A Year In Reading - 2015

It's been a terrific year of reading for me. Last year felt like a jumble of misplaced words and thoughts, after losing my reading list in the birth year of my son. I remember reading Me Before You early last January, in a strange, milky haze of motherhood and misplaced sleep. Beyond that, everything in that year, including my newfound identity of 'mother', felt like an interrupted thought, a word at the tip of my tongue that never quite leaked out.

This year felt more solid and whole on the reading front (and many others). I aimed to read a book a week, which is my goal every year. And that seems to work for me. I guess I even surpassed that goal.

I don't like to list favorites here. Books are so uniquely their own, to stand them up against one another feels wrong. However, I was asked to compile a list of recommended young adult books for Cleaver Magazine and, while I personally hesitate to call it a 'best of' anything, it is a list of amazing books that were powerful and meant something to me and each of our awesome reviewers. I link to it here.

I love to list the books I've read, to remember where I've been and where I ended up in my reading year, in the hopes that you'll tell me where you were and we can talk about the places we overlapped. I only included books I completed and enjoyed. So this list is made up of a ton of excellent reads and I celebrate all of them. I also linked to the books I offered more thoughts on in my blog or on the Barnes and Noble Kids blog.

I suppose the best thing about this reading year were how many of my amazing friends published incredible books this year and last (highlighted below). And I discovered some new-to-me authors that are probably not new to anyone else whose books I'm thrilled to have finally found: Lauren Groff, Nova Ren Suma, Lucia Berlin, Elana K. Arnold, Celeste Ng, Angela Flournoy, and Marilynne Robinson.

I hope you had a terrific reading year too. And I have more news soon, about a redesign for this ole blog in the new year.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Brunt Rifka
Blue Birds by Caroline Starr Rose
The Summer Prince by Alaya Johnson Dawn
Free to Learn by Peter Gray
I'll Be Right There by Kyung-sook Shin
The Girl with Borrowed Wings by Rinsai Rosetti
The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender
Red Butterfly by A.L. Sonnichsen
Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Goodbye Stranger by Rebecca Stead
The Professor and the Madmen by Simon Winchester
Rainey Royal by Dylan Landis
Evil Spy School by Stuart Gibbs
Watch the Sky by Kirsten Hubbard
The Darkest Part of the Forest by Holly Black
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
We Are All Made of Molecules by Susin Neilsen
One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
Suart Little by E.B. White
The Penderwicks #1 by Jeanne Birdsall
The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma
The Trumpet of the Swan by E.B. White
Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff
For Real by Alison Cherry
Arcadia by Lauren Groff
The Sunlit Night by Rebecca Dinerstein
Emily Windsnap and the Ship of Lost Souls by Liz Kessler
The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff
Tender at the Bone by Ruth Reichl
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich
Smile by Raina Telegmeier
He's Gone by Deb Caletti
The Night We Said Yes by Lauren Gibaldi
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Rules for Stealing Stars by Corey Ann Haydu
Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann
The Marvels by Brian Selznick
Some Luck by Jane Smiley
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo
M Train by Patti Smith
The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin
Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash
Bone Gap by Laura Ruby
Rats Saw God by Rob Thomas
Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt
The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle
Infandous by Elana K. Arnold
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nahesi Coates
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
Home Cooking: A Writer in the Kitchen by Laurie Colwin
My True Love Gave to Me: Stories Edited by Stephanie Perkins
The Turner House by Angela Flournoy
Mr. Lemoncello's Library Olympics by Chris Grabenstein
A Manual for Cleaning Women: Stories by Lucia Berlin

The Reading Spot

Thinking of my reading spot. The spot I sit in now. The burgundy pillow pushed up against the arm of the old tan couch. My shoulder bone shelved against one of four pillow points, curled like withered leaves in winter.

There's a spit-up stain beneath me and I remember how I stood hunched over a toothbrush and clump of baking soda, sprayed cleansers, sighed at the distorted rings of forever, as they blackened like mildew into the folds.

I read here. I write. I watch television and movies. Tyler stands at the edge of the kitchen counter, waiting for risotto to plump. Buttered onions seer my vision. I sink into the heat of our summers. I listen to the clang of the metal heater, the croak of the wobbly kitchen table as my son slams his plastic car against its limping wooden leg.

