The past few weeks I feel like I have this version of Kermit boinging around inside of me. Screaming, flailing, and a bit excited, but also, chaos. My sleep has been bad, my papers are everywhere, I’m losing the thread on dates, schedules, and timelines, and yes, I am likely dehydrated. Welcome to this month’s Talk Soon: Chaos Edition in which, instead of fighting the chaos that is currently taken hold of my brain, I walk right into it, and take you in with me. It’s a bit like opening a really full closet, except what’s about to fall on you are half-baked ideas and book recommendations and some bandages of various sorts and well, grief. Enter at your own peril.
I’m writing from my neighbor’s apartment two doors down from ours, where we’ve been staying for a little over a month while the floors and walls in our apartment are repaired post the water damage we had in late February. It has been so nice to be close to our place, to not disrupt our daily routines all that much, but it’s not home, and all of our stuff is crammed in between someone else’s stuff, and the whole of it has been disorienting. In part it’s that our apartments are nearly identical, except that this one retains a lot of the original details; it’s been a bit like stepping into a time machine here and there, to our apartment pre-renovations as our actual apartment gets more and more modern. I love apartment buildings for this reason, the variations on a theme. But I am eager to go home.
My desk looks like this. I hate it.
I’m having what a friend calls a “band-aid day” which is when you patch up all the little wounds you’ve been meaning to stop the bleeding on for a while in one fell swoop and then feel accomplished for taking care of things. I’m chatting with my cell phone carrier (these tasks are not very fun a lot of the time). I’m scanning in essays for my revision students. I’m putting away the boxes of literal Band-Aids from when I managed to give myself blisters the other day because I could not resist walking 35 blocks in really glorious weather but was not at all wearing the right shoes for it, or any socks. I haven’t been sleeping well—my scattered mind, a bed that isn’t mine—and I like to believe that in more grounded times I would not do something so stupid. But it’s chaos days, and in chaos days, I do, apparently. I’m thinking about how exactly I’m clean the construction dust off of everything this weekend so we can sleep in our own beds again. I’m doing a fuckton of laundry.
The Columbia graduation ceremonies are happening in succession two blocks from here, so all day long I’ve been hearing the graduation march on repeat, which creates its own sort of time warp. Of course I’m thinking about why these graduations have been moved up here, 100 blocks north of where they usually are, and about the steadfastness and clarity of many of the student protestors. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I think about the counterprotestors throwing lit firecrackers, amongst other dangerous objects, into the heart of the encampment at UCLA while the police did absolutely nothing to help (I won’t link to those videos, but they’re out there). I’ve been thinking a lot about my high school history teacher, Joel Doerfler, who passed away last year about this time, and who taught me how to think for myself, to trust my voice and intellect, and who I’d like to write about more someday, but am still, now, especially, awash in the grief of not having been able to tell him how much he formed vital parts of me. What I wouldn’t give to have a conversation with him right now.
I haven’t been working on my own fiction much, but I have been thinking about how to protect my time, the way I’m always telling others to protect theirs: by thinking ahead, being realistic, and laying down their boundaries out loud. I have a 9-5 gig in June, the sort of regular hours I have not kept since literally 2005 —will it kill me? stay tuned!—and then I’m doing it, I’m closing my books for July and August1, which is scary to even type. It’s hard to say no to paid work, but I am so far from where I imagined I’d be on the novel by now and that feeling is harder than anything else, and enough already with being stuck in that feeling. I’ve been thinking about how much easier it is to teach than it is to integrate the things I teach into my own work. To say to others, “Don’t worry about your sentences, which yes, you know how to write” and then, a day later, write a note to myself that a scene “reads like shit” when I’m not at the sentence-editing phase of my work. To counsel others that it’s about time sunk into the work and not the output and then despair over how a three page scene hasn’t been finished in two weeks. The gap between beliefs about process and practice and my lived process and practice (currently compounded by being in between spaces) is part of the reason why I do teach, to have to articulate those beliefs, to hear them out loud in my own voice.
I’ve read some great books lately, though. Katya Apekina’s impressive Mother Doll and then a re-read of Rachel Lyon’s The Fruit of the Dead (what are you waiting for, buy it already!), and then Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, which was intense and gothic and plucked from my neighbor’s very good book collection. These three books are all about mothering in very different ways, I’m realizing. Then I gobbled up Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot, about a boxing tournament for teen girls, which I loved for its brilliant use of form and its prose, which was itself a reflection of the form, punchy and well-timed. I just started Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, a book I have been meaning to read for years.
We bought a record player turntable2! I’m entering my frivolous pleasurable things era, I suppose, which, better late than never. First albums to land in our house, with contributions from all the family members: Fiona Apple’s Tidal, Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders, Haim’s Women in Music Pt. III, Taylor Swift’s Evermore, Alabama Shakes Sound & Color, and the new Maggie Rogers and Heard It In A Past Life, too.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
Though I will be teaching a class in July at Center for Fiction, and will have lots of fall offerings, including 1 or 2 spots for MFA application help. If you’re interested in any of that, you should subscribe to my class listings newsletter:
.Apparently this is what you call it if you’re cool? I’m working on it.
I just saw a big Kermit doll in someone's parked Slope car, all of him smushed up against the glass of the back window. He's everywhere. Cheering you on! XO