MARCH

I may have written my last novel. Who knows; I’ve said that before. But what a marathon they are. How exhausting. How far you have to travel outside the world—away from your loves, away from the living world.

No regrets, Coyote. I don’t regret these books of mine. Or the time I spent on them. They are my heart stitched onto sleeves; they are things left in drawers for my children to discover when they are older; they are strange smelling satchels for my unborn grandchildren to pull down from shelves and crack open. I wrote them and they exist—what a thing! What a feat. What a cache to leave behind: my little songs about how one might live well in this world.

But I don’t know if I want to do it again. My goal is to live on this sweet earth while I am still here, while it is still here. That means as much time as possible in the woods; as much time as possible in the garden (flowers, herbs, vegetables). My goal is to invite friends over. To put the kettle on for tea.

My goal is to help others find their voices, which is really helping them believe in and know themselves. I don’t think that’s going to happen via academia in the way I want it to, and so there will be some other pathway. Some room. Some gathering space. Some portal for connection.

There are not enough resources on this earth for all of us to keep living in the ways we have been living and so we must start living in other ways. Maybe that is what all my books are about—living in other ways.  A poet with a bowl full of apples. A neighbor who sets out seed each night for foxes and porcupines. Every block of wood I place in the wood stove for heat was once a tree felled by a machine and split by a machine and driven to my house in a truck burning diesel. One must live with that knowledge now. One must tread carefully, not with fear or shame or anxiety, but with awareness and accountability.

How will you live, going forward? What promises will we make to ourselves, and which ones will we break? When is the flight worthwhile? When the fruit wrapped in plastic? When the Joy? What new footpaths can we find leading toward that Joy?

Sweet forest, everyone. Happy March. Month of madness and becoming. Sap and croci. Jean Valentine:

Never ran this hard through the valley

never ate so many stars

xx

Robin

READING:

Patricia Lockwood’s NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS. (Loved. Also: we share a birthday.)

Jean Valentine’s DOOR IN THE MOUNTAIN. (We also share a birthday!)

ON THE STACK NEXT TO MY BED:

Brandon Hobson’s THE REMOVED

Jessica J. Lee’s TWO TREES MAKE A FOREST

Daisy Johnson’s FEN

solstice

The darkest day of the year. The great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. The headlines a 50/50 cocktail of terrible news and good. Friends all around me are making radical changes in their lives: leaving relationships they need to leave, quitting drinking, quitting sugar, going back to school, sitting down to write that book, at last. Friends are also suffering, greatly: too much. Too much. It is too much.

Me: I feel like a pot that is simmering and the confluence of nebulous dreams, the ones I am perpetually sketching in notebooks and in Word Docs and on Excel spreadsheets, are bubbling to the surface after a year of (very quiet) gestation. And yet they’re hazy still. Just out of reach. I can’t quite clarify the vision yet, or parse the budget. Here or here? This or that? I have faith it will come to me, that the universe will knock on the door, loudly, in time, but for now I am just walking this same back road, filling these same bird feeders, sitting on this rug next to this same wood stove, sketching the vision again and again, like the novel to which I do the same, whose plot line, despite my endless coaxing and determination, will not come clear.

My daughter said yesterday: “Mama, you just need a good plot. It’s all about the plot line.”

She is twelve and she is right. I have long resisted this notion of plot as holy grail but plot is desire, plot is story. Every human loves a good story. If you’re going to ask for two-hundred or more pages of someone’s time it’s a thing you must deliver in one way or another: that yearning, that surprise, that sting and revelation.

And so onward I go coaxing, mapping, charting, walking. A student asked me recently, “What do you do when you just can’t figure out how a story should end?” and though I had a good answer to every other question that class asked me, I didn’t know how to answer that one. “Time,” I eventually said. “Some things are only revealed with time.”

Which is a disappointing and unpleasant answer, for them and for me. And yet it’s true. And so this simmering in the dark. This waiting for revelation, and widespread vaccines, and clarity and togetherness and forward momentum.

In solidarity, my friends. And hope. And faith. That the systems will be radically re-imagined and redesigned and re-implemented. That we will find our way through this dark season of transition and gestation and grief and isolation, to find not one, but many bright paths on the other side. I can’t wait to find out what they are.

xx

Robin

settle in

It is mid-December and last night the sun set the earliest it will all year, at 4:15 pm. Today it will set at 4:16, which means although the sun is still rising later each day, and the darkest day of the year is yet to come, our evenings are growing, imperceptibly yet surely, longer.

