Currently I’m doing my best to participate in 1,000 Words of Summer, organized each year by Jami Attenberg. This two week sprint encourages writers to write 1,000 words a day, every day. It’s a great way to create a container of time for creation and give yourself a dose of motivation and accountability. I always look forward to Jami’s daily emails featuring reflections on writing from a wide range of inspiring authors. If you need more structure, jump into the daily write along at 8am eastern organized by the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College - if you’re looking for a way to start, this could be a good one!

I started this round of 1,000 Words of Summer strong, full of swagger and intention. Last Saturday, the first day I decided to walk to a coffee shop with my laptop and journal, one of the luxuries not available to me in the desert. But I couldn’t decide on which coffee shop to go to. One with a backyard seating area tries to position themselves as a brunch spot on weekends and probably wouldn’t appreciate a laptop. Another one felt too corporate and had no personality and was too perpetually full of laptop tappers. Another had a garden-like seating area, but it was too dark and damp for the beautiful May day.

Finally I faced the obvious: instead of taking the time to walk to a coffee shop, spend $15 for a coffee and pastry, elbow my way to the table and connect to the wifi I could just start writing from the comfort of my own kitchen table. I could write in the overgrown backyard while admiring the enthusiastic rosebush currently spilling over with blossoms. I didn’t need the perfect moment or setting. I could just start.

My point in relaying this story is also inline with the 1,000 Words of Summer. Pick a place and get going. It can be a prompt, a project that’s been hanging over your head, an idea that’s been nagging you and won’t let you go, it can just be opening up a blank page and seeing where it takes you. Today I’m writing this newsletter as part of my 1,000 words. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to find the most ideal place to write. Instead of making another excuse, start where you are.

While trying to cultivate moments of creative focus, I’ve been swept up in the manic magic of Gemini season, going to a show or a reading or a dinner with a friend every single night since I arrived in New York City. There are some seasons that this would deplete me, but now I feel the fresh summer energy and am buoyed by the bright green chlorophyll of the new leaves on the trees, the intensity of the washed-blue sky, the sunsets after 8 pm, and the restless breeze. May and early June is always a roll of the dice weather wise, you can get drenching rain or perfect sun, but I like it that way.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with my band Skirting putting the finishing touches on the vinyl release of our EP What You’ve Been Told. We’re playing our release show this Sunday, June 7 at Mama Tried, our favorite clubhouse under the BQE in South Brooklyn. It’s at 4pm, a perfect Sunday afternoon. There will be two other talented bands, Neon Grlz (from DC!) and Gladys, and an all vinyl DJ set by Sue Problema (from Texas!).

We finished the recordings a year ago, but took time to decide how we wanted to release the music on vinyl. In undertaking this project I’ve been struck by all the little decisions that go into making a piece of art. Even though the songs were already written, recorded, produced, mixed, and mastered, it has been a long process. The tracks needed to be remastered for vinyl. Album artwork needed to be conceived, agreed upon, and laid out for vinyl. We needed an insert. We needed to ensure we got all this done in time for the records to arrive from the pressing plant in the Czech Republic in time for our show. Each one of these steps required coordination, decision making, creative thinking, time, dedication, consensus, and delegation.

Bringing the record to life also required help from our friends. Our talented engineer Matt Shane remastered the music for vinyl. Our amazing friend Keight helped lay out the artwork for printing. I was also grateful for Justin, our rep at Pirates Press, who answered every annoying amateur question that I had about the vinyl production process with grace and also somehow broke one of our boxes of records out of French FedEx purgatory. If you need to press vinyl, he’s your guy.

The whole process has been an illustration of the levels of work and the community that goes into creating a work of art, however seemingly simple or ordinary the end product may seem. I’m proud of the effort we’ve put in, to realize a longstanding goal to commit our songs to vinyl. If you want a copy you can order from bandcamp or just reach out directly if you live locally!

Every time I make something, I am reminded of this lesson: Art takes the time it will take. Whether it’s in the raw creation or the final production, art needs to be given time to breathe. While deadlines, accountability, and deliberate containers of time are the only strategies that really get me to produce, I also have learned nothing can be forced.

This applies to my writing too. Right after I graduated from my MFA (three years ago! Time! It doesn’t stop!) I wanted the book of essays about the desert that I’m working on done so badly. They were part of my MFA thesis and I wanted them as a book out in the world. In my mind I could see the cover, read the blurbs, and was ready to organize the book tour, solicit the reviews, and pitch myself to podcasts for interviews.

I was getting angry and impatient at myself, at the work, at the generous friends and peers who served as readers of the essays. Why wasn’t it done already? Why couldn’t I have a critically acclaimed book out in the world that showed I was a real writer now? I wanted proof that I was a an important literary voice and I wanted it soon.

Of course, I’m still very excited to do all of that necessary promotion work when the time comes, but the book is still in the creation stage. My impatience with the process and attachment to the product of course meant that the writing suffered (and my friends too). This kind of attachment doesn’t serve us or our art. It doesn’t make our art better or us happier. It skips over the most pleasurable and difficult part of art: the making. Besides, even the most successful works of art will be forgotten one day. It’s not just about creating something to be remembered, but something that feels essential to us now, that bringing pleasure in the process and the making.

We’re in a time where culturally we’re always told to hurry up, cut corners, and produce a product already. We’re pushed to have an output polished and done without effort and before it’s barely a fleshed out idea. In this environment, it’s a small act of resistance to give our creative ideas the meandering time they need, to make a choice to pay attention and nurture our creative work until it emerges. The effort behind every small choice is what makes our art intentional and fully ours. That’s not something I ever want to lose.

Speaking of time, my essay The Desert House was printed in the beautiful new Jackrabbit Journal, which is only available in print. This piece was written as part of my MFA thesis and is a love letter to my home in the desert (it was also rejected 17 times before publication). I’m so happy it’s found its publication home in a desert-based lit mag that centers desert writers.

Finally, thank you to everyone who reads this newsletter and tells me you enjoy it. In this attention economy, it is an honor to have yours and I don’t take it lightly. While I do have typos (I am a human), every word is weighed and considered and I love that you take a time to read them. Please share with a friend if you think they would like this newsletter as well!

And if you’re in New York, I’d love to see you Sunday, June 7, 4 - 7pm at Mama Tried in Sunset Park for Skirting’s EP release. Not in town? You can order our EP from bandcamp (or just ask me)!

Are you doing 1,000 Words of Summer? How’s it going? Otherwise, what are your creative plans for the summer?

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach (I highly recommend this novel to anyone who has ever been part of a food co-op, worked together on a community organizing project, or spent time in spaces that are trying to serve communities and be “values driven” while surviving during capitalism. You know these characters. I know these characters. I love and hate these characters and have conversations with them in my head. This book is tough, tender, and frustratingly hilarious).

The talk turned to how we were coping with these times. We circled around the difficulty to find joy in creativity and hope in the possibility of collectivity at this moment. It’s a conversation I’ve had often. It’s hard to believe that justice will be served, that we will come out of this stronger and more equal, with more possibilities available to all. We are being so flooded by manufactured crises, based on cruelty or ego or deeper issues, like white supremacy, that our ability to muster a meaningful, collective response feels overstretched, worn down. I know that this is by design. I know the key is to center our own values of empathy, inclusiveness, and justice, to de-center our egos, and to keep going.

Recently, my essay Home and Garden was published by the Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly. It was an honor to be selected by guest editor Neala Claire Siegle for an issue with the theme of “rooted.” The piece explores adaption, resilience, and the power of time, as well as how we reflect the soil in which we grow. It’s a love letter to the native plants of California, who have taught me so much in these past six years of trying to understand and cultivate them in my garden, as well as the gardens (and parents) that raised me in my home state of Maine.

I began this essay four years ago, in 2022 when I was deep into my MFA program and a version of it appeared in my MFA thesis. I read snippets of it at public readings, one in my friend Aileen’s back garden in Brooklyn and at the Breadloaf Environmental Writer’s workshop, which helped me identify the strongest, most emotionally resonant parts of the essay. It was submitted (and rejected) 22 times before it found its home with the Santa Fe Writers Project.

Many of my plants were struggling transplants when I began the essay. Now, thanks to vigilant watering, pruning, weeding, and the passage of time, the ones that survived are well established and deeply rooted. I don’t need to belabor the metaphor here, but a garden needs time to come into its own and so does our writing.

The lessons my plants have taught me are an apt metaphor and also a way to survive these times. A garden is about patience, persistence, hope, and experimentation. It is an ecosystem. So is creativity and a creative life. So is organizing for social change and addressing injustice.

I had a full circle moment too with the essay. There’s a line, “I’m trying to cultivate my own patience while growing narrow leaf milkweed, in hopes that it will attract monarch butterflies in time.” The narrow leaf milkweed is still struggling, but the skeleton milkweed I planted a few years after it is thriving. The other day I was delighted to see a monarch flitting around it. It felt like a small victory, a hope and promise fulfilled. The flowers on the skeleton milkweed also seem to be a favorite of tarantula hawk wasps. I give them a wide berth.

I’m reminded of my theme of the year, “Magic through consistency.” While I’m finding that a consistent creative practice doesn’t need to mean a rigid one, it also means that effort over time will produce results, though we can’t anticipate exactly what those will be. It’s important to remember when the world feels so heavy.

Acts of collectivity, of community, and hope can be small and subversive. This to me is what publishing a zine feels like and I was excited to write about the new Mojave Zine Fest for the Coachella Valley Independent. The fest takes place May 15 and 16 here in the hi-desert. I will sadly miss it, but as my roots as a writer and media maker are firmly rooted in making zines, it felt gratifying to talk with zine makers and champions about why zines are so critical in this moment. To paraphrase the brilliant Brooke Palmieri who I interviewed for the article, zines are a way to seize the means of cultural production and directly tell your own story.

While we are being worn down, connecting with others can give us hope and help us persist. Two pieces of news have heartened me lately about the power of collective resistance. Locally, the controversial Ofland resort that would develop 152 acres of undeveloped land adjacent to Joshua Tree National Park was cancelled (I had the privilege of breaking the story for the Desert Trumpet). And a plan to extend the border wall through Big Bend National Park in Texas were also cancelled. While this is certainly not the end of these specific fights, or struggles over desert development and militarized borders, they are victories that were hard won by the communities they impacted and show the power of collective refusal.

So keep creating and cultivating what you want to see. I truly believe that those visions will flourish in time.

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry by Melissa Auf de Maur

PS. For those of you in NYC, Skirting will be releasing our EP “Wants and Needs” on 10” vinyl and we are so excited. I hope that you can come to our release show, Sunday, June 7, 4pm at Mama Tried with Neon Grlz, Gladys, and DJ Sue Problema. I hope you can join us!

Since the protest my inbox was flooded, as it always is, with emails asking “What comes next?” Most of them fundraising for different candidates or causes. I’m sure yours was flooded too.

To those I say: Keep doing the tedious work of Democracy.

Fundamentally, democracy is inconvenient. It is by nature inefficient. It takes a lot of mobilization to get anything done. But in a world where tech oligarchs are trying to ram through AI and the data centers to support under the rhetoric of ease and reducing friction and streamlining your whole life and brain, isn’t a little inconvenience actually a good thing?

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the writing I’ve been doing for the Desert Trumpet, a hyper local online news source, for nearly a year. My “beat” such as it has touched on issues surrounding local development, local change makers, the Twentynine Palms Tourism Business Improvement District (TBID) board, and most recently the local board of education and their push to potentially close several local elementary schools.

In attending the tourism board’s monthly meetings, I’ve gotten a sense of local stakeholders, elected officials, and people who care deeply about the city of Twentynine Palms. I’ve seen first hand the passions, tensions, ideas, ambitions, and inertia that drive a small piece of city government. While my meeting recap articles may not be the most creative writing I’ve ever done, after the better part of a year, I’ve become something of an expert in one small area of public governance. From one perspective, it’s incredibly mundane. From another angle, I’m getting a (literal) front row seat into how one small desert city is trying to position itself to take advantage of desert tourism (for better or for worse), encourage the growth of local businesses and events, and try to balance the needs of visitors with the needs of locals. This is the tedious work of democracy.

I’m reminded also of the volunteering I’ve done for Tech for Campaigns, writing emails for state house-level candidates in Michigan and Virginia the past two years. It has been again a front row seat to a grassroots campaign and to see the work, hustle, and money that goes into a race at this level. It has left me clear eyed at what it takes to run for office at that level (more money than I can believe) and the intense work that goes into it.

Money is absolutely a barrier to entry for democracy and it should not be. Far too much is spent on political campaigns, vying for eyes and attention. However, I realize that for me, investing my time in candidates who, if elected, will make a concrete difference in the lives of their constituents, is a worthwhile endeavor. This is also the tedious work of democracy.

Of course, there is other work that can and must be done: Direct action to disrupt the many violences of this current system and mutual aid work to support those impacted are also vital right now. And guess what, coordinating those kinds of ventures can also be tedious.

I’ve been thinking about this lately because there is so much that needs our attention and our compassion right now, it’s easy to feel paralyzed and like nothing we do matters. But If we can plug in our skills to a place where they’re needed and can have a small benefit, not only is that satisfying, but if we do this consistently we can make a difference, however small.

I’m curious about how you’re finding ways to plug in, find hope through action, build community, and to participate in civic life right now? What feels tedious, but ultimately worthwhile, to you?

For those in the Morongo Basin, I hope you’ll join me this Sunday (tomorrow!) at my dear friend Sharon’s house for a meet and greet with Tessa Lynn Hodge. Tessay is a licensed clinical social worker and community builder born and raised in the high desert. She is running for congress to defeat MAGA-ghoul Jay Obernolte and is endorsed by the California Democratic Party.

I truly believe that flipping California 23 is possible and while I know some disagree with me, I think challenging incumbents even when it seems like a long shot is so important. In democracy, we need options and to show that not everyone is falling for the line that those currently in office are towing. I know it can feel futile when so much money goes into these races (and Obernolte is one of the richest members of congress). However, these races are not just about the candidate running, but all the conversations that take place and connections and momentum that are built along the way. That too is the tedious work of democracy. You can RSVP for more information and the address (or just ask me). See you there.

On a personal note, I’m looking for creative, responsible, cat-loving people who want a low-cost retreat to do focused, creative work this spring and summer. If you need a serene, comfortable place to work on a project or just slow down a bit, my house in the California hi-desert is available May 13 - June 9 (open to shorter stays within that date range) and September 3 to 11 in exchange for taking care of my teenaged kitten Pan Dulce and watering plants.

Maybe you want to attend the Mojave Zine Fest on May 15 and 16 and stay awhile? Maybe you want to admire the stars from an official dark sky area? Maybe you want to see why desert summer really is the best kept secret?

You: Creative, responsible, animal lover looking for space and time to work on a project or just chill. You’ll need to provide your own transportation.

The space: One-bedroom, one-bath, fully equipped kitchen, great AC, fenced yard, native plant and cactus garden, 15 minutes from downtown Yucca Valley. No other pets please.

Interested? Questions? Let me know! Please feel free to share with responsible friends.

