write on, vol. 3: gentle fun & ice lollies
Dear friend,
It's August, which means that I am overdue for another installment of this newsletter! Summer has been a whirlwind—I think I've been home only one or two weekends since the beginning of June, between work-related travel, weddings, and our European globetrotting of the first half of July. It's a novelty to be out and about so much, and while there are parts of me that miss the quiet of the last few years, I am also high on so much activity & hungry to keep planning our next trips/outings/bakery visits.
In an attempt to strike a balance over here, we have adopted the directive GENTLE FUN as the organizing principle of the summer, which is one of way of reminding ourselves to take breaks and build in rest and hydrate and remember that just because my heart is a flapping bird crying "Carpe diem!!!" as it manically scrolls on a tiny bird iPhone while flying directly into the sun doesn't mean that I have to always listen to it.
A big part of this too, is navigating the energy gap between Ashley and me. Our pandemic routines were built around this: Maggie goes for a run while Ashley sleeps in; Ashley reads quietly on the couch while Maggie creates elaborate baked goods. Back in the world of planes and trains and weekend trips, we are learning to be more intentional about how to make sure that everyone gets to do what they want to do without crashing and burning. Because guess what? Even though I am not the one with an undiagnosed yet persistent chronic fatigue condition does not mean—gasp!—that I don't also need to stop and breathe deeply every once and a while. Say it with me, friends: gentle fun!
Some as-yet-unshared glimpses into our trip, clockwise from the top left: outdoor art in Bristol, Lady Danbury's house (actually a museum) in Bath, a rare sighting of beloved college roomie & defender of international human rights Vanessa Murphy in London, and a VERY sexy bathtub at the amazing inn we stayed in on our first night in the UK.
READING
Perhaps you'd like to read one really well written, thought-provoking, and delightfully engrossing book before the summer is over? I humbly offer up to you four such books that I have read or listened to since the last issue of this newsletter, which I will briefly characterize using a selection of key words and phrases. (I couldn't be happier to tell you that all of these books are also gay!!! What a time to be alive and reading!)
In no particular order:
Eleutheria by Allegra Hyde
climate crisis! charismatic & deeply flawed leaders! Boston! the Carribean!
Dead Collections by Isaac Fellman
vampires! being trans! archives! AO3!
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
spontaneous combustion! wacky high school friendships! political wives!
Yerba Buena by Nina Lacour
coming of age as a young queer woman! exquisite restaurant interiors! gumbo!
At this point, most of my non-work-related reading is happening via audio, but these were two exceptions & I am happy to lend either to a local friend if anyone is eager to partake.
Before I conclude this section, I can't not mention what is possibly my favorite book cover of 2022 (please please don't miss the opportunity to click through and giggle with me) on Vladimir, a book whose interior I also enjoyed a lot more than I expected to—I would recommend this one (with a few reservations) to those in search of (1) satire aimed at academia and its denizens and/or (2) another entry in the already-rich genre of college professors being jaded and behaving badly.
AGENTING
First things first: I finally sold my first new book of 2022!
This goofy-looking thing is, for me, the pinnacle of professional success: a new book deal announced in Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication with notoriously awful graphic design.
As a lover of indie bookstores (I know, you're shocked!) I am very excited to see this project come to fruition over the next few years, and a little jealous of the author, who is planning to personally visit as many of the featured stores as she possibly can. Katie also has a very cool online bookstore of her own, where she sells new, used, and sometimes hard to find books by Black writers and curates custom packages for readers.
Speaking of readers... as I believe I teased in my previous newsletter, Jessica Martin's For the Love of the Bard came out at the end of the June, and I had the very great pleasure of getting to attend Jess's launch event at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. Because a writer's work is never done, Jess has just finished editing the second draft of her next book, which is a continuation of the Bard's Rest series. One of my absolute favorite parts of working with writers is getting to partake in the alchemy of hard work and magic that goes into a successful revision—giving notes and seeing how the writer takes them and runs with them and turns them into something beyond what I could have ever imagined. For book 2, Jess did this is in a big way, in a very short period of time, and I am so proud and impressed! It's a little cheesy, but I truly feel lucky to be a part of people's writing process.
Here I am with the authoress herself!
