Writing News and Updates
 Am I still doing book posts in 2026? It looks like I am. It's a habit at this point, and I suppose my version of a book journal, which is something I've never been able to keep (on paper, in an actual journal) for more than a day or so, despite being an inveterate documentarian of every other aspect of my life.
My January reads (meaning books I completed in January--there are several floating around that I've been reading but didn't finish or have been dabbling in now and then and might never finish) are all fiction, which is a kind of rare occurrence for me, and the stack seems a little smaller than usual. We were in Puerto Rico for the first nine days of the month, and while I normally put a fair amount of time into researching and selecting books to complement a trip, with the holidays coming right before our trip and all that entails, I didn't have the time. So two days before we left, I searched "books that take place in Puerto Rico" online and, armed with two or three of the lists that popped up, headed to the nearby big box bookstore and combed the shelves for the authors listed. I found these three, making this is less of a definitive selection of books to read while on vacation in PR, than a "what the Augusta Maine Barnes & Noble happened to have in stock" selection. Nevertheless, I was pretty happy with the results. First up, I read Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzales, picking it first, I'm not gonna lie, because of the colorful cover. This is a contemporary book (taking place around the time of Hurricane Maria), and in fact only a small portion of it takes place in Puerto Rico--most of the action is in Brooklyn--but it gives a really interesting portrayal of the Puerto Rican diaspora, gentrification in New York, and some of the modern politics and recent history around the question of statehood, US exploitation of the island, etc. It made me realize that our guidebook glossed over these issues to a pretty significant extent. It's also a really intriguing story of family dynamics, political intrigue, and finding one's purpose in life. And also a sweet love story. I really enjoyed it. Going much further back in the past, The Taste of Sugar by Marisel Vera begins around the time of the Spanish-American War, right after Puerto Rico gained liberation from Spain and just as it was taken over by the US, going from one cruel and exploitative/extractive master to another. The story centers around Valentina, a young woman from Ponce who marries a coffee farmer and moves to the hills. The economic system forced on the small-time coffee planters makes their life a marginal one, and then a hurricane destroys what little they have left. Valentina and her husband and children decide to travel to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations, amid promises of prosperity which of course are a pack of lies. It's a devastating narrative and indictment of horrific, racist, classist, violent US policies that way predate our current time. Also, it's an inspiring story of Valentina growing from a spoiled city girl to a resourceful farmer's wife and mother to a bit of a revolutionary. Finally, The Storyteller's Death by Ann Davila Cardinal is a coming of age story of a girl from New Jersey who spends the summers in Puerto Rico with her mother's family, feeling like she doesn't fit in in either place. The book follows her from childhood through her teenage years, at which point, after her grandmother's death, she begins to witness, and experience, some of the stories she used to hear as a young child, only they play out in a much more disturbing fashion than what she was told. Over time, she begins to unravel a tragic story that affected her beloved great aunt's happiness and her great-grandfather's life. The book takes place in the 1970s and 80s and also touches on 20th century Puerto Rican political and social issues, including the question of statehood or independence and intra-island racism and classism. After our return, I picked up a handful of Paul Doiron's Mike Bowditch, renegade game warden, mysteries (Knife Creek, Stay Hidden, and one more that I didn't finish until this month) and plowed through them, enjoying the escapism from the horrors of January 2026 in the USofA. There's nothing like a page-turner to keep you from picking up your phone every five minutes to check and see if a certain someone has popped his clogs yet.