Why am I telling you this? Because I am seeking light, of course, as we are all seeking light during this year to be remembered. This year of sorrow and isolation. This year of stillness and radical reflection.

Sources of light on this eleventh day of December in this year that will be remembered:

1. Grace Paley, whose birthday is today. Grace, who wrote, “Let us go forth with fear and courage and rage to save the world.” Yes.

2. The pile of books that surround me. I am enforcing a book-buying freeze for the rest of the month (now that I have already purchased books for all my loved ones) because my house is full of unread ones, and living with all of these unread books is, I realize, like living in an attic full of squirrels. They crowd the desks and floor and tables. They move around at night, chattering and twitching. There is no rest, I realize, in a house full of unread stories: voices dying to be heard.

So here is a list of the books I purchased this year that I have yet to read or finish reading, which I plan to do now:

1.          The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld

2.         To the River by Olivia Laing

3.         Last Things by Jenny Offill

4.         Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck

5.          Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

6.         The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams

7.          Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phllips

8.         Breaking Into the Backcountry by Steve Edwards

9.         One Long River of Song by Brian Doyle

There are others, I know. Hiding in corners in other rooms. But these are the ones haunting me. Taunting me with the memory of need and compulsion and curiosity, which so quickly leaped to the next thing, without ever settling in.

I am looking forward to settling in. Me: so good at leaping, so quick to hunger. What does settling in look like for you? And which books on your shelves are dying to be read?

xx

R

literary touchstones, love child

There’s a bookshelf of mine in my son’s room (a room which was, not all that long ago, my office). This morning I sat on his floor, helping him get ready for school, and looked at those books: Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munro, Terry Tempest Williams, Jamaica Kincaid, others. They’re my heart books there on that shelf. The ones that have shaped me, defined me, saved me, resurrected me. The ones that showed me how you could make something deep and beautiful at once. Blood-thick and porous. Rooted and star-spattered. Real and mystical. Feminine and radically intelligent. Crimson and gold.  Place-based and transcendent.

One of the very first assignments I give to all students in my workshops, regardless of their age, is to find their literary touchstones. I tell them to choose between two and five books that are their lodestars, and to bring those books to class, and tell us why. I tell them to think of the book they’re writing as the “literary love child” of these touchstones.

I go on to tell them that once they have their writing spot in their house/apartment/room picked out (and I highly recommend having a writing spot to all of them), they should make a stack of those two to five books and place them front and center on their desks. Have them close, I say. Pick them up when you need re-tuned. Look at them as visual reminders of what words can do. Use them as a map to keep you centered and true.

What fabulous advice! And how far I am from living it during these eight months in a small house with no room of my own, in a house with books scattered everywhere, and with the most precious ones of all living on a shelf in my son’s bedroom. Symbolic! Of disorientation, distraction, dislocation, noise.

The room where my desk currently resides is a lovely room, full of light and windows and an old rug, but it has no doors that close. It is full of books, but they are a wild tangle of kids’ books, cookbooks, art books, and the many, many new books I’ve purchased over the past ten years.

Many of those books are beautiful, important, necessary, radical, transformative. But not many of them are my touchstones. These new books stretch me, pull me, push me, challenge me—all good things. But few of them feel like home to me. They are not my lodestars. They are not my maps, sacred geography, first teachers, gods.

And so I think a little rearrangement of my rooms is in order. I’m going to move some books around today. Maybe build a new shelf. Move the noise into less sacred rooms. Make the sanctuary clean, rooted, holy.

Tell me—what are your literary touchstones? And if your book in progress was the lovechild of three books, what would they be?

xx

Robin

One of laughter, one of anguish

 

I said I was going to write one of these each Monday. And then the train of the past two weeks hit. The election. A positive Covid case in my daughter’s classroom. Quarantine, waiting for test results, waiting for election results, watching a coup unfold—when have the internal stakes ever matched the external stakes so well? Or with such absurdity? As an editor I would say: pare back! Too many crises at once! Too many story lines!

 

And yet here we are. Our poor brains. Our poor tired brains, so desperately in need of rest. (A year of rest and relaxation.)

 

I’ve had a hard time reading the past two weeks. It’s hard for anything to compare with the page-turning stakes of one’s Twitter feed, or the New York Times. As addictive as doomscrolling along those sites can be, there’s also something transformative & nourishing about being in this time with others. A live and collective processing of shock and astonishment and trauma. It allows me to feel connection and solidarity while locked in my house, masked up, spraying down the bathroom every couple of hours.