There are days I push forward, scoot my bottom to the crack of the cushions, close my eyes and wish for a few moments of quiet, before a sticky hand is at my thigh, a knee at my knee, my boy breathing through his stuffed-up nose with a book in his hands.

Because this is the reading spot. This is years of a butt-marked dip in the catalog couch, with its velcroed cushions and the lump and sag of never-forgetting. This is the spot where the laptop fidgets against my thighs, where the overhead light cuts at the sharp edge of books from the Brooklyn Public Library, the Strand, Book Court, and the rug of my old bedroom.

This is where, he knows, we read.

In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf. And a tiny finger goes from one white round circle to the other. From egg to moon. Two gaps amongst splotches of wet-paint color.

Together we sink deeper. We carve our places in the space we make for words.

You have a reading spot, too, I bet.

Halloween Here and There

I love Halloween here in Brooklyn. It's more festive than anywhere I've lived. With all the brownstones and apartments and local shops so close together, the streets are lined with people and store clerks giving out candy. There are a lot of families in our neighborhood and people come out in spectacled groups, sequined and felted, wielding plastic swords and scepters, with wild head-pieces and spooks. The leaf colors are at their peaks and it's just before we lose the lushness of our tree-lined streets and things become more stark and cold.

This year, Little O was a duck, an outfit chosen because it's a word he says emphatically. He sends his arm out, like a saluting soldier, pointing at anything in books or in life that closely resembles the feathery creature (rubber duckys, baby chicks, yellow dots). Then he calls it out with gusto: duck! 

At first, the costume made him grumpy. He ripped off his duck-billed hat and the velcro-ed web feet. Then we went to a Halloween party at his daycare, which we call school (which he calls coooool), and everyone fussed over how cute he was, so he finally understood the costume was an attention-getter, and, therefore, a welcome addition to his life.

Later, while trick-or-treating, he learned that holding out his orange and black bag would award him more oohs and ahhs, so he proudly accepted candy, with no concept that his parents would be the eager recipients of the fruits of his labor later that night.

After a long afternoon wandering the streets we went to a child-friendly bar serving pumpkin beer for the adults (we do it right here in Brooklyn) and a mound of french-fries for Little O to share with one of his little buddies.

I kept remarking to my own Dad the kind of 'damage' I could have done had I grown up in this neighborhood on Halloween. I was the kid who came home with pillow case-sized bags of loot, wandering late into the evening with my friends. Halloween was a mission to traverse as much sidewalk and bang on as many doors to get as much candy as I possibly could. 

I remember this woman 'around the corner', as we always said, who gave out whole candy bars on Halloween. They were Ronald McDonald bars -- something I haven't really seen since (though a google search tells me they can be ordered and personalized to sell for fundraising efforts) and she had a giant wheel in front her home, like one you'd steer on an old ship. She wasn't like our immediate next-door neighbor, who gave out pennies if you dared to knock on her door, who once refused to give me any despite giving them to my friends, because, who knows, any one of her crotchety, old lady excuses would do.  

We knew which houses gave the best and the worst treats of the day. We knew which darkened porches to avoid and which streets were too dangerous to cross. We knew the land like we'd settled and mapped it ourselves. 

It made me smile to think, no matter where Little O ends up doing his growing, he'll, hopefully, have his own Halloween land to map out too.

Writing for the B&N Kids blog and an opportunity to review for Cleaver Magazine

Managing a freelance writing career this past year, I've been really happy to find some book gigs. I recently realized I never posted about them here.

I hope to cross post in the future but, since March, I've been writing about and celebrating children's books (mostly middle grade) on the Barnes & Noble Kids blog. It's been super fun to interview authors, celebrate new books with review-like posts, and create lists of books to recommend to young readers and their parents and teachers.

If you want to follow along, the link is here . The blog features picture books, chapter books, and middle grade. I most recently read and loved Corey Ann Haydu's beautiful book Rules for Stealing Stars.

I'm also editing YA and middle grade book reviews for Cleaver Magazine. There, we feature children's books from small and independent presses. I've been finding some incredible hidden gems out there. Follow along here.

For those of you who are interested in writing formal children's book reviews for Cleaver Magazine, I'd love to work with you. While we do tend to have more reviewers than books to review, I would still love to add you to our list of reviewers. If you're interested, let me know in the comments!