Thank you, friends.

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading/just read: Hemlock by Melissa Faliveno. The first novel from one of my favorite writers! A story of middle-aged haunting that wrestles with identity, purpose, family, and addiction. I loved how Faliveno built tension throughout, how the woods itself is a character, how she avoids easy answers, how the book centers queer women and non-binary people, and how you’re not sure what is a dream, a ghost, a vision, and real (and ultimately, it may not “matter”). I read most of it in my garden one sunny afternoon because if you live alone in a cabin in the middle of nature well, you may not want to read this one at night.

Whole Holy Hot by Chrissy Martin and Southwest Reconstruction by Raquel Gutierrez. Two books of poetry by two incredible writers, both very differently wrestling with identity, culture, family, and bodies. I have started reading poetry at the dining room table, ingesting it with food, letting it nourish me in short bursts. I recommend.

Like so many writers, I recently returned from this year’s addition of AWP, the huge annual writing and publishing industry conference that everyone loves and loathes in equal measure. Attending AWP is a privilege and one I don’t take lightly. This year’s edition was held in Baltimore and to make it more affordable to attend, I was lucky enough to stay with a friend and took part in the work exchange program for a free badge.

AWP always feels frenetic, running around an often new-to-you city with thousands of other writers (apparently 11,000 writers attend the conference this year!) from readings to parties to friend hang outs. It’s always exhausting, but this year felt especially so. Everyone I talked to about their experience said they felt especially drained. The world is just that much harder this year and it’s hard to throw yourself into an event that’s a roving panel discussion, party, and pitch session rolled into one when there’s another unpopular war being waged abroad and an onslaught of violence continues to target communities at home.

However, creative communities can offer solace, a reminder that we are still here. I was delighted to discover and revisit places in Baltimore that have harbored and nurtured creative and defiant communities, whether Leon’s, one of the oldest gay bars on the east coast that graciously hosted a reading and open mic my friend Liz and I organized, or Red Emma’s, a worker-owned cooperative bookstore and cafe that has been in operation since 2004. I only went to definitely feminist and queer events and readings at AWP and that felt great. I hugged friends in passing, to acknowledge we’re still making a go of it, still investing in our creative work and the communities that hold us, even in this strange and straining time.

Co-organizing my own reading at AWP, as well as the high desert writers meetup the weekend before, was a reminder that we have the power, however small, to create and support the communities we want to see. In a world where AI is treated as inevitable (it is not) and those holding the most political and economic power are actively exploiting and separating us for their own gain, taking a do-it-yourself approach is more important than ever. And as I always used to say, Do It Yourself does not mean Do It Alone. Creating community space creates an opening for others to step in and exercise their voices and their power and to connect.

I was so gratified when nine people signed up to read at the open mic after our invited readers. It’s so brave to go to a new city and present your work in front of readers and listeners you don’t necessarily know. What a beautiful thing. A big conference like AWP can feel so alienating, can reinforce social hierarchies and feel like you’re the unpopular kid at middle school, so I felt it was especially important (for my own sake) to create an inclusive, welcoming event. It also meant I got to invite writers I admire who live all over to read in one space and that felt like a dream come true. I hope you’ll pick up (or pre-order) their books, including In Inheritance of Drowning by Dorsia Smith Silva, Whole, Holy, Hot by Chrissy Martin, Southwest Reconstruction by Raquel Gutierrez, Diary by Marisa Crawford, and When My Mother is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki.

For anyone wondering exactly how to find a writerly community, I also wanted to recommend a great guide! At AWP I picked up my friend and pressmate Jessie L. Kwak’s recent book From Solo to Supported: The Writer’s Guide to Finding Community. Jessie breaks down the nuts and bolts (and power and pitfalls) that can come from finding your community. I thought her section on approaching events and conferences was especially excellent. She even gives a step-by-step guide on talking about yourself and your work, making conversations, and how to go from feeling awkward to feeling confident. I also loved her frank talk about how to navigate writerly relationships, especially when they bridge the professional and personal. This book is even pocket-sized, so it can easily fit in your bag if you need to take something to an event to remind you what to do.

Speaking of writing community, I was proud to have a chance to write about our homegrown, and growing, writers community in the hi-desert for this month’s issue of the Coachella Valley Independent. I’m also excited to be participating in the upcoming Hi-Dez Lo-Fi Lit Weekend March 20 - 22. I’ll be on a panel about music writing on Saturday, March 21 at 3pm and joining Susan Rukeyser for the Desert Split Open reading on March 22 at 1pm that highlights voices that are queer, feminist, and otherwise radical. I’m really looking forward to a weekend of hanging out with my fellow writers so close to home and if you’re in the area I hope you’ll come join us!

I just returned from New York, where I headed after AWP, and had the luck to catch “false spring,” where the temperatures shot up to seventy degrees and people shed their layers and lazed about muddy Prospect Park on hammocks and inflatable couches in shorts and tank tops. I love the flush energy that spring brings, the renewed sense of aliveness, the turning towards light. It’s so important to keep finding each other right now, to reassure each other we’re not alone, that we can see and be seen and support others, to model the kind of world and communities we want to live in, all of this can give us the energy to keep going.

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better by Polly Atkin

Hi Friends,

This year is already a blur, isn’t it? Before I dive into the meat of this newsletter I wanted to share the news up front, because I have some community-focused events coming up and I’d love to see you there.

For hi-desert friends: This Saturday, February 28 my friend Abigail Stewart and I are hosting a meet up for writers in the hi-desert at Out There Bar in Twentynine Palms. There are so many writers in the area, but not a lot of opportunities to connect and just hang out. Come join us from 2 - 4pm on the back patio, meet kindred spirits, and find your people, whether you’re looking for a new writing group, hoping to launch a literary event, or just want to build creative community.

For friends going to AWP or in the Baltimore area: My friend Liz Flyntz and I are really excited to host Writing Our Resistance, a queer, feminist, and otherwise radical happy hour reading and open mic at Leon’s, which is one of the oldest gay bars on the east coast! I’m excited to put together an event that not only brings together some of my favorite writers from all over the country, but focuses on community and connection and just having a nice time during a large conference I find emotionally harrowing. I hope you’ll join us on Thursday, March 3 from 5 - 7pm. Want to read at open mic? Just sign up when you arrive and keep it to 3 minutes. You can RSVP, but it’s not necessary.

And more fun stuff on the horizon! I’m thrilled to be participating in the first Hi-Desert Lo-Fi Lit Weekend taking place March 20 - 22. I’ll be participating on a panel about music writing on Saturday, March 21 at Z Club in Joshua Tree and reading on Sunday, March 22 at the Desert Split Open revival. It’s going to be a fun weekend and a great excuse for friends from around Southern California to plan a visit to the hi-desert!

These events remind me of the centrality of my creative work and community in my life. I feel my creative resolve and momentum has felt difficult to sustain with the work of just living (and working). I feel like my brain has no more space, that my neurons are constantly short circuiting. I have a hard time approaching any project, whether it’s making breakfast, doing laundry, or making revisions to my ever looming essay project, with any kind of methodical attention. Overwhelm seems to be the only constant feeling lately (and the out of control weeds in my yard are not helping) which makes me freeze and then blame myself for freezing.

In so many other times in my life I’ve been able to timebox and pomodoro method and caffeinate myself through in order to balance work, school, social and community time, feeding myself and somehow getting exercise. At almost 45 with one of the most demanding jobs I’ve ever had and in an increasingly dark political situation, I have to realize how I’ve been approaching time is no longer working. I know much of this is not me, but is indicative of a systemic problem, but also,

I need to rethink.

Last year my life came apart in so many ways and while I’ve managed to puzzle a lot of it back together, it also demands rebuilding. I want to be deliberate and intentional. This, I realize, is going to be a process.

In mid-January I briefly gave into the 2016 nostalgia that was circulating around the internet for a few weeks. That internet moment has passed, like so much pop cultural weather, pushed out by more urgent, bigger, more serious moments. At first I was going to write about the dangers and pleasures of nostalgia, but mostly I was thinking, “2016? Really?!” In many ways, 2016 still feels too close to be distant. It still feels very present. There’s no techno nostalgia of the digital cameras of 2006 or the point and shoot film cameras of 1996. It was not a simpler time, and fashion was not better or even distinct. I can’t remember anything about trends or music or fashion in 2016. That’s probably because it was all eclipsed by the election and what came after.

In 2016 my apartment had not burned down. My cat Crackers was still alive and my now deceased cat Biscuit hadn’t yet been born. I was still at the beginning of my tech career. I was still writing my book Riot Woman, which took me seven years and ended up as a much different book than I set out to write. I dyed my hair a pale, millennial pink or other wild, rainbow colors, which required a laborious and expensive double process bleach and dye, which often faded out to an unflattering blonde. Living in the desert was a distant dream of “maybe someday.”

2016 was a turning point.

In 2016 I learned what it is to be a neighbor and take care of my neighbors. Though I had lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn since 2002 I had felt disconnected from the people in my neighborhood. A neighborhood made up of overlapping immigrant communities, from Scandinavian to Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Central American, as well as Chinese, I didn’t really interact with many people there, didn’t know them, or their story. I didn’t know who my city council member was or what the community board did. Even though I considered myself an “activist” I hadn’t really pushed myself to connect at the hyper local level.

2016 changed all that. In 2016 I re-learned the meaning of the slogan that I had first heard in the context of environmental awareness and action as a child reading 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” I was briefly paralyzed and then catalyzed by the first election of you-know-who. As a post-colonial and intersectional feminist studies student in undergraduate I had all the theory I needed to understand oppression as an intersection, interlocking systems. But I felt powerless to truly address them, to move from my place of privilege into meaningful action. 2016 pushed me out of my paralysis and perfectionism and I just started trying things. I got off Facebook, except for my neighborhood organizing group, and went to potlucks that were part strategizing, part socializing. I helped to host know your rights potluck dinners for immigrant neighbors in allies homes. I wrote postcards, went to protests, took bystander intervention training and experimented with how to use my skills to create the world I wanted to see.

2016 was when I attended my first artist’s residency, the amazing artist-organized CAMP in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina at the incomparable Azule. It was an absolutely magic week where I got to forget about much of the outside world and really feel what it might be like to dedicated more of my time to my own creativity. It was also then that I first read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which had recently been reissued.

Solnit’s thesis is that no conclusion is forgone and that that action is a form of hope that propels us to a future we might be able to imagine, but cannot yet see. A balm and constant re-read in dark times.

Solnit continues to galvanize me and in a recent post on her Meditations in an Emergency blog she reminded readers,

One of the axes I grind regularly is about and against habits of thought and unquestioned assumptions that interfere with clear perception. One habit I see all too often is the assumption that the future will be an extension of some obvious force in the present: that force will continue to enlarge in power and impact or just stay steady. Thus we get the idea that Trumpism will just become an all-encompassing force of authoritarianism and there’s nothing we can do about that … In fact, again and again the forces that matter, sometimes to the point of revolution or transformation, were nonexistent or overlooked or dismissed a few years or decades before…

In 2016 I was still chasing who I wanted to be. I wasn’t yet fully settled into my adult self and trying to force it with my career and romantic relationships, trying to fill in who I thought I should be through outside validation and the choices I thought I “should” make. So when I look back to 2016 I also see someone still insecure, still trying to prove herself instead of just letting herself be. I’m glad there’s aspects of 2016 that can stay in 2016 (and many I wish would have).

This decade has been relentless. My life has turned and turned again since 2016. All of ours have. I don’t have a clear takeaway from this, except that in 2016 I started to have the audacity to really live how I wanted for the next phase of my life, instead of wishing I could. I still had so far to go, but I can see the groundwork was there. It always is.

As I muddle through another rebuild year, I’m thinking about how I often feel momentum and inspiration and sustained in community. I’m reminding myself to reach out, seek collective solutions and support instead of isolation when the overwhelm hits.

So in the spirit of Solnit I remember, nothing is inevitable and we don’t know exactly how all these moments will add up and where they will lead. May our actions this year continue to be a turning point towards hope.

xox,

eleanor

PS. A lovely new support tool for reflection and finding momentum is the Travel Tarot deck, released by Lonely Planet and created by Jeff Hinshaw aka Cosmic Cousins. I talked to Jeff about the process of creating the deck for the Coachella Valley Independent and it was a really wonderful profile to write - a balm in difficult times.

Currently reading: Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones

I know that one, or many, or any government official singlehandedly turn the tide of justice, that we can’t project our hopes onto elected official, but it was a breath of fresh air, a surge of hope to see issues that actually impact people, education, housing, safer streets, protecting the rights of the vulnerable, be addressed. For narcissistic, self-serving swagger to be replaced by a genuine will to serve the people. It was a glimpse of the world I want to live in, even if we have a long way to get there.

On January second I went to a small show of Brooklyn musician friends. It was in the back room of Young Ethel’s, an unassuming bar on 5th avenue in Brooklyn that has been a place that nurtures friendships and creativity since the mid-2000s under various guises. At the end of the show my friends, Stephen Perry, Alice Danger, and Kiri Oliver, collaborated to cover the Mountain Goats’ “This Year,” a song I haven’t thought about in, well, years. I tried to dab away tears, feeling silly and vulnerable, getting weepy over a cheesy, heartfelt cover. But they kept coming.

By the end of the song I was openly crying over the chance to be in the company of friends I’ve known for years, who are still making music and playing shows after everything, in the audience with some of my other closest friends, in a city that can be so frustrating and so expensive, and yet we persist on being there, that moment of feeling held by my community felt special, fragile, and too rare. It was an ordinary and beautiful moment and I was glad I let myself be in it.

I always harbor a naive hope that the start of the year, no matter how arbitrary, will be a reset. A clean slate. A chance to take a breath, reflect, and reset. On January first I thought that this year, maybe, it could be possible.

But early January is a dubious time.

Soon after I woke up to the news from Venezuela. The news from Minneapolis. Reflections on the one-year anniversary of the Eaton and Palisades fires in Los Angeles. The five-year anniversary of the storming of the capital by a far-right MAGA mob. I’ve felt heavy, exhausted, my body leaden with anxiety and dread, my brain flooded with overwhelm. A sense of winter bleakness pervades, even back in the desert.

These days, I always feel like there is something looming behind me, something I forgot, something hanging over me. I have a hard time really relaxing or finding a creative sense of flow. Recently I was listening to KCRW as they commemorated the fires. They shared the story of a Saha Kanji, who lost his home in the Palisades fire, and the impact it had on his mental health. He talked about navigating PTSD and described it as “that thing in the background.” I recognize this feeling, even when I know my life is relatively secure, even when the privileges I have buffer me from the worst impact of this current political moment. Listening to this story I had to pause and wonder how PTSD from my own loss still weaves its way through my days, even almost seven years later. Sometimes things feel manageable, and sometimes they feel incredibly tenuous. With the anniversary of the fire I thought again about how many thousands of people are navigating their own version of this loss, and I felt humbled and heart broken all over again.

