Letter the Second: winter, stories, crafts, foods

• winter and recipes
• short stories, upcoming and to read right now
• craft project updates
• a project I dream about now and then

Our songs for the letter are "Sweet Winter Hello", by Gregory and the Hawk, which was the first song I ever choreographed for fabric, five-ish years ago. I should revisit that choreography someday, it had a pleasant rocking rhythm to it. Continuing in winter theme, let's add the aptly-named "Winter Song" by Emily Smith, which is very much where I am now.

This winter has been a hard one, already. The snow did come after the last letter, and brought the temperature crashing down from an unseasonable 70ish (low 20s C) right to, and below, freezing, in the span of only a day or two. Between that and some other life shenanigans my body has still not recovered, despite all the wool I am swaddling myself in. 

I did make a snowfriend, though.

Usually in December I bake - a eclectic suite of recipes, not quite the same every year, that are meaningful to me personally. I try to get everything done and ready for eating and sharing by mid-December and I had a solid "make and fridge/freeze" plan laid out in stages this time, but despite that, this year, it is not happening. I have only one batch of dough in the freezer made and waiting for a baking day. I am trying to tell myself that this is ok. I'll get to the rest eventually. The aspirational list this year (some of the links are only "closest equivalent" to my written versions, but they'll get you there if you want to try them): snickerdoodles, speculaas, peanut butter kisses, raspberry-nutella star bread, chocolate espresso babka, and rugelach (last year was poppyseed but this year probably jam).

Stories
Winter is a good time for stories, in general. Stories and crafts and cozy things. It is good for me right now in that I just sold two - "Live Off the Land" will be coming out in The Future Fire, and "Set Alight" in Kaleidotrope, both sometime next year probably. I'm very surprised that these both sold so near to one another as they are both weird, slightly creepy little stories with an experimental tone. But sometimes it works! 

I didn't have anything come out in 2022 except the self-published poem I shared here, so I'm glad to have new things coming on the horizon. Between that year "off" and the way different facets of people and art get isolated, possibly some of you don't know that I write at all. You can find a whole bibliography on my website (short fiction, poetry, interactive pieces, essays) but here's some direct links, too. "Renovation of a Finite Apartment" came out two years ago, making it my most recent story, and is a quiet little piece about interior decorating and surviving and grief. This is also a good time to year to (re?)read "The Way You Say Good-Night", one of my very favorite things I've had published (from 2016), about access intimacy and surviving the literal and figurative dark times of the year.

Other short things by other people, that I've read recently and recommend: "Baba Nowruz Gives His Wife a Flower Only Once a Year" by Fatima Taqvi, arguably primarily a Nowruz (spring equinox) story but very much also a midwinter story, too. About the power of stories, and change, and flowers and love and folktales and it made me do some crying, but the good kind. This sentence does not do it justice. "Luminous" is a poem by Timi Sanni that just came out yesterday(!) and is a prayer and a hope about light and warmth that resonated with me deeply.

I am thinking a lot about what I can give back to the world, lately, and I think that is a little bit of what poems are for.

Crafts
I did not think I had made enough Passacaglia progress to report, but then I did a mock layout check on the floor again and surprised myself. It grows bit by bit, though work on it has slowed as I have other things in process.

I am also remaking a sweater that stopped fitting after my body changed shape in transition and then changed shape more with access to aerial work. None of my hand-knit sweaters fit anymore; the ones that are reclaimable I will reclaim (unravel the yarn, wash, reskein) and knit into new things. At least one is too far worn to survive that process, and not sure what I'll do in that case. But one already got turned into a thick shawl-collared vest with pockets. This one is switching from being a shawl-collared cardigan to a pullover. I feel like I have been knitting this body length forever and it will never end, but it will get there, someday. I am not using a pattern, just a formula and some math and a combination of cable patterns I like.

This is one way to knit a sweater: you start below the collar up top (sometimes at the collar, but usually you go back and put that on after, so that it's smoother and tighter), go around the neck opening partway, back and forth, farther each time, so that the back of the neck gets taller and will sit high on your back, and the opening of the neck will be lower in front. Once your back-and-forths reach one another in the front you switch to going around and around: along the top of one shoulder, across the top of the back, across the top of the other shoulder, across the front of the chest, then you are back where you started. You increase regularly between each of those four parts to make a raglan shape (diagonal lines) or in many different places for a round yoke shape, but either way you keep going until it is as deep from collar to working stitches as you are from neck to armpit. At that point you move the stitches that were the top of each shoulder section onto some spare yarn to stay out of the way for a while, then connect the back to the front and keep going, around and around. Later you come back for the collar (it can be good to pause work on the body and do it in advance, as I did here, so that when you try on as you go, it's sitting accurately), and then come back again for the held stitches that each get joined to themselves and knit around-around into sleeves.

A project dream
I have more project ideas than I can possibly execute in a lifetime. Sometimes it's more fun to dream them than do them, anyway. This one is very tempting but I think would be too big a bite to take, so I will tell you about it, instead.

I imagine a poetry anthology of queer disabled poets - but not the usual kind, with disparate selections curated by an editor or even pair/team of editors. Instead, an emergent volume, of dialogues. Last spring I was on a panel discussion with fellow Vermont queer disabled poets Eli Clare and Judith Chalmer; Deborah Lisi-Baker joined us in the planning, but unexpectedly passed away before the panel itself. (And oh, isn't that heartache so known, in queer disabled life. A topic for another time.) The panel itself was not the highlight for me, though, and maybe still would not have been even if it weren't overshadowed by grief. I loved the exchange we got to do leading up to it, planning, sending poems back and forth. Themes emerged, and particularly, elements of world-understanding, embodiment, even just particular shared uses of imagery that resonated deeply in ways that I do not often experience with other (nondisabled, nonqueer) poets' work. The way we talk about stone. The way we make rituals. The particular kinds of knowledge of place. The movement of the body. I could have played poem-telephone - you send me a poem, I send a poem that branches out from a similar point, you send another it reminds you of - forever. 

So I think about: what would a book look like that worked like this? Where the poets picked the works in relation to one another, letting sections emerge by themes. Not writing new work for this purpose but placing our existing, ongoing work deliberately in one another's mutual context. A poem, and a bit of text to go with it highlighting whatever the author feels needs highlighting in the relationship between it and its surrounding poems. Ideally then at the end of each section, a transcript of a lightly-facilitated conversation between the participating poets, where actual discussion can be had (and documented!!) on what our work means to us. Together. What does it look like? Where do we converge and diverge? What grows in our work when it can be seen in these lights, in this context, ours?

I know enough about project logistics to know that this would be... complicated. I maybe have the facilitative or editorial skills to push the boulder partway along the slope, but the skills and connections and energy for publishing, fundraising, promotion, etc, are definitely bigger than I am/more than I have. (And that's before we get to the question of accumulating the poets.) So it remains a dream. 

But if you ever want to swap/share/read poems together, you know where to find me.

I have loved your various responses to last month's letter - texts, voice recordings, reading lists, emails. Take care friends, and may your winter be cozy.

Toby