In Process

In a time of a lot of uncertainty, waiting on all matters of things (both personal and professional) to right themselves, I'm feeling at peace inside my own stories. When the freelance work doesn't call, I find myself with pockets of time to lose myself in the real work (a shift in thinking from a time when I thought only the paying work was the real work) of trying to tell a story.

I have to work hard at this. Maybe I can kite-run off with a pretty sentence every now and then but, beyond that, I learn my limits every day. I have to fight to find a plot. I have characters that arc into broken rainbows, no pot of gold at their ends. I struggle to find rhythm. I forget the point I'm trying to make, if I ever had one to begin with.

But I'm learning, every day, to put my faith in the process and recognize that, for me, that process is going to be very messy and long. I used to think I was losing time. I used to think, without a book deal or an agent, I was lost in some writing blackhole, never to find my way out. But, a few weeks ago, I had a nice conversation with a writer who simply said in a voice so mild and zen I thought maybe I'd found God, "What's the rush? It'll happen someday."

What is the rush? I don't know.

So I sit somewhere between the possibility of someday and the reality of now.

The reality of now is, maybe, a little harsher than I'd like. But, in terms of writing, now is a process and 'someday' relies on it. I have wrestled with so many things inside stories, tried to bend characters and plots to my will, let them all go their very-wrong-ways and turned around again and again.

Maybe this is what I love about writing, the practice of it, the mess of it, being in a place where there are a million second chances, a million possibilities for a plot or a person or a relationship. Sara Zarr spoke in her This Creative Life podcast in an interview with John Corey Whaley about a tweet that made her recognize a possible reason she writes to begin with: it may be the only place she has any control at all.

I related to that.

This morning I decided to take two characters and make them one and I laughed, because I had to, because the only place it's possible for that to happen is while writing fiction, or maybe when a twin is absorbed in utero, I don't know (I'll leave that to the science fiction writers). Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's a good one. It's a possibility, at least. And whether it's good or bad - I can live with the consequences. Either I move forward or I try again. While in process, there's always another way to go.

Givng Myself the Time to Reflect Here

On a run through Brooklyn Bridge Park, I stopped for a sunset

Even though there are still technical days left of summer, the start of September is always the start of my 'fall'. And fall is when I begin my new year. This September I'll begin a brand new novel that's been edging its way into my heart and mind. I'll confess, these days, there's hardly time to stop and let a a story find its way. But I'm trying to find moments to slow down.

I realize, the lack of time to reflect is what pushes me away from this space. I wake up to my son 'chirping' (as we call it) and there's barely a moment to wipe the sleep from my eyes. I'm immediately thrust into the day, as he squirms up to our bed, and I'm in game of 'catch', to keep little hands away from the lotion on the nightstand, the lamp, the hardcover of a book, or the iPad I've left to close to the edge.  

Before I know it we're dressing, and eating, and I'm swiping a cloth against the tray of the high chair, dipping to the floor 1,000 times and back up, filling straw-cups and snack containers, setting off to playgrounds and gardens and pop-up pools. On the two days a week that Little O goes to daycare, the day flies away from me, consumed with freelance work and correspondence. I'd clip the day's wings if I could.

Occasionally, I sorta-stop. For a run in the morning or a podcast on the walk to the grocery store. Three times for a yoga class squeezed between the hours of here or there. I savor the words of books (the latest, Thirteen Ways of Looking by the great Colum McCann. More on this, I hope, soon.) But rarely, a moment to reflect. To look. To take stock. 

I'm working on that. 

I'm working on coming here, to the blog, to understand where I am. To tell it as it is. To, maybe, snap a photograph, in order to see what I've actually seen. The days are full and rich. I am more content and at peace with my life than I've been in a long time. But, it's nice to step back and see things for what they are or, maybe, more importantly, for what I wish they could be.

I've wondered why I can't let this space go. Many times I made the decision to, simply, walk away. But then I'd think, hold on to the space. Not because of social media platforms or personal brands (neither of which I have.)  But because I miss the conversation. The record of an ordinary day. I miss being able to say, this here is a thought I once had, whether it be naive or insightful or too raw to be understood. And I miss someone saying, me too. This September, this year, I'd like to give myself permission to spend more time here. 

