Newsletter BTS
Hi!
Yesterday I launched a new newsletter, Making It, which is part of my job. SUBSCRIBE??? The gist is that I interview a different creative person every week about how they make their stuff, and also how they make it in this cursed world. So far so good? I loved talking to Casey. The next few issues are good too. I still feel like I'm working on making this format feel and sound like "me," an extra spicy meatball since "me," as a concept, has been undergoing some unattractive and arduous renovations recently.
If you are a longtime subscriber and follower you probably didn't miss the fact that last summer I lost my marbles completely. I was hospitalized for three weeks and went on 8 weeks of medical leave after a protracted manic episode. During that episode I did and said all kinds of humiliating things to all kinds of people, much of which I don't remember but all of which are, unfortunately!, still my responsibility. My marriage is still complicated, but since Keith is the person whose steadfast love has enabled me to begin to pick up the pieces, I am not in the midst of expensive divorce proceedings. (Contributors to the divorce fund will be refunded over the course of the next month as I start getting paychecks again).
So yes, it's been weird, more than weird, I don't know if we have a word in English to describe what it's been like, to try to edge back towards writing professionally or personally after getting the rug pulled out from under my brain. Someday I will write in more detail about the whole shebang, but wow, not anytime soon.
Over the weekend, in the spirit of "ok, I guess," we went to the Edgar Allen Poe museum in Richmond, VA. The many Poe artifacts there include, among other things, a pair of his socks. The item that impressed me most, though, was the desk he sat in at his job at the Southern Literary Messenger, a pamphlet-style magazine where some of his stories first appeared. The chair had an awkward cut-down back and a placard near it said that Edgar's editor had done this to make the chair less comfortable. That didn't make sense to me at first. Wouldn't he have wanted to make the chair more comfortable, so Edgar would sit in it and write more? Then it occurred to me that sometimes that's not the problem.
Anyway, you can find me at my other newsletter, and probably only there, for now. Thank you for having read this far.