Events
On Friday November 3, 2023 at 4:30pm EST, I’ll be reading and in conversation with the Ohio Center for the Book. This event is virtual, free, and open to the public. You can register to attend here.
When Retreat is your Resting
This update is late, I know, but look at the world. In my own small world: fragments have been tearing at me. The school nurse calls to report the child is sick again. He gets injured by a bully at school. Half a bottle of water is spilt on my laptop. I have to fly across the country only one day after … flying across the country, leaving the child behind.
When I get overwhelmed, I retreat. I’m not the kind of person to ask for help, to reach out when I feel down or buried by obligations. I’ve adapted, and possibly this not a good way to be, to do it all alone. But that’s been a big part of the single mom experience; we’re told the only one we can really count on is ourselves.
Sometimes this is bad. Obviously, I know it is. There are people in my life I can depend on for help, and many others who would want me to reach out when I don’t feel strong.
Wanting to is half the battle when it comes to making art.
But I am a burrower. I tuck my head down and do it. I ignore texts and then forget about them. I power through. I shut out the world in order to make work in it.
And in order to make my own world.
Really, I should be resting. That’s the conventional wisdom. That’s what people say. Only a couple weeks ago, I turned in line edits for my next novel, Dust, publishing in October 2024. That was a lot of work, but 2024 is a whole year away, and I don’t have a ton to do with the book right now. I’m waiting on blurbs. There’s no cover art to approve, no author photo yet to take, no interviews or readings to arrange. The machine of book publicity is not yet grinding.
But I am. I took a week. I cleaned my office and cut my hair. I watched a few movies. And that was enough time for me to be away from the world in my head.
I’ve gone back in. On Friday the 13th, I launched myself into a drafting a very new, very October novel, one involving owls and a ring and an old house with a name. And I think it’s a trilogy: my first-ever series. I’m not writing a ton on it, 500 words a day if I’m lucky.
I haven’t been lucky the past few days.
Still, I want to write it. I want to live there in my made-up, chilly northern town for a little longer. I want to retreat into it as a way to survive. And sometimes wanting to is half the battle when it comes to making art.
Art has many purposes—and no purpose at all.
The word that’s lobbed at me more than any other is prolific. How am I so prolific? How do I write so much? For my day job and at night? For fun? Sometimes the word is used—usually by old men with tenure track academic jobs—as an insult. That being prolific automatically means not good.
You can make a lot of art and have it be good. Look at Alice Hoffman, Octavia E. Butler, Angela Carter. Just revise, cut, and read a lot too. Also, this is my self-care. This is my night out. This my best friend and my love. This is my favorite TV show, my comfort food, my home: the worlds I invent in my head. This is my resting.
It’s always been this way, since I was a half-deaf child, surrounded by people who only spoke orally, babysat by an elderly farmer’s wife who used to just put me outside in a field to occupy myself. I occupied myself. And I continue to occupy myself just fine. Writing for me isn’t a punishment, unlike those old men. It’s actually fun, most of the time. It’s where I come alive.
I feel safe in my writing, and that’s OK. Art has many purposes—and no purpose at all. And that’s its beauty. It’s just there for you. Let it be there for you.