All I can say is, I'll try. 

Words From a Novel in Progress, Inspired by the Bodega Cat

Yesterday, this beautiful creature stood ahead of the refrigerated meats and cheese at the local butcher, looked stoically at me as I stood bedraggled after a long day of work and I was reminded of a scene I wrote. One that was inspired by cats like this one, maybe not as impeccably groomed as this regal puff, but roaming Brooklyn bodegas and shops just the same. This is from my novel, THE TREE BOOK, my first attempt at middle grade. A book I've dreamed my way through the best I could. Now I'm dreaming for it.

Not much to set up except that my main character, Cora, is chasing her little sister, who chases a cat.

I slink on over, slow, to Miss Li’s, and stand at the swinging bell door. Adare crouches at the beer refrigerators, where the cat is pawing at the silver and steel. Adare giggles and the cat stretches its front legs out like it might leap away but instead it starts licking its gray fur down and Adare’s cheek falls to her shoulder, mesmerized.

            “No animals allowed!” Miss Li shouts, sticking her arm out, to her handwritten signs behind the register, something about IDs and cigarettes, and no animals, and a big red X slashing through American Express.

            “It’s not ours,” I say but Miss Li’s arm swings back again and one long, wrinkled finger looks like it’ll poke the sign straight into my eye.

            “Out.” She says and her lips sag to her chin, like always, except for the one time Adare reached over the counter and touched the gold bracelet on her bone-thin wrist. Real gentle, with just one soft finger, but I still thought Miss Li would slash her across the store quick. Of course, Adare’s smile, the way it has a habit of knowing people and calming them down, made Miss Li smile too. A gift from my son, she said.

             I look at her gold bracelet now. It’s made to look like a ribbon, looped in a perfect bow. She wears it so tight, so close, her skin bunches up, tries to take a breath from behind it, but never quite lets go.

Brooklyn Summer

It's been a long time since I've updated. Busy with the stuff of life. My professional freelance life has picked up a bit and O now adjusts to part time daycare, a balance that feels much better for us both.

The business of writing and publishing has set me back and I struggle with where I have landed, somewhere far-far-away, or so it feels, but I have a finished novel I love, a new idea ready to run where it runs, and I have my cautious optimism. Some days, it feels, what is there to say about this writing life? Except that it goes and goes and has its carousel-way with me. Maybe that's why I've been so quiet here.

I've been walking through this hot and rainy summer, the air hanging low and wet. I take Little O to various playgrounds. I hide in the shade, against the curl of the red slide. O's better now about getting up and down the stairs. He holds on, his toes hanging over each step and, one at a time, he lets one foot meet the next. He totters, like a penguin, down to where he came from and back.

I find myself in a Brooklyn summer as if for the first time, experiencing it with O. The kind of summer when children's laughter and wet braids slash through the spray of fire hydrants. Kids dangle from their parent's wrists and popsicles drip in rainbow lines to their elbows. O walks round and round our block with his push toy. He wrestles with the gates of the community garden, stomps in mud pits and sprinkler puddles, dipping watering cans and pails in the muck. We wait with braceleted wrists at the city Pop-up pool and he blows bubbles in the water. I consider, over online shopping carts, which swimmies might be best for a road trip lake vacation (puddle jumpers, anyone?).

Visiting my parents, I remember, as the little kids in the house next door send their bare tummies along their slip and slide, how summer was wet and restless and racing, with legs and arms pumping. I dunked my head in water, clutched at the grass in handstands, ran after the ice cream truck.

I am thrilled to discover that Brooklyn summers are similar. We may trade grass for concrete, but all the wet spray and breathless laughter and running toward the steel drum bell of the ice cream truck remain the same. I am reminded that summer, when done right, is barefoot and sticky and slick with sun cream, no matter where it takes place.

Celebrating Lauren Gibaldi and The Night We Said Yes

I'm writing in celebration of the lovely Lauren Gibaldi who releases her debut novel The Night We Said Yes on June 16th. I have been waiting for this book and I know it's one you will want to read, so I hope you'll check it out. 

Lauren asked about a time I said 'yes' and it got me thinking about a lot of things. Dates, jobs, engagements and, then, this...

For a long time, I waited for someone else to say it first.

