Writing News and Updates
 December seems so long ago, already, but here's what I read last month.
Nonfiction: I finished The Comfort of Crows by Margaret Renkl, which I'd started in December 2023, reading one essay per week over the course of a year (this is how the book is organized--seasonally). The essays are lovely contemplations of the natural world around Renkl's home in Nashville and about the larger issues facing that world--climate change, habitat loss, pesticides, etc. It's a soothing, sad, and hopeful book all at once, and beautifully illustrated with her brother's collages. As my family can attest, I've been obsessed with cults lately, an obsession that began with listening to Amanda Montell's podcast Sounds Like a Cult (which mostly pokes fun at the cultish aspects of everyday elements of pop culture, but sometimes delves into more sinister cult land) and was soon followed by regular watching of docuseries about cults (have you watched The Vow yet?). So of course I had to read Montell's book, which is an engaging, accessible, and fascinating analysis of the way language is used by cult leaders to create in-groups, coerce members, and stifle questioning and dissent (a great phrase I learned is "thought-terminating cliche." I wish I had this term in my lexicon back when I worked in the 9-5 world). Fiction I recently picked up a copy of Albert Camus's The Stranger, because I remembered it having a big impact on me when I read it in high school, but I couldn't remember why (all I remembered about it, in fact, was a sense of blinding, hot sun on a Tunisian beach). Reading it again now, I still don't know why it seemed so life changing at the time. It is beautifully written (although this is a different translation than the book I read 30-odd years ago)--in simple, spare language that nevertheless evokes vivid images and carries the reader through pages where, other than the one significant event of the story, not much happens. I think perhaps it made an in impression because it was so unlike anything I'd ever read before, and because the narrator was so direct and unapologetic in his disbelief in god, which I might have found a little shocking then, a year or two into recovery from a childhood in Catholicism. I don't know if I should say I enjoyed reading it--because it's kind of a bleak, unhappy story--but I do feel drawn to read more Camus. On the lighter side, I picked up Still as Death by Sarah Stewart Taylor at a used book store. I've been meaning to check out her work, and this is one of her earlier books (the third, I believe). I was excited because the main character is an art historian, and because there's a gold mummy case on the cover. "Could this be my new Elizabeth Peters?" I thought. Alas, it was not. The book lacked Ms. Peters's sense of humor and her madcap plots. It was, in fact, rather slow, and the moment of crisis not terribly exciting (not once did I think he protagonist was going to be murdered herself), with a lot of side characters who each get their own chapters (to establish potential motives for murder, I guess), which is not my favorite. I haven't given up, though--I will try a more recent book by the author. Because Still as Death was moving so slowly (I mean, we were like 100 pages in before anyone even gets murdered!), I grabbed another mystery with an art historian protagonist off the shelf--Borrower of the Night, by Elizabeth Peters (natch), the first Vicky Bliss book, to try to analyze what I enjoy so much about EP's writing (snappy dialogue, doesn't waste time giving every character's resume or moving them around in space, great historical storyline intersecting with the novel's storyline, but the historical info woven in seamlessly, scary old castle, seances, absurd antics), and I ended up reading it straight through. (To be fair, the only murders in this book took place hundreds of years in the past, so maybe it's not the dead body that generates tension, but action and reaction, sinister characters, and creepy goings-on.) Finally, I had The Mistletoe Murder, a book of short stories by PD James, in my stack of seasonal reads, and during a rare lull in the holiday preparations, I picked it up to read again, and discovered I'd only read the first story in the past, so I finished up the remaining three or four stories--and they were all tight, clever, and compelling. I didn't read it in an analytical frame of mind, so I'm not sure what exactly made James a master, but she truly was. Also, in the holiday spirit, I reread "Santaland Diaries" by David Sedaris, like I do every Christmas, which is one of my favorite traditions.