But there have been small acts of generosity. A friend who has been a trusted caretaker of my house and cats for years, but who I’d never met in person picked me up from the airport after my flight home was diverted from Palm Springs to Ontario. We reflected on the year ahead as we drove back to the desert under rain-heavy skies, talking about taking the time to create space in our lives and not rushing to fill it, but rather to sit with it to see what space that expansion can bring.

I don’t have hard and fast resolutions this year or even goals really. I’m more wanting to nudge my life in the direction I want it to go. Small acts, like jettisoning my smart watch to take a small step away from surveillance and screens. Spending less time scrolling Instagram looking for fulfillment I’ll never find. Spend time outside daily, walking or weeding, or just drinking coffee and looking at the sky. Regular time for writing. Publish this newsletter at least monthly, trusting I’ll have something worthwhile to share.

The other afternoon I had tea with a friend I would like to know better and we talked about the importance and consistency of living our values. Last year I threw myself into the Flamingo Heights Community Center, wanting to build community with a capital C. I’m proud of the work I did with my fellow board members, but also realized that the center took over my free time in a way that was no longer conducive to writing or even building the type of creative, flexible community I feel sustained by. For me, the joy had drained out of it. I realized that for now I needed to step back in order to create the space I need for my art to flow. I fought with myself about this decision, feeling like a failure and feeling like my values about community are all talk, but that I couldn’t walk the walk.

But the truth is, community as the antidote to authoritarianism, as an alternative to the hyper-individualism capitalism, doesn’t have to take a certain form. Community building is not perfectionism. It is not worthless if you don’t create a lasting structure or a longstanding community institution. Community is showing up, taking the time to care, to connect, to move outside your exact comfort zone and away from screens. I’m not sure what form that will take for me this year, but I’m trying to leave space so I can act when I’m called and when I need to. I know that I want spaces that feel expansive, where connection feels like possibility and a way forward.

This past weekend I got together with friends for our annual vision board making brunch. It was a welcome gathering to break my urge to isolate when times feel hard. I joked that all of my vision boards are basically the same year over year, that I haven’t really evolved. But then I compared last year’s to this year’s. And I noticed that this year’s collage has so much more space - less words, less trying to force a future and more just grounding into myself and trusting what will come out of that.

Last week I took an afternoon walk with a friend off a back road several miles from my house. The light filtered through the clouds, illuminating the pink-beige granite boulders and dark lava flows. The ground was strangely spongy due to recent rain and full of desert plants with fresh green growth, chia starting to sprout, smelling minty and earthy underfoot. At one point we walked across a vein of quartz, the ground littered with bright white crystal points. “It’s like we’re rich!” I exclaimed.

Lately I’ve shifted how I keep my journal. I used to write down mostly feelings, political analysis, or stream of consciousness free writes. I still do these things, but now every evening I sit down and write down what happened and what I did, however mundane. These days can feel shapeless and strange and writing them down helps remember and quell the anxiety.

The other day my kitten learned how to climb up the bookcase and knocked off several books of poetry. One of them was Algeria, Capital: Algiers, by Anna Greki, and translated into English for the first time by my friend and classmate Marine Cornuet. Maybe the kitten was acting as oracle, because Greki’s poetry is what I need to read right now. Greki was an Algerian of French descent who was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned in 1957 for her participation in the Algerian liberation struggle and she wrote the poems in this collection while in prison. Her words remind me about the many struggles that have been and will come. From the first stanza of the first poem, With Rage In My Heart:

I can no longer love but with rage in my heart

It’s my way of having a heart of plenty

It’s my way of defeating pain

It’s my way of setting ashes ablaze

Through sheet heart crushes and rage

The only loyal way that clears for me

A thoughtful route at the edge of wreckage

With its weight in gold, in joy, in distress

These lips of your mouth my double richness …

Poetry. Time in nature. Small acts of community care. Writing and making music. Fewer screens. Finding consistency. That’s what I have so far for the year ahead. I’m giving it space to evolve.

What are you creating space for this year?

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading:Algeria, Capital: Algiers by Anna Greki, translated by Marine Cornuet, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

It was Death.

The way I use to calculate the card of the year is to add your birth month, birth day, and current year, and then adding the resulting numbers together to get a number between 1 and 22. So for me 5 + 26 + 2025 = 2056, then 2 + 5 + 6 = 13, the death card in the major arcana.

I tried to reassure myself, “It’s not literal, it’s about change, transformation, rebirth,” I told myself, but then wrote in my journal, “Death feels really on the nose here.”

I wanted to ignore it, laying out more reassurances in my journal, reminding myself this card is about:

• Letting go.

• Finding focus on what really matters for my creative hopes, dreams, and goals.

• Finding time to sit with myself so that I can feel replenished, revived, protected, and grounded.

• Reaching deep into myself and trusting my intuition, vision, inner voices and desires to guide me.

But despite my reassurances I knew. We always know before we know.

This year came as a series of blows: The LA Fires in early January. The Trump inauguration and the onslaught of violent, self-serving, and cruel policies that followed. My layoff in April. Biscuit’s sudden cancer and departure in July. Despite my intentions to frame death positively, my mid-year it was also literal.

The routines, habits, and responsibilities that had grounded me all fell away. Firm footing was pulled out from under me and I had to refind my way forward.

Back in January, as I reflected on my full time work and professional life I had also written, “Keep my full time job, don’t take it for granted.” But I also wasn’t quite ready to face the fact that I felt stuck and sidelined, churning out marketing content, my skills diminished and devalued. I didn’t see any path forward at that company that involved professional growth or new challenges that I wanted to take on. I was interested in leading teams, helping craft strategy, and finding creative solutions to thorny problems around growth and engagement. Like so many others in the tech industry, the company was fixated on AI as the solution to it all. However, the idea of going through a job search process, especially when I was unclear what I really wanted or if it was even out there, seemed like too much to take on. Better just to do what had become rote, what I understood, so I could focus on other aspects of my life. But then my job quit me and that decision was made.

With the layoff, I told myself I would lean into my own creative process and work. I would pitch stories far and wide that I would finally have time to write. I would establish a regular cadence for this newsletter. I would go to residencies. Submit to literary journals with a clear strategy in mind. Revise my book in process. Think of creative workshops to lead. Apply for grants. I would muster my resources and become the “real” writer that I wanted to be.

Instead, my creative work largely fell by the wayside. Besides the article reflecting on my own fire loss that Architectural Digest so gracefully published in January, all my other pitches and submissions were rejected. I did get 33 rejections this year, falling short of my goal of 50, but still managed to put in some effort. I’m proud of the local reporting and analysis I’ve done for the Desert Trumpet, and honored to write in service to the Morongo Basin community. And I got to participate in wonderful readings with The Desert Split Open and Desert Salon and lead a fantastic book marketing workshop with The Center for Fiction. But I felt a lack of momentum, like I was scrambling for focus and finding none.

Overall, this was not a year of creative output. I needed to reorient myself emotionally and financially, to spend time figuring out what I wanted to take with me from where I had been professionally and where I could go next that was also possible in this current economy.

Like so many other times in my life when I’ve found myself lost and trying to make my way through a crisis, the community I’ve built over the years picked me up. A former boss and current friend and mentor offered her coaching services and served as a touchstone of accountability and cheerleading throughout the job search process. Another close friend helped me start to imagine what starting my own thing could really look like and how we might collaborate to get there. The guidance and advocacy of another dear friend led me to conversations with a woman I had long admired professionally, which ultimately landed me my new role.

These countless conversations with generous friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who are also figuring out how to use their skills to navigate this current economic nightmare helped shift my perspective and explore different paths for survival. They also clearly illustrated that our current economic chaos is by design - to maximize profits, atomize and alienate workers from each other, to devalue all kinds of labor. We’re all hanging on the best we can right now. It makes me sad for our world and our culture, but it also makes the art we make and community organizing we do feel even more valuable.

Working in my new role has been an immense adjustment. It’s been an investment in time, energy, and emotion to figure out complex professional challenges and how to approach them which took a substantial part of my focus this fall. I recognize that I needed to get my economic footing right before leaping into my creative work, but part of me feels intense frustration about this. However, this year has taught me that I have to fully accept where I am, where my energy is, and to work with what is there, not what I wish could be.

Looking back, this was indeed an intense year of shedding that felt relentless, uncomfortable, and stressful. But in the end, it has landed me in a place that feels more authentic to who I am and want to become. I’m more secure in my own footing. I trust more deeply who I am and how I want to contribute my unique skills to the world.

In writing the above, I want to be very clear that I do not believe that everything happens for a reason. I do not believe the universe meters out rewards and punishments in order to teach us lessons. Things happen to us that are completely beyond our control. We make choices and we can’t always anticipate the outcome. Life is unpredictable. The best we can do is reflect and analyze where we are, be in community to know we’re not alone, muster our resources and deploy them creatively. That’s how we grow.

Even in this year of immense personal and political difficulty, joy continued to find me. A neighbor scooped up a four-week-old kitten who was all alone in the middle of the busy state highway in early September and a month later Pan Dulce came to live with me. She’s a bright, curious, and occasionally chompy ball of hummingbird energy. She’s the first kitten I’ve ever adopted and she’s already brought so much love and levity to my life. When I took her to the vet the techs looked at her and declared, “Biscuit sent her to you.” And we all teared up.

For 2026 Temperance, the 14th card of the major arcana, is my tarot card of the year. It embodies finding harmony, healing, and magic in steadiness. After the upheaval of 2025, I’m ready for it. I’m grounded enough to carve out the creative containers of time I need to create, to find a steady momentum of writing, of nurturing community, of honing and editing my work so it can finally go where it’s capable of going.

What are you carrying into 2026? What are you letting go of?

Sending you peace, hope, rest, and renewal for the New Year.

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Write Through It by Kate McKean and The Mother Code by Ruthie Ackerman

I’m back in California and full time work after two intense months of travel and four months of unemployment. When your time is packed and you’ve been doing a lot, it’s easy to forget what happened, but I’m finding it helpful to rewind, remember, slow down, and savor. To aid this remembering, I made a list of all the places I swam this summer:

1. Big Bear Lake, California

2. Yucca Valley High School Pool, California

3. Palm Springs Surf Club, California

4. Descanso Beach, Catalina Island

5. Rockaway Beach, New York

6. Loch Shiel, Glenfinnan, Scotland

7. Seine River, Paris, France

8. Conche des Baleines, Ile de Ré, France

9. My parents’ pool, Pownal, Maine

10. … and a last hurrah Labor Day weekend at Rockaway Beach

When you swim, you get to feel the flow of a place in your body. Each swim was a unique immersion into the contours of a place: From the numbing waters of Loch Shiel, from which I only warmed up after a glass of whiskey by a fireplace at a local inn, to one of the new “pools” in the Seine, where you can feel the river current passing and I marveled at seeing Paris from river level, to the best Pacific ocean swim I’ve ever had at Catalina Island, where the beach was sheltered from the waves and I could just float, to the comforting beauty of the pool at my parents house, which is surrounded by my mom’s gardens and I swam while bright zinnias bobbed in the August breeze. Swimming is a way to absorb the rhythms of a place and feel a part of it, even if those rhythms are simply morning laps at the local pool.

Spending time near the water also had this effect. On a cloudy day in Edinburgh I traced the winding path of the Waters of Leith, half lost, but followed the river until I arrived after almost two hours of walking at the city’s port. On a hot afternoon in Amsterdam I puttered around the canals on a friend of a friend’s boat. On a sunny Sunday I sauntered along the shady banks of the Seine with my sister at her house outside of Paris, a walk we’ve taken together on my visits since I was 14. In Maine on my mother’s birthday I walked the beach at Reid State Park, where I’ve been going in the summer since childhood, watching 10 foot waves stirred up by a hurricane far out in the Atlantic crash on shore.

Unemployment created a portal of time this summer that I was able to step into. Between stressing about not working and looking for work, despite my attempt at a DIY writing residency, I found it difficult to engage deeply in a creative practice and to find any kind of sustained focus. However, traveling, walking, and swimming suited my restless brain perfectly: Moving around, discovering, absorbing, and connecting. The places I went provided the structure and the distance from any sense of my regular routine gave me freedom to explore.

I also took a deep dive into museums where I could. I used to work in museums, so entering them can feel like clocking in if I’m not careful. However, when I’m able to effectively focus, I find that seeing art is not unlike swimming: You immerse yourself in an environment that may be familiar, if it’s a museum you’ve visited many times, or completely fresh and foreign, but overall you know how to navigate.

My museum run started with Andy Goldsworthy at the National Gallery in Scotland, whose conversations about our relationship to art, environment, and impact are understated, stunning, and humbling, an antidote to a world that is too fast, too cruel, and too digital. I saw shows deeply rooted in place and relationships: Agnes Varda’s photographs of her street in Paris at the Musee de Carnavalet (whose permanent collection also boasts a pair of gold earrings depicting the guillotine and Marie Antoinette’s lifeless head); the Nikki de Sainte Phalle and Jean Tinguely exhibit at the Grand Palais, which my friend and I went through twice to see all the sculptures that “animated” (aka moved) and thought about these two artists’ wildly different styles and lifelong relationship; and the the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit in the empty library space at the Centre Pompidou as they prepare for a 5-year renovation process - my favorite piece was old computer cartels, each with a monitor displaying a video of a person reading, writing, or studying. I went to see the sumptuous couture of Worth at the Petite Palais with a friend who sews costumes for the Comedie Francaise and got a lesson in fabrics and stitching, as well as a window in a past gilded age. The final museum I visited was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where I took in the still lives, portraits, and landscapes that seem to glow from within and speak quiet volumes about the politics, wealth, and history behind them. Like swimming, I emerged from these shows feeling saturated and tired, but refreshed.

This trip, and time, was not so much one of creating, but of filling my cup which had felt depleted from the stress of my last job, unemployment, and (waves hands) the ongoing state of the world. I was also processing the grief of my beloved cat Biscuit’s sudden departure from this place of existence in July. The weeks I spent in Scotland, France, Amsterdam, Maine, and New York visiting friends, family, and traveling on my own enabled a time for me to absorb, and acquaint myself with who I am, outside of work, outside of productivity, and outside the context of the United States, though what’s happening here is reflected everywhere. It was an incredible privilege to take a step back and the kind of break I needed to return to bring refreshed attention to my projects.

Now, back home, I find myself craving structure. I have a new job working with people in time zones spanning the west coast to Europe, so my days start very early, but I’m working to find the momentum of writing and revising my next book-length project. Creating containers of time in which to work helps me be more creative, and I am incredibly grateful to not have the stress of finding employment hanging over my head. Like many, fall will always feel like back to school - time for new pencils and fresh projects - and just the other night I had a dream that I was back at Queens College with my fellow MFA students, greeting each other in the hallways and talking about what we’re working on.

To cap off this summer, I’m proud to announce that my band Skirting released our new EP, “Wants and Needs,” recorded, mixed, and mastered by the talented Matt Shane this spring in Brooklyn. It’s a collection of four songs that I absolutely love. For me these songs explore creativity and survival in late capitalism, the insidiousness grotesque of the society we live in, and finding wild, loving, and joyful moments within it all. It’s a tribute to the music we all love, from post-punk and Riot-Grrrl to 90s alt-rock and beyond.

