the romance of it all: Portuguese, forty-seven books, and two manuscripts
It is the writing/art newsletter of Sharon J. Gochenour/Juniper Butterworth, returned to your inbox after a long hiatus!
For the past two months, I have been spending my break three times a week with my Brazilian coworker, eating fruit and speaking very childish Portuguese (on my end) and patiently explaining Portuguese vocabulary (on her end).
Humbling is not quite the word; humbling doesn’t quite get at the sense of various internal organs being rediscovered and immediately rearranged. I have kept up casual language-learning for many years in the privacy and comfort of my own home, but it’s been a grip since I last exposed other human beings to my attempts to speak their native tongue. Last I tried in a real way was in 2016, on a dairy farm in Brittany, taking instruction from a French farmer as I hooked up cows to the milking machines; before that it was in grad school in Switzerland, compiling endless lists of architectural and engineering vocabulary to understand my coursework.
Before that, it was doing internships in Tokyo and Madrid where years of study in Japanese and Spanish could not force the words out past my social anxiety.
What I’m doing now is not that. My coworker is a tiny, bubbly woman who worked in a daycare before she immigrated, and she has correspondingly enormous stores of patience. I help her parse bits of difficult English which come her way, and she helps me conjugate verbs in the present tense and makes funny faces at me when I accidentally use a French or Spanish word that doesn’t resemble the Portuguese counterpart. (As romance languages go, Portuguese and Spanish are fraternal twins, and Portuguese and French are first cousins.)
Between 2009 and 2018, I spent almost four years outside of the United States; from 2019 to 2024, I’ve spent just under two weeks traveling internationally. Now, we don’t have time to unpack how I feel about that, but it’s true that I’ve been feeling a little wistful about the fact that I haven’t been to Paris in eight years and don’t have any idea when I next might visit, and it’s also true that now that my life is basically predictable, I am able to do roughly ten times more writing and art than I could when I was swerving around the globe like a panicked hamster.
But taking the time to phrase my questions in a new language, with new words, and finding out what a new person thinks I should learn: all this reminds me of the person I was when I was well-acquainted with various cheap hostels throughout France and Spain. It reminds me of taking my notebook to tiny old museums and writing down dozens of words pertaining only to Roman archaeology, and of editing my graduate classmates’ papers (which were definitely mentally composed in another language before being translated to English, with varying levels of success).
I am still the person who learned French for grad school and to work on organic farms, but I am also a person who works in a grocery store which both employs and serves a lot of Portuguese-speaking folks, both from Portugal and Brazil. Portuguese sailors started arriving in Massachusetts in the mid-1800s from the Azores to work as whalers and fishermen, and a series of economic and climatic misfortunes propelled more and more Portuguese people toward New England in the century after. Massachusetts now has the largest population of people of Portuguese descent of any state in the U.S.
When Brazilian immigration into the U.S. picked up in the 2000s, Massachusetts — with its already-established networks of Portuguese-speaking churches, groceries, and social clubs — was an obvious choice for many people. (Brazilian and Portuguese dialects of the language sound as different as American and British English, in case you’re wondering; speakers from Portugal tend to clip off their words, while speakers from Brazil have a somewhat more musical intonation.)
What this means for me in every day life is that sometimes two elderly Portuguese ladies want to know what kind of filling different packages of ravioli have, or a young Brazilian instacart shopper is confused about the layout of the store and want to know where the big bags vs. big boxes of small bags of chips are located. Portuguese is a genuinely useful language for my work, and I would be lying if I said I was learning it for a reason other than spiritual fulfillment.
Other spiritually fulfilling things I have been doing include reading a great deal. I have read forty-seven books so far this year. Highlights so far have included The Scandalous Letters of V and J and The Mischievous letters of the Marquise de Q, both by Felicia Davin, both queerly imaginative and imaginatively queer in a way that refreshes my belief in writing as a good and worthwhile pursuit for humans to undertake. (They are also quite funny. V&J starts with a diary entry wherein Victor carefully catalogs all the sexual acts in one of their aunt’s dirty books.) Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass both overwhelmed my little brain with the beauty of the prose and the imagery, and gave visceral form to a lot of the terrible things I have been feeling about the state of the world. (I could tell you about the war pteranodons, or the medical wasps with stings that cause flesh to regrow, but no part of the book is more compelling or terrifying than the depiction of the patriotic fanatic Qhudur.) I got to read an advance copy of Ann LeBlanc’s The Transitive Properties of Cheese (link goes to an interview with the author + cover reveal), which is coming out later this year, and I have never encountered a book that combines the infinite potential of gender with the infinite potential of dairy cultures in such a stirring fashion.
You might be picking up that I haven’t been writing much. Last year I wrote 210,000 words (more or less three books), did eleven watercolor illustrations, self-promoted regularly on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Bluesky, and Mastodon, and ended the year as a gelatinous lump of anxiety and physical discomfort. I found this personally disagreeable, and have taken measures to sort myself out: learning Portuguese, lots of reading, kayaking, eating fruit, and vastly lowering my expectations of daily production.
While not generating much new, I am slowly but steadily editing two manuscripts, and I have high hopes of releasing said manuscripts in November and December of this year.
The first of these, which I hope to release at the end of September, is The King in the Forest, the last book in the four-book Goblins and Cheese sequence that starts with The Changeling. The King in the Forest comes back to the main characters of Priest-Queen: the new queen Elsyn, her prince-consort Kandar, and her childhood best friend Ben, a year on from the events of their first book. They face a kingdom more wracked by magical turmoil than ever, after the fairy king Oberon was killed by an enraged goat shod in iron, ending a number of enchantments which kept powerful fairy lords imprisoned.
It is a story about struggling toward a better world day after day, unsure of what forces are secretly working against you and your loved ones, struggling with endless setbacks and distractions from basically aligned factions with different priorities, administrative woes, and local disasters, while at the same time facing the places you are broken inside again and again and again, unsure if you will ever be able to move forward. It is also a story with even more magical cheese, dragons, blue trolls, and a flaming pig-god. Editing it is proving to be a Herculean effort, though I am excited to watch it take shape and pull the threads of the past three books together.
As for the second manuscript! Well, I have felt a little silly talking about it, because in spite of it nearing completion, I still don’t have a title, beyond Regency Cheesemakers #1. This book is my first historical romance, set in rural Shropshire. It has: cheese, murder, a trans man as one of the love interests (loosely based on Dr. James Barry, who performed one of the first recorded Caesareans section where both child and mother survived), and a very large family of siblings all getting in each other’s way.
I HOPE TO SAY MORE SOON, and I hope all of you are prospering.
Best,
Sharon