🪸 Bottleship: The Reef
Selfishly, I’m just happy to talk about my friend.
Greetings, friends!
It is I, Lucy Bellwood, writing to you shockingly soon after my last dispatch.
In my Fall update, I mentioned the burden of admiring too many people right now. So much of the internet centers on curation. We’re all just holding up various bits and bobs and saying “Here. Look.” But we’re pulling from more potential information than ANYONE HAS EVER HAD ACCESS TO EVER BEFORE! It runs the risk of feeling overwhelming. Fleeting. Cursory.
Withdrawing from social media has pushed me towards a deeper appreciation for a smaller network of humans. I want to know people well enough to be able to recommend them wholeheartedly. And I want to be sure when I’m sharing them with other people who are kind and attentive enough to care about what I have to say, that I’m doing so with depth.
So this is The Reef, a series of newsletters (how many? no idea!) about people I love and admire.
Starting with Sarah Gailey.
I met Gailey because a mutual friend had thrown my name in the ring for a freelance gig. “Who is this person,” I thought, “who would commission custom artwork (to be printed on t-shirts, no less!) just to celebrate the release of a friend’s book?”
Gailey, that’s who.
Since 2021, they’ve loaned me so many books. I’ve brought in their packages and fed their cats. We’ve traded life stories over delicious weekly meals. They’ve pointed out a hawk’s nest on the bike path. I’ve sobbed on them in a snowbound cabin after receiving news of a death. They’ve identified that my struggles with the script of Seacritters centered on having a story with too much plot, not too many words (life-saving). Currently: I’m wearing two items of their hand-me-down clothing.
Sure, they write thrilling novels and satirical comics and insightful essays. But it’s the fact that they embody care and intention in everything they do that makes me want to jump up and down and HOLLER.
They produce and pack up hundreds of boxes of custom fudge to be mailed to their friends every year in December! They brought a room full of genre fiction luminaries to their feet to toast courage and resistance in turn! Their newsletter, Stone Soup, is currently hosting Stories About Stories, featuring interviews with the oft-unsung people who make books happen: Editors! Publicists! Illustrators! I love it!
They’re one of the friends I think of as a “Real Writer” (Unhelpful! I know! But it’s like this sometimes), so when they invited me to contribute to a series called the Personal Canons Cookbook, I was intimidated out of my gourd. Sharing an actual first draft of anything with them felt horrifying. But writing that piece allowed me to put words to one of the most important relationships in my life, and Gailey’s notes made it immeasurably better.
I’m back for their latest project, Love Letters: Reasons to Be Alive, which brings together a group of writers I’m frankly astonished to appear alongside: Amal El-Mohtar, Helena Fitzgerald, Peter S. Beagle, Shing Yin Khor, Chuck Tingle, DongWon Song, and many, many others.
In Gailey’s own words:
This project was inspired by a dark season filled with small bright lights. […] A cold clementine eaten in the bath; a heron flying low enough that I could hear the wind in its feathers; a blackout night spent curled up with a friend by candlelight, talking about television show gossip. I strung these moments together until I could see sunlight again.
In that season of grief, I thought often of how mundane my experience was. So many of us experience seasons of darkness; so many of us find ways to carry on. I wanted to know what my loved ones found to cling to when they needed a buoy.
Basically: amazing writers write pieces about tiny pleasures that get them through dark times, the essays get published online for everyone to read for free, quarterly zines get published and sent to Kickstarter backers throughout the year, and a very special 80 backers get a box full of the items featured in the essays hand-wrapped and shipped to their door once the project concludes.
This idea is so genius it makes me furious. It also dovetails beautifully with a number of books that have brought me pleasure during my last three years as a caregiver: The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, Enthusiasms by Bernard Levin, and Delight by J.B. Priestley.
The project wraps up tomorrow morning and is more than funded, but it seemed like a great excuse to make Gailey my first subject for The Reef. I hope you’ll check out a book of theirs from the library, or subscribe to their newsletter, or give them a follow on social media.
Selfishly, I’m just happy to talk about my friend.
Thanks for reading,
Lucy
P.S. In future dispatches from The Reef, I’ll list the values each person embodies at the top of the letter. For Gailey, I’d say they’re care, nourishment, integrity, and mischief. May we all have a bit more of each in the weeks to come.