We write Skirting songs as a group and the process of bringing together scraps of melodies, a few lyrics, an infectious drumbeat, and a punchy bassline into a full-fledged song feels like alchemy. To be able to share it with you, and to have these songs reach their potential under Matt’s ear, is really a pleasure. It’s available exclusively on bandcamp for the next month before we release it on streaming, and every dollar we raise selling the EP will go towards pressing vinyl. Thank you for listening!

It’s so important to keep making art, keep connecting, and keep building communities that are defiant, loving, create space for the most marginalized, and stand up to those in power who are hell bent on destroying this world and everyone in it for their own gain. For desert friends, I hope that you will join me and the unstoppable Susan Rukeyser for a feminist reading and open mic at the Flamingo Heights Community Center on Saturday, October 11th during Banned Books Week. We’ll be celebrating the freedom to read and the opening of the center’s Little Free Library, so please bring a book or two for a community book exchange!

Where are you finding brave community this fall? What fresh projects are you tackling? Or what existing projects are you tackling with a fresh mindset? How do you create containers of time for your creative work, especially in a violent and noisy world?

xox,

eleanor

Currently Reading: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton

I’m writing you from Paris. The first night I arrived I joined a friend who I’ve known for nearly twenty years for dinner. We met in 2006 because our toxic boyfriends were best friends at the time. We thankfully, eventually, ditched the toxic boyfriends and stayed friends, which has been a gift to my life.

My friend is a filmmaker, graphic designer, activist, and writer, and over a long, slow, carefully prepared dinner and a shared liter of natural wine our talk turned to writing after we caught up on our lives. My friend remarked that she feels that she’s a slow writer and that it takes her awhile to feel she has something to say, but when she homes in on an idea, she knows it has to come out. We both write about our lives and find we both still struggle with feeling that our specific stories are worthwhile to share. We both know that the more precisely we write about our own experiences, the more they resonate with our readers, but it still feels intimidating to write this way and to publish.

My friend and I both spent our adolescence and early adulthood in the punk scene. There, we learned the importance of claiming space and finding our voices, whether screamed into a microphone or photocopied onto the pages of a zine. In writing a personal zine for many years, I knew the deeper I plumbed the depths of my internal secrets and shame, the more my readers would respond. However, I find it difficult now to connect with that energy and necessary sense of self-importance that what I have to say matters and will have an impact. In fact, as I write to you now, I’m doubting whether I should be talking to you at all, especially given all the issues in the world right now that demand and benefit from our attention, energy, and action.

One of the purposes of my trip is explicitly to give myself time and focus to write. I’ve found it exceedingly difficult to do as I navigate unemployment and finding a new job. In Paris, I’m setting out to write for a few hours in the morning and early afternoon before going out to wander around the city and fill my cup with art, street life, ice cream, visits with friends, and steak frites. While I am deep in essay revisions for my feels-like-its-never-going-to-be-done book project, trying to untangle knotty paragraphs and ideas that seem clear in my head but convoluted on paper, I’m grateful for this time to reacquaint myself with the practice of giving my words space in my life.

In so many ways, this trip is about giving myself permission to write and also to simply be, to spend time in one of my favorite places as I reel from a year of unexpected loss and change and gear up for a new chapter. I had hoped to have a residency or fancy writing workshop this summer that would afford me an official kind of permission to focus on my writing, but none came through. So when I realized I could create my own residency thanks to airline points and generous friends who are letting me stay in their apartment while they’re away, I was reminded that no one needs to grant me the authority to write, I just have to take it for myself.

So much of not only writing, but sharing our work with the world, is believing that we are worthy enough to do so. In that spirit, I wanted to let you know that this Saturday and Sunday, August 9 and 10, from 11 am to 2 pm eastern (8 am to 11 am pacific or 5pm to 8pm central European time if you’re fancy ) I’ll be leading a workshop on zoom through the Center for Fiction on how to market your book and promote your writing in a way that feels authentic to you and true to your style.

In teaching various iterations of this workshop I believe ever more deeply that writers feel intimidated about promoting their work not because learning the skills and mechanics of it are difficult but because to do so, you have to overcome the real hurdle of believing your work matters and giving yourself permission to talk about yourself and your writing. Once you connect with your why, the rest, like writing a newsletter, planning events, or making a social media plan, are just techniques you can learn and refine. The “special sauce” of any book marketing campaign is you.

In this workshop we will cover the basics of creating a marketing strategy for your book or writing career, as well as fun and creative ways you can get your work out there. My goal for participants is that you emerge ready to tackle that “marketing” section of your book proposal with confidence, feel ready to support your book upon its release, and, if you’re earlier in the process, build a sustainable, supportive, literary community around your work. Beyond these practicalities, I think what makes this workshop really special is that we dig into who you are, what motivates you to write and share your work, and identify that many different communities that may connect with and champion your work. This kind of thinking and strategizing can serve as the basis, and motivation, for any number of marketing tactics, which you can decide are, or are not, for you. Once you give yourself permission to share your work, the tactics you can use to do so come more easily.

So, I hope you’ll join me this weekend! Take a break from the sun and the heat, log on with an icy beverage or two, and let’s get ready to share! The world needs your stories, your work, and your creativity. Let’s support getting it out there together!

And of course, if you can’t join the workshop, you can always buy Promote Your Book and the accompanying workbook for insight, exercises, and inspiration around book marketing.

There’s much more to say about rediscovering joy through art and friendship and how community and mutual aid is how we’ll get through these terrible times, but for now I just want to express my gratitude to you for reading and hope that you’re granting yourself permission to create, explore, and rest this summer.

xox,

eleanor

PS. A very fun book about permission, pleasure, feminist community, and Paris in August is I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol - if you’re looking for a vacation read that won’t insult your intelligence, consider it!

Currently reading: The Outrun by Amy Liptrot

I’ve been working full time since I graduated college twenty years ago, and for ten years before that if you count the odd jobs I did as a teenager: Cleaning horse stalls, mowing lawns, working in a late-90s internet cafe. On top of full time jobs I’ve taken on freelance projects in order to earn extra cash, make ends meet during tight times, or to pursue projects that are interesting to me but don’t quite fit within the bounds of my full time job. Outside the bounds of paid work, I’ve pursued creative work - writing and playing music, which are both joyful, generative, and revitalizing, but also necessitate administrative aspects which can feel like a job. In addition, I got two master’s degrees while working full time: A Master’s in Public Administration I thought was necessary to further my career (it wasn’t, but it did teach me how to make a budget, use Excel, and showed me that I actually love data and quantitative analysis) and an MFA in creative nonfiction, which was not for my career at all, just for myself, but it did open up the opportunity to teach at the university level, which I did for a year while also working and attending school full time.

Within my work, I have also been more privileged than most: Since college my jobs have come with health insurance and retirement benefits. When I moved into tech from the nonprofit sector my jobs have also enabled me to put aside money in savings. Since the pandemic, I’ve been able to work remotely, giving me the gift of a highly flexible life. I was lucky, until my luck ran out.

I’m not listing this work history out to brag or show off my hustle, but to illustrate that since an early age work has been a structuring principle in my life. It’s brought me security, community, and a sense of purpose. It’s also brought me stress, burnout, severe depression, and a sense of self-worth that was too bound up in the outside validation of other peoples feedback, titles, and salary. When I got on the layoff video call my first question was, “Is this performance related?” (Answer: No, my position had been “eliminated”).

Work has been my constant through major personal and societal upheavals. I worked and dodged layoffs through the 2008 recession, Hurricane Sandy, a major breakup with the person I had convinced myself I was going to marry, losing my apartment in a fire, the pandemic, moving across the country, through two master’s degrees, massive protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, January 6, while I witnessed the genocide in Gaza, the slide towards fascism in this current administration … as we all have, as we must. Despite my insistence that we are not our jobs, that I had a hard boundary between my work life and my personal life, my work and job also gave me a sense of satisfaction, and as I see it now, a false sense of security.

I thought that I was the cartoon roadrunner, swiftly and artfully dodging obstacles, staying several steps ahead of a constant and inevitable threat to my livelihood, coming up with ever more clever solutions to outrun danger, to keep running and to try to find joy in that. It turns out I’m the coyote: Pursuing a prize that’s always just out of reach until the ground was pulled out from beneath my whirling feet and I was left futilely spinning my legs in the air before crashing down to earth, ensnared by my own ingenious solution.

Capitalism turns us all into the coyote: Forever needing to come up with new ways to survive while chasing the elusive prize of success, satisfaction, and security, and forever pulling the floor out from under us, so that what we thought was solid turns out to be nothing but an illusion and empty air (not to mention clobbering us with an actual or metaphorical anvil which can take the form of debt of all kinds, housing insecurity, rising taxes while billionaires revel, and on and on).

The thing is, none of this should be a revelation for me. I know that work won’t love you back. I know that capitalism is capricious and cruel. I know that American society purports to venerate work above all else, but crushes workers for the sake of profits for the few. I knew that professional women are often pushed off the corporate ladder in their 40s or 50s. I just thought I was smart enough to have threaded the impossible needle where I could be both critical of and removed from the cruelty of capitalism and benefit from it. Or at least had a few more years to build my savings and safety net until I was shoved out of the workforce and deemed too expensive and too experienced. Not so. This sudden layoff has necessitated that I begin the deep, and long, process of assessing my relationship to work, self-worth, and productivity and the much larger role that employment by someone else has played in that.

The crux is that I’m proud of the work I’ve done in tech startups and the arts as a marketer, content strategist, community manager, fundraiser, program officer, arts administrator, and educator. I’m proud that I was able to build a career that felt aligned with my values and skills. I’m proud that I always delivered quality work that felt good to me - that never compromised despite pressures of time, budget, or shifting demands. I’m proud I was able to pivot to new jobs and new industries when I felt a role was no longer fitting. I’m proud that I have built a deep and varied professional network and despite my recent insistence on separation between professional and personal, I have colleagues who become friends, mentors, and fellow travelers. I realized, however cheesy, that these are accomplishments that no layoff can take away from me.

As it has been so many other times in my life when a crisis has hit, community has been my net. In the past few weeks I’ve had birthday parties in the three places I consider home (Brooklyn, Maine, and California) with cherished friends and family, attended a dear friend’s wedding, recorded a new EP with my band Skirting, taken a mini-California road trip to see friends, and had many conversations with friends and former colleagues, many of whom are in or have been in situations similar to my own. Every conversation brings new insight and clarity, a new angle on my situation, and a new possibility to pursue.

The truth is, every message I was receiving this year, from my intuition and from my body was telling me I needed to slow down, to take a break, to stop driving myself forward in every possible way all the time. It’s a stressful, heartbreaking time in our country and our world and I was trying to knuckle my way through it. I was trying to make up for all the destruction in this world with more and more creative and community work, and pushing and pushing to keep myself relevant at my full time job. While I realize that this break is not exactly the one I needed or asked for, I’m also trying to really listen to myself, reassess, and not just rush into the next thing. Given the current job market it’s also doubtful the “next thing” is right there waiting for me anyway.

This is, as a news outlet may say, a developing story. I don’t have an answer and I don’t know how or where I’m going to land. I’m grateful that I have some financial runway thanks to unemployment, severance, and the savings I was able to put aside (never enough), and a network of incredible people dedicated to helping me figure it out. I feel like there’s three possible paths in front of me: Go back to full time work for a company, take on contracting roles, or start my own thing. Most likely I’ll end up with some combination of the three, but it still feels like very early days in knowing what will be the right fit, what will pay me what I need, and what is actually possible.

Now that some frenetic travel is finished (for the time being), I’m settling into the desert summer. Outdoor pool season begins soon. I bought a summer pass for the San Jacinto tram, so I can hike at cooler, higher elevations. I’m also doing 1,000 Words of Summer to kickstart a more regular writing and editing process on my memoir-in-essays manuscript and to try to tackle some of the pieces I promised myself I’d work on and pitch if “If I had time.” I’m also starting the Artist’s Way. I know some people swear by it, some people shrug it off, and some have found it moderately helpful but not life changing. But a few friends were working through it over the summer, so I figured why not join them? I’ll report back to you about my experience!

Before the layoff, I was already slowly working my way through two excellent craft books, both of which are providing me much needed encouragement and perspective. The first is Dear Writer by Maggie Smith, which contains beautiful vignettes about shaping prose and approaching your work on the page. Smith approaches her work with a sense of playfulness, openness, honesty, and wonder, even when writing about the hard stuff, and reading it feels like a big hug for us anxious writer types.

The other is the exact book I didn’t know I needed: You Must Go On by Brian Gresko. The tagline says it best, “Not a book about how to write, a book about why to write and how to keep at it in a world that wants you to shut the hell up.” I’ve admired Brian’s work building literary community and writerly presence from afar for a long time, but I had the chance to meet him at AWP and pick up a copy of the book. Divided into 30 short missives each one is a pep talk, a dose of reality, a call to action and literary arms, and a reminder of why it’s important to make art even when you feel crushed by capitalism and the caprices of literary coolness. You Must Go On feels like it was written just for me (and you, and all of us). It helps yank me out of my darker moments when I think “Why bother with this work? Just give up now to avoid being disappointed later.” Instead, Brian has given me (and you!) 30 reasons to keep going that have everything to do with making art, connecting with people, and building true community and nothing to with finding an ever elusive notion of “success” in the publishing world.

Speaking of true writerly community, I also wanted to let you know I have two fun events coming up: A reading in the high desert and an online workshop on book promotion with the Center for Fiction.

I’m really excited to be reading as part of S’more and stories, a fireside reading of desert and visiting writers organized by Lexi Pandell as part of Desert Salon that will be held at Mas o Menos in Joshua Tree on June 22nd at 7pm. Join us for a reading and then toast marshmallows with us by the fire! It’s going to be so fun!

For those looking to boost their book marketing acumen this summer, I’m thrilled to be offering “Book Promotion Your Way: Marketing Your Writing Without Anxiety” as an online workshop through the Center for Fiction. It will be a two day workshop over the weekend of August 9 and 10 and I promise to make it just as fun as a trip to the beach in August (and more enduring than the sunburn you might get). I hope that you can join me!

Tell me, how do you keep going right now? And tell me, fellow type A workaholics, how do you rest when work has always been your coping mechanism?

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: No Straight Road Takes You There: Essays for Uneven Terrain by Rebecca Solnit

PS. As a desert resident, I must inform you that the coyote and roadrunner cartoon is a work of fiction! To learn more about actual animals check out the Wildlife Wednesday columns on roadrunners and coyotes from my friends at The Desert Trumpet.

Like hundreds of thousands of people around the United States, and the world, Saturday April 5 I joined a “Hands Off!” protest, this one in New York City. The day was windy and cloudy, spitting rain, a classic New York in early April kind of day. As I walked with my friend Keight and thousands upon thousands of other New Yorkers, down Fifth Avenue, past the New York Public Library lions Patience and Fortitude, past the Empire State Building, chanting and cheering and smiling and raging together, I felt a buoyed sense of hope. There’s more of us than them, I reminded myself, and we need to utilize the rights, and tools available to us across the spectrum to resist, to say no, to make our dissent visible. We need to make protest and dissent as normal as breathing. And then we need to go deeper than that.

