Holding Space (for your work)—I started a Patreon!

/

(cross-posted from my Substack)

It’s that time of year again! Feeling sad/SAD about the scarcity of daylight and bemoaning that night begins at 4:30 pm! (Cue “It’s the Most Wonderful Time…”)

I know I’m not alone in this, at this moment or historically, given how many light-themed festivals and holidays coexist in the last quarter of the year—Diwali, Hanukkah, and Saint Lucia’s Day (yes, I’m thinking about American Girl dolls) among them. I picture my ancestors checking their winter stores of canned and salted food, and facing down fifteen hours of darkness for weeks at a time, and I understand the holy importance of sparkle lights and indulgent little sweets.

Two years ago, I visited Germany and had the Christmas market—Weihnachtsmarkt—experience, eating part of a whole salmon smoked on a log in front of me, riding a Ferris wheel, and drinking tiny mug after tiny mug of gluhwein. The Weihnachtsmarkt is not a one-night thing, but a gathering space set up for weeks. Beyond offering gifts and knickknacks for sale, the temporary space feels like a cozy outdoor bar. On a list of recommended markets to try, someone commented something to the effect of: “It’s the terrible dark cold time of year again—we need these artificial lights and blazing fireplaces and hot wine so badly!” I liked that phrasing, that it’s not pointless carousing but a deep human NEED for cheer, more necessary when the atmosphere is bleak.


I want to know: What sources of light are sustaining you this autumn-into-winter?

One bright spot for me this fall was the first few minutes of each Book Club Workshop class, checking in human to human as each person signed in, and talking about our in-progress projects.

I think our lives and our creative work exist in symbiosis: feeding one part feeds the other. It’s easy to think that the creative part is not important, or that it can be the last priority—that we’ll get around to it later. But my life feels better, lighter, less unwieldy when I tend to this part of me. It’s that cheer-in-winter feeling: necessary. If you’re a person with the urge to create, you probably need to tend this flame, too, to feel fully alive.

That’s why I’ve created a virtual gathering space for us.

  • Are you a creative with great ideas but can’t seem to make time to work on them?

  • Are you a recovering people-pleaser who can keep appointments with other people but not with yourself?

  • Are you neurospicy in a way that makes a fixed routine (even for things you want to do) feel like a burden?

  • Does body doubling help you get shit done?

Then I made this for you!

Holding Space (for your work)

is a group for getting around to it now and it looks like this:

  • I hold the space and you show up, in whichever configuration of the schedule works for you. “Rise & grind” is not how my energy or creativity works, and is not the only way to complete a project. Pick one of the morning sessions weekly? Cool. Pick just the final half hour of both evening sessions? Also cool. Put Holding Space (for your work) on your calendar as a promise to yourself, and an excuse that protects your time: “I already have plans then.”

  • Each gathering is divided into pomodoro sessions: 25 minutes of working followed by 5-minute breaks. Gatherings will also include creative prompts, meant to be helpful if you don’t already have a project underway :)

  • Every week, I’ll pull cards for a Creative Work Forecast, a way of thinking about and through our projects and our relationship to creating that week.

  • I’ll post accountability and celebration threads each new moon and full moon, where anyone who wants to can share your creative goals and wins.

  • A monthly Q&A post will answer questions about writing, editing, publishing, staying motivated/curious, and anything else you might want to know about following creative rhythms and sharing work with an audience.

  • We’ll have a monthly visit from a special guest—an author, agent, editor, or other creative (filmmaker, visual artist)—on Zoom, with a recording for subscribers who can’t make it.

I’m soft-launching the group this month! You can sign up here. I’m not scheduling a guest this first month, so anyone who signs up in December will receive a discount for your first month as a thank you.

(Note that, because of some weird new Apple Store rules, subscriptions made through the Patreon app cost more than subscriptions made through your browser, so sign up through your browser!)

One publication I neglected to mention in my last newsletter was this: Northwestern University Press invited me to do a tarot reading for their fall season. You can read it here.

