What it means to make something - #103
And what we lose in the process.
I’m sending you elsewhere today. Many months ago,
asked me to write a piece for her Substack AFTER/WORDS. Easton grew up in the Mojave in a meth lab and credits writing with saving her life. For a beginning so dry and isolated and dangerous, her writing is a wellspring.Originally she asked me to write a piece on grief, and I swore up and down I would, and then I didn’t. I didn’t have anything else that wanted to be said — I was in the private halls of my grief. So she offered an alternate topic: pregnancy. I jumped on it, only to send her the piece and realize it was about grief anyway.
Turns out there are a lot of different halls of grief.
“Trying” to get pregnant is like applying to jobs. There’s always that liminal space between submitting your cover letter and hearing back from the employer. Most of the time you hear nothing. Your period shows up and you’re back to banging your head against the wall. Or in this case, merely banging. Even when you do hear back, you interview once or twice before finding out there’s a hiring freeze.
Even though it seems like everyone you know has a job and everyone in history had a job, somehow jobs magically evade you. Even when you’re offered the job, you don’t start for another couple months. Don’t put it on LinkedIn just yet because it might not happen!
The analogies go on and on. I am in the midst of “trying to get a job” if you will, and in my fastidiousness, I saw the gap between how I treat pregnancy and how I treat art. That’s what I wrote about for Easton. I hope you like it, and I hope you like exploring the rest of her work as well.
If reading about pregnancy is not your bag, here are a few other pieces that delighted me this week:
Interior design when you can’t make up your mind by
This piece on if marriage makes you happy made me laugh. Time to make super-friend part of the cultural lexicon.
Or maybe you want to read more about pregnancy! In which case, I recommend these:
On preparation and its limits by
Being friends across the childfree divide by Ann Friedman
Also here’s a piece I wrote about fear from November 2022, in case you’re new
Or, final category, you’re a writer struggling to write – then here:
This was what my writing salon guide calls a “whole cloth piece”….. the conundrums, the oppositions to ways that you love, driving in the dark which is like driving into pregnancy, the what ifs… and yet,. Inspire of others’ personal truths, you are following your heart guided by your own rhythms and pulsations… I wish for you that you get it all… beautiful writing
I mean...I wasn't interesting in reading about pregnancy? But then I read your guest post anyway, and now I want to read everything you write about it.
I really love how you have been incorporating nature imagery in your writing, and I hesitate to say recently, because maybe you have been doing it all along and I'm only just starting to notice. I feel like your more recent posts have taken a beautiful turn toward creating a sense of place and scenery, drawing connections between things like gravel and waves on the water. That image in particular just hit me in such a specific way. Immediately I thought: oh, that is so perceptive, and she's absolutely right. So beautiful. Also, fat moons and mountains as memories vs monuments: more, please!
I hope you get the chance to share all the love you hold within with your future yahoo/sprite/pain in the ass, and I really hope your novel continues to take shape.