O golden month! How high thy gold is heaped!
That line comes courtesy of Helen Hunt Jackson’s “September” from A Calendar of Sonnets. I’d never heard of Ms. Jackson, but apparently she was a cool lady if a just okay writer in the eyes of history. The things you learn when searching for a poetic newsletter subject line!
At this time last year, I’d just turned in a solid draft of A Song Called Home. I felt accomplished and relatively grounded amid all the uncertainty of 2020. There was something about thinking of the conditions of last year as temporary that helped me through it. I think it was that way for a lot of us who grew up used to living in survival mode. While others had early meltdowns, we were all, Hey, this stress is familiar! I can do this!
But here we are in September 2021 and it’s all still dragging on. I don’t only mean the pandemic. I mean all of it. And because of the way it’s dragging on, which seems 1) based in man’s hatred of fellow man and/or total lack of critical thinking skills and 2) at least to some significant extent preventable, it all just feels…real bad!
My friend Bryan retweeted a Michael Chabon thread about nihilism the other day in which Chabon said that “in negating the purpose of life, nihilism invalidates agency, conscience, self-determination. It’s a surrender, and like any form of surrender immediately raises the question: To whom?”
You might guess part of the answer:
Well, damn.
Bryan (who writes great books btw) added, “existentialism as a theology might ‘come back’ for teenagers and how we respond to that—in our fiction and our theology—matters.”
All words I want to remember when I feel myself slipping into that bleak surrender.
The act of writing itself feels like some kind of shield against it. Or, not a shield, but something less defense and more offense, an outright raid on hopelessness. Flannery O’Connor said people without hope don’t write novels. Well, the whole quote is:
“People without hope not only don’t write novels, but what is more to the point, they don’t read them. They don’t take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience.”
Meditate on that for a minute. Phew.
At the end of August, I committed to myself to write fiction every single day of September. Writing every day is not my usual thing, especially when I’m in a transition or have a looming dread or things are unsettled. All of those things are true for me this month, yet so far I haven’t missed a day. Some days produce fewer than 100 words and are not getting me anywhere very fast, but I need to try to heap up some emotional and hopeful gold in this golden, difficult month.
A few recs:
Believe it or not, I had never seen Moonstruck until a few days ago. I have a list of movies like that--ubiquitously popular, out forever, haven’t seen ‘em. I found it delightful and a good antidote to all the murder shows and grim movies I tend to watch!
I just finished Ashley Ford’s memoir, Somebody’s Daughter. It took me two tries, because there was some difficult content I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for, initially, but when I did finish, I loved it. For those of us who sometimes feel that we more survived our childhoods and adolescence than lived them, or has health with issues around parental abandonment, you will find understanding here.
I’m halfway through We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida and am hurrying to finish before the Libby app snatches it from my shelf. It’s set in 1980s San Francisco with teens navigating adolescence here, as I did so much of mine. This was a rec from my sister that she told me about when we were on a walk in Sea Cliff, a neighborhood I would definitely live in if I win the lottery.
Book news:
My sweet, misunderstood pandemic baby, Goodbye from Nowhere, was named a Bank Street Books Best Book of 2021 for readers 14 and up. Don’t go trying to read it if you’re thirteen and a half!
A Song Called Home is available for pre-order, a thing I will keep mentioning as February gets closer. Order early and often! And speaking of hope, Gary Schmidt--legend, Newbery winner, good human--says that it (my new book!) “dares us all to hope.”
That’s a dare I’m taking on myself right now.
Until next month…
So spot on dear one.
I recently read on another forum, some observations of a concentration camp survivor, and he was noting that the ones that survived, had hope, hope for unfinished dreams, some imaginary goal that kept them fighting, when giving up was easier.
It was inspirational.
I went back and copied the quote, it is long but spot on.
Quote:
The Bible was my primer in jail but there was also a book called "Man's Search for Meaning" authored by Dr. Viktor Frankl. He was a psychoanalyst who was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII. His book was about his observations and conclusions regarding how, why, some prisoners would survive the mental abuse and physical torture while others simply gave up and died. Here are some of the quotes from his book that I found to be directed to me personally.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude …
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” He concluded that those who survived the atrocities they suffered had things that had gone unaccomplished. An architect who had been developing plans for the highest skyscraper in the world. A mother who was taken by the Nazis while her children were at school and she needed to tell them what happened to her, why she went missing. Multiple examples of uncompleted plans or dreams. “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”
This came at the right time. I've been thinking a lot about how buying things is a form of ultimately unsatisfying self-medication during the pandemic, for so many of us.