That’s all from me for now as I wrap up the year! I’m looking ahead to February, when Cosmic Tantrum will be out. Media friends, if you are interested in a review copy, let me know.

Curiosity & Ritual newsletter gets a shoutout in Electric Literature

/

Many thanks to Nancy Reddy for including my Substack newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual, in this roundup of “8 Newsletters to Spark Your Creativity.”



For the full article, including additional newsletter recs, click here.

To subscribe to Curiosity & Ritual, click here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay—or you’re looking for accountability and feedback while drafting your book-length manuscript—I’d love to work with you. Fill out my contact form here.

Announcing Book Club Workshop!

/

I’m teaching a class, you guys

(cross-posted from my Substack)

One curiosity I’ve had since childhood is what it’s like to live another life, and the ritual that lets me do it is reading. I used to get a little carried away. (Apparently you’re not supposed to read novels at the dinner table, or during math.)

Fast-forward to my adulthood and reading still occupies most of my time. I’ve read thousands of published books by this point. Between client projects and my acquiring editor days, I’ve also read hundreds of not-yet-published books.

So many unpublished novel manuscripts (that have beautiful prose, interesting settings, and charming characters) feel like they’re missing some subtle, subterranean wiring. Readers can watch a character experience a big emotion but not necessarily feel invested or emotionally impacted ourselves—especially if we haven’t been primed to hope for or dread any specific actions or outcomes.

Plot points are satisfying when (forgive me)…they don’t just fall out of a coconut tree. When they exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them.

I’m saying you can get tricky and go back and reverse-engineer that context.

You know who’s great at doing that? Poets! For poets, the structure of a work (how it is told) is essential to the meaning of the work. So when poets write novels, those novels tend to be cool as hell. They satisfy reader cravings for structure but often in unusual ways.

I could teach a class on this, I thought. Participants could read two different novels as part of a wider study on structure—and, through that study, create outlines for their own novels. A book club, but not a regular book club. A workshop, but not a regular workshop.

This idea has been turning over in my mind for months now. I made a syllabus but tucked it aside for a rainy day, then took

Esmé Weijun Wang’s excellent workshop on online workshops (more of her classes here) and decided that the time is now. (Thank you, Esmé!)

Book Club Workshop is born!

This first iteration is focused on novels by poets, specifically Monarch by Candice Wuehle (which I had the pleasure of acquiring and editing for Soft Skull Press) and Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (which I had the pleasure of reading and enjoying). We’ll also talk about some poems, John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, and Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.

Class meets on Zoom and starts August 13th. Candice and Melissa will join as special guests for the final class on October 22nd! (You could have a full outline in time for NaNoWriMo.)

~ * ~ Full deets here. * ~ *

I’d really appreciate help spreading the word if you can!

Interview with Brad Neely at X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine

/

A real dream come true to chat with Brad Neely about his funny and philosophical new book, You, Me, & Ulysses S. Grant, hero narratives, cults, and meat-bodies. Many thanks to Brad, and to X-R-A-Y for hosting the interview! For the whole shebang, click here.

2023 brought me my first BOOK DEAL

/

Hey.

It’s me.

We made it to the end of the year, pals.

Last year was the first time I noticed that the coldest winter weather doesn’t coincide with the solstice, the shortest day (at least in the northern hemisphere). There are weeks of little light, and then weeks of bitter cold. Same for summer: the solstice brings the longest day and the most light, but I don’t feel the hottest heat until the following months. Maybe the weather is different where you live, but it was true for me again this year and I found something beautiful in that: how it looks doesn’t have to match how it feels. (And how it feels doesn’t have to match how it looks.)

As a writer, I tend to have long, slow seasons of output that no one sees. Eventually, months or years later—when I’m further away from the self who made the work—it (that self and that work) finally meets other people through publication.

