October: My Favorite Month
The joys of work: teaching, writing, podcasting, publishing, and self-publishing
In the twelve months since last October, I spent a total of four weeks at home in Salt Lake. As you can imagine or maybe have experienced, so much time in a temporary living situation was wearing, to say the least. About three weeks ago, I packed up my work, my clothes, and my cat, and was accompanied by my husband on the 14-hour drive from SF to SLC to resettle myself here for a season. (Or forever? Who can say.) He had to immediately return to CA for work, so it’s me and the cat for now.
Back here in my roomy home office, I immediately dove into work in the way I haven’t been able to for most of the last year, and it has felt so very good. Life balance is fine, but sometimes you want the freedom to obsessively, relentlessly, selfishly lean into all your workaholic and hyper-fixated tendencies, without guilt.
I’m also aware this is a somewhat rare and complicated pleasure for women, and that makes me enjoy it all the more.
“Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.” - Gloria Steinem
The work:
What have I been working on? A few things. In addition to drafting my next novel, I’ve been working with my MFA students and a couple of coaching clients. I love this work and the problem-solving challenge that each writer and their stories and/or process presents.
Being home has also given me the time and space to start recording new podcast episodes. Do you already get the This Creative Life emails? If not, you can find out more details about what’s going with the podcast there. (I keep thinking I should combine this list and that list as I know there’s a lot of overlap anyway, but I don’t know if people want that. Let me know if you have thoughts!)
The biggest podcast news is the pod-within-a-pod miniseries I’m doing with Andrew DeYoung about book launch season. Don’t worry—if that level of inside baseball isn’t your thing, I’m also doing a batch of the classic format episodes.
Speaking of book launch season, I’m sure by now you’re well-acquainted with the phrase “supply-chain issues.” You might even have supply-chain fatigue by now! But it’s worth heeding all the warnings about the extra time it will take this season and through the holidays to get physical books. Buy early and often!
Speaking of which, I’d be remiss to let any newsletter between now and next spring to go by without me mentioning that A Song Called Home is available for pre-order. You can use the links provided, or pre-order through your favorite local book store. Or hey, why not both?
But wait, there’s more!
This Creative Life: A Handbook for Writers is something I’ve wanted to do for awhile now and am working on as a self-publishing project. You can read all the details about that and see the pre-order information here.
Right now I’m in the process of editing lots of conference talks, previous writing-on-writing, journal entries and the like into a more book-like shape—figuring out a good sequence, adding and subtracting materials, and trying to think of every single other thing I know about the writing life that I can pour into this project! I’m enjoying the full control that the self-publishing process offers. I’ve also enjoyed researching and learning how it all works. It’s fun to learn something new in an industry I’ve been in for…what feels like forever.
All of that is to say: I like my job, and I’m so happy and grateful and relieved in this season to have the time and space to throw myself into it with wild abandon.
On to this month’s recs:
Muhammad Ali from the PBS Ken Burns team is a fantastic deep dive (like, eight hours deep) on the life of this enormously compelling and complicated figure, and in that life a lens through which to see a lot of things about America and about humans.
Dana Spiotta is an author whose books I always buy because they always feel so different to me than anything else. They aren’t mysterious, but there’s this sense of a puzzle being put together as I read, and sometimes the payoff doesn’t come until I put in the final couple of pieces at the very end. Her latest, Wayward starts off not feeling this way but then, yep, it is.
I spent much of this past summer writing this piece for Image Journal, all about Nomadland—the book, the movie, the lifestyle and my years-long obsession with it, how it all connects to Jesus, my childhood, economic instability, Bag Lady Syndrome, "minimalism"…phew! I’m grateful for a journal like Image that makes space for these kinds of longreads that contain multitudes. (If you hit a subscription wall with the link above, watch for it on LitHub where it should turn up in a week or so. Or subscribe to Image!)