 

But books, too. Here they are, sprinkled all around my house (a problem, really). I’ve picked them up here and there this week, mostly the old ones, the old friends, sweet shoulders to lean on. I crack open Terry Tempest Williams’ brilliant Erosion, her great love song to this time, where she writes, in the preface: “If the world is torn to pieces, I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation.” She ends that preface with the paragraph, “The paradox found in the peace and restlessness of these desert lands, where rockslides, flash floods, and drought are commonplace, allows us to embrace the hardscrabble truths of change. In the process of being broken open, worn down, and reshaped, an uncommon tranquility can follow. Our undoing is also our becoming.”

 

Our undoing is also our becoming. I’m not yet in that place of “uncommon tranquility,” but I feel its emergence. I feel the hope of this undoing transforming into becoming on global, national and personal planes. We don’t know yet. But if the external mirrors the internal then I can say for sure: we faced those fears. We faced those darkest corners of ourselves. What blooms now?

 

I also picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own because it is what we all want these days, what we all need during the Great Quarantine—that mythological room. But what I found within the pages was something I hadn’t noticed before: the way Woolf was shaped, internally, by the Great War and its accompanying tragedies. “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its place?” Before the war becomes a refrain, a time of innocence and romanticism, now lost. Woolf, pondering this cold truth, goes walking. “It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in windowpanes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

 

One of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. My heart feels torn asunder. For this country. For democracy. For truth. For my Armenian friend and the war that has erupted in her home country. For the many people suffering and dying in rooms alone. For. For. For. When does the for ever end?

 

And yet this beautiful world, still. These sunsets. These gardens. The music people make. And the words they put down on the page. I feel less alone with all of it. Onward, in fragmentation, dear ones.

 

xx

READING IN THE GREAT QUIETUDE: NEARLY NOVEMBER

“ I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.” ― Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 1923-1928 ”

Well, my friends, we are eight months in. Here in New England it’s getting dark early, and there is snow in the forecast, and the things that kept our spirits afloat through the warmer months—swimming, walking, outdoor and distanced gatherings with family and friends—are for the most part coming to an end. So what will get us through the long winter?

These are old arts and old skills—we don’t need to reinvent or improvise. For me it is: candles, good food, and at the top of the pyramid, books. “It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive,” wrote James Baldwin. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!,” wrote an enthusiastic Jane Austen.

Yes yes. Books keep me connected. Books keep me alive. Below is a list of the ones I’m reading now and the ones I’ve loved most the past few months. Send me a note if you’ve loved one of them, too. We need words AND connective tissue.

*

READING:

RED AT THE BONE, Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead). I’m excited to dip into this lyrical and musical short novel by this master. My daughter and I have loved her YA books so much. Now I get to dine.

WILD MILK, Sabrina Orah Mark (Dorothy Project). Do you read Sabrina’s brilliant pieces in The Paris Review? If not, do so! Then read this alongside me and revel in the glory of her scintillating sentences.

THE ESSENTIAL RUTH STONE, edited by Bianca Stone (Copper Canyon). I have a lot to say about this one, and maybe I’ll write it down somewhere. For now: Ruth’s miraculous and gritty and astonishing poems have traveled with me for a long time now. I’m very excited to read some I haven’t read before, and to see them gathered through Bianca’s loving eyes.

PLANTING THE NATURAL GARDEN, Piet Oudolf & Henk Gerritsen. I had an immensely difficult summer, and this book, and the blooms within its pages, and the promise of a garden they carved, saved me. I still read it nightly, learning a little more every time, whispering the Latin flower names like incantations.

READ AND LOVED:

THE FIRE NEXT TIME, James Baldwin (Vintage). It’s been quite a few years. Read it again. Let it soak into your bones.

FUNNY WEATHER: ART IN AN EMERGENCY, Olivia Laing. I am obsessed with the mind and view and style of Olivia Laing. Here are essays on some of the artists and books she has loved most, plus extras with titles like Feral, The Future of Loneliness, and Skin Bags. Read and be subsumed.

DESERT CABAL, Amy Irvine (Torrey House Press). My, can Amy write. This book is a corrective and a medicinal tincture for all of the women who have loved the desert and for all the women who have read Edward Abbey and tried and failed to find themselves there. Hot damn. Thank you.

THE SHAME, Makenna Goodman (Milkweed). This book! I think everyone who reads it has that reaction. This book! Oh my god, how did she do that? It’s a slim miracle, published by the amazing Milkweed Books. Buy it. Read it. Smile for days.

That’s it for now, dear ones. Send me your thoughts. (Comment link above. Conversation is the jazz.) Stay lit. Stay warm.

xx

Robin