Re-Vision
Hi Friends.
I don’t want to do that thing where someone who’s been out of touch explains their time away, even if these days, time feels different, more present and more invisible all at once, but of course it’s the same as it ever was, steady and inevitable, it’s just that we are all thinking about it so much more. We’ve changed; we’re changing. Hello, from where I am to where you are in that perpetual change.
Like many of you, I have been taking care of my family, living the best I can in what some days doesn’t exactly feel like life. I’ve rearranged the furniture; my desk is now in our bedroom rather than in the middle of our living room, which grants me a bit more peace and quiet to work. We got a new dog in June, and named her after the month. There are lots of photos of her on my instagram account, though I am spending less time there and more time in my head, or in books, or with various members of my family in the wooded park near our apartment. I’ve met lots of new neighbors during our get-the-dog-tired outings, and I’m grateful for that expansion of my universe, for a new reliable routine. I highly recommend watching dogs play as an interlude of joyful escape.
I also recommend doing a balloon drop in your living room on your children when an election victory goes the way you wanted it to. Even as your husband says balloon drops are for conventions and you say no, they’re for right now. Turns out that the $9.63 I spent at the dollar store on 30 blue balloons, a clear plastic tablecloth, and streamers was the best investment of the year. There was also cake and champagne and earlier that day, playing Ella Fitzgerald’s version of Ding Dong the Witch is Dead out the window into the neighborhood, whose cheers had alerted us to the Biden-Harris victory.
My husband and I have been re-watching Lost. I’ve devoted a fair amount of brain space to thinking again about traveling through time, opening hatches, watching for synchronicity. It’s been so all-consuming to run through a show we used to have to wait a whole week for (with commercials!) that I literally cannot recall anything else we have watched in this time.
I’ve been reading, of course, too. Some of my favorites from these months are Carolina De Robertis’s CANTORAS, Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s HEADS OF THE COLORED PEOPLE, Laura van den Berg’s I HOLD A WOLF BY THE EARS (I’ve developed a habit of reading a story collection and a novel at the same time, which sustains the pleasure of a collection; I highly recommend it), Julia Fine’s THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, out early next year, Vanessa Veselka’s THE GREAT OFFSHORE GROUNDS, and BELOVED, by Toni Morrison, a novel I mistakenly thought I’d read before and whose prose knocked me back page after page. During the Jewish high holidays I read and have held close Alan Lew’s THIS IS REAL AND YOU ARE COMPLETELY UNPREPARED, a book that can be read at any time of year but that felt especially relevant during a time of upheaval, for anyone of any (or no) faith.
Like many of you, I am very sick of cooking and very in love with Hrishikesh Hirway and Samin Nosrat’s podcast, Home Cooking. It makes me laugh really hard. I’ve been inspired by interviews with Vanessa Veselka and Brandi Carlile and Tana French.
Teaching Updates!
I’m writing again because I am also gearing up to teach again. I’d so hoped to meet students in a physical classroom, but as that isn’t in the cards anytime soon, I am going online and you can take a class with me wherever you are in the world. Two that are around the bend, with application deadlines:
-Revising the Short Story with Catapult. This is a rerun of a class I did in 2019 that I really enjoyed, a craft intensive that focuses on process. Revision is about seeing what is actually there and working with it, about believing that it takes small steps to make big change, and that we can do it. It seems an apt metaphor for right now and also on a craft level I will give you the tools to revise all your stories while walking you through a plan for one. The class runs January 12th-March 2nd but the deadline for applications is December 1st. I can say that there are a lot of applications rolling in so if you want in, throw in. Don’t hesitate.
-Advanced Fiction at 92Y. This one isn’t online yet, but I’m running my 4-week advanced workshop at the 92Y from February 11th-March 4th. This one is a more straight-up workshop for those of you already working on stories. Watch this page for the listing and have an application (a completed short story) at the ready.
Stay well. Stay lost. Stay re-visioning what you already think you know.
Danielle