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It's time for the 12th annual I Did It! post, in which I celebrate my accomplishments large and small over the past year. Previous years can be viewed here: 2023, 2022, 2021 (Apocalypse Year 2) 2020 (Apocalypse Year 1), 2019 (including decade-in-review), 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013.  Writing In 2024, I wrote:
I also:
 Travel and Adventure There was no way 2024 could top 2023 in the travel department, but looked at on its own, it was a pretty good year.
 I also made a goal in the fall of 2023 to visit the beach at least once a month, all year long. When January of 2023 came, I made that a goal of visiting a different beach every month of 2024. I managed to visit the beach at least once a month during 2024, hitting at least one different one in every month but December, for a total of 16 -18 different beaches in 2024 (depending on how you count them). I collected sand in little jars at all of them as well (only I accidentally threw out October's sand).  Arts and Crafts
Household C and I did a major amount of home improvements this year, including:
All in all, 2024 was a full and fulfilling year. I see a lot of things I want to carry over into 2025 and a few things I'd like to do differently. That's what the year-end review is all about.  Amanda K. Jaros, author of the forthcoming book In My Boots: A Memoir of Five Million Steps on the Appalachian Trail wrote a lovely review of Uphill Both Ways over at Mom Egg Review. She writes:
"Uphill Both Ways is more than a hiking travelogue, more than a motherhood journal, more than a natural history reader. It is one woman’s attempt to unify the pieces of her life in search of happiness. It’s also a reminder to other women out there. You don’t have to be just one thing." You can read the whole review here.  As the days grow shorter, that doesn't mean you have to curtail your outdoor explorations! In my latest article for Green & Healthy Maine (Winter 2024), "Oh, What a Night! Exploring Maine's Winter Wilds after Dark," I share lots of ideas for exploring the wilds at night, from stargazing to owl-prowling. Look for a copy at your local co-op, coffee shop, or tourist information center. Or read the article online here.
 I started this month reading a book about World War II (and Nazi collaborators in England) and one about the history of witch trials, for no other reason than I'd been recently given the first one and had bought the second one at a literary Halloween bash. Both felt portentous, and not in a good way, once the election results came in--not the way we want life to imitate art.
Nonfiction Bring Down the Little Birds by Giménez Smith. I don't often read pregnancy and new motherhood memoirs these days, now that I'm nearing the far end of that journey, but I've been seeking out books that incorporate themes of motherhood and nature. This one does not have much to say about nature, but it's still a lovely meditation on a second pregnancy and on motherhood and daughterhood. It would make a wonderful gift to an expectant or new mother. Wintering by Katherine May. I've been meaning to read this book for a while, and I finally picked it up on the day after the election, when I was consolation shopping at one of my favorite bookstores. I figured now would be a good time for settling in to a little self-care. I really enjoyed this book, but it is an incredibly quiet read (as might be expected from the title), and I think May really lucked out by its being published during the pandemic, when lots of people were looking for ways to cope with a period of wintering. I have a hard time imagining it being a bestseller otherwise in our normally frenetic world. (And let me reiterate--I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm happy that it became a bestseller. I'm just amazed also.) Witchcraft: A History in 13 Trials by Marion Gibson. I've been wanting to do more research into the history of witch trials for a while, and this book was a good place to start, focusing on 13 specific cases where a person or group of people were accused of and tried for witchcraft, and how the religious and political milieu of the time fed into the charges and trials. I learned a lot, and was surprised to find out that witch trials began a lot later in history than I had understood (coming into prominence during the reformation years, beginning in the 16th century; I had