focus
(I wrote this like, four days before the Trump administration engineered a border crisis, and then the Supreme Court kneecapped unions and abortion rights and Justice Kennedy announced he was retiring, and then it didn't really seem like the thing. But this week I am mostly off the internet and instead on a writing retreat in Malibu, trying to do novel-type work, so it seemed like an appropriate moment to send.)
Hi friends. It's been a quiet few weeks. Not in the world-- never in the world-- but in some parts of my world. It's been nice.
I'm working on a small handful of freelance projects right now, trying to adjust from living under a constant hailstorm of deadlines to, like, let's say a gentle rain of them, in the hope that, once some checks come later this summer, I can step in from the weather all together and concentrate on writing and revising those novels I told you about. I'm planning on taking that time off from Twitter, too. It's going to be really nice, I think.
But for now I have to keep the cash flowing, so I'm slowing my pace and getting a lot of sleep and preparing for the work ahead by reading. I don't usually do much research for my novels, or at least I don't do it in an intentional, concentrated way-- it's like, I get very obsessed with something and then I start writing about it, and sometimes I check in on particular facts or aspects or whatever, but it's not like, I get a bunch of books out from the library and settle in and concentrate.
But LOOK has what I've been calling a Bluebeard letimotif (pretentious, and yet, sadly, accurate), and I realized at some point that I didn't know enough about what it was doing there, so I've been reading other people's Bluebeard stories to try to figure it out. So far: Angela Carter's The Bloody Room and Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox and a chapter from Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With Wolves, plus Francesca Lia Block's retelling in her collection Roses and Bones. Please let me know if there are others you recommend!
It's been really, really soothing, which is not what you'd expect to say about immersing yourself in stories about a misogynistic serial killer, but, haha, at least this one is fictional. Or / and / also, all of these stories are written by women. They're not only about a misogynistic serial killer; they're also about how we grapple with misogyny and its violences and its narratives. They're about how long we've been telling each other stories about men who hunger to kill us, and how we might find a way out of that story, instead of getting so scared that we end up trapped by it.
After all, Bluebeard dies at the end.
A lot of my work is being willing to sit still and untangle a knot. What do I really think about this? How can I say it in a way that makes sense? How can I turn a bunch of feelings into an explanation, opinions into an argument, ideas into a story? I've spent most of the last two weeks trying to write something really, really complicated-- both that has a lot of moving parts in the real world, and also in my mind-- during the day. Then, when I can't do that any more, I sit down and read different versions of the same story, again and again and again, giving myself a generous amount of time and space to figure out what's happening inside of me when I do.
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That complicated thing was last week's Buzzfeed piece, which has gotten... a lot of reaction. I'm not ready to talk about it yet, so here's something from Patricia Lockwood's How Do We Write Now? for you to have this week:
Also, I wrote about cannabis terpenes to help keep the lights on.
in the belief that concentration is reverence,
Zan