I waited for graduate schools to decide what kind of writer I was. A playwright. A screenwriter. A novelist. (For a few years, at Boston University, it seemed, a screenwriter I'd be...and yet...) I waited for sights-set-too-high literary magazines to say 'yes' to the stories piling up in my heart and in my hard-drive. They sent back rejections on printed slips sealed with 'no'.

I waited because I thought a 'yes' held the weight of all my writerly worth.

In 2007 I signed up for a novel-writing workshop at The New School at the last minute. I ended up on a waiting list. I sat through the first class and, in the end, walked up to the professor:

What are the chances I'll get in this class? 
You won't.
But I need this.
Why?

He stared me down, this pale, skinny thing, with hair in his eyes. It felt like a challenge. Like, if I gave him a good enough reason, maybe he'd find room for me. But it also felt like a statement. You don't need this class, or any class, to be a writer. You know that. 

Maybe I could have answered. Maybe I could have said what I felt, that I needed someone to let me in. To tell me it was okay to sit with stories, to weave words, to let go of whatever mess might sit inside me making sense of itself through tall-tales.

Can't you just let me in? I asked.

And then it came, an answer I was accustomed to hearing, the inevitable no.

I walked away, out of the building, crossed the city, west to east, to the one room studio on 18th street with the blue couch and a window that sat on the street. A place for watching.

I was tired of waiting for everyone else to decide for me. Tired of standing outside of where I wanted to be. Between each no, stood my drumming yes. I wrote that night in secret. I told my stories in the dark, at a wobbly white desk, when the day was done, the real work finished, the work of dreaming begun.

In the years since, I still wait for yes. Sometimes, it comes through in an email from an agent or for a flash fiction story or a chapbook. More often, it is just out of reach, beyond the folds of maybe or if or next time or never. It sits far away from a not what I had hoped.

But I know my own hope. I have my own yes and it's the only one I need.

Thoughts on One Thing Stolen by Beth Kephart

(Florence. April 11, 2001. Me in the first of a string of purple coats. Lynn and Ponte Vecchio.)

I sat with this exquisite book late at night, my husband snoring beside me, a dim light keeping watch. When I read a Beth Kephart book, I make sure the hours are there before me, uninterrupted. I knew, about thirty pages in, there would be no stopping mid-way. I had to get to some kind of end.

One Thing Stolen is about Nadia Cara, who, on a research trip with her mother, brother, and professor father in Florence, has begun to lose her ability to speak. She's snatching pieces of memory, of her elusive now, searching for a boy who may or may not be real, stealing pieces of a city and weaving them into elaborate nests. 

She lives in a room once occupied by twins and she fixates on the might-be disappearance of one of them. We watch, as if on high or below or behind or across, the weave of two Nadias. One, through memory, as part of a plea for us to know her as she was in her home of West Philadelphia, the whip-smart planner, witnessing miracles, leading her best friend Maggie to hidden pockets of her city. A girl with a future. The other, a shadow of her former self, whose everything is uncertain.

I can't tell you how much I love this book, how in awe I sat of this story, an elaborate nest of its own. I'd copy every beautiful sentence from this novel and leave it here for you, but that is the gift of Kephart's book, sitting with its soft feathered pages. This book is not a tangle. It is an incredible, careful, deliberate weave. Ribbons and strands of story coming together to create something exquisite and beautiful. Like Nadia's very first steal, which involves taking apart the words and language she is losing her grip on and braiding it back together in pieces, this book is a similar, spectacular creation.

The broken Nadia is what captured my heart as it pulsed and raced through these pages, what broke it and put it back together. I don't, that I know, have a neurological disorder, but perhaps I understand what it is to mourn someone I used to be. To feel that I have unravelled, lost pieces of myself, chasing through the streets of a foreign city, desperate to find myself whole. 

There is time, in our lives, to seek out, to remember, and to hold tight to the people who remind us, every day, who we are and who we can be. In this book, that person is Nadia's best friend, Maggie. We meet Maggie throughout the book but we know her and come to love her as she wrestles with Nadia's story for us. She, like the Mud Angels who rescued the city of Florence after its 1966 flood, is steadfast, certain, hopeful, and loyal, willing to see past the muck and mire, to the rare relic of us all. She is someone we should all aspire to be. To one another. To ourselves.