thought they were common in Medieval times, thanks mostly to Monty Python). It was also interesting / distressing to note the way that humans blame all of society's problems on marginalized members who have the least amount of power (usually women in the case of witch trials, and often women who were also poor, disabled, outsiders, or in some way "other"), and to consider the way this scapegoating continues to this day. Fiction Mr. Churchill's Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal. This is a murder mystery/spy thriller set in London during WWII, in which a young woman gets a clerical job in the Prime Minister's office, while someone in her inner circle is spying for Nazi sympathizers. It was a good read, and would have been a lot more fun if it didn't feel like history is repeating itself in the modern era. Dial A for Aunties by Jesse Q. Sutano. This book, by contrast, was all fun: a madcap caper in which the main character accidentally kills her blind date and her mother and three aunties all pitch in to help dispose of the body, in the midst of putting on a spectacular wedding. One farcical calamity after another occurs, leaving the reader breathless wondering how they would get out of their mess unscathed. Sisters in Crime edited by Marilynn Wallace. I picked this book up at a library book sale, and it was so much fun--a collection of short mystery stories by many of the big names of mystery from the 1980s (it was published in 1989). It left me wondering if the 1980s can be considered a second golden age of (women) mystery writers? Discipline by Debra Spark. I recently met Debra Spark at a book event in a nearby town, and while I'd heard her name bandied about in the Maine literary world, I hadn't ready anything by her, so I picked up her latest, in which an art appraiser discovers that the art she's been hired to value has gone missing. This leads down the path of the history of the paintings, which includes a case of mistaken identity of the actual artist, a child's experience at an abusive school for troubled kids, and other subplots, as well as the main character's struggle to connect with her own teenage son. It sounds like the plot of a thriller, but it's not, which is kind of an intriguing thought: take a plot premise and make it into either a literary novel or a thriller (or another genre). Can that be done with any story? Either way, I enjoyed the story, and Debra's writing style, and I'll be looking out for more books by her.  When I was a baby, I earned the distinction of being the youngest library card holder at our local library, and I remained a continuous library card holder for nearly half a century. One time, years ago, I lost my wallet at a street fair in a nearby town, and when I picked it up at the police station (with all the cash still present--thank you kind people of Hallowell), the cop who handed it back to me said, "You sure have a lot of library cards." My wallet still held my Jessup Library card, from when I was in college in Bar Harbor, Maine, my Aurora, Colorado, card, from my year there in the AmeriCorps, my Littleton, Colorado, library card, from where my parents were living at the time, my Maine State Library card, and my Gardiner, Maine, card, from the town I lived in then. I kept my Gardiner card going, for an annual fee, for years after we moved away, because our town didn't have a library, nor did it have a relationship with another town's library. But during the pandemic, when a trip to the library meant checking out books through a window, as if they were an order of French fries, I let my Gardiner card lapse, even though I rarely wandered the aisles to check out in-house books, rather relying on interlibrary loans ordered through the Minerva system. With the pandemic came a conundrum: I couldn't order books without renewing my card, but there was no point in going to the library to renew my card when there weren't any books waiting there for me. I instead focused on trying to read down my TBR pile, while also refilling it with obsessive online purchases. For the first time in my life, I was without a library card. (Technically I still had, and still have, a Maine State Library card, but that institution, along with its neighbor the State Museum, used the pandemic as an opportunity to move out and repair the leaky building they were both housed in, and there's no sign of either of them opening up again in the near future.)
