please stop and take a breath, please
It's mid-week, and I have some good things to share with you.
It has been a long while since I’ve shared something like this with you, mostly because I’m in the throes of a book tour for Permission, my publicist left my publisher, I’m wearing a lot of different work-related hats, trying to balance the news that I must watch with that which I absolutely cannot, attempting to organize my elderly mother’s continued hellscape of care (the short version is that, in New York State, the powers that be drag their feet and generally muck up the process by design in the hopes that the elder will die while waiting for assistance; the longer version is that my mother’s NPD has gotten so much worse so that after she does things like, for example, spits on the threshold of my house after I have just fed her a holiday meal, she follows it up with a call from her home two hours later telling me what a wonderful time she had but it would have been better had I allow her to be abusive), and trying to plan a long-awaited trip next month to England and Scotland to visit friends and family. (We haven’t told my mother yet. Because there is just so much hysteria I can take all at once.) And lest I forget: the absolute and even freeing finality that comes with accepting, at sixty-one, that I am never going to be — never was, never will be — one of the cool kids, this fact manifesting in all sorts of very visible ways.
Also: let’s add to this the changing creative topography of Substack, and how quiet writers like myself will handle it without coming off sounding, you know, sour grapes.
Authenticity and art-making are why so many of us are here, and why we won’t leave.
That last bit, about cool kids and sour grapes: I had a small chat with myself of the sort that I have with my students and creative friends who spend copious amounts of time wringing their hands about being left out of the fray, their hair ablaze while they shout WHY NOT ME in a tone not unlike that face-tearing Parker Posey whine she does so well while being stuck in an elevator with Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail. The bottom line of this chat is this: do your work. Make it the best it can be. Build your own community of readers. If someone exponentially famous shows up here, flips on their turn-signal and it results, in a matter of hours, in hundreds of thousands of readers (some of whom are yours and mine) dumping their paid subscription to your work because there is just so much they can afford — I understand this; I have to do a budget evaluation at least every month because we’re pretty much currently living on one not-big salary and it’s my wife’s — it will not feel good. After you acknowledge that it doesn’t feel good — my rate of paid subscriptions just in this very short time since the turn signal was flipped has dropped by 53%, making the fact of it financially breathtaking for me and my household. I’m a writer; this is what I do. This is how I pay my bills, how I support my elderly/nasty mother, and how I support my household while I’m busy writing books — you also have to ask yourself, Is everyone entitled to be here? Yes, for sure. Is everyone entitled to shout from the highest mountaintop that they are here, they’ve arrived, Elvis is in the building, let’s build a community? I suppose so. Except: amazing communities — beautiful literary, creative, scientific, design-y, culinary, political, social — are already here and have been here for a few years, and this is what makes Substack, with all its glitches and wannabes, a very good place. Substack writers without bestseller checks are some of the best I’ve read anywhere, and it is important to say that, and to do so loudly.
We are bound to each other by the smallest filaments of hope and possibility, even here, on Planet Substack.
So I have told myself what I tell my students: do your work. Live the creative life you have built. If you search your soul and come to believe that someone might be taking what is yours (your space, your time, your voice), or trying to — consciously or not — they very well might be, or not. Acknowledge it, let it go, and then: get back to the writing, or whatever it is that you do. Because, as I always say: we are the art-making species, and that will never, ever stop because it can’t. It is primal. No one but you can make your art, write like you, or do anything the way you do it.
Having said that, I want to share with you some lovely things that crossed my path over the last few days and weeks, in the hope that you will enjoy them too. It’s spring. The sun is out. Flowers are blooming. Americans are now under authoritarian rule, and I weep at least fourteen times a day. And then, when I was drying my eyes yesterday, I learned this week that in 1941, a prisoner in Dachau hand-fashioned a magnificent violin in which he tucked a note that read: Trial instrument, made under difficult conditions with no tools and materials. Dachau. Anno 1941, Franciszek Kempa.