I am lucky, so lucky, to have many Maggies in my life but I could not help but close the pages of this book and remember my own time in Florence with my very own Maggie, my friend Lynn. Lynn held tight to our Let's Go Europe guide book and led us through cobblestone streets, teetering gelato cones, yanking my chin up to the Duomo, waiting with me in an endless line at the Uffizi, standing above and beside the almost-but-never-will-be (S)Arno river. I was reminded, as I looked at the photo above, that I was designated map girl. Me, hopeless with direction, a person who never knows where she's going until she's there, but, like Nadia, so certain, so sure, I had a future.

This book holds tight to hope and I held on with it. A really stunning, masterful work. 

Back In Spring

It's spring and the ants are invading, lining the windows, zagging the floors. I wash the counters with vinegar and sprinkle cinnamon like pixie dust. All at once the pear blossoms bend their branches to form a canopy over Columbia street and, now, Little O and I are no longer caught indoors, wishing the cold away, instead we circuit playgrounds in a wide loop around our corner of Brooklyn.

Some playgrounds are crowded with rows of nannies rocking strollers, shushing infants to sleep in a back and forth, push and pull, while their siblings streak and tear through the narrow spaces of play. Others sit tucked beside the various entrance to the BQE, invaded only after school. The children come in waves of screams and O doesn't understand why he can't toddle with his tentative, bumbling, Frankenstein walk when they come through.

The playground I like best is on the waterfront and it's for the smallest of the littles. Even O, who only began walking a few weeks ago, can climb the broad steps of the slide and make his way down alone. Sometimes I overestimate his capabilities and he's tumbling across the blue ground, arms up and wondering and waiting for love while he pouts.

This spring finds us in the swimming pool at the YMCA in Manhattan, navigating subway stairs and stroller wheels through clogged streets to get there. Sam is the bare-chested, gold-chain wearing swim instructor, who sings nursery rhymes like he's sauntering the stage of a cabaret, while we swirl the babies on our hips, and it reminds me of my childhood in our above ground pool that always looked vaguely green with its dented walls. My friends and I used to churn water to make a soft, singing whirlpool.

But now I am the mother carrying childhood memories, reciting Humpty Dumpty over and over, from 'wall' to the 'fall', from the tile to the water and back again. O was the only child to cry for twenty-five of the thirty minutes. But he smiled through chlorine and tears and kicked his way through the last five.

As if he recognized the thrill of his experience, too late, he wailed as we exited the pool, wanting only to go back in.

More writing. Less dwelling.

Since Little O's been born, time feels like a series of pockets. Zipped up most of the day, then flung open in hour increments when he naps. When he finally (finally) rests his bright red hair on the alphabet sheet and ends his day, it feels like my work day begins. It's in the evenings and late into the night that I sit down to work or write. 

This is no different from when I worked full time at a day job. In some ways, there's more time because the day isn't spent drowning in corporate stress and pressures. I may be physically exhausted, hauling Little O through our world, wrangling him upon changing tables or inside cribs and high chairs and strollers and carriers. I may be emotionally exhausted trying to understand what a mini-human who can not speak actually wants, tested by someone who knows more about wrongdoing than he pretends (but how can I scold that innocent face, those pleading up at me big-brown mirrored eyes?) But my mind is active and engaged with life and the world in a way it hadn't been inside a gray cubicle. And, for this reason, it feels like these very small pockets of time are more productive.

I'm not going to pretend I'm accomplishing loads of freelance work or knocking out novels and essays and stories in mere weeks. I can't say that I'm writing at some new level of quality. But my writing has become more focused. I thought, for a while, it was because of the time constraint alone but I realize it may be that active and alert mind throughout the rest of the day.

I used to use writing time for both writing and dwelling on what I would write or say and how I would say it. Now I dwell on words in some kind of secret passageway in my mind throughout the day, during the quick shower, the stroller walk to the park, at the sink washing dishes, or while feeding O yogurt from a spoon. And my writing time is, for the most part, writing time. Tapping out words. Playing around with them. And if words aren't coming, I move on to the next task on a very, very long list of to-do.

Of course, next week, it all could change. If motherhood has taught me anything, it's that nothing is static, everything is in motion, just a phase of the moon.