As I shuffled through the canyons of midtown, I felt that I was walking along my 22-year old self. I was 22 in 2003, protesting the start of the Iraq War in 2003. The same streets, the same feelings: That we were part of a massive movement, that it not just about one issue, but many, that it was about putting forth a fundamentally different view of the world and of public policy, that we wanted a future that wasn’t based around violence, corrupt power, and scapegoating a vulnerable population. I was marching with Keight then too and it was one of those moments where I felt time folded in on itself and then I realized: 22 years old was half my life ago.

I still feel like the voice of that 22-year-old I was, or wanted to be, follows me around though. That person is both idealistic, perfectionist, and relentlessly sincere. She is also cynical, rigid, deeply judgmental, and dismissive. She is heartbroken that the history of the world has been shaped by violence, and so angry that time and time again, power asserts itself through violence, scarcity, and scare tactics. She is also kind of a jerk.

This inner-22 year old is an anarchist, yes, but is much crueler and more dismissive than any actual practicing anarchists I’ve actually known. These real-life anarchists tend to be deeply empathetic, idealistic, and steeped in radical theory and actively practice mutual aid. But this 22-year old insists on activist purity, or nothing. She is the imagined embodiment of all of my worst qualities. My inner critic in (almost) human form.

Later that night I played a show with Skirting, as well as our friends A Bird at War with the World and The Roulettes. All women and femme-identified people, most of us over 40. On stage I carried my hastily made protest, “Stop Obeying in Advance.” The night was sweaty and electric, one of those shows where you feel in the zone and transported from the back of a neighborhood bar in South Brooklyn to a place of possibility and energy, a place where you do feel another world can be possible, because the people in this room are going to make it. For me, this is the enduring power of punk and DIY. It’s also why I specifically insist on whenever possible, sharing the stage with other women and queer-identified bands. There’s a sense of solidarity and also never a question of why you are there or why you should be there. No one challenging your rock credentials or saying that you’re so “different” or sound like the only other band they’ve heard with women playing in them.

It was a day that gave me what I needed emotionally and politically, that reminded me of the power of creativity and community. But then my inner 22-year-old anarchist piped up. Didn’t I know she insisted, that the Hands Off protests were white washed, organized by Democratic strategists and not grassroots, that they couldn’t possibly bring any real change and if people just wave a funny sign and go home and feel they’ve done something they still haven’t actually done anything. Don’t I realize that simply opposing fascists isn’t enough? That we need to tear the whole system down first to rebuild something better?

She took a swig of her Nalgene water bottle covered in stickers (my 22-year-old anarchist is straight edge, as I was at 22), tucked in her silkscreened, obscure punk band t-shirt, and let out an exasperated sigh. Protesting she continued, is not a direct action. Instead, we could be blocking arms shipments to Israel and ICE deportation flights, and setting up community intranet for when corporations and the government shut internet communications down.

My inner 22-year-old anarchist is a real thief of joy.

She’s also not wrong. I understand her analysis, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t be also taking direct action, but that kind of action isn’t available to everyone. Resisting is going to take all of us, in multiple forms. I also can now see, at (almost) 44 what she (me) could not when I was 22. She wants direct action to change the world. She wants to change the world. Herself. Right now. She doesn’t yet realize that community, and commitment are a lifelong process that needs to change and evolve as the world changes and evolves.

After the Iraq war protests failed to stop Bush’s invasion of Iraq I was devastated. It made me doubt the power of protest and assembly, because if the largest protest in history (until the Women’s March in 2017) could not achieve our objective, what was the point? I turned to cultural work and education, thinking that was where I could express myself politically, but was even further discouraged that could “do anything” when an (anarchist) friend told me that I wasn’t an “organizer” because I “organized events, not people.”

Thinking about that phrase still hurts.

I started to realize that my dark feeling of failure wasn’t helping when I read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark when it was republished in 2015. I realized hope, and action, is a long game, and that our actions both massive and small add up to changes we cannot yet see or know, but we have to trust they will create change, but it’s not a one-to-one results (ie. I protest X therefore Y happens). Solnit reiterated these ideas in her closing speech at the San Francisco Hands Off rally, reminding us that,

“I talk a lot about hope. Hope is not optimism. Optimism says everything will be fine. Hope says we don't know what will happen but if we show up, if we stand up, we can maybe seize the chances. Hope makes friends with uncertainty, takes it by the hand and guides it toward our desires, hope grabs the possibilities. Hope recognizes the future is made in the present, it's made by what we do and don't do.”

We need to be in it for the long haul, Solnit reminds us, we need to keep showing up, keep using all that’s in our power and ability, even when it looks impossible, even when it’s scary. We don’t know what comes next, but it’s up to us to invent it. She says,

“I am not saying we will do this. For that we'd have to be patiently passionate and passionately patient. We'd have to stick to our principles, keep showing up and keep standing up even when it looks bleak. We have to do the right things even when the consequences of our actions might not be immediately obvious. We have to persevere even if it is scary, and by that we, I mean those of us least at risk on behalf of those most at risk. We can do this.”

My 22-year-old-inner-anarchist (because she is 22) doesn’t understand the long haul because she hasn’t yet lived it. 22 years old was half my life ago, which seems impossible, because I already was sure I was an adult at 22, much less sure than I am now.

At (almost) 44 I can look back and see so much of what my inner-22-year-old cannot. I can see my own consistency towards living my values, despite the despair that characterized so much of my mid-20s and 30s. I can see that I’ve committed to making art, through writing and music, to working for organizations I believe in that hopefully make the world just a little bit better, to organizing locally with my neighbors, to supporting causes I believe in. I’ve marched, called, door knocked, built community through events (which yes are organizing), donated, raged, rocked, and written in service to my vision for a better world for nearly three decades. And I hope to keep doing so for however long I’ve got.

I was a 22-year-old anarchist, yes, but now I’m a 44-year-old realist who tries to hold on to those ideals and passions that inflamed me at 22 and still do. I just have less of an ego, less thinking how can I solve a worldwide problem of power and oppression singlehandedly and instead think of how can I be in service to justice, community, and those who need support the most, however imperfectly.

Maybe I will look back at this post, tomorrow, or further in the future, and say my inner 22-year-old was right, that what we thought was resistance was just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, but I hope she’s wrong.

There’s more protests today, and more planned for May 1st, and there will be more after that. See you out there. There’s a lot of rumors swirling about what might happen, there’s a lot of scary stuff that’s already happening and has been happening for quite some time. But we need to keep showing up, keep practicing compassion to ourselves and others, not letting our cruelest critics, those inner perfectionists, keep us paralyzed and silent, thinking we’re powerless unless we’re perfect.

xox,

eleanor

PS. I’m back in the desert and for my high desert friends, I hope you’ll join me May 4 at the Flamingo Heights Community Center for Flamingo Fest, our re-opening party. 12 - 7, drop by for a maker’s market, a signature cocktail, food by Citali Tamales, Friendo Burger, and Galaxy Pies, tea from Milk Thistle, music by The Kearns Family, a collaborative art project, and to connect with local nonprofits and community resources. We need each other more than ever and strengthening community ties means strengthening our resilience, compassion, and sense of possibility. We can’t wait to see you!

PPS. Anarchist friends, I am sorry to over simplify what you believe in and so boldly work for, I am indebted and grateful to the work you do.

Currently reading: A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham

All through middle and high school, I played clarinet, a much maligned instrument, in the school jazz band. Despite years of lessons and dedicated practice, it never ceased to be a difficult instrument for me to play. But every Monday night I showed up to band practice, no matter if I was struggling with the recent arrangement or angsting about the fact that I would have to take a solo. Part of the draw was the band leader, our teacher Ray Morrow.

Ray was somewhat of a legend around my school. He was understated and unassuming, but poised and powerful enough to gracefully wrangle a bunch of surly teenagers into an ensemble that regularly won a competition for high school jazz bands at Boston’s Berklee School of Music. He was dedicated to his craft and felt that we, as petulant teens, were worthy of sharing it with - he once went so far as to get in touch with the widow of Charles Mingus in order to get permission for us to perform a specific arrangement of one of his songs.

Through example, Ray taught me about creativity, consistency, and the power of a teacher who truly believes in you. There were no try outs for jazz band. If you played an instrument, you could join. That meant we often had several drummers, two bass players, and three flautists. While some of the musicians I played with were insufferable jazz snobs, the band Ray cultivated was by nature inclusive and expansive. While by the end of high school I was more focused on punk rock than jazz and the freedom of teaching myself power chords on the guitar, I kept my commitment to the band and the clarinet, even as my other tastes and ideas changed rapidly during high school.

One of Ray’s brilliant pedagogical techniques was “story time.” He’d give us a ten minute break during our two-hour evening practice and then to corral us back into our chairs and refocus us he’d tell a story from growing up in Maine or from his musical career. We loved his stories and would call them out by name. “Blue hubbard squash!” “This mic is shocking me!” we’d clamor.

Ray also created small traditions and rituals, which added to a shared culture of the band. One of his favorite days was March fourth. “It’s the only day that’s a full sentence!” he proclaimed. It was a day we should “March forth!” Perhaps literally. I remember one day in honor of March fourth my friend Mark decided to walk the 14 miles to school that morning, leaving in the freezing dark of 4:30 am to make it on time.

Coming up to writing this post, I’ve been feeling stuck. No new writing to share. The projects I’ve been pitching and editing and nurturing and trying to force into accountability have ground to a sludgy halt. The momentum with which I approached my writing at the beginning of the year has drained away and transformed into overwhelm. I’ve read post after post about how under this current administration we need to stay loud, keep making our art, protect our joy. But I am exhausted. And I am outraged. And from this place I can’t connect with the focus I need to be generative. My time feels alternatively grasping and fractured, or stretched out like unproductive taffy. I think I need to accept instead of fight it, but sometimes I get into that headspace of “If this [ie. writing] isn’t happening now, therefore it will never happen again!”

But then I remembered March forth! In Maine (where I grew up) the fourth of March is still winter, at least for now. While the days are starting to hint at being longer, the sun shining a little stronger, some of the breezes a little softer, most winters you can be sure that there’s at least one more big snowstorm on the horizon, that you cannot pack up your heavy sweaters anytime soon. But there’s an energy under the surface, a crack in the shell of winter.

While it may not always feel like it, the earth is beginning to soften (unless you live in coastal Southern California where the flowers are already blooming, lucky you, in my high desert yard the storksbill are just rearing their tiny sprouts, warning at the months of weeding ahead) and perhaps the dawn of revolt is emerging into our spring of our resistance. I certainly hope so.

Right now, I’m as inspired by the creative protests and refusals I’m seeing around the country as I am angry at all the people and companies complying with these idiotic and illegal executive orders and mandates in advance. You can just say no!” I find myself saying to the screen, to the radio news, multiple times a day, “Just don’t do it!”

But also, the revolt is there. 433 protests in national parks last weekend, including a large one here in Joshua Tree. Here in Yucca Valley, residents showed up en masse to a town hall with our ghoulish MAGA puppet representative Jay Obernolte to try to force him to “do your job” and it made national news.

Marching forth isn’t just about saying no, it’s about what we’re building. In my overwhelm, I’m trying to center myself with what I know and what I can confidently contribute. I’ve decided to put my energy into joining my Flamingo Heights neighbors to revitalize a quasi-dormant community center about a mile from my house. Together we’re envisioning a “third space” where people can come together for workshops, performances, social events, and information sharing. I keep reminding myself that so much of this march towards authoritarianism is about keeping us isolated and mistrustful, to dismiss any attempt at sincerity and solidarity as “cringe.” The antidote to that is building something that reflects our values - inclusivity, openness, and connection - together.

Frankly, this dismissal of a belief that community can matter as “cringe” reminds me of in the 90s when I began organizing punk shows and activist groups in my hometown of Portland, Maine and would be dismissed by adults, and fellow teens and punks as being “too earnest” (the 90s equivalent of cringe). However, I believe that heart-on-your-sleeve sincerity and a belief that we have the power to make our world better together is what makes life bearable. So I have decided to move forward with an energy that feels creative and productive, and to dare to create a place where people can not only learn from each other, but connect and have fun.

I’m also jumping into volunteering for another state race via Tech for Campaigns. It’s a chance to use my email marketing skills to support the re-election of a working class, Black candidate who is one of the youngest to ever be elected to the legislature in his state. As flawed as our democracy is I do still believe there’s something that can be gained from progressive candidates in office that actually listen to and work for their constituents.

I share all this to ask, how are you marching forth? Where can you move through the murk in a way where action can turn to hope? I’m absolutely still muddling through, but I feel little better about muddling together.

xox,

Eleanor

PS. I’m also, in this windy transitional month, thinking about the famous line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “Beware the ides of March,” a warning to emperors and empires everywhere, a reminder that a corrupt power grab will not go unnoticed. May we be the warning and the knives.

PPS. Are you going to AWP? Doing a reading, panel, cool offsite? Let me know. I’d love to see you there! I have very mixed feelings about this conference, but I’m trying to approach it as some fun days in LA amongst other writers, not a place where I have to prove myself as a writer.

Currently reading: Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (finally!)

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

- Robert Frost (courtesy of the Poetry Foundation website)

I loved trying to unravel the paradox of this poem as a child, but rereading it as an adult, its weight is far more apparent. Frost wrote the poem in 1920, shortly after WWI, and the tensions, fears, and sadness it encapsulates feels extremely contemporary.

Last Sunday, after a nearly record breaking dry period, it finally rained, which turned to snow overnight. I woke up Monday morning, ready to face another work week, and instead found the desert enveloped in slushy, wet snow like a muffled blanket. I chucked aside whatever “productive” plans I had made for the morning, dug a pair of waterproof boots out of a bin in the garage, and set out for a neighborhood walk, the tang of icy, damp wind on my face familiar from years of north east winters. Around me, the plants breathed a sigh of relief, soaking in some much needed moisture, and familiar sights were transformed.

The last time I saw snow this deep in the desert was on a visit in February of 2019. Then I rented a cabin in Landers, just a few miles from where I live now, that was heated only with a wood stove. Each day at the desk I lit a candle and drew an oracle card to help guide my writing. On the morning I woke up to snow I walked into what I now know is the Hondo wash, the same wash I walk in several mornings a week, and delighted at how the it settled on the tops of cacti and the upturned, spiky leaves of the Joshua Trees. In that mystical morning in the bottom of the wash I knew I had to come back to the desert to live, though the path to do so was unclear.

Just a month after I returned to Brooklyn from that desert trip, a fire destroyed my apartment in Sunset Park, the place that I thought would be my forever home. This loss, combined with the pandemic a year later, propelled towards making a new home in the desert.