0 Comments
 One of the most fraught decision to make when traveling (other than where to go and how to get there and where to stay and what to do when you're there and, of course, how to pay for it all) is what to bring for journaling supplies. (I wrote about this some in my Quebec City Travel Journal post.) For our trip to Puerto Rico earlier this month, I opted to go with a Sillman & Birn Zeta Series 5.5 x 8.5 landscape journal. The paper was the perfect balance of heavy enough to take a little water but not so thick and toothy that I didn't want to write on it. At 26 sheets (52 pages), it was the perfect length for a 10-day trip (~5 pages/day plus a couple bonus pages).  I'd been inspired by this series of sketches (above) that I saw at the Farnsworth Museum in the fall, and I wanted to try something similar in my travel journal. Unfortunately, I neglected to take a picture of the interpretive sign, so I don't know who the artist is (it was part of the "Joan Jonas: An Island Departure with Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson" exhibition, so probably--maybe--Joan Jonas?) or what the medium was. It looks like a combination of colored pencil (or possibly pastel) and watercolor, possibly even watercolor pencil. I played around with watercolor pencils (which I already owned), and was able to create a similar effect, but the colors weren't as vibrant as I wanted, so I bought myself a set of Derwent Inktense Pencils and brought those, along with a water brush, a pencil, a few pens, a pencil sharpener (used once or twice but you'd miss it if you didn't have it), and my Ivy photo sticker printer, plus a few other items I never used (ruler, watercolor set, washi tape). The pencils take up a lot more space than a tiny watercolor kit, but are so much more manageable and dry much faster. Before we left on the trip, I put a map of our destination on the first page of the journal, as I always do, but this time did it in the style of (possibly?) Joan Jonas. I love this loose, scribbly way of drawing. It's so freeing, and I employed it on later pages, as you will see. On our return, I added a photo sticker of myself in front of a mural at one of our guest houses and some pressed flowers, including a big, beautiful bunch of bougainvillea.  I'm working on striking a better balance between text and images. Of course my journals lean more heavily toward words, because I'm a writer, but I'm pretty happy with where I've landed ratio-wise with this one. An interesting thing I've discovered, however, is that at the same time that I've tried to make my travel journals more visually appealing, what I write in them becomes less personal, because, I suppose, I envision wanting to share my sketches with others. Not that I imagine anyone would sit down and try to decipher my handwriting (or even care what I wrote about being irritated with one of my family members, as a totally random example). Most of this journaling took place in the evenings, after we returned to our apartment or guest house post-dinner. The boys would play cards and I would draw and write, which worked out perfectly, because only four can play cribbage, and by the end of the day I was tired of human interaction. I found it hard to draw on-site from life, because we were so often on the move, walking or hiking or snorkeling, so as a consequence, most of my drawings are from photographs. But I did manage a couple en plein air sketches:   In conclusion: I loved the Stillman & Birn sketchbook and will use these again. I loved using the Inktense pencils, sometimes in combination with pen, sometimes alone, and especially with this loose, scribbly style of drawing. I want to draw more from real life when I travel (I might need to go on a sketching holiday to make that happen). And I want to write more interestingly, if I don't feel I can write more personally.
 December's reading list is all over the map--with no coherent theme or throughline (is there ever in my reading lists? No, but this one seems extra weird to me. How about you?
Poetry I've really gotten out of the habit of reading poetry lately, but I was in the local anarchist bookstore during December's art walk (yes, there really is such a shop in Gardiner, Maine, of all places, and they also sell yummy bread) and I saw the latest poetry collection by an acquaintance of mine: Samaa Abdurraqib's Towards a Retreat. I snapped it up, because while I'd interacted with Samaa in other settings (mostly naturalist-based), I hadn't yet read any of her work. I was not disappointed! It's a beautiful collection. I especially enjoyed the "Upta Camp" series. Fiction I picked up Jessica Elicott's latest in her WWII lady constable series, Murder on the Home Front, at Maine's crime writing conference back in September. I always enjoy Elicott's work, and this one was both entertaining and interesting in its peek into life in a coastal town during the war. My sister sent me The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year a while back, and I saved it for Christmas season. It's really a romcom with some crime novel elements (a locked room mystery and a stranded in a country house trope), but it was a rollicking good read, and