dry spell
tumbleweeding
Welcome to the Sunday post.
This is the first Sunday post that I’m writing right up to the wire, the time of its release at 6pm Pacific.
For a couple weeks now I’ve felt dry as a tumbleweed. The kind of dryness that concerns Southern Californians, as in today’s Santa Ana winds. Electricity feels pent up. Rubbed the wrong way I can easily manufacture sparks, but it would not be pretty.
It turns out that this is a period, hopefully short, in which I feel I don’t have it in me to be particularly artful (?). Like, I feel wrung out. I will just wave my hand at all of it, everything, and hope you understand.
Thank you to everyone in the streets.
This Thursday, you’ll receive an excerpt from a novel coming out in February 2024. The author of Still Alive, LJ Pemberton, (kindly, generously) described our meeting (and how we have remained connected):
It was too long ago, now. After Romney had uttered that ridiculous phrase “Binders Full of Women” and a cross-continental Facebook group was created full of female professionals—writers, editors, journalists. I lurked in the group, didn’t post much, but now and then I’d get a wild hair, think I should take advantage of these opportunities that kept popping up. Editors saying: pitch me.
So one evening I logged into Publishers Marketplace using credentials saved from an old internship at a now defunct literary agency, and scanned the recent deals. Most were from the Big Five, but there was an independent release that caught my eye. Excavation by Wendy Ortiz. I pitched an interview with the author to the NY Post of all places, because that was the editor whose most recent Binders post was soliciting pitches, and then I reached out to Wendy – cold. We’d never met, never spoken, and I didn’t blame her a touch of trepidation. The POST?
But she accepted, anyway. Our conversation was wide-ranging and animated. If I recall correctly, we spoke over Skype; this was long before Zoom had become de rigueur. The Post killed the interview – wasn’t salacious enough, I guess, but then I reached out to an editor I knew at The Brooklyn Rail and they picked it up. You can still read it here.
Years later Binders had become a strange digital artifact of an overly optimistic past. I had moved from Brooklyn to Savannah and then to Los Angeles. Remarried. My name had changed and I had decided to go by LJ full time. Wendy invited me to her family’s annual tamale party and I went, bringing along my friend Katie as my side-kick. Thank Hecate, God, the gods, whomever, Katie’s tongue wasn’t as tied as mine. I remember being in awe of Wendy’s home, her wife, the life she had built, and if I’m honest, I couldn’t quite escape that initial fan-girling. I was in Wendy’s HOUSE? Wendy fucking ORTIZ?
She invited me again the next year, but I was deathly ill – a by-product of an overly aggressive asthmatic response to the generally polluted air. Then the next year it was COVID and the party was cancelled. I don’t even live in LA anymore, even though I think the tamale party has resumed.
When I reached out to Wendy this year for a blurb for my forthcoming novel (with enormous trepidation), she admitted she was swamped with her own work (OF COURSE), but generously offered to run a blurb in her newsletter instead. So here we are. All these years later. A strange literary dance across time, and geography, and life. I count myself lucky.
I count myself *especially* lucky that I can share an excerpt from Still Alive with Mommy’s El Camino readers.
Take good care of yourselves and each other. See you Thursday. xo
