one: not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation

Okay, Issue the First. We'll feel our way through this thing together, guys.

January first and second were a quiet and rather deliberate start to the year: for the first time since I went full-time as a writer, I took the two weeks around the holidays absolutely, positively, no-exceptions off -- and let myself rest, read, recharge, and get bored. Let us tip a hat to composer and theorist John Cage on this matter:

A special thanks to Marissa Lingen, who enabled this absolutely excellent stupid joke.

But in any case, January 1st Energy was entirely bright and quiet: baked beans in the oven, last summer's tomato paprika jam, sweeping and mopping and gathering the recycling away, website backend work, knitting in front of Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, a beautiful tarte tatin for dinner, and a prose poem about Cassandra and the act of listening and what it is to save that has roughed into an odd little monstrosity that can't decide if it's poetry or flash, but either way is gorgeous, so I'm left to decide what direction to shape it in revision.

January 2nd Energy came in better yet: back at work and setting up a pile of forward-reaching client projects for the month, a teaching crit written for OWW, new words on the novella project drafted, plans made, and drinks with a friend where we just kind of talked our creative projects and life and our general bullshit for a few hours and the waiter snuck me a soda water refill while saying what refill, this didn't happen, and I went I don't know what you mean and tipped extravagantly.

And then on January 3rd the world crackled back in and it's been a bit of mayhem since.

But in the mayhem, a lot is already growing forward, professionally and personally, and I've got the template already. Enough template to make the decision that all my weekdays this year should be January 2nd, and all my weekends January 1st. It is stormy weather out there; I've decided, when it blows me off course, which way of working and being ought to be the way home.

It's clear the world will crackle in; there will only be so much I can do about it. But I'm hoping some of this year will be about what we do in response when the static inevitably rises: a way to go there, that is where I belong and walk back to my proverbial workbench, coax the fire back to life, and pick up the tools.

Things I'm reading

Over the holidays I went on an unscheduled detective book spree; one of the side effects of taking on more book reviewing has been that I'm defaulting more to other genres -- mystery, literature, history -- for pleasure reading.

This one was entirely off recommendations -- John D. MacDonald courtesy a direct rec from Chris McLaren, and Louise Penny courtesy C.S.E. Cooney's sheer enthusiasm for it a few months back.

MacDonald is incredible. I was warned that these are nearly fifty-year-old books, and the representation of women and general gender politics might not be a strong point for me as a modern reader, but found a crisp, wounded kind of emotional intelligence on display that made even -- especially -- McGee's bad choices read as rounded, human actions, and a fierce insistence on the value of human life and agency that really felt like home. Reading him makes me think about all the ways trauma is talked about in post-world war novels: every genre that existed before reaching for vocabularies to talk about what's changed now, and how, until we can finally pool our collective resources and figure out that, yes, we are talking about the same feeling. This felt like one of the clearest attempts I've ever seen.

I'm finding Penny's series opener totally absorbing in a different way: there's a simplicity to her prose style that shows the things seen through it cleaner, like a pane of very fine glass. It has its emotional hitches and hangups -- there is something clearly being worked through about a certain kind of young woman, one who is angry and brittle and terrified of being seen -- but it was no small thing to be immersed in a cozy where the strict values of the universe are compassion, and kindness, and giving grace.

Both ran to good reminders that there has always been more of those things out there than we tell ourselves sometimes; both recommended.

Things you can read

This'll be a pretty full inaugural newsletter for publishing news, just because December and January packed most of last year's sales and editing into one publication month.

I saw two poems published this month, although they're both on graduated schedules:

"The Dream of the Wood" is in Reckoning 4, which is a gorgeous annual journal on environmental justice. The ebook edition launched on New Year's Day and is available now; the perfect-bound will be out in July, with all the pieces posted online in between.

"The Death of the Gods" -- part elegy, part professional meditation, and part reeling at the way your sense of human scale changes as you grow up -- is in the latest Uncanny Magazine, available to subscribers now and online in early February. The piece will be posted for free reading on the Uncanny website early February, in the second half of the issue.

As well, short story "Over/Under" -- a story about Toronto winters, harm reduction, addiction, grief, grace, and why the Descent of Inanna will always win in a fight between it and the Campbellian monomyth -- saw print in late December in the Nowhereville anthology. The book is doing delightfully well for itself: starred rave reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, and a shout-out in USA Today as a don't-miss release. It's kind of phenomenal for a small-press anthology, and gratifying to see people like Mike Allen get shoutouts that big after doing so many years of good work.

Just before the holidays, I guested on friend of this household Leeman Kessler's Ask Lovecraft After Dark to talk about said anthology, the motion of cities, and the motion of genres, and if you want to watch the two of us brainstorm a little bit the interview is posted live on his channel.

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Like I said, I'm still feeling this through and probably will be for a few months. I'm not married to certain kinds of content, or tone; if there's something you'd like very much to hear about, or something you're finding a little stale, let me know, please. It's a correspondence; it goes two ways, multivariate. It grows like a tree.

I hope you guys have some good things shaping up under your hands this week, and a January 1st and January 2nd Energy to build, or something building.

See you in about three weeks. :)