I think it did both genres proud! Nonfiction Here's where my list starts to get kookie! In the service of reading down my TBR pile, I read Mama's Girl by Veronica Chambers, which a friend sent to me several years ago. It's a memoir of a young Black woman who grew up in New York City with a single mom and absent/angry dad. What it's really about is navigating and repairing a fraught and difficult mother-daughter relationship. I really enjoyed it, and as my friend noted, it was a quick read! Also from the tall TBR stack: All Souls by Michael Patrick Macdonald, which is the harrowing account of growing up in the projects in South Boston in the 70s and 80s, when Whitey Bulger's gangs controlled everything. You know from the beginning of the book that several of Macdonald's siblings are going to die over the course of the narrative, so it's just a matter of biting your nails as you read and asking, Why doesn't somebody do something? Still in the family stories department, but in a completely different vein, I picked up two David Sedaris books I found at a used bookstore (probably because I needed a few laughs after reading All Souls, and living in 2025 America): Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls. These are both fairly old, and I'm sure I've read at least one of them before, but they're good for a giggle if you need to lighten the mood these days (who doesn't?). Finally, I read Deep Things out of Darkness: The History of Natural History by John G.T. Anderson. John was my biology professor in college (Bio I and II as well as Conservation Biology). I was expecting the book to be heavy going--not because John is dull, but because it's sold (and priced!) as a textbook. However it's every bit as charming and engaging as John's real life lectures. Even though he refers to his personal life rarely in the book (noting places he's visited or lived, for example), his personality and especially his enthusiasm shines through on every page. I love how he made it into a conversation among the various naturalists profiled--noting whether and how they knew each other (and liked each other) or might have read their predecessors' work. It's unfortunate that it wasn't marketed (and priced!) as a trade book, because I'm certain armchair naturalists and historians would find it as delightful as I did. Since 2013 I've taken a moment every December to look back over the previous year and, instead of lamenting all I did not accomplish, enumerating what I did, primarily in the writing department, but also in other areas of my life. This year I felt like I spent a lot of time spinning my wheels. Let's see how it actually shook out!  Writing In 2025, my creativity group went through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, over the course of 12 months rather than the prescribed 12 weeks. Part of this program is to write "morning pages"--three pages written long hand every morning. Although I missed a fair number of days, and occasionally did not fill three whole pages, this practice resulted in my filling up six Decomposition Books (by contrast, in 2024 I filled four of the same notebooks), plus two small travel journals. Also, in an effort to be less precious about writing tools, I stopped buying refills for my favorite jell pen and instead tried to use up some of the several million ball-point pens cluttering up the house. The good news is that I used up a lot of them. The bad news is that my husband replaced them with ones brought home from work at least once a week. Whether any of this morning "brain dump" writing did me any good is still an open question. I did not have any major epiphanies, but I do often mine my old brain dumpings for essay material, so you never know... Aside from journal pages, I wrote:
 Travel & Adventure
Trips taken in 2025:
I recently read the advice to "local like a traveler" (an inverse of the "travel as a local" philosophy), and this is something I want to intentionally put into practice, although I think I did a pretty good job making the most of local cultural opportunities and attractions, in addition to taking a few trips. I didn't set out to visit two museums (or museum-like places) a month, like I did in 2024, but I still managed to visit 21 museums, some of them more than once, which averages out to about two a month:
I also saw four plays and a ballet at local theaters. I went on a few local hikes (and did one volunteer trail maintenance day on the trail nearest me) and paddled a few nearby ponds. Arts & Crafts
Overall, some things I want to keep doing--traveling, making art, visiting museums--and some things I want to concentrate on doing a lot more of--writing, submitting (and publishing), hiking, kayaking--in 2026. NATIONAL DES BEAUX-ARTS DU QUÉBEC  I started last month by reading the last book* in Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody series, The Tomb of the Golden Bird. After that delightful romp through Egyptology, I turned my attention to attacking my TBR pile, which had once again grown out of hand, starting with several books I'd begun reading over recent months but had set aside for various reasons (mainly because my attention had been diverted by rereading Peters).