So: beauty wins. The bombs fall and the children cook, the writers write, the painters paint, the singers sing, the gardeners grow. We are bound to each other by the smallest filaments of hope and possibility, even here, on Planet Substack. Authenticity and art-making are why so many of us are here, and why we won’t leave.
These are the things that are breathing life into my days:
Marginalian Editions: Maria Popova, whose work I have loved since the earliest days of The Marginalian, announced this week that she is collaborating with independent bookseller extraordinaire McNally Jackson to publish three previously out-of-print books a year that have been lost to the vagaries of distraction and time. Popova describes her venture as an act of resistance to the erasures of culture and a loving corrective for the collective selective memory called history, and includes works by Muriel Rukeyser, Henry Miller, Kathleen Lonsdale, and Diane Ackerman. McNally Jackson writes more about this here.
My return to seasonal eating, starting here, with Martha’s Vineyard-based Susie Middleton’s spring dish of soba noodles in miso broth with vegetables and mint, published in Cook the Vineyard, where Susie is editor. If you have not discovered the stunning recipes written by Susie, who is a dear friend of mine and the creator of
here on Substack, please avail yourself. Also, Cook the Vineyard contains a WEALTH of lovely recipes, and you should get to know them.A hotel pad full of delightful sketches, posted by
. ‘s beautiful container tulip garden, and pretty much everything else she does at @Horticulturalish. And her essay, here, on Life, Death, and Gardening which is so beautiful that it made me cry. (Again. A lot of leaking from the eyes these days.)
One of my favorite authors, Robert Macfarlane, has written a book about rivers: Is A River Alive? Macfarlane is a naturalist, a scientist, a poet who has changed the way I think about the planet on which I live. The time for his books is always; the time for this book is now. Please read it, and then go over to YouTube and search for him, his talks, his music, his art, his life. Start here.
Yesterday, I came home from a maddening eldercare day in New York City to a postcard from another of my favorite authors and possibly my favorite visual artist and writer, Jackie Morris, whom I have written about here a lot. Normally, I would not share something this personal — not everything is meant for public consumption — but the world being what it is, I decided to. To receive a piece of mail from someone you’ve never met (except during a Zoom webinar) and whose work, which speaks of peace and nature and quiet things, has meant so much: a gift.
Making travel plans: visiting Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, Derek Jarman’s garden, breaking bread with friends I never/rarely see, spending time in and near the water, going north to Scotland for the first time since I was at Cambridge (forty-two years)—these are all things that are allowing me to put one foot in front of the other these days.
Whoever and wherever you are: remember to breathe.
Please.
Note:
Please join me for a week-long writer’s workshop at the stunning Castle Hill/Truro Center for the Arts, from August 4th - August 8th, on Permission and Writing the Story You Must Tell. This will be my third season teaching at this beautiful, welcoming place, which is very close to the magical beaches of Truro and Wellfleet. For more information, go here.
I was born and raised in NYC and moved to LA in 2001 because I needed geographical space between me and my mother, though I loved her and still love her with all my heart. She got ALS out of nowhere in the spring of 2020, was diagnosed that June and refused to accept the diagnosis for over a year. During COVID lockdowns. Which meant I was trying to manage her care from Los Angeles over zoom in NYC until it was safe to fly there. She’d do things like send the cough assist machine back after I spent months trying to get it sent to her. Good times. I want you to know every time I see one of your posts about phone calls going to her instead of you, or people telling you they don’t know where you should send your POA docs, my whole nervous system understands and cries for you. I am so sorry you’re going through this, and I understand how hard it is to care for someone who spits on your threshold on the way out the door, too. You will ALWAYS be at the coolest table in my book, and your work and your words matter to those of us smart enough to be paying attention to the best kind of cool, for whatever that’s worth. Sending you a lot of love.
Well, this piece is the best reason to renew my subscription and let’s make it an annual one as I’m fed up with the chopping and changing and trying to fit all the people I want to pay to subscribe to, and support, into a monthly budget. I know who I value on here, it’s the writers I have followed the years. You are deeply appreciated Elissa. Also, enjoy your trip to UK it is beautiful here at the moment and the gardens are simply exploding!