Cosmic chickens and the calm after the chaos
Late September ramblings
The exciting stuff first:
Listen to me reading the first two chapters of SEX OF THE MIDWEST at the link below.
Then go pre-order a copy, here.
My Letter to a Dead Artist is going out this Thursday followed by a Substack Live with
on Friday, Oct. 3 at 1:00 pm (EST). I am so excited about this letter and had so much fun writing and illustrating it and I hope you all love it as much as I do.My conversation with
on her The Long Road to Publishing Podcast, also releases this Thursday. Eva’s podcast is great at dispelling all the myths around publishing and I had a great time talking to her.On Oct. 6 at 7:00 pm (EST) I’ll be having a Zoom conversation with my Galiot Press editor,
, for paid subscribers of my newsletter or paid subscribers to Galiot Press Substack. Link below for paid subscribers (which costs only $30 for an annual subscription or $5 for a month).
I always find this part of the year a little anxious-making. Or maybe, truthfully, I find all parts of the year anxious-making. I’m always waiting for the season to change and this is especially true in fall. I love fall. It’s my favorite season. I get very antsy when it’s late to arrive, which it will probably increasingly be in the world we live in. I feel cheated out of my standard allotment of fall.
The high today in Madison is supposed to be 88, which is not fall weather. After all the rain last week and the high temps now, it feels like a plague of infestations have descended on us. In our house we have fruit flies and a certain slow-moving type of house fly. Our friends have ants. Another friend has stinkbugs, which she vacuums up and joyfully feeds to her chickens.
It all feels a bit like punishment or a sign of everything that’s off about the world. I wish I could vacuum up all the wrongs in the world and feed them to a big cosmic flock of chickens.
This weekend my brother, who is the official astronomer at the Cincinnati Observatory (the oldest professional observatory in the United States and a very cool place to visit), was supposed to be on NPR’s Weekend Edition, talking about their upcoming exhibit of real meteorites. He got edited out of the final version, which is a thing that happens.
I’ve been very close to having essays appear in both The New York Times and The Washington Post in the past only to have fate intervene. The first time, Covid happened and no one was interested in my op-ed about gender and sports (it did eventually get published here). The second time, the essay was about Bengals fandom and when the Bengals lost the Super Bowl, it got pulled, even though I was literally making edits to it during the game (you can read it here).
Shit happens. Which is to say, there are some very exciting things in the works related to SEX OF THE MIDWEST, but I’m not going to tell you about them yet because I’ve learned my lesson. It’s just too crushing to tell everyone you’ll have an op-ed in the NY Times and then have to explain that it didn’t happen after all. Maybe also I’m weirdly superstitious and believe that the telling itself invites disaster.
Here’s something I can tell you about, though. I’ve been working on an essay to pitch, related to the book (and it got accepted at LiteraryHub, hurray!). It’s sort of about the joy of encountering familiar faces, which is something I’ve written about before.
I’m also re-reading Ross Gay’s first book of delights and I came this morning to the one about high-fives from strangers. He’s talking about touching and being touched by strangers in general. Ross Gay loves the guy in Italy who slaps his biceps. The waitress who puts a hand on his shoulder. He acknowledges this pleasure is all very conditioned by who he is—a straight, cisgender, Black, man. Obviously, a stranger putting their hand on my back in a crowd might not feel the same to me as a woman.
At the end, Ross Gay kneels next to a man on a plane and puts his hand on his forearm because he thinks the man is his Uncle Earl. The man is not Uncle Earl and the people are a little confused. It’s a little weird, but he ends with this:
“All the same, given as Uncle Earl died about six months later, I’m delighted I got to see him. and touch him, gently, lovingly, about one thousand miles away.”
When I read that sentence this morning I realized, “Oh, yes, that was what I wanted to say in that essay.” It’s not surprising that Ross Gay said it so much better. Strangers are family. Or at least, in the world I want to live in, they are. And don’t our wantings have the power to create and re-create the world, just like a spell?
One of the best fall songs of all time is “Homecoming” by Josh Ritter. He just released a new album, I Believe in You, My Honeydew (is that not a great album title?). I’m obsessed with one of the songs on the new album, “Truth Is a Dimension (Both Invisible and Blinding).” Also a great title for a song.
The song is a first-person narrative from a star-gazer who is clearly missing his ex-girlfriend and having profound revelations about the nature of truth as he looks at System 611 through his telescope. It’s sort of funny and haunting and incredibly real in its very specific details (the girlfriend’s name is Tanya…her new boyfriend is Neil…the narrator smells the remains of cookout when he stops to gaze into his telescope).
Songwriters blow me away. It’s a lesson in compression and the power of detail. A whole novel suggested in a song that’s 2-3 minutes long. But every word matters. And then, of course, the music, in this case, nothing more complicated than a very simple guitar line. But even that simple guitar line becomes transcendent in a way that fiction can never really reproduce. No one sings along to a novel, do they?
In Madison, it’s a big weekend. Saturday and Sunday are Chautauqua, an art festival, which is one of the biggest events on our calendar. Last year, a hurricane came through on Chautauqua weekend, with high wind and rains that put a big damper on the festival. This year it’s warm-ish, but at least sunny. When I’ve ventured out of the house, the crowds are big.
We might wander out later today to check it out. We might not. It’s a lot, the hordes of people. You have to plan not to move your car on a weekend like this or you’ll lose your street parking spot.
One of the stories in SEX OF THE MIDWEST is about a young woman, Sam, trying to introduce her girlfriend to her hometown. She wants her girlfriend to get it. She wants her to understand the town because to understand the town is to understand who she is. But can anyone understand a place that isn’t theirs?
The story takes place around a big event for the town—not Chautauqua—and Sam tries to explain to her girlfriend that her favorite moment is after the big event is over. “The morning after,” Sam explains. “You walk along the river and all the food trucks and rides are still there, but it’s all quiet. And then people come and start to pack it all up and they’re talking about the weekend and, you know, you get to stay. They go, but you stay.”
That is, not surprisingly, also how I feel. The best moment is the calm after the chaos, when the town belongs mostly to us again. Everyone else goes home, but I’m already there.
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