But for now. Today. More writing. Less dwelling. It's been interesting. 

Currently

I'd like to blog more. I don't know if I will. I feel a quiet in the blogging world that makes me sad. It feels like a place of nostalgia rather than a place that screams now, now. So, I figured I'd plant myself here, find my way back in, as urgently as I can, with a currently post. 

Watching

Tina Fey's latest, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. I am trying to pace myself when it comes to this show. Even though I don't want to pace myself. I want to watch it all in one wonderful, hyper-color, fluorescent sitting. In the words of my own pithy twitter status, this show is everything. To elaborate: smart, charming, optimistic, positive, and, above all, hilarious. It makes me smile. It improves my mood. The world needs Kimmy Schmidt. We are lucky to have her.

Reading

We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. After last year's mishap with my reading list, I decided to participate on Goodreads. If you want to know what I'm reading, I hope you'll join me there, here.  

Listening

To Sia. Podcasts, podcasts, and more podcasts. Death, Sex, & Money, The Longest Shortest Time, This American Life, Pop Culture Happy Hour... the list goes on and on. Little O's babble, a steady dadadada, tatatata, bababa chant. Long ago it was mamamama but, sigh, he's moved on. 

Making

Cakes. Novels (I finished a first draft of a new book last week.) Essays. 

Feeling

Restless. Ready. As I'll ever be. As I've been.

Planning

My revisions. And a weekend trip with one of my favorite friends, away from the little ones. 

Loving

Green things pushing through the dirt, past the winter we've had, letting themselves be known. Time with family and warm weather down South, where I spent the past few days among even more green, like the live oaks above, finally feeling, not cold. The moments when I'm alone, sitting, thinking, staring out a window or in the dark or tucked in bed and I think of Little O and something runs through me, from my toes to my chest. A love surge. 

A reminder that stories matter

With Little O napping, a cup of tea at my side, and a deluge of sun at my window, I find myself with a few moments to sit here with words. Usually, I'd use the time to work on my novel or plug away at essays and articles I try to pitch for publication or for the rare freelance work or to find some work or any work or more work but there's an exhaustion that comes with spending every spare minute working toward something, instead of just being with the time we have.

These past few months, I've written a lot of blog posts and emails in my head. Some, I've even sat down and started, then deleted before pressing publish or send. There are a lot of days when I just don't feel confident in my words, even in a silly email to a friend. Most days, I don't want to share anything I write at all.

I've been journaling. On the computer. In secret. Paper journals have never quite worked for me. There's something about paper and pen that feels very permanent. Unforgivable. The typed word feels transient, fleeting and, therefore, comfortable. There are some ideas and thoughts that don't need to be etched in the stones of history.

Journaling has helped me remember and understand what I think and care about. It's helped me find a lot of joy in sitting down to think, which, for me, is a bit more active, since writing is how I think my everything.

Irony of all ironies, the secret journaling has helped me understand that sharing some of the work is important to me. I've spent my entire life engaged in the stories of others, entangled in a rich dialogue with writers I've never talked to or met, and I'd like some of my words to get tied up in the same imaginary dialogue someday.

Once I was asked for writing advice, or maybe I was asked in my head, that's definitely possible since I don't engage in much real conversation anymore, but I thought the best advice I could give was to always remember that stories matter and that the work is important.

For the past few months, in the imaginary lines of an online journal, in the actual words, and real thoughts, I've questioned validity.  I've thought about writers and writing and the way our world sees the profession. I've wondered if the work still matters if it isn't shared or seen. I've wondered when it is seen, if becomes more or less valid. Or if, all of it, is part of a disappearing act. I've questioned the importance, the mattering of writing at all.

I guess I discovered, in secret, what I already knew. It is important. It does matter. Seen or unseen. Secret or exposed. It's all part of a rich dialogue, some of it imagined, some of it real. So I'm here to remind myself, novice nobody writer that I am, that it is and it does.

Snow Day

They closed schools, shut the subways down, the BQE became a ghost tunnel, and we prepared for the blustering, dumping, blizzard they said it would be.

Instead, the storm surged East and North and we had a slushy few inches. 

A let-down, in some ways. I expected a wonderland when I woke up. And, for me, I thought how much better a snow day would be if I didn't have to wake up and be ​present​. If I could read all day in my pajamas, watch a dumb movie on tv. 