The oldest poems in my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, will be eight years old by the time the book is out. It’s a collection I wrote years ago, burned to the ground (excepting those few old poems), and rewrote hoping to match the kind of winking melodrama of the title. It’s absurd and serious, like a life.

Here’s the official announcement screenshot, with a collage-border embellishment of my making. I’ve been in these before as an editor, but never for *~*~my own book, as the author*~*~

By the time I was given the okay to share the good news on social media, I had already known for several months that the book would eventually exist in the world. I’d had my private peak-experience solstice-y feelings about it before I could share the news with others. Maybe that’s the way. We are asked to hold and process so much on any given day—often so much pain and horror, so much to fight against and live alongside and through. I got to hold this joy and let it gestate a while, and now I’m glad to share it with you to pick up and set down again, or file away in your mind for a better time.

Because December is a month for accounting, beyond the book announcement, here’s What Else I Got to Share in 2023:

  • The Zürich-based art gallery Sgomento Zurigo commissioned a poem from me for their show, “Singalong,” featuring artworks by Ken Kagami and Anders Dickson. In addition to using the poem in the exhibition’s pamphlet, they hung it in the gallery!

  • My press-mate Michael Chang invited me to read a few poems at the launch for their poetry collection, Synthetic Jungle. Books Are Magic recorded the reading.

  • The Millions published my review/essay on Lucy Ives’s excellent novel Life Is Everywhere, Cyrano, Sarah Bernhardt, alter egos, and reality vs. “reality.”

  • Taylor Byas’s brilliant debut full-length collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which I had the pleasure of editing, was published in August and has already won the Maya Angelou Book Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award for Poetry!!

  • With Summer Farah, I co-edited Best Debut Short Stories 2023: The PEN America Dau Prize and wrote an intro about art as “content,” the writers’ strike, AI art as “a manifestation of an authoritarian fantasy: an ‘artist’ that can’t say no, and works for free,” and how these winning stories are the result of each writer’s choices and refusals. This year’s prizewinners were selected by judges Venita Blackburn, Richard Chiem, and Dantiel W. Moniz. The winning writers are Dailihana E. Alfonseca, Ren Arcamone, Sonia Feldman, Stephenjohn Holgate, Faire Holliday, Mengyin Lin, Verity McKay, Clara Mundy, Jo Saleska, Annabelle Ulaka, Lisa Wartenberg Vélez, and Patrick J. Zhou. You can read interviews with the winners here.

  • My essay on John Darnielle’s Devil House, homes with dirt rooms at their secret centers, and the nightmarescape of California real estate was published in Vol. 1 of the print edition of word west revue.

  • Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s daring, touching, experimental memoir, Touching the Art, which I also had the pleasure of editing, was published in November. In a Between the Covers conversation with Mattilda, David Naimon describes the book in a way I love, as “speculative nonfiction,” a “beautiful gesture against, I think, the inevitability of history.”

  • After many years of submitting work there (by postal mail!!), I was really honored to publish a poem in ZYZZYVA. “Baby Island” appears in their Fall Issue, No. 126.

  • In honor of the Gemini Full Moon (and because I’m a Gemini Rising 😈 ), my tarot teacher Jeff Hinshaw invited me as a guest on their podcast, Cosmic Cousins. Jeff did deep reads of a few of my poems and explained how they relate to my astro chart, which was pretty sick.

  • I’m slowly making paintings that correspond with my poems, with excerpts of the text pasted on, zine-style. I partnered with a local print shop that will print and ship any ordered through my website.

  • And I read and edited over a million words this year in client projects—about 1.36 million across developmental edits and editorial assessments for novels, memoirs, story collections; copyedits, cold reads, and proofreads of novels and narrative nonfiction; book proposals; and misc. excerpts, essays, and stories.

I hope December is treating you as well as it can, and that you can linger for a while in this between-time of the end of the year. Wishing you catnaps (in lieu of hibernation) and hearty foods. Now that the shortest day has passed, each day offers a little more light.

If you enjoyed this newsletter and want more, sign up for my Substack here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.