In the Woods, In the Weeds, In a Cabin

Gratitude for a residency, looking forward to the year of Sinead, plus writing about inequality and goats and anxiety

The weird thing about writing is that you have to feel things and actually live through things and process things in order to write about them. (Or, I mean, you can just not but that doesn’t seem to work as well.)

I’m at the tail end of a two-week stay at a multi-disciplinary artists’ residence at an amazing place called Craigardan in the Adirondacks. The first week was cold and wet, and the second week has been sunnier, but it’s amazing how the two weeks have also had their own terrain and drama, how I went deep into my shell sometime around day 8, and how I had to feel through some stuff in order to write about it.

I came here to finish a draft of my forever-albatross project about inequality in Connecticut. I’m psyched about this latest version; it has evolved from being the “please-everyone include-everything behemoth narrative” into a series of stand-alone essays, each tied to an element of the natural world that still, together, tell a story about capitalism and inequality, which is much more fun than my previous drafts and which I can see publishing at a university press, or wherever. I’m calling it The Chasm: An Unnatural Field Guide. I did get through that draft, but in the process I pushed myself, was my own little task-master, and that gave me a great (terrible opportunity) to look at the voices in my own head.

And yikes. I mean: it’s always yikes, but without any distraction, and in a tiny cabin that was the only “inside” space we had (the kitchen doesn’t have any walls although thank god we have a fridge and a stove) it was sort of all laid bare. And because I was thinking of this precious two weeks of time as something to use as maximally as possible, I was ALSO doing research at night (this was my “recreational” reading) on the psychology of attachment and insecure attachment, which is the subject of my next project—and also goats, of course. Somehow. Like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup: Anxiety and Goats, two weird things that go better together.

So the combo of all this work and some solo hikes and writing and reading was a sort of soul fender bender around day 9, which even in narrative terms makes sense. Of course it was day 9. And I didn’t run down the mountain screaming, it was just kind of an internal crunch that required some taking apart of the pieces. I realized that when I am writing, I often sort of put all the feelings to the side to make the sentences, and then I have to feel them all. They all smashed together and I realized that if I’m gonna write about the roots of my anxiety, I have to also really feel about that.

I don’t think I’m particularly weird in being drawn to topics that reflect the challenges in my life; I believe that’s why a lot of creative people make art: to see stuff and work it out. The women here on the mountain have been talking a lot about that. It’s been so helpful and frankly amazing to be with Lu, Leena, Zora, Laura, and Shawndel.

In a big way this 2 weeks at Craigardan has been amazing: a chance to connect with a wonderful amazing crew of 5 other writers and artists and just be together and talk. And feel normal together: as in, my brain gets to feel normal in this environment, in its churning drive to make things and figure these things out. I have very rarely in my life had that feeling of being among other brains that do the same things mine does. Yes, in grad school, but never in a 24-7 environment. So this feels like something I could have used earlier in my life, but that I’m glad I got to experience at any point, this grounding in the fact that this, too, is a perfectly normal way to have a brain.

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In other big news that I announced on social media but not in this newsletter, Martha Bayne and I are co-editing a book of essays inspired by Sinead O’Connor called So Different Now: What Sinead Taught Us, which will hopefully come out next year from One Signal, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. I am so excited—and it feels so unreal, that an idea that started with a few sentences on Facebook is going to become a book. I think it’s the unreality of it that has delayed me from writing about it, but we’re just doing the next right thing to get it off the ground as the essays begin to come in. And they’re amazing. We get to work with amazing writers including Megan Stielstra, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Sharbari Ahmed, Gina Frangello, Brooke Champagne, Mieke Eerkens, Sarah Viren, Nalini Jones, and so so so many others. We will be doing launch events in multiple cities and will be putting something together for AWP in LA.

I can’t wait! (By which I mean that I will have my anticipatory dread and I will get through it and will have a massive stress over the calendar and the numbers and making sure I don’t make mistakes, then afterward I will be glad that it happened!)