In the meantime, a scrappy group of volunteers in my town turned a pile of donated books and a drafty old grange hall into a library. I had visited early on, to donate a bunch of children's books, but hadn't been back until this September, when I was invited to give a reading. It was a delightful event, and the library is a wonderful space. At the end of my reading, I signed up for a library card, which I picked up earlier this month, when I checked out my first book. Nonfiction Educated, by Tara Westover. I know I'm about six years late to the party on this one, but I've been meaning to read it since it came out, and when I spied it in the library's stacks, I realized the time had come. I brought it home on a Wednesday afternoon, stayed up way too late that night reading, and finished it the next morning. It was that gripping--harrowing and shocking. I mean, I'm not surprised that there's abuse and gaslighting and family members treating each other terribly, but I'm still shocked by seeing this brutality laid out, line by line, paragraph after paragraph. I went into it expecting one of those books that's a good story but mediocre, but it was beautifully written, from the overall structure to the individual sentences. Fiction The Lottery and other Stories by Shirley Jackson. I kept going on my Shirley Jackson kick with a reread of The Lottery. It had been over ten years since I read it last in graduate school--the whole book, I mean, not the story "The Lottery," which I've surely read a few times over that time. I was delighted to find how much I still love these stories. They're creepy and quirky and mundane and insightful and chilling and pitch perfect. Broken Harbor by Tana French. This is a police procedural, with a the propulsive pace of thriller. I was totally sucked in for about the first half of the book, but then I started to find the minute-by-minute narration of every second of the detective's work on the case a little tedious. Around that time there was also a moment where the narrator (first-person) zooms out, as if he's narrating from some distance in the future and comments how a certain event was the moment when something important occurred, even though the whole rest of the book, before and after, is written as if in the narrator is experiencing it all in real time. I wondered at first if this was a clever technique on the writer's part, or just a weird slip of the pen. I decided that it was a slip (or a sloppy choice) since it distracted me for the rest of the book. Finally, the events led the murderer to do what they did were just way too farfetched. So I give it a "meh." Maybe I'll try another--she's apparently a highly regarded writer--but I won't rush out to do so. The Dark on the Other Side by Barbara Michaels. I've been trying to stop myself from going back and reading more Barbara Michaels until I get through my whole TBR pile (which just keeps growing so it's a hopeless task), but I happened to run across this one and I didn't remember anything about it, which made me think I hadn't ever read it before (I later checked my blog posts and found I last read it in 2018). What intrigued me is that there is a male main character (with occasional exchanges of POV w/ a female character), which Barbara rarely does, so of course I had to read it and see what that was like. It was a delightful read--and perfect for October, with a witch and werewolf (or is it a gaslighting husband?) theme. So fun! Scat by Carl Hiassan. This is another of the books I found in the boys' closet and which I read because I felt sorry for it, having never been read by my kids (though M told me later that he had read it, so I needn't have fretted). It's a cute story about a couple of kids who get tangled up with a biology professor and a Hayduke kind of character who are trying to protect a swamp and the Florida panther who lives there from some oil development guys. It was a fun read, and it's too bad my other two kids missed out! Poetry Sparrow Envy and Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves by J. Drew Lanham. I loved both of these books so much. The poems are about birds and wild things and history and social justice and human nature. They make you think and make you feel. Some are joyful, yes, while others tend toward the heart-wrenching end of the emotional scale. But all are beautiful.  September was another read-ey month--still in summer hammock mode, I guess. My book selections this month were all over the map. My reading lists are usually pretty diverse, but I think this month could win a prize for weirdest combination of books. Working our way from the bottom up, we have:
Fiction The Cliffs by J. Courtney Sullivan. C heard a review about this book on NPR and he thought it sounded right up my alley--a coastal Maine setting, a spooky old house, ghosts, women's history, a woman seeking to reset her trajectory midlife--and ordered it for my birthday. It was okay (I don't usually like to say anything negative about books here, but since this one's a Reece's Book Club pick, I think it can handle it). There was *so much* exposition throughout--starting with a many page prologue. Whole life stories of characters and whole histories of groups of people told in pages and pages of summary and information dumping. And while those stories and histories were interesting, they did not read like a contemporary novel. It felt like the author did a lot of research and wanted to reader to know it. Or that she was on deadline and didn't have time to revise the summaries into scenes. Also, the ghost story just kinda fizzled out. Anne of Windy Poplars by L.M. Montgomery. This is the fourth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, and the last one that I bought in PEI. I continued to enjoy Montgomery's writing, the saga of Anne's life, and the details of that time on PEI, as I did to through the second and third book, but I also continued to miss the spunky Anne of the original. I don't think I'll go on to read the next four, although I do want to see her and Gilbert finally married. The Sundial by Shirley Jackson. I'm still going with my Shirley Jackson kick, that was (re)set off after reading her collected letters last month. The Sundial is a strange book (no surprises there!), about