Because it’s summer and it’s slow, and maybe because it just rained here for three days straight and all I want to do right now is go back to reading Made for Love, I present to you a humble inventory of the (mostly) literary-related matters I enjoyed or endured over the course of the last seven days:
Wednesday: Replied to an email from a farmer-by-day poet-by-night I’d met at the Chautauqua Institution to answer her questions about publishing (and to send this, which I think is handy for newcomers to the lit mag landscape). Fun facts about this delightful person: She leaves poems as voicemails for her friends. She uses her time working on the farm to think about poetry. And she recommended that I visit a used bookstore in a nearby tiny town. When I emerged from that bookstore on the last day of my trip, I ran into the farmer-poet on the sidewalk outside like it was fate. She was wearing overalls, and behind her was a stand selling Amish bakery, and everything was right in the world.
Thursday: Sacrificed a chunk of my morning writing time to go jogging instead. That night, I drank beer at a lakefront concert and watched a man whittling a design into a walking stick. He told someone he was known as the “stick man,” we could google it. I did. By the end of the day, my novel wasn’t much revised, but I had over 22,000 steps on my fitness tracker. Any feelings of smugness over that were later erased by some ankle pain, which I nursed by watching Glow on the couch while covered in cats.
Friday: Received a Google Alerts message calling my attention to an online opinion piece trashing the writing magazine in which I was a contributor. Said reviewer branded the liberal writers appearing in that magazine’s pages as hysterical, annoyingly diverse, fragile babies, etc. A most exciting find for Google Alerts!
Saturday: Participated in an email thread with my longtime writing buddies to share our writing/publishing anxieties and to set up a Skype appointment to exchange critiques and much-needed literary camaraderie. Also read the new issue of the same writing magazine the reviewer criticized above. Did not find anything “hysterical” in it, but what do I know?
Sunday: Spent hours lost in a revision spiral while working on several novel chapters I’d already revised countless times. Read a book about fortunetelling techniques for novel research purposes. Aside from giving said book the side-eye, I was a little tempted to fill a bowl with soot and oil to create my own endlessly reflective black surface. Or maybe I’ll carve YES and NO into some onions and stand back to see which sprouts first. Then I’ll have my answer.
Monday: Following an early dentist appointment, I celebrated my “beautiful teeth” (the hygienist’s words, not mine) by trapping myself inside to work on novel revisions for four hours. Also worked on an article outlining some “rules” for submitting to literary magazines only to promptly break one of those rules myself.
Tuesday: At work, researched the tragic death of one of our country’s great founding librarians. That night, attended the Brews and Prose five-year anniversary reading, where I accidentally ordered an 8.5% beer, saw many friendly and familiar faces, was entirely absorbed by both Nick White and Alissa Nutting’s readings, congratulated my former MFA classmate for taking over as host of the series, and then nearly left my sweater behind at the end of the night.
Bonus: On that last night, I dreamt I’d embarked on a mountain climbing expedition that entailed scaling a Seussian landscape—a series of sharp, narrow cliff ledges accessible only by impossibly tall, wobbly red ladders. “The danger here,” the trail guide told me, “is that there’s nothing to hold you back in case you fall. So don’t fall.”