Appetite for Destruction
Hi Friends.
I’ve always known this newsletter would be irregular, but keeping the promise I made myself that I’d only write when I felt like it has made its appearance a mystery even to myself at times. It’s been one of those—beyond the general crap1 in the ether—upending years for me. I’ve chosen many of these upheavals, and they are only slightly more comfortable for that, but needless to say I’ve been thinking a lot about the cycles of endings and how we get there and move forward from them.
I’d meant to send this before the new year, but my husband got Covid despite all the precautions, and that has added to the wild ride that has been the end of 2021. He had one of those thank-you-vaccines milder cases and the remaining three of us are asymptomatic and well and everyone can be in the same room without masks again. But you’re getting this now and my family will be celebrating what we have deemed New New Year’s Eve this weekend because markers of time are arbitrary at best and I won’t let things like calendars rule me. Or will I? More on this below.
One of the major chosen upheavals in my life is that we are undergoing a massive renovation in our home, and living here while it happens. In some other life this newsletter would detail how to move one’s dining room/kitchen/entry foyer into the living room and still speak to your family, but I want to talk about demolition. It’s loud and messy and happened behind big plastic sheets while I listened gleefully from my desk upstairs (in our bedroom, because the temporary kitchen is where my desk usually is; it’s all topsy turvy). The kitchen that had been annoying us and giving up on itself for a near decade? Gone in a single day of demo work. Other parts took longer, but not long; everything was more or less down to the dust within a week. I said gleefully, and I meant it. We had lots of bumps before we started so once those hammers hit walls, we were ready for the change we had wanted really badly.
Precisely two months out from that first day of demo, there is dust everywhere. Demolition is messy work, but so is building, and we have months ahead of that, too (supply chains, but also the scope of the job). I’d never thought as much about the layers of a foundation as I have when I am watching my home be taken down and built back up again.
Every day when the workers leave for the day, I roll up the plastic zippers and admire their work. The crooked edges they level. The care they’ve placed tiles with. We’re a ways away from using the spaces as we have dreamed we will. I don’t love the mess but it’s a necessity. The floating particles, the holes for new electrical sockets, the layering of materials to level and secure. The slow speed at which it happens. Destruction, endings, can be nearly-instantarnoues. The speed of that moment can feel monumental. Freeing. But you always have to go somewhere after, and at a very different clip. That’s the harder part for me, in life and renovations and writing, even when I’ve chosen to destroy or rebuild something. Patience and the understanding of the build. In renovations, you have to know where the outlets go early. Luckily in writing it’s not so, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could build as solid a plan?
Reading, Thinking, Feeling
Some of the books I’ve held closest to me this year: Kat Chow’s Seeing Ghosts, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Makena Goodman’s The Shame, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum’s Likes, Nadia Terranova’s Farewell Ghosts. I typed that list randomly but am really into the fact that it was held together by parenthetical ghosts. Boo.
In the times when time has felt elusive (aka when my husband referenced “last year” about Thanksgiving, I replied “Wait, which last year?”), I found myself doing more end of year accounting and long-view planning than I usually do, in an effort to grasp something about who I’ve been this year and who I might be in the near future. I like to joke that my religion is office supplies, but there is something true and real about that, too, about the way I’ve used pens and rulers and clips and scissors to understand and mark the passing of time. I find a desk clean particularly centering.
I loved a lot about this profile of Pauline Boss—her work on ambiguous loss has been so clarifying to me the past few years, and particularly as I wrote about not selling my novel—but most of all the part where she talks about being a lifelong student. I want to be that in 2022 and beyond.
Gratitude for the only thing I published this year2, about not publishing my book, making it onto Literary Hub’s year-end editor’s selection list.
I watched Tick Tick Boom with my girls in one room while my husband, at the start of his illness, watched it in another. I’m not a musicals person generally (yeah, I said it), but I’m glad I watched this when I did, when I felt most waylaid by time and chaos and the difficulty of making art.
Where to Find Me
I’ve got a one-day process class up at Catapult for the end of January if you’ve ever wanted to know what all the parts of a writing life are, how much more there is than typing. There are two scholarship slots available for BIPOC writers.
Spots are open for coaching, manuscript consults, and MFA prep starting in February 2022. Get in touch via my website.
Literally dusting off my writing notebooks and making more work in 2022.
Stay well. Talk Soon.
Danielle
PS: You’ve likely noticed this newsletter is coming to you from somewhere new. Don’t fret; you don’t have to do a thing, I already brought you over this way. I’m definitely on this platform because of the footnotes, and because I can I do things like popping this button in so you can ask your friends to read this and maybe even subscribe.
Substack offers paid subscriptions, but I’m not ready for that just yet. This newsletter remains and will stay free. That said, if there is anything you’d pay an annual fee for: more newsletters, personalized book recommendations, my empty pen shells, short story discussions or zoom hangs, please let me know.
PPS: You can still reply to this email to send me a note (I think; I’m still learning this too!), or email me anytime at backtalklazarin@gmail.com
Crap is my middle schooler’s new favorite word. It’s wrong that I find it hilarious, but also maybe my finding it so will make her think it’s really uncool and stop using it?
Not for lack of trying! I will spare myself the counting but it was a mid double-digit number year for rejections for me on stories and the novel. Hoping for a better ratio in 2022.