Now, the same storm that brought us this year’s desert snow also brought much needed rain to Los Angeles, and I hope some relief to those still battling the multiple fires there. However, I know that the rain is of little consolation to those who have everything in the fires and the communities and history they tore through. As I watched the suffering of friends and strangers who lost their homes, I couldn’t help but think of the long period that comes after.

I got to share a little bit about my own after, reflecting on the loss of my home and the ongoing lessons I learned from it for Architectural Digest. I have a small hope that it provides some guidance to anyone who was impacted by the fires and is trying to navigate what comes next in these extremely challenging times.

I am forever grateful for the community who helped me in the immediate aftermath of “my” fire and the people whose friendship and generosity have enabled me to reshape my life since. However, I struggled to articulate just what the loss felt like and what it meant. Losing your home is a grief similar to losing a loved one, and a profound loss on a financial, emotional, and logistical level. I hope in sharing what I have been going through I can provide a small reminder no one going through this needs to suffer alone.

So many days I’ve been listening to the radio and hearing stories of people impacted by the Palisades or Eaton fires and felt a flash of sudden and horrifying recognition. Artist Camilla Taylor spoke of losing their artwork in their Altadena home, saying, “[It feels like] that I've been in many ways erased.”

I’ve shed scant few tears since losing my apartment, but hearing the stories like Camilla’s and so many others of so many going through it now the tears spring without warning. I ache for the lives shattered, the whole neighborhoods burned and scattered, the strength takes to begin again. Losing a home that is so much a reflection of your essence, as well as your sanctuary, feels like an erasure, and with such a loss happening on a community level, well, it’s hard to fathom (and of course, writing this I also think of the horrors and loss the people of Gaza have been enduring).

Like so many, I’ve felt paralyzed by the news (and the unrelenting horrible things that are unfolding everyday), but instead of doom scrolling I’m trying to make a small donation to GoFundMe campaigns that could use support whenever I start to spiral out - this list has been very helpful.

Money is just one way to help, of course, and I’m heartened and inspired by all the ways that communities in and around LA have come together to practice mutual aid and support those impacted by the fires. I’m hoping to find a way to plug into help longer term recovery, especially for those who are the most vulnerable and may not have deep networks of support, because I know how long and hard recovery (if such a thing even exists) can be. If anyone has any ideas, please send them my way!

Somehow as I write this, it is still January. This month has been stacked with stressors big and small, starting with major dental surgery for my cat Biscuit while I was still back east (thank you Biscuit’s friends and fans for taking such good care of her), a lingering two-week cold, a water leak from a pipe I previously had no idea existed, of course the rapid devastation of the LA wildfires, and a flat tire on my car, not to mention the wanton, narcissistic cruelty of this new administration.

This month has also included moments of joy, community, and hope, both loud and quiet. I took a quick weekend trip to Portland, Oregon to see the 30th anniversary show for the band Team Dresch, as well as teenage queercore favorites The Third Sex, Longstocking, and The Need. It was a powerful reminder of the importance of queer, feminist visibility and building sustainable communities and making art that affirms, celebrates, rages, and fights for us, no matter what the laws or lawmakers say.

(The video below is one of the few I took because I was too busy rocking out - #1 Chance Pirate TV!)

I also started to get back to a regular writing practice thanks to the accountability from multiple writing friends and a delightful class with Kelly McMasters. I’m teetering on the edge of diving into making major edits and revisions to the collection of essays I hope will be my next book, but still a bit unsure how to start. I had ambitious plans to finish the manuscript and query agents this year, but I am re-learning the lesson that writing takes the time it takes and what I need to do now is to diligently put in the work and not focus on external results.

I did set writing goals for the year, but I’m saving my annual visioning for February (January felt somehow too dark to vision). This year I really want to focus and slow down. To give myself over to the revision and re-writing of my essays and to let that further crack me open. To commit to at least one dedicated writing session a week. While I want to insulate myself from publishing industry noise, I am aiming for at least 50 rejections, to put more energy into pitching mainstream publications instead of submitting to obscure literary magazines, and attend at least one writing workshop or residency.

(Also, no shade to obscure literary magazines, I help edit a great one, MAYDAY. And we are open for submissions - we’d love to read your work!)

How are you approaching your creative goals this year? Doubling down or giving yourself space? Finding community, building skills, getting your work out there, or giving it time to develop?

Stay strong and take care of each other.

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Cactus Country by Zoë Bossiere

PS. I joined BlueSky, finally. I’m still figuring out how I’ll use it, but I hope that you’ll join me there - it’s a relief to be on a platform that is not saturated with ads and influencers (and fascists).

PPS. I have fulfilled my New England writer destiny by quoting Robert Frost. It was bound to happen. Did I mention I got to visit his Vermont summer cabin while I was at Breadloaf last June? He had a telephone with a direct line to his secretary/mistress. That was a spicier tidbit than I was expecting as in my mind Robert Frost is a permanent old yankee codger.

“Is tonight the night we try Black Bear Diner?” texted Sharon. “Choose well,” she continued, “Because wherever we go, it’ll go in your memoir!”

“Which memoir?” I quipped back, “My memoir about being a feminist during America’s slide into authoritarianism?” As I wrote, I wished I was actually joking.

It was Election Night and we were trying to find a place to commiserate that wouldn’t have a thousand TVs blaring returns.

Black Bear Diner’s opening in Yucca Valley was much hyped, though I’d never heard of this West Coast chain before. I even met someone who told me he drove from an hour away in the low desert just to have a meal there. Their opening caused a kerfuffle with the town planning commission over whether the chainsaw carved black bear sculpture that they wanted to display in front of the restaurant constituted a “sign” and thus was subject to certain kinds of zoning rules. I can now report that the food was just okay. The wine I ordered to blunt my oncoming depression and panic was, on the other hand, undrinkable.

Later that night I put my phone on sleep mode and willed myself to do the same. On November sixth like many I woke up feeling wrung out and, despite having anticipated the election results for months, I considered never getting out of bed again. But there was part of me that knew what needed to be done: Connect with people in actual spaces. See community members. Take care of myself. Face reality. So I donned my “Ban Fascists, Not Books” tank top and shoved myself out the door to my new favorite 8:30 am spin class. I’m a real latecomer to spin. Previously I preferred riding a bike that got me somewhere, but that’s less of an option in the desert. I enjoy the no-frills classes at my no-frills local gym, the cardio rush, and getting out of my head for an hour while someone else tells me what to do set to loud music. The only thing I can do right now, I thought, is keep going.

Later that night I went to the closing event for an art show organized by Corinna Rosella and Mary Evans at Corinna’s apothecary and shop, Milk Thistle. It was subdued, but the chance to hold space with each other, to reflect on the process of art making, and ground ourselves as Mary led a beautiful meditation was healing and necessary. Making art, supporting independent businesses, and creating spaces to be together are all muscles we must continue to develop, especially now.

I remembered that after the election in 2016 I hosted a potluck at my Brooklyn apartment and invited my friends to come to share their feelings, express their fears, and vent their rage. I’m sure there was a lot of cheese and too much wine, but it also was the start of a reconnection, of expansion of community care in the face of an uncertain but certainly cruel future. After this election, I reminded myself that making space like this was a small thing I could do. The Sunday following the election I invited some of my desert friends to come over, bring comfort food, and talk.

I know I’m a more experienced organizer and community builder than I was eight years ago, that I’m more politically astute and less naive. The incoming President’s first term and the pandemic taught me valuable lessons about mutual aid and community care. But I’m also living in a place that still feels new to me. I don’t have the deep networks and community knowledge I had in Brooklyn. While I’ve been slowly nurturing pockets of desert friends over the past four years, when it comes to thinking about trusted networks of caring, I realized I needed to seek out and create the kinds of space I might need in the years ahead. So why not start over food (and too much wine)?

That first week of November it felt too early to strategize or plan, but our conversations reminded me that we don’t have to have answers for the unknown, but we must not face the times ahead alone. Now is the time to turn towards, not away from, our community. It’s time to think about where we can put our energy and leverage our access and privilege in the service of those more vulnerable. The strategy will come, and I trust it will be led by those more directly impacted and with more organizing skills than me, but networks of trust and understanding are the baseline. May we counter this short-sighted and callous administration that only knows power for personal gain by continuing to build the kinds of communities we want to see and inhabit that are centered around justice, equity, and inclusivity.

During the dinner I was reminded of this bystander intervention zine I made after attending a training in 2016 facilitated by Rachel Levy and hosted by Bluestockings Books and the Arab American Association of New York. There are many strategies we can use to make public spaces safer for the more vulnerable, and while intervention can be a complex subject, I think this provides what I hope are some helpful reminders. The zine is a one-pager, so if you want to hand it out you can print out the PDFs, photocopy it, and follow the simple instructions to assemble. Or make your own and share strategies that you find useful for surviving and protecting our communities during this time!

For my comfort food contribution I made butternut squash mac and cheese. This dish was my staple offering for the Know Your Rights dinners we used to host for immigrant neighbors in Sunset Park in 2018 and 2018 and one of my favorite comfort foods to make and eat. This time around I added parmesan on top for extra flavor and made it with chickpea pasta as some kind of nod towards “health.” May this meal fortify you too in the years ahead.

As we reflect on the year that’s past and prepare for what’s to come, many fellow creative people, especially women, have told me they’re in these coming years they’re determined to finish their book, start their band, and get their voices into the world. Not as a way to hide from reality, but to engage with it. It’s a reminder that our survival depends on expression, creation, and new, broader visions. Art, like community and action, is a necessity. Our creative work can be a strategy to make visible our brilliance, rage, and counternarratives, to believe that our voices and lives matter no matter what.

With the end of the year approaching, I was inspired to take a look back at what I’ve put into the world this year. Last year I was feeling weighed down and sad, like my writing was without traction or an audience. Writing moves slowly. In the spirit of creating momentum, this year I set out to receive 50 rejections (whether from publications, residencies, contests, any type of literary opportunity). I’m proud to say that I’m currently at 45 rejections and while each one stung more than it should have, I’m proud of myself for trying.

But I also did get a few acceptances and I’m so grateful for every word that gets published and every opportunity I’m offered. I’ve loved sharing these with you over the course of the year. I know that being consistent about making work, editing work, submitting work, and sharing work will be what brings me to the next step. I can be strategic, yes, but without being narrow minded. I know I’ll feel like I’m failing and flailing until an opportunity comes. It will all feel uncertain until a path opens, and even then nothing is guaranteed. This is a lesson I have to constantly relearn.

I’m still at the very beginning of my journey as a writer of literary nonfiction, but have to remind myself that I’ve been writing publicly for years. I don’t want to discount my experience of contributing to and creating small press and independent media. None of that may matter to prestigious publications or agents, but I know it matters to me and has made me the writer I am. As I gathered up the writing I’ve put out in the world this year, this list served as a reminder that as we push ourselves forward creatively it’s also vital to take a moment to reflect, recognize, and respect where we’ve been.

I’m very proud of two brand new publications: For The Rumpus I interviewed literary community builder, editor, and fiction writer Kristen Felicetti about her fantastic first novel Log Off. I also got to talk to the ebullient and multitalented Courtney Kocak for The Bleeders, her podcast about writing and publishing. I loved reflecting on my publishing philosophy, what I’ve learned from my publishing journey, and my top five quick tips for book promotion. It’s a fun, short, high energy conversation. I hope you’ll give it a listen!

I was proud to have several new essays published this year and so grateful for the independent presses, literary magazines, and media outlets that gave them a home.

• On Annihilation was published by Kitchen Table Quarterly and investigates the overlap between the sacred, sacrificial, and sublime in the militarized desert.

• Inheritances was published by the Upper New Review and is an essay grounded in my three home places, and a reckoning with family, identity, history, and what we inherit and what we choose to keep, whether we want it or not.

• Finding My Femme-inism published by The Coil is a sweet reflection on how Riot Grrrl, Queercore, and zines impacted my identity as a teenager growing up in Maine in the 1990s.

• Bliss Street was published in The Queens Review, the excellent literary journal coming out of the Queens College MFA program, that captures the political, personal, and creative hopes I had in my early twenties and is a love letter to the “world’s borough.”

• My short personal essay “​​I lost my apartment in a fire. I learned that community is what makes a home,” was published by Business Insider and I am beyond proud! I’m planning more pitching in 2025, as bringing this piece together was incredibly gratifying.

• For The Midst I reviewed Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, Rebel Girl and reflected on the impact her art has had on my life from a mid-life perspective.

• I recently started writing for the Coachella Valley Independent. I’m so excited to be part of a vital independent news source for the desert. While many writers I know began their careers at independent weeklies, I didn’t have that opportunity, so I’m excited to contribute now. With independent outlets shuttering all over the country, supporting media like the CVI is more important than ever.

I also got to be part of two new books this year: The workbook accompaniment to Promote Your Book, the Promote Your Book Workbook came out in the spring, which is perfect for those who want a hands on guide to crafting their book promotion plan (and pssst it makes it a great gift). I also am so grateful to have my essay “Anonymous was a Riot Grrrl” included in the luminous, necessary, and timely Weird Sister Collection, edited by Marisa Crawford (which also makes a great gift for the feminist in your life). I also got to interview Marisa for Literary Hub about the origins of Weird Sister, the collection, and why literary feminism and 90s girl culture need more critical attention.

I expanded my writerly community this year, heading to AWP in Kansas City, the Breadloaf Environment Writers Workshop in Vermont (absolute heaven), and a DIY writers retreat with my MFA friends at my parents house in Maine. I’m grateful for my ongoing writing accountability partners, especially Marisa, whose Thursday morning zoom sessions ground my weeks. I’m also excited for fellow Breadloafer Hurley Winkler’s weekly writing nights starting on January 1. If you are looking for writing accountability I hope you’ll consider joining!

Somehow also this year my band Skirting released our debut EP “What You’ve Been Told,” played four shows, and wrote new songs, all while navigating our bicoastal existence and very busy lives.

I am so grateful for everyone who came to my readings and shows, read this newsletter, and wrote me back!

Cultivating our creative work and nurturing community will help us find grounding, peace, and resilience when times get harder. Just this week I put out a call to my Instagram friends for affordable artist residencies and retreats in California and I wanted to share a few with you, in case you too are looking for a creative boost and some time to recalibrate.

For those looking to take a day to recharge, on January 24 musician, writer, and yoga teacher and sound healer Taleen Kali will host a dreamy, one-day creative retreat in Los Angeles - the perfect creative wellness reset for the New Year! For those looking for residency opportunities, the Dorland Mountain Arts in Temecula has beautiful, affordable cabins and Wellstone Redwoods also has beautiful lodging in a tranquil setting. Writing x Writers has lots of cool workshops, readings, and residencies (though the deadline for 2025 residencies has passed, but mark this for the future). Also, if you’re looking for artist friendly residencies farther afield, I love the research that Pineywood Atlas has been doing to highlight artist run residencies around the country. Of course Poets and Writers and the Author’s Guild also have residency resources, but some of those are either too exclusive to count on or cost way too much money in my opinion. Feel free to drop any other accessible creative retreat ideas in the comments!

As the year comes to a close I hope you’ll join me to take a deep breath, ground yourself, and reach out. And keep making work.