Fall is shaping up to be a great season for books from my writers—I have FIVE books coming out between the beginning of September and the end of November. I promise this is not an infomercial, but I would be remiss if I did not remind everyone that you can peruse my full selection of client books that are available for humans to pre-order, buy, and read right here.
And lest I skew too rosy in my portrayal of my work life, I'll also add that literally every day of work over the course of the last three weeks has felt like a struggle: something about working from home, in this infernal heat, in the summer, in the year 2022... it can be a slog, even if the work is often interesting and enriching and results in very good books. All these things can be true simultaneously!
Trying to channel this vibe.
EATING
In which I look my most delighted whilst seated in front of foods I am excited to consume: on the left, tea and chocolates; on the right, an Ethiopian feast (both in Brussels).
As one might imagine, our world travels provided some excellent opportunities for culinary indulgence. One favorite: the cheese bar we visited at Seven Dials Market in London, where plates of cheeses and accoutrements traveled on a conveyer belt, waiting to be plucked off and savored. The highlight was a hunk of gouda that was served with a salted caramel fudge... Unreal. Just a few blocks away, I had what may have been one of my favorite pastries of the trip, the honey butter toast at Arôme Bakery in Covent Garden—basically a slab of beautiful brioche dipped in syrup and caramelized to a beautifully burnished brown on every surface.
In Brussels, we had a particularly memorable Liège waffle with the trademark pearl sugar throughout and "chocolat à l’intérieur" i.e. a melted chocolate interior! We also sampled the Belgian waffle, which is lighter and crispier and very tasty, although Liège came first in our hearts.
The aforementioned Belgian waffle—topped with speculoos ice cream(!) & whipped cream!
Since our return from abroad, we've been suffering through some pretty horrendously hot and humid days, which have required the frequent consumption of frozen desserts. I had a beautiful maple creemee on our jaunt to Mildred's Dairy Bar in Weston, Vermont (left, below), and we're a little obsessed with Far Out, a New Zealand-style ice cream place down the road in Brookline, which blends frozen fruit with ice cream or frozen yogurt for a refreshing and delicious soft-serve-style experience (right, below). I have also made a few batches of popsicles (or, as the Brits call them, ice lollies), including Smitten Kitchen's peach melba pops and some improvised raspberry lemonade pops based on a combination of another Smitten Kitchen recipe and some further wisdom from Fany Gerson's Paletas, which I checked out from the library after discovering that it seems to be the urtext on homemade popsicles. I have promised Ashley that fudgesicles are up next, so let me know if you have a favorite recipe. (Here are the two that I am eyeing.)
ALSO
Let's talk about podcasts! What are you listening to religiously? Occasionally? Are there specific episodes that you still think of as being in your all-time hall of fame? (Mine include the fajita episode of 99% Invisible, this Britney Spears episode of Mystery Show, and this very sad but very memorable episode of Love + Radio.) My current most-beloved rotation includes:
Normal Gossip, a show about regular people getting up to all kinds of shenanigans—which has been bringing Ashley unmatched joy on our weekend drives around New England.
Gender Reveal, a show about (duh) gender, which has introduced me to many, many cool trans people & their thoughts about the world.
You're Wrong About, a show about how everything you know about cultural phenomena of the past is probably warped by the forces of sexism, capitalism, etc. etc. One of the founding hosts, Sarah Marshall, is high in my personal pantheon of intellectual crushes/public personages I fantasize about becoming best friends and sharing long and beautiful homemade dinners with (more on this in another newsletter?). [Ashley and I also love Maintenance Phase, which is former You're Wrong About host Michael Hobbes' spin-off show about the complete garbage that is all things diet culture and "wellness." These two were the soundtrack to many 2021 evenings of baking, jigsaw puzzling, and collage-making, and continue to deliver delight, education, and some light outrage to this day.]
Nothing to do with podcasts, but too great not to include: Ashley compares the size of our fish & chips to length of their forearm.
HOW GOES IT IN YOUR WORLD?
What are you listening to? How are you staying cool? Do you have big plans to commemorate the upcoming birthday (August 10th!) of Ashley B. Trebisacci, America's (and perhaps the world's!) favorite Leo? We are still zeroing in on birthday plans, but rest assured that there will be ice cream.