write on, vol. 7: uncomfortable-looking but aesthetically pleasing chairs
Dear friend,
Remember me? You would think that I would have used my holiday break time to compose one of these occasional missives, and yet I was VERY busy thrifting a new pair of jeans ($14.99 and seemingly never worn?!), reading about The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (gayer than expected!), and not cleaning our bathroom (on the list for tomorrow's snow day).
But never fear: I am spending a slice of this January Saturday ensconced with a candle and my laptop in order to update you on all the latest and most thrilling news of my activities.
On New Year's Eve, Ash and I ordered sushi, made ice cream sundaes, and made vision boards for the new year. This is mine. The next morning, I had some doubts about featuring so many uncomfortable-looking chairs, but they are just so aesthetically pleasing! We will be making another round of vision boards tomorrow afternoon at my client's Nancy Reddy's Zoom vision board planning party, which I believe you can still sign up to join (for free!) if you wish.
I also decided to weigh in on the question of 2024 trends, which ended up being more an airing of my personal preferences of the moment:
Speaking of the gender binary (or not!), a brief PSA: Ash is now Ash full-time and using they + she as pronouns.
READING
If you follow me on the socials, you have already seen my favorite non-work-related books of 2023, as below.
You can also now read poems in our tiny downstairs bathroom, which we finally decorated (after almost 2 years!) over Thanksgiving break, using a whole lotta thrift shop frames and a beautifully curated selection of poetry Ash picked out from our shelves + a few library books.
I deliberated about whether to include this book on my list of favorites, but I was worried about recency bias, since I had just finished reading it. The first book in the series, A Marvelous Light, was on my 2022 book list and this one (number 3) is also absolutely delightful and filled with fairly explicit gay magician sex.
AGENTING
You may recall that, as of my last newsletter, I had recently transformed from a part-time agent, part-time administrative babe into a full-fledged agent, and I am happy to report the first few months of my new life went better than I feared they might! I made four new book deals in Q4, two of which have still be to be announced and two of which are these beautiful bambinos...
First, this ~poetry anthology~ by the internet's favorite curator of poems that fit perfectly onto your phone screen:
And second, this ~two-book deal~ for the brilliant fiction writer Mac Crane:
Publishing's rhythms are such that I only had three new books come out in 2023 (see right, below), but they were three very good ones: Mac's first novel (dark! queer! beloved by the NYT!), Jess Martin's second rom com in her Bard's Rest series (witty! Shakespearian! banter-filled!), and Museum Bums, my only book to date to also be published with an accompanying wall calendar and set of notecards. I have a couple of extra 2024 calendars bumming (hehe) around, so if you can use one, please let me know and I would love to put it in the mail before we get too far into January. I would hate for them to go to waste!
And, of course, there are many more books to come in 2024, starting with Andy Graff's second novel True North in January and Julia Ridley Smith's impeccably titled story collection Sex Romp Gone Wrong in February. Teacher friends may also take note of The Advocate Educator's Handbook: Creating Schools Where Transgender and Non-Binary Students Thrive, out January 31st (ask your administrators to buy twelve copies)!
The picture on the left here is an almost-complete stack of all my books to date, including early copies of several forthcoming 2024 treasures.
As always, you can keep tabs on all my books that are currently out and/or pre-orderable via ye olde Bookshop list.
EATING
It's hard to distill four full months of eating here, so instead I'll highlight three out-on-the-town carbohydrate treats enjoyed during the month of December: sourdough pizza at Quanto Basta in Portland, Maine; the ham and cheese empanada from Super Bien in Allston, MA; and the pancakes with orange zest butter at the very quirky no-cellphone wine bar/brunch place/chocolatier Zuzu's Petals in Cambridge, MA. Rest assured that my commitment to eating cheese and bread shall continue unabated into 2024.
I made it to high tea twice this fall, once with my client Jess Martin at the Vintage Tea and Cake Company in Lexington, Massachusetts, where I was given this truly unforgettable pinafore pig teapot (above, left). The tea came out of the corn cob in her tiny basket! On the right is the tower of treats enjoyed by Boston visitor Beth Cooper and me at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, which had been on my tea bucket list for some years. (My next goal: getting a highly sought after (a.k.a. impossible to get) reservation for tea at Beacon Hill Books). My general feeling about tea is that it's about the experience more than the actual quality of each individual food item, but both of these spreads left me with few complaints.
I made Christmas cookie boxes to benefit the youth of Transanta for the second time this year, featuring (from top left, clockwise) the Bon Appetit peanut butter miso cookies, Jesse Szewczyk's brown butter brownie cookies, Jesse's grapefruit soft sugar cookies, Dorie Greenspan's "jammers" with cranberry jam, Deb Perelman's brown butter shortbread, Deb's "bee sting" bars with almonds and honey, Jesse's cookie butter blondies, and Liz Ho's earl grey linzers with lemon curd. (Everyone please follow Liz and share her content so a publisher will buy her cookbook proposal when we go out with it later this year!!)
ALSO
One of the current objects of my fascination is Heidi Parkes, an improvisational quilter(!!!) who makes autobiographical and diary quilts. For the last several months, I've been admiring all the instagram posts from people making embroidery journals, & Heidi's work takes this to the next level in terms of both scale & abstraction. In this podcast interview that I just listened to while running errands, she talks about how certain fabrics are "recurring characters" in her quilts... I am obsessed.
Apparently, I am teaching again! After taking some time off during the panini, I returned to Boston's GrubStreet in a serious way this fall, leading two back-to-back in-person sessions of 6 Weeks, 6 Stories. And I kind of loved it! Having an opportunity to leave the house and swan around the fancy new GrubStreet HQ, visit the nearby location of Flour Bakery, and interact with real live humans every Thursday was a real positive. I'm taking a little break from now until April, but not until after I teach a one-day session on Resolutions for Writers next weekend. (One of my favorite stories I taught in my classes this fall was this new-to-me gem about gender euphoria and sandwiches.)
Aforementioned fancy Grub HQ in the Boston's Seaport, which I find generally unsettling in its newness & shininess BUT does boast the nicest Trader Joe's I have ever shopped at.
One last thing that has been bringing me joy of late: our public library's cookbook club! Each meeting has an assigned book, from which each attendee chooses & makes one recipe to share with the group and then, we gather at the library to taste everyone's creations and discuss the recipes. I have always wanted to be in a cookbook club — and the added element of the library-as-social-melting-pot is truly the cherry on top of this joyful and wacky experience. At our last meeting of 2023 (centered on Sarah Kieffer's Baking for the Holidays), attendees included an older lady who immediately told everyone to find her on IG at @momthefoodie and two adorable early 20s roomies whose triple chocolate mousse cake was very much falling apart but still delicious.
THE END
Tell me, sweet friends: What is in "in"/"out" for you in 2024? What was your favorite cookbook of last year? Should all restaurants enforce a policy of no phones at the table? What poem should Ash and I add to our bathroom display? Drop me a line!