up with this one on a Sunday at solo-brunch (The Old Ways), or on the couch (anything by Peter Mayle), or unexpectedly early in the morning at the coffee shop (Dead Ladies Project) or on Valentine's Day with tea and a croissant (The Living Mountain). This is a book for sandwiches in a park and train rides and terrible coffee and bad weather and sore feet and sitting too close to the front door. It needs to be read with water and good bread and the room to close your eyes and Go There from time to time.

I may have had some thoughts about today's articles Sept 14 2016

Publishers Association Issues Brexit Manifesto

The Anger and Joy of a Native American Poet in Brooklyn

The Uncomfortable Truth About Children's Books: Attempts to diversify lily-white kid lit have been, well, complicated.

Ava DuVernay's 'A Wrinkle in Time' Film Adaptation Has Found Its Lead: Storm Reid (are you kidding me with how completely adorable she is and her name is Storm like parenting done right!) Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling in talks to join Oprah Winfrey in A Wrinkle in Time - Okay, who even knows who else is going to be cast, but the part where Ava DuVernay wins is basically the theme of this paragraph. Because she is everything.

How NYC's First Puerto Rican Librarian Brought Spanish To The Shelves

In case anyone wondered: privilege is everywhere - Lionel Shriver’s Address on Cultural Appropriation Roils a Writers Festival - the absolute equanimity that it must require to address anyone about the ills of being respectful while wearing a sombrero (apparently as some kind of statement) is indicative of the depth of the problem. White people will do anything to prevent having to think before they speak. Or ever. Really. We're known for it.

What is Women’s Writing? A Discussion at the Emily Books Symposium

I was going to include another link to an article about a powerful white woman having a hissy fit for not being noticed enough, but I'm not going to. Somewhere in the world a white woman with power isn't being noticed enough. It's not new. It's not helpful. Stop it.