When I saw a series of capers by Peter Mayle at a used book sale, I was reminded of the summer before I went to college, when my best friend's mother loaned me Mayle's A Year in Provence. Perhaps she thought it would make me more worldly, or inspire me to move to France, but it did neither, since I never cracked the cover and returned it to her unread, but much battered from riding around in my tote bag all summer. I do love a good caper, however, so I gave the first in the series, The Vintage Caper, a go. Now, the term caper refers to the way the action in these stories (which often center around a heist) resembles a goat scampering around with no apparent purpose or direction. I'd say the action in this book was a little less goat-like and more like a languorous house cat, lying in the sun and talking about wine and food and the difference between Marseilles and Paris, a lot. I started reading Strangers on the Train by Patricia Highsmith a year or so ago, after I picked up a book of hers on the craft of writing suspense. I figured I should be familiar with her writing before I take her advice. She does suspense very well. So well that I had to set the book aside for a year to calm my nerves. It was just too stressful waiting for what you inevitably know will happen (that the protagonist will be driven to commit a murder). It's a brilliantly written book (although to be honest I'm not sure I'd have handled the ending the way she did), but I don't think I want that level of anxiety from the books I read. I'm not sure why I picked up Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha from the used bookstore a couple of years ago. It's an older book---1993 Booker Prize winner--about a 10-year-old boy growing up in an Irish village in the 1960s, written from the boy's perspective in an engaging, nonlinear fashion. The cover says something about it being a comic novel, and while many of the incidents, and the way the child sees the world, are humorous, it is ultimately really sad. For Father's Day, I sent my dad The Book of Flaco by David Gessner, about the Eurasian Eagle Owl that escaped the zoo in Central Park and lived "wild" in New York City for a year, and he sent it back to me after he read it. It's an interesting meditation on freedom and wildness, versus captivity and peril, as well as human interactions with birds in general and this bird in particular, and each other. Interestingly, Gessner never saw the owl in person, but writes the whole book from the perspective of after (spoiler alert) Flaco's death, relying on interviews with the most involved humans on his beat. Laura Jackson was an editor at Literary Mama for part of the time I was there also, and she and I were in a remote nature writing critique group for a couple of years. I always enjoyed her wry humor and enthusiasm for the less-loved elements of nature (I recall an endearing essay about earwigs). So I was thrilled when her first book, Deep and Wild: On Mountains, Opossums, and Finding Your Way in West Virginia, came out earlier this year. Whether you've spent time in WV (I think I nipped through a corner of it on a road trip between Georgia and Western Pennsylvania) or you only know the state from less-than-flattering television and movie portrayals, this book will open your eyes to the land's beauty and richness and make you want to pack up the car, buy some dramamine, and hit the country roads. It will also make you laugh. And we need a lot of that these days. Finally, my sister passed on her copy of Blood, Sweat, Tears, a collection of women's writing on the outdoors (mainly hiking and trail running). There were some really lovely and moving pieces of writing here, and also several that made me worry about women today---there seems to be a drive among a lot of them to punish themselves through grueling outdoor pursuits, not just pushing personal limits and challenging oneself, but depriving one's own body of food and water while causing injury. It seems almost like another variation on diets, eating disorders, plastic surgery, and other ways women contort and harm themselves in order to conform to impossible standards and/or to take up less space. It makes my heart hurt to read about.  In October, I continued my avoidance of reality reading spree and finished *most* of the rest of the Amelia Peabody series by Elizabeth Peters, except for the very last book (in chronological order; stay tuned) and the one posthumously finished and published book, which I'd found disappointing when I first read it, and real life is disappointing enough, I don't need to read a disappointing book. (They might not be in the correct chronological order in the stack, but rest assured they were read in the proper order.) Interestingly, reading books that I know so well I was even more compelled to get to the resolution of the various plot points than I would be on a cold read--knowing what was coming didn't tune me out; it made me more invested.
I also read/finished a handful of nonfiction titles: More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, edited by Jared Champion. I have an essay in this collection, along with 10 other writers. It was interesting to read about other people's approaches to and experiences on the trail. I especially enjoyed Champion's piece, "Backpacking, Ideally" and "Wild Geese" by Katie Jackson. As well as my own, "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail," natch. Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists by Marcia Myers Bonta is a collection of mini biographies of 25 women naturalists from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which I've owned a long time but had only ready as far as the introduction. It's a fascination view into the challenges and the triumphs of women finding their way and making their mark in a field dominated by men. Deranged: Finding a Sense of Place in the Landscape and in the Lifespan, by Jill Sisson Quinn, is a collection of braided essays exploring her childhood landscape of Maryland, her home as an adult in Wisconsin, and what it means to belong to a place.  Tomorrow evening (November 18, 2025) I'll be a guest on the YouTube channel Outside Comfort Zone, talking with Jared Champion about the book More than Hope: Lessons from the Colorado Trail, which Jared compiled and edited and in which my essay "Eight Kinds of Joy on the Colorado Trail" appears. We'll also chat about writing, art, and adventures. If you want to join us, you can tune in here at 7:30 p.m. eastern time. Hope to see you there!
I don't remember how I stumbled on Amy Stewart's newsletter, It's Good to Be Here. I've been a fan of her Miss Kopp lady detective novels for years, and have enjoyed many of her countless other books about plants, trees, and, forthcoming, birds. So when I did come across her newsletter, I was intrigued. And when I discovered that it was mostly about sketching, with a lot of emphasis on travel sketching, I was sold. A prolific writer of historical crime(ish) novels and books about nature, plus an inveterate traveler and artist? Yes please. (It's like she's living my dream life--or as she might put it, wrote my dream job description. Her posts include a lot of thoughts on creativity, introduction to other artists' work, and a ton of tutorials on various aspects of painting and sketching, which I enjoy a lot, because they're short and down-to-earth, and she doesn't present only "perfect" works of art--she is happy to share videos of art attempts that don't go exactly as planned, and she has the perfect attitude when that happens: oh well. One of the perks of being a subscriber is that she will occasionally do a painting (and painting tutorial) from a photo sent in by a reader. I recently sent her this photo that I took from the wall of Dubrovnik on our last day in Croatia two years ago:  Here is the painting she did from the photo:  I love how she used red ink plus a very limited color palette. It really conveys the depth of the endless red roofs of the city with the Adriatic Sea in the distance, plus the energy of this ancient city. Her tutorial is here, and here's my attempt at the same:  I used a maroon Micron 0.5 pen, rather than a fountain pen, so I didn't quite get the variation in line, but I think it worked well enough, and I really love how the color is softer and earthier than black ink. I would never have thought of using purple for shadows, and it was liberating for me to sketch in the buildings in a slap-dash fashion, rather than using pencil and neat, straight lines (what in real life is neat and straight anyway? Certainly not a Medieval city!). Here is the painting I did of a similar view (from a slightly different perspective) in my travel journal:  This was also done from a photo, after the fact (I gave up on drawing/painting onsite after the first couple days of our trip). This image was done in all watercolor over pencil--no ink--with a wet-in-wet technique. I like it fine, but it doesn't have the energy the other one has, the texture of the tile roofs is totally lost, and it took much longer to paint (wet-in-wet takes forever to dry!), so it would be impossible to do in real life. I'm excited to try some on-site sketching using a similar technique, with red ink and a few quick swipes of color.
 Okay, well, this book stack is a little embarrassing. That's 12 books in one month--all but one a re-(re-re-re-)read. Let me tell you how it happened:
Fiction When I got home from my week-long writing retreat on September 1, I started reading Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first Amelia Peabody mystery by Elizabeth Peters. This was supposed to be a research read. During the retreat, I'd decided to go forward with writing a historical mystery novel that I'd begun toying several years ago and which I'd set aside due to the pandemic shutdown making research a challenge. My book will take place in a similar time period to Crocodile (although in a very different place), and I thought, since I'm so very familiar with the story, I could concentrate on the mechanics, reverse-engineering the novel. Haha, joke's on me. Instead of deconstructing the book, I delved in, as delighted with every twist and turn as if I'd never read it (several times) before. And when I closed the last page, I couldn't stop, and picked up the next book and the next and the next. I won't list them here, but I read the first 11 books, from Crocodile through Guardian of the Horizon. And, as you might have guessed, I've kept going this month. Why fight it? Perhaps, on a subliminal level, I'm learning a thing or two about plotting and character and dialogue and all the other elements of putting together a book. But most of all, I'm having a grand time. As for how and when do I read so much: Normally I only read fiction at bedtime, but I've made an exception and read these books while I'm eating lunch and breakfast, as well as during any lull I might experience at the end of the day, either before I embark on making dinner or after I've made it and am waiting for C to get home from work. I also probably stay up reading a teensy bit later than I usually do, especially if my current read is less exciting. (Something about knowing how a book will end makes me want to get to that end even faster than when I'm trying to figure out what will happen.) One good thing is that reading has largely taken the time previously occupied by doomscrolling, which means I'm in a happier frame of mind. Nonficiton I did manage to squeeze one nonfiction book in among the tombs and pyramids: We Are Animals, by Jennifer Case, a collection of essays about pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood in modern America. Case is unflinchingly honest about her feelings about her second pregnancy (i.e., not happy), and her personal experiences are fleshed out with thorough research about our country's incredibly horrid, misogynistic, and racist birth industry. It's a timely book, when women are losing their access to choice around conception and birth, and it's engagingly written. In last month's newsletter, I wrote about my ambitions to both travel more and document those travels more regularly and skillfully. I've kept travel journals for many years: First row: Ireland 2013; Colorado road trip 2015; Colorado Trail 2016. Second row: Mexico 2022; Slovenia & Croatia 2023; Prince Edward Island 2024. Some notes about these journals: All in the top row are in Moleskine Cahier blank books. These are thin enough that I can usually fill them up in a week or ten days, and they are light and small enough to be portable while big enough to not feel cramped. But the thin paper is not great for watercolor. The first one on the next row is Field Sketchbook, with heavier paper, smaller in size but with a lot more pages (and a ribbon bookmark and elastic closure, which I love!). The middle one is a landscape oriented watercolor sketchbook whose brand I can't recall. Great for watercolors, but not great for writing (partly because I didn't want to "waste" watercolor paper with words). I couldn't keep up with painting while on this trip, which was jam-packed, so I ended up writing daily in a Moleskine Cahier and then I did watercolors from photos after we returned and summarized my notes from each day into a single page. It took two years. The third is a handmade blank booklet, about half the size of a Cahier, which I bought at a farmer's market in Charlottetown maybe the second day of our trip. My mode of travel journaling is always to write a lot and put in sketches and ephemera in varying amounts. I really do love my past travel journals, especially seeing them laid out together like this. But I also want to up my game--more and better illustrations, more on-the-spot sketching (rather than after-the-fact), neatly lettered headings (since neat handwriting is probably too much to hope for at this point). In preparation for a trip to Quebec City in August, I watched several online videos on travel journaling and urban sketching from Amy Stewart's newsletter It's Good to Be Here and The Piegeon Letters. I spent quite a lot of time looking for the right journal and assembling my kit.  I ended up with a very small (about 4.5 x 7 inch) book by Clairefontaine that has about 40 pages (of thin paper). I also picked up a pack of Tombow dual brush pens--and then a second pack, because I realized the first one didn't have a blue--as well as an Ivy photo printer (it makes the cutest little stickers of phone photos!). In addition, I brought many pens, two sets of colored pencils, a ruler, a glue stick, washi tape, a set of Vivia Colrosheets watercolors and water brush, two binder clips, a pencil sharpener, a kneaded eraser, two pencils, a white gel pen, and an envelope for ephemera. Plus a small shoulder bag for toting *some* of the supplies with me when we were out and about. I brought *way* more stuff than I needed, and most of it stayed in the hotel room. The first photo shows roughly what I brought with me each day (minus the Ivy and the glue stick--those stayed back at the hotel), and the second photo shows what I brought in my backpack on our last day when we visited Montmorancy Falls. I still did a lot of writing (that's not gonna change), and did most of my journaling in the evening when we returned to the hotel room. (It was hot as blazes the whole time we were there, so we usually declared defeat and retreated to cold showers and A/C by 6:30 p.m. This gave me plenty of time to document the day's events while C watched TV. Only once did we head back out into the inferno for dinner.) I did manage to do *some* on-the-spot sketching: the street lights and wine glass in the second row (photos 1 and 3); the St. Laurence River from the quay on Île d'Orleans (third row, third picture), a spot in a formal garden where we stopped to rest and pretend the shade offered some respite (fourth row, middle picture), and Montmorancy Falls, which I sketched while we waited in line for a gondola ride to the top (sixth row, middle picture). New things I tried:
|
Archives
December 2025
Categories
All
Copyright © 2017
Andrea E. Lani. All rights reserved. |
RSS Feed