At least, we thought, Little O could play in the snow, in a way he couldn't in his infancy last year. We bundled him in his space-suit, his hood an astronaut puff. We stepped out the door, caked snow on his mittens, touched it to his cheek, our voices knocking up a register, as always. ​Snow! Snow!  He sat in it, looked at it, had this way of looking back up at us, glum and unimpressed, wondering when we'd take him in from the cold. 

Our usually happy baby spent the rest of the day indoors crying, fussing, unhappily being plopped from one uninteresting activity to the next. The mat, his room, the bag of books, the basket of toys, the slinking dog pull-thing, the ride-on push-car with its piano keys. None of it inspiring, apparently. 

Yes, we stayed safe. Yes, all was not lost or destroyed. We are lucky. But I feel his restlessness. So much excitement over the white-stuff. Press conferences and news headlines. Empty supermarket shelves. The possibility that the world we know and everything around it could turn white and drift and slope, shake our footing, shape the ground, contour our lives, and we'd see something we'd never really seen before. 

I guess the gray and white days will slog along just the same until spring. 

First Drafts

Sometimes, when I face a first draft, the daunting, bridge-less white gaps of story, I feel overwhelmed. I think, this is the worst part of writing. This is the conjuring. Every word, every sentence, an angry miracle.

Other times, the empty spaces feel like possibilities and I marvel in them. I send strands of story as far as I can. I circle them into messy, tangled nests that I hope will one day become functional.

I often count words and days. I wonder when I'll reach an end. I make deadlines. I think if I can finish a draft before this but after that, I will be on track to get here so I can get there. Because if I don't get there I'll never be anywhere and who, in their right mind, would want that?

I add. I divide. I carry the one. I try to understand how long it will take to finish.

Finish.

Finish.

The old chant.

So much of my creative life, measured in the completion of words, rather than the actual practice of finding them.

Today, I thought, this is the best part of writing. The actual, well, writing. The wandering and wishing through a story I didn't know I knew. The waiting for words, however agonizing.

I think there's certainly something to be said for completing a work. For thumbing through the pages of a printed manuscript. For being able to say, I did it.

But, today, I feel even more satisfaction as I sit with all the words ahead of me and say, I'm doing it. 

Blue Birds by Caroline Starr Rose

This week we're celebrating Caroline Starr Rose's Blue Birds, which turned out to be my first completed book of the new year. Little O was feverish and cough-y and had fallen asleep on my chest. A rare moment for the boy who will no longer sit still. I reached for this gorgeous novel in verse and read it without ever needing a bookmark, turning pages to find out what would happen, stopping to re-read the most beautiful passages, until I reached the end.

This novel takes place in 1587 and follows the friendship of two spirited, young girls. Alis: the only English girl to arrive on the island of Roanoke. And Kimi: a member of the Roanoke tribe. 

Tensions rise between the English and the Roanoke, war is waged, and these girls find one another, call to one another, take unbelievable risks, and make room in their hearts to understand and love one another like sisters.  

The novel takes place in 1587 but it's a story for right now. Today. This minute. 

It's a story to stop and sit with, to use the rare moments of quiet amidst all the terrible noise. War wages across our world and within our hearts and we need more stories about finding empathy and compassion. We need more stories about two girls who find beauty in the mystery of one another, who look past their differences and find a shared language of friendship and love.

I loved this book. I also needed it. Since every day I listen to the noise and wish we could all find a new way of seeing. 

There are so many stunning passages in this book but I'll pull one of my favorites, a question Alis asks: 

What if a flight of birds

followed the wandering one,

joining him on a journey

entirely new?

These days, I ask a lot of what if's. This gorgeous novel answers many of them. It releases in March.

But read on to pre-order. The book is gift enough but Caroline has another beautiful gift for you too.

This post is part of a week-long celebration in honor of the book Blue Birds. Author Caroline Starr Rose is giving away a downloadable PDF of this beautiful Blue Birds quote (created by Annie Barnett of Be Small Studios) for anyone who pre-orders the book from January 12-19. Simply click through to order from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Books A Million, IndieBound, or Powell's, then email a copy of your receipt tocaroline@carolinestarrrose.com by Monday, January 19. PDFs will be sent out January 20.