Thank you for an intense and vibrant year together. I am so grateful for you.

xox,

Eleanor

Currently reading: Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik - Reader, I am struggling with this one! As a Didion and Babitz fangirl, I’m loving the hot literary goss, but Anolik’s writing is atrocious. She has such access to incredible material but apparently … no editor? (Like why does she keep interjecting to address the reader directly declaring, “Reader …” all the time.) I want to take a red pen to every sentence. I really disliked Hollywood’s Eve as well and it pains me that she has such exclusive access but no ability to really tell a story or build a book length work. She either completely lacks analysis or is trying to be clever and failing. For example, she asks rhetorically why Joan Didion deferred to her husband publicly when she was the more famous and talented writer, hmmm … Lili, have you heard about the patriarchy?

(That’s a book review/rant you didn’t ask for, but enjoy!)

“Check tonight, point your camera north!” my mother texted me in early October, along with photos of the aurora borealis over her house in Maine. I grumpily acknowledged that I was probably too far south to see them, but I would try anyway. I had taken a friend to Palm Springs to the airport and driving home at sunset I noticed that the sky seemed to have more of a purplish hue than usual. Then, taking out the trash at home, I saw it, a pinkish haze on the northern horizon. I grabbed my phone and texted my neighbors, “We’re getting the aurora tonight!” For the next 45 minutes I ran around my yard and into the open desert across the street, phone pointed at the sky, as the aurora borealis pulsed above in shades of pinks and greens. 

Several nights later I was driving home from the gym when I saw a smear of light across the western sky. The C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comet was making a once-in-80,000 years pass by. “Wow,” I marveled, “Wow, wow, wow,” as I nearly swerved off the road. The next few nights I went out just after dusk to find the comet, and when I located it, I felt a thrill. A few days later, as the comet climbed in the sky and faded from view I whispered a farewell, “See you in 80,000 years.” 

What a gift these celestial phenomena are. Yes, we have the scientific explanations for these galactic happenings, but they are nothing short of miraculous. They remind me of just how small we are in the universe, but that we are here to witness something so much more beautiful and powerful than ourselves. We are shaped by the same universal forces and through our witnessing we are connected to these heavenly events and each other. 

As these delights were playing out in the heavens, on earth I like so many of you was feeling sick, angry, and heartbroken about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the daily horrors that we watch play out on social media and TV. Did you know that Israel has dropped almost 80,000 tons of explosives in Gaza over the past year? That’s about 36 kilograms of explosives in Gaza for every person who lives there. They dropped the equivalent of 2 nuclear bombs on Gaza in October 2023 alone, and now the bombing has surpassed the bombing of Hamburg, London, and Dresden combined in World War II. And the United States covers about 70% of these costs. 

And there’s the devastating destruction in Western Northern Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, and now Spain, from hurricanes and rains fueled by the warmer waters and disturbed atmosphere of fossil-fuel driven climate change. 

The universe, the galaxy, the heavens are reminding us that we are a small part of something so much larger than ourselves, but that our actions have consequences. Our lives and this planet are so special and singular. I am continuously dumbfounded that we can live on a gift of a planet like this, yet those who are hungry for power, profit, and their own short-term gain are bent on destroying it, and the precious lives of those that have deemed “other”, to serve their own short-sighted goals. 

A year ago I packed up what was left of my life in Brooklyn and moved to the desert full time. Ten days later, I drove to Las Vegas on a mission. I had a coveted slot on a tour of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly the Nevada Test Site, hosted by the Department of Energy (formerly the Atomic Energy Commission). The tour left from the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas at 8 am on a Monday morning. 

I was hoping that my visit to the test site would be a kind of reflective memorial to an era of American folly. That we would see the nuclear arms race, and destruction of the environment and human lives it created in its wake, as a short sighted moment in the past. I was hoping that the visit to the test site would cement the lesson that the road of nuclear escalation was a losing side for all involved. What I found was the opposite. We’re heading into a new era of nuclear brinkmanship, with Russia and China stepping up their weapons programs and threats, and the US overhauling and updating its nuclear arsenal. 

It feels fitting then, that “On Annihilation,” an essay I wrote reflecting on the conjunction of the sacred and sacrificial landscapes of the desert and my visit to the test site, was recently published in the visually beautiful and thoughtfully put together Kitchen Table Quarterly. It’s a reflection on our nuclear past and future, the use of the desert as a testing ground for war games and weapons, and the attitude of manifest destiny that enabled it. When I began this essay in 2022 I thought it would be a reflection on environmental destruction and a call to action against militarism and climate change. However, the events that have unfolded since then, enacted by a colonizing mindset that does not belong to the United States alone but is certainly enabled by it, have shown that as always our past is present and the landscapes we inhabit bear witness. This has been one of my favorite essays to work on and I hope that you will give it a read. 

My friend Rachel Greenley wrote on similar themes for the New England Review in her piece “In Umatilla,” reflecting on the myth of the West and the legacy of the Umatilla Chemical Depot in the northeastern Oregon desert. I remember driving by the eerie bunkers on a road trip in my early twenties and becoming curious about the history behind it. I love how these two essays speak to each other. 

I also wanted to call out another reflection on dailiness and process that harkens back to the entry I wrote about the power of swimming: Hurley Winkler’s zine 100 Swims, which is a necessary look into the power of committing to a process, however it comes. Sometimes the ocean is calm and sometimes it’s full of waves, and sometimes the writing flows easily and most times it doesn’t and you keep going. For anyone who often feels trapped by their cruel inner critic (raises hand) I highly recommend this zine to remind you you’re not alone and there’s always another approach.

Our actions, however small, add up to big impacts. That’s a reminder to vote on or before Tuesday the 5th and vote for candidates that will do less harm to our future, while continuing to imagine and work for a world that looks different. A world not bent on our own destruction, that recognizes the beauty and connections that surround us, and works to repair the harms that we have caused. 

xox,

Eleanor

Currently Reading: A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham

Greetings from early fall in the high desert! I am back home in California after six weeks of visiting my other two home places, Maine and Brooklyn, and taking an adventure farther afield to the north of Portugal. There I was lucky enough to celebrate a dear friend’s milestone birthday with a trip to the stunning Douro valley and then spend some entirely restorative and necessary alone time in the tiny village of Cristelo, right across the river Minha from Spain. 

I spent four days reading, napping, and walking through pine forests, along walled cobblestone lanes, and across windswept beaches. I sweated up hills to catch a view of the expansive Atlantic and blindly followed a Google maps route even when the road I was on turned into a dirt track through a whispering, solitary Eucalyptus wood. Despite my initial fears, the route did deposit me right at my door. I walked dozens of miles in entirely inadequate Vans low tops, some of it along the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route, passing well equipped pilgrims in trekking gear making their way to Santiago de Compostela. I dreamt in fragments of Portuguese, lulled to sleep by the stream that ran right by the window of the stone house where I was staying.

My second morning in Cristelo I woke up and had no sense of who I was. Temporarily freed from my schedule and obligations, I couldn’t grasp my job, my home, or even a strong sense of my own identity. It was exactly the place I was hoping to reach by being away, this state of disconnection a privilege and a gift, one I haven’t been able to achieve since the fire and the pandemic. 

Of course travel always makes me think about home, but the concept of home and place, how it shapes us and how it impacts our lives, has long been a focus for me. Along with intersectional feminist analysis and creative empowerment, home, place, and its impact on identity is one of the anchors of my writing. (Thank you Raechel Anne Jolie for inviting your readers to reflect on this in your piece on the Johnny Cash school of obsession, inspired by Hanif Abdurraqib.)

How fitting then that two pieces exploring these themes have recently been published. One is a short personal essay that came out yesterday in Insider! “I lost my apartment in a fire. I learned that community is what makes a home.” is a short essay about losing my home and the logistics and lessons that came along with it. It’s the first time I’ve published something so directly about losing my Brooklyn apartment. Thank you in advance for reading. (Also, it may be paywalled, unfortunately).

I originally pitched the piece as a service piece, hoping to share the lessons I learned about how to prepare for losing everything, but the editor, Conz Preti, asked if I would be interested in writing a personal essay instead. Of course I was. I really appreciate the many readers who gave me feedback on this brief piece before I sent it to Conz, especially Christen for her reading and edits sitting on my bed in our beautiful Douro Valley quinta in between celebratory activities. It was a reminder that we never write alone and where a piece starts is never where it ends up by the time it reaches its readers. 

The second essay, Inheritances has recently been published in The Upper New Review, an exciting new journal looking at our relationship to our homeplaces through a literary and environmental lens. It also examines the impact of losing my home, but from a wider, longer lens. It shares one pivotal moment with the shorter piece, but moves outward in multiple directions from there, starting with a place that defined my childhood: A small, uninsulated cabin on Arrowsic island in Maine.

I initially wrote this essay in the fall of 2020 during the first semester of my MFA program at Queens College in Briallen Hopper’s excellent Writing About Family class. Writing this piece was a turning point for me. When I entered grad school I knew I wanted to write a collection of essays about place, family, and identity, but I thought it would take a different focus and form. Instead, that fall, deep in grief from losing my Brooklyn home, in the midst of the unknown, anxious day of the early pandemic, and recently and suddenly landed in the Mojave desert, I needed to take stock of how and why I ended up where I did, and who I was in this landscape. This piece is a beginning: a grounding in my three home places, a reckoning with family, identity, history, and what we inherit. 

Inheritances as published feels like a snapshot in time of who I was as a writer four years ago. I am so grateful for my workshop mates, many of whom are still my closest readers, Briallen’s guidance, and the Upper New Review, for bringing this iteration to life. I’m also acutely aware of what’s missing, including a more nuanced representation of the relationship with my family and deeper analysis of class, race, family, and place. I’m excited for this work, and the essay collection it anchors, to continue to evolve. 

I write all this to remind you, and myself, that writing is a constant state of evolution. What we think is done is never really done. We keep learning, growing, and understanding ourselves and our relationships differently and more deeply. So many people were behind these pieces that took two very different paths to publication: One direct, one winding. When I begin to despair about my work finding its way in the world (or being made at all) I remind myself that I have to just keep going and putting time, energy, care, and attention into it, not only behind my creative practice, but the community that sustains it. 

In the midst of reflecting on community and home, it felt like absolute serendipity that Kelly McMaster’s highlighted my “leaving letters” postcard in her newsletter. I wrote this postcard nearly a year ago, on the brink of leaving Brooklyn to live in the desert full time. What a gift Kelly gave me to reflect my words about losing and gaining a home back to me when it’s in the forefront of my mind. 

Speaking of community, I wanted to shout out a really exciting upcoming workshop, an awesome literary contest, and some wonderful published work from my writing community! 

If you want to learn more about investing in community and building a sustainable, authentic strategy for building your platform as a writer or marketing your books, I hope you’ll join me for a book marketing workshop with the absolutely inspiring HerStry community. Details below: 

Join me for a book marketing workshop, October 5 & 6

Workshop: Create a Book Marketing Plan: How to Authentically Promote Your Book and Engage Your Community

When: October 5 & 6, 12 - 2 pm eastern, 11 - 1 central, 9 - 11 pacific each day

Through big and small group discussions, brainstorms, writing prompts, and real life examples, we will explore how to strengthen your community, identify your book’s audience, and create a plan to connect with your readers. We will cover strategies to communicate about your book effectively and you will leave with a marketing plan outline. You will be able to apply the work you create in this class to a book proposal, use it to promote a forthcoming book, or employ it as a tool kit to build your community and presence as a writer. Writers in all genres and phases of their careers are welcome - when it comes to marketing we all always have more to learn, especially because media, technology, and culture are always evolving, and it’s more fun to learn together!

Join the workshop

Submit to the MAYDAY magazine contests! 

Do you write nonfiction, fiction, or poetry? If so, I’d love it if you’d submit to the MAYDAY contests before the November 1 deadline. 

I’ve been volunteering for MAYDAY for just about a year, running their newsletter and social media marketing, and have shifted roles to serve as a nonfiction editor. I love the work that MAYDAY publishes. It’s both deeply literary and politically astute. The team is sincere, smart, passionate, and scrappy - exactly the kind of literary company I want to keep. 

The theme for the nonfiction contest this year is “Hope is action” and we’re looking for essays that move readers toward action, reflection, and hope without oversimplifying. Learn more details on our contest page. 

Learn more

Finally, I wanted to should out some really wonderful pieces from my writing community: 

“Curds in the Classroom” by Katie Machen about the delight of teaching kids about cheese for Culture magazine. 

“If We Had Enough Time” by Devon Fredericksen in the Sonora Review is an absolute masterclass in an essay that weaves personal narrative, vulnerability, cultural analysis, environmental writing, and different timelines. (Devon also has a great substack about pleasure and nature).

“Weak Link” by Tomra Vecere in the Fourth River is a short, intense, and vivid portrait of a young girl and a family contained in one tense moment.

The Worst Kind of Girl by Susan Rukeyser is a reflection on love, life, and queer joy in mid-life in the midst of the high desert and all the wonder and odd characters and happenings that populate it. A great addition to my desert feminist bookshelf. (Susan also has a substack reflecting on writing and desert life).

Finally, a note that the world has felt very painful this past week, month, year ... The weight of injustice and state sanctioned violence weights heavily on me as I write this update. Instead of hopelessness, I’m trying to act on my values of empathy, solidarity, and community support and local action as a way to make a small difference in the places I inhabit. It’s imperfect for sure, but important to acknowledge.

Thanks as always for reading and being in community with me. 

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald

To get some movement in during the hottest part of the summer, I’ve been swimming laps at the Yucca Valley high school pool a few mornings a week. If you know me, you know I’m not a sports guy. I practice sports inconsistently at best, shifting my interest in what I do every few years. Yoga. Dancing. Soccer. Boxing. Weight training. Hiking. Cycling. But swimming is something I come back to. 

I used to live across from the Sunset Park pool in Brooklyn and relished the early morning summer lap swimming (before a certain mayor cut the program, probably to pay for fewer lifeguards and more cops). When I was doing my first master’s at Baruch after class I would swim laps in their sports center, squeezing in after the swim team practice and my evening class, which ended at 9pm. I still remember the feeling of wet hair on the subway on a cold February night. In the summer of 2004, the last I lived in Portland, Oregon, I went to the Dishman community pool and tried not to be weird when I was swimming laps next to Janet Weiss, the drummer for Sleater-Kinney and Quasi, two of my favorite bands. I wouldn’t actively identify as a swimmer, but when I look back at my life, I have consistently sought out opportunities to swim, and remember the name of every pool I’ve swam in.

I’m not a particularly “good” swimmer. My only training was the swim lessons I took when I was around ten years old at the Greely High School pool in Cumberland, Maine. I never had taken swimming lessons before then, so I was grouped into the beginners level. I remember standing poolside, teetering and dripping, a foot taller than most of my classmates. But I know how to crawl, breaststroke, and backstroke, but cannot do a kick turn and no longer trust myself to dive. 