a wealthy family who hole up in their big house in anticipation of the end of the world--which was foretold to one of the characters by her dead father. The entire story centers on the interactions and relationships among the characters--the remaining members of the family and a few friends and strangers who come to join their small cult--and their various ways of preparing the future that will come after everything outside of their realm is destroyed. It's wryly funny while at the same time feeling like a cutting indictment of human nature (but what is it saying about human nature, exactly?). And it's a murder mystery without a solution. I'm still pondering what I think of it two weeks after I finished reading. Flush by Carl Hiaasen. I don't normally read YA or middle grade fiction (now that I don't have kids around to read to, and if you don't count Anne of GG, which I guess is maybe a YA?), but I was getting a bunch of books ready to go to the library book store, and this book, along with another by the same author, appeared as if they'd never even been opened, and I felt bad about that so I decided to read them both before I sent them on. Flush is about a kid whose dad has gone to jail for sinking a boat that he suspects of dumping pollution into the bay near the characters' home in the Florida Keys. Despite the clear young reading level, the pacing, development of setting and characters, and buildup of suspense, and even the stakes make it an engaging read. What a bummer for my kids that they didn't give it a try! Nonfiction The Quickening by Elizabeth Rush. I've always been fascinated by Antarctica, and when I was in my 20s, I looked into going there to work at one of the US research bases, but since I had no useful skills, there wasn't anything I could reasonably apply for. I still don't have any useful skills (why didn't I become a diesel mechanic?), so I probably won't ever make it there, unless I reach a place where I could qualify for a National Science Foundation artist residency. That is how Elizabeth Rush found herself on a boat for several weeks, plying Antarctic waters to study the Thwaites Glacier. In The Quickening, Rush tells the story of this voyage and her interactions with the scientists and crew members on board the boat, while also contemplating pregnancy and parenthood, which she's put on hold for a year in order to participate in the trip, and interviewing her fellow passengers about their birth and parenting experiences. Through telling the story in this way, Rush aims to subvert the typical Polar travel story of white men setting out to discover and conquer the ice caps and replace it with a story of nurturing and care, and seeing Antarctica and its glaciers not as terra incognita, but as an animate, entity, a driver in our human story. It's a beautiful, thoughtful, and engaging read. The Book of (More) Delights by Ross Gay. I loved this book every bit as much as I loved The Book of Delights. It's the same format: short essays about whatever it is that delighted the author on the particular day of writing--figs, a notebook, a visit with a friend, etc. Totally quotidian things elevated to magic through Gay's *delightful* way of seeing the world. (I almost typed "Ross's" up there, because after reading three books of essays by the guy, I feel like he's a friend.) Craft & Current by Janisse Ray. I've been following along with Janisse Ray's Journey in Place (which she describes as a "year-long correspondence course in place-knowing) all year, and I've read three of her books. I like her way of writing and looking at the world, and so was happy to get in on crowd funding this writing craft book. It has some useful ideas and frameworks and ways of approaching writing, which I'm already trying to put into practice, but what I found most interesting were the bits of memoir about her journey to becoming a writer. Poetry Indwelling by Libby Maxey. When my former co-editor at Literary Mama came out with a second book of poetry this summer, I ordered it right away, and then promptly lost it among a pile of books and papers. Amid a subsequent flurry of cleaning and reorganizing, it resurfaced and I've been savoring a poem or two a day all month. Libby's (I can use her first name because we really are friends) writes in sonnets and other traditional forms, which gives the poems a pleasing feeling of timelessness. While at the same time, it's thrilling to discover within the strict structures of these poems thoroughly modern and everyday moments, like a truck stuck in the snow, an encounter with a turtle in the grass, sheets hanging on the line in winter, cheese purchased at a farm stand, the things left behind in an abandoned house. The combination weaves together the past and the present, history and personal experience. Audiobooks C and I listened to the fourth Rivers of London book by Ben Aaronovich, Broken Homes. But it was a challenge, because we've been listening after we go to bed at night, and C kept falling asleep, because he's back to teaching and getting up early, and we'd have to replay half of the previous night's selection every night, and we were both confused about what was going on. A long drive to Massachusetts and back helped us through a big chunk of the book, but I think we'll have to wait until we need to drive a long ways before picking up with book #5. Because I listened to the whole Thursday Murder Club series (over and over again), I felt compelled to get the latest Richard Osman book, We Solve Murders via audio as well. Also it was narrated by Nicola Walker, which is reason enough. The book, which is the start of a new series, is every bit as delightful as the TMC books. A bodyguard, her retired-cop father-in-law, and a world-famous thriller writer go on madcap caper from South Carolina to St. Lucia to Ireland to Dubais with assassins and cartel bosses and money launderers chasing after them, and vice-versa. Yes, the bodies do pile up, but it's all in good fun. Nothing gruesome or disturbing. Just highjinks and hilarity.  A hot Sunday afternoon in mid-August, my husband and three children out of the house. Giddy at being home alone, I can’t settle down to any of the things I’d like to do in the rare quiet left behind in their absence. So I go for a walk.
So begins my most recently published essay, "Walking in Place," which appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Stillpoint Arts Quarterly. I jotted down the first germ on an idea for this piece in April 2010. I completed a full draft in August 2015. Over the next year and a half, I revised it with input from my writing group. I sent it out on submission for the first time in February 2017. Over the next seven-plus years I sent it out 13 more times, revising it a bit here and there, letting it rest for long periods of time in between (I didn't send it out at all in 2021 or 2023). Finally, on the 14th submission, nine years after I completed a first draft, 14 years after first I first toyed with the idea, the essay was accepted and subsequently published in Stillpoint's "Walking" themed issue. All this is to say is that--on top of the continual study of craft, the steady practice of putting words on the page, the self-discipline of sitting down and writing and rewriting words--writing, which is to say publishing, requires patience and persistence. Sometimes it pays off (though less often does it pay off literally). Sometimes it doesn't. I had all but retired this essay when I saw the call for submission that eventually led to its publication. The reason I hadn't fully retired this essay was that, despite repeated rejections, I believed in it. The writing describes most honestly and accurately my relationship to the place where I live and to the place I come from. Last weekend I gave a reading at the local library for my book, Uphill Both Ways, and a member of the audience, who had already read the book, expressed surprise that I'd written within its pages that I felt "stuck in Maine." It had never occurred to her, she said, that anyone who lived in Maine felt that way. What a wonderful gift that would be, to exist in the comfort and certainty that the place you occupy on the earth is the place where you belong. Though there are many lovely things about Maine, I have never felt that way, as long as I've lived here, and I don't expect I ever will, even though I'll probably never live anywhere else. This struggle with a feeling of dislocation is what "Walking in Place" is about. You can read the essay here and peruse the rest of the digital edition here, both for free. Or you can purchase a print copy here.  I'm very excited to be teaching another nature poetry workshop at HVNC this month:
Enchanting the Forest. Hidden Valley Nature Center, Jefferson, ME. September 21, 2024, 10 am - 12 pm. The word "enchant" comes from Latin roots that mean "to sing upon." To enchant a forest means, literally, to sing to it, and cultures around the world have historically sung to forests and other special landscapes. In this workshop, we'll walk the trails of HVNC, noticing the wild things around us engaging in word play along the way, including rhyming, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. When we reach the barn, we'll turn this word play into poems inspired by those in the books The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane. When we're done we'll speak, or sing for those brave enough, our poems out loud--thus enchanting HVNC's forest. This workshop should be a lot of fun--and it only costs $5! I'd love to see you there. Register here.  I'm really excited to be giving an author talk in Whitefield on September 14, 2024, at our town's wonderful library. Please join me for an afternoon of Colorado Trail adventures. I'll read an excerpt from the book, answer your questions, and sign copies. As always, I'll also have a little giveaway. For directions and other info, visit the library's website.
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