Lap swim in Yucca Valley is 50 minutes long and I’m usually a few minutes late. The pool is 25 meters and I try to get at least 40 laps in, with a stretch goal of exceeding 50 laps. At first I just concentrated on not losing count of my laps, but as I relaxed into swimming this summer I started to occupy my mind so I’m not just constantly looking at the clock. Sometimes I try to remember what spotty Portuguese I’ve learned on Duolingo and conjugate verbs as I crawl. Other times I reflect on whatever knotty writing problem I’ve encountered, seeing if the motion of swimming can work me through it.  

In the last few weeks during my laps I’ve been ruminating on what swimming can teach me about my writing practice. The motion of swimming is reflective and soothing in a way that makes it feel less like an act of athleticism and more like a meditation practice. The first takeaway I have is that it’s just that: A practice. Something that I do because I like to do it, because it’s good for me, and because I’ll get better at it as I continue doing it. It’s first and foremost for myself, a time to be in my head and in my body and let go of the world for a little while. This is the kind of flow state I crave when I’m writing, the giving yourself over to the process, but I find it easier to enter when I’m in actual water. It’s a reminder to practice writing whether or not there are “results” (a finished draft, an acceptance, a publication) attached to it. The act of being creative, of making, can nourish us for its own sake. 

The middle is hard. There always comes a point, usually around lap 13, where I realize I’m no longer at the beginning of my swim, but still significantly far from the end. I am warmed up, I’m kicking, my heart rate is up, but I still have many lengths to go, even to hit the lower end of my lap goal. 

What’s your lap 13 in writing? I feel like I have multiple “lap 13” moments in my writing process right now. There’s the moment when I’ve completed the first draft of an essay and gotten a round of feedback and made edits, but the piece still feels stuck. I know the ideas and concepts are solid, but the spark just hasn’t made itself apparent to me yet. I have no choice but to stick with it and keep going, to work through the hard and sometimes boring moments, to get to the polished piece. 

I’m going through another lap 13 moment with the manuscript I hope will become my next book. This collection of essays about finding a home in the desert and reckoning with the multi-faceted history and present of this pace has grown out of my MFA thesis. I’ve already been at work on some of these essays for over three years. They’ve been written, revised, workshopped, rewritten, and workshopped again, revised, and polished. They’ve been submitted and rejected, over and over again. I know there’s still more polishing that can be done. I hope, trust, and believe in my gut there’s a book in there, but I know the manuscript isn’t done, isn’t even ready to be shown to agents, as much as I want it to be. Even though somedays I just want to climb out of the metaphorical pool, the only thing I can do to be fair to myself and the work is to keep going.

People swim for all different reasons. The Yucca Valley pool is the chattiest place I’ve ever swam and I love it. I’ve made new friends and feel more connected to the community here thanks to swimming. People are there to exercise, to train, to relax, to keep up their skills, to get out and meet others. Similarly, writing serves multiple and different purposes for all of us who pursue it. In doing something that I have no goals around, other than just to do it, I’m hoping I can back off the goal-oriented attitude I’ve been bringing to my writing lately. 

Do I want to finish polishing this manuscript and write a sizzling book proposal and head turning query letter? Yes, I do. Do I want to find the right agent and publisher to help me bring this next book into the world? Yes, I do. But I also know that if I focus on these goals alone I’ll feel miserable and disconnected from the work itself. So I know the only way to get to my goal, whether it's 50+ laps or publishing the next book, is to keep going and to keep myself moving, even if sometimes that looks like just doing laps back and forth at the local pool.

Even though there’s still plenty of summer (and time for swimming) left, if you happen to be planning ahead for the fall, I wanted to share that I’ll be teaching a weekend workshop on zoom, Creating a Book Marketing Plan, with HerStry and I’m so excited. I love the supportive community and valuable workshops that HerStory hosts and I’m very proud to be a part of it. 

Here’s the details: 

• What: Create a Book Marketing Plan: How to Authentically Promote Your Book and Engage Your Community

• When: Saturday, October 5 and Sunday, October 6, 12 pm - 2pm eastern (11 am central, 9 am pacific), both days.

• Where: A zoom room near you! 

This workshop is for writers in all genres, at all stages of their publication journey and is designed to help you define the audience for your book (or writing in general if you don’t have a book yet) and put together a plan that feels authentic to you and fits within your life. If you missed my workshops on this last year, this is a great time opportunity to sign up and learn with others in a supportive community! 

If you want to work through creating a book marketing plan at your own pace, I wanted to remind you that Promote Your Book’s little sister, the Promote Your Book workbook, is now available! Interactive exercises, prompts, and space to write that will help you put together your full book marketing plan.

And for the rock’n’rollers in the audience, another reminder that my post-punk band Skirting has released our first EP “What You’ve Been Told.” I couldn’t be more proud of these songs and being in this band. As a solitary writer and desert rat, the opportunity to create and perform in community is really special. 

If you’re in the New York area and would like to see Skirting live, you have two opportunities to do so:

Tuesday, August 27 at Hart Bar with Argument and a fun, outdoor afternoon show on Sunday, September 15 in Sunset Park at 4pm at Mama Tried with The Lookout Honeys and Bikini Car Wash! 

Hope you’ve found an activity to keep you cool and creative this summer. Keep swimming! 

xox,

Eleanor

Currently reading: The Last Fire Season by Manjula Martin

I feel most like myself and inside my personal power in Gemini season, which just closed out right before the summer solstice. It contains my birthday and the birthdays of many of my closest and most admired friends. It’s always the time of year when I start to feel that I can have agency in my life, that I am capable of manifesting my dreams and bringing them to life, when connections flow and sparks fly.

Also, at first my computer autocorrected “Gemini season” to “Feminist season,” which also works. 

I’m back in the desert now and the weeds and wildflowers of spring have turned a crispy tan. I’ve filled up my galvanized stock tank “pool” to take the edge off the afternoon heat. It’s hard to believe that just over a week ago I was in the lush Northeast where I had the luck to spend Gemini season. At this time of year there the days stretch long and the light lingers well after 9pm. It’s a season where I finally have energy again, where I feel myself bursting with enthusiasm like the lilacs, roses, and peonies I all associate with this time of year (in the Northeast, anyway). 

What struck me most about being back East was the green. In early spring and summer the leaves are new, shining, deeply vibrant. Looking at a forested hill felt hallucinogenic. Whether it was the trees in Prospect Park, in the woods behind my parents’ house, or in the rolling Green Mountains of Vermont, I spent my six weeks on the East coast marveling at the lushness of the landscape I formerly took for granted.  

My trip combined a visit home to Maine, several weeks in Brooklyn, and a week in Vermont to take part in the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference. I meant to write this newsletter weeks ago, but New York’s energy pulled me in and I reveled in it. I like the push-pull of my East Coast/West Coast life and being able to dive back into New York headfirst when I’m there. It was a blur of weeks of friends and readings and parties and band practice and a show and changing plans at the last moment and it all still feeling like it worked out magically (if breathlessly). I also am still processing my intense and transformative six days at the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, so perhaps that will be a letter for another time. 

A big high of the visit was the release of my band Skirting’s first EP “What You’ve Been Told,” which you can listen to and download on Bandcamp! All of the members of Skirting are in our 40s and have full lives (in addition to now being split being two coasts) and to be able to make and release music together is such a gift. We recorded all of the instruments live back in November, right before I moved West, and then collaborated on the vocals across coasts. We were able to realize this vision with the recording and mastering help of our friends John Gergely, Jared Jerome, and Peter Kerlin, which reminded me that one of my favorite parts of playing in a band is the community aspect of it. I’m amazed that I’ve been playing in bands for over 25 years and it still feels like alchemy to bring songs to life. And the cherry on top of our release was that Paul Bruno played our track “Stranger” on his show on WFMU, my favorite radio station in the world. Was I chill about it? No, decidedly not.

In the spirit of being a “lifer” in music and creativity, I was very interested to read Kathleen Hanna’s new memoir Rebel Girl and got to review it for The Midst, a great new digital publication for women finding power and purpose in the middle of their lives. The Midst was founded by Amy Schroeder, who also founded Venus Zine, the place I got my start reviewing bands over 15 years ago and whose energy, creativity, and drive I have admired for years. 

I learned so much about building a DIY life and creative project from Amy and many of those lessons made it into my first book, Quit Your Day Job, and then into Promote Your Book. There was a recent article in the Guardian on the rise of author’s taking on the promotion of their books and how this corresponds to a crowded literary market and staff cuts at big publishers. Of course, indie publishers have always had a shoestring or non-existent publicity budget, so much of this is not news. With so much on the author and so much pressure to break into a difficult market, I completely understand why authors are turning to outside marketing consultants. But I also feel that promoting your book, planning your events, and spreading the world is a way to connect with your community, readers, and bring the book to life in an exciting way that makes you feel more connected to it once it leaves your hands. 

So, instead of paying $100 an hour for marketing help (which is a fair rate for a professional btw! And I am available for freelance work for the right project!) I’m excited that Promote Your Book now has a little sister: The Promote Your Book Workbook!

This workbook expands on the ideas and exercises in Promote Your Book and gives you a chance to research and build your marketing plan all in one place. Get it as a complement to Promote Your Book or as a standalone - it also makes a great gift for your writer friends, no matter where they are in the publishing process! 

After my crammed full eastern weeks, I’m stretching out into these hot desert days. In New York I do and act and in the desert I think and digest. I crave the social engagement, diversity, and energy of New York, and the solitude and slowed down pace of the desert. A true Gemini, wanting and believing I can have both, and all, and everything in between. But maybe not all at once. Overall, I’m still figuring out the rhythm of this mostly West Coast-based life when so many people I love are 3,000 miles away and how to keep my energy, projects, and relationships sustainable. I’m feeling my way into it, a little at a time. 

How are you leaning into this summer? 

xox,

Eleanor

Currently Reading: I am anxiously awaiting my copy of Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time and when that arrives whatever I am reading will take a backseat.

The coverage has made me think back to the organizing I took part in as an undergraduate student in the early 2000s against the Iraq war. I was at Eugene Lang, which is part of the New School, which has a long history of political dissent. When I began at the university they had just hired Bob Kerrey as the New School's president. A hawkish politician from the midwest, he seemed like an odd choice for the famously rebellious school, but it was the time when universities were starting to look more towards profits and real estate acquisition, and viewed students as “customers” and Bob Kerrey was seen as the leader to usher the unruly and disjointed New School into this new age. 

This “students as customers” was always bullshit, but the model seems to have gone by the wayside, because who uses rubber bullets, tear gas, and calls in the riot police, against their “customers”? This has also made clear that the real goals of so many university administrations (not necessarily the faculty or the students) is really about creating docile capitalist subjects and not actually teaching critical thinking or life skills, which is not a surprise. Because what I see the students doing is applying what they are learning in the classroom and taking the critical texts they are reading to heart and daring to challenge power. They are pursuing, in the words of Paolo Freire who I first read at the New School, praxis. 

In the early 2000s I was inspired by my friends and fellow Lang students who were in Jews Against the Occupation and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice As we joined the national protests against the war, we also looked closer to home at our college. We found that, similar to what the students are finding now, that even our famously progressive university, which was once known as the “University in Exile” as it hosted Jewish intellectuals escaping World War II, was deeply tied, through investments and board members to the defense industry, which was profiting off the Iraq war. In one case, courting war mongering profiteers had the audacity to meet in the “Orozco Room,” which features murals by Mexican artist José Clemente Orozco. The pieces famously feature paints including Call to Revolution and Table of Universal Brotherhood. Yes, the irony here is palpable. So we organized. We created petitions and counter proposals and statements of dissent. We occupied the president's office to deliver our statement.  

Bob Kerrey eventually left the New School and I always thought he left an embarrassing footnote to the school’s history. However, last week I found out that the New School had the audacity to name a new hall after him. A new hall that students occupied last week, demanding divestment from Israel and justice for Palestine, renaming it “Bisan Hall” after Bisan Owda, the Palestinian filmmaker and journalist who has been a valiant source of information and commentary during the ongoing siege on Gaza. “Fixed it,” I thought as I watched the videos of the students. These students were later arrested as they were sleeping, despite the university administration promising they would do no such thing. Shame on the New School. Shame on all the institutions resting on the laurels of their past history and not listening to students demands now.

Thinking back to my time as a student activist, what I remember of our organizing, beyond the thrill of putting our theory into practice, is what came after and what trickled down from it. Obviously, the New School did not divest from “the war machine,” but maybe this generation of students have more widespread support and momentum to make that happen. But we did keep organizing. A group of us started a student-run newspaper, a much more mature version which still runs today as the New School Free Press and has been reporting on the evolving situation there. Other students organized to support the faculty forming a union, a union which I was proud to join when I returned a decade after I graduated to adjunct at the New School. I’m hoping, watching this current generation of students, that not only do they have the strength in numbers and the sophistication of tactics to force real change, but will keep organizing and keep growing and keep applying the lessons they are learning in an ever moving, expanding, uncertain future. 

“Hope is action,” a quote from Rebecca Solnit is painted on the back of my denim jacket and through their action, these students are giving me hope. The biggest lesson I took from reading Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which was first published during the darkness of the Bush years, beyond her thesis that that hope is not a luxury, despair is, is that the actions of activists have reverberations for years to come and compounding impacts we cannot predict and that is part of the beauty, and audacity, of protest. Of course, bombs are falling and people are dying and there are no universities or hospitals left in Gaza. This current atrocity must stop.

In thinking back to those heady times in my early-and-mid twenties, I wanted to let you know I have a brand new essay called “Bliss Street” in the brand new Queens Review. This is a quieter, highly personal piece, but I think that it captures the political and creative hopes I had at that time in my life and how I was pushing so hard for them, even if I didn’t realize there wasn’t a straight line for what I wanted. It’s also a love letter to the “world’s borough” and I wrote an early draft of it exclusively on the subway going to and from my MFA classes at Queens College.

I’ll be back in New York to celebrate the release of the Queens Review and reading from this piece on Saturday, May 18 for a reading and launch party at Kew and Willow Books at 7pm. I hope that you can join us! 

I will also be celebrating the release of my band Skirting’s EP “What You’ve Been Told” and my birthday on Thursday, May 23 with a show at the Footlight Underground at the Windjammer at 552 Grandview Ave in Ridgewood (the theme of this NYC trip is Queens, baby!). Skirting will be joined by feminist alt rockers Lollirot and feminist skate punks Witch Slap. I cannot freakin’ wait. Doors are at 8:30, $12 to $15 and no one turned away for lack of funds, but the show is 21+. You can grab a ticket early if you’d like to support! 

Life this spring is a contradiction: Beautiful walks through the desert looking at color-saturated wild flowers, the excitement and life-sustaining work of making and sharing art with friends, the energy of building resistance with the reality of ongoing and escalating repression and violence, both here in the US and abroad. Life holding these contradictions as true, always. 

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading:Log Off by Kristen Felicetti

For all of you viewing, or hoping to view, the full or partial eclipse today, may it be a day of revelation, clarity, and an invitation to embrace what’s ahead. Here in Southern California, I'll be looking at the shadows cast by the partial eclipse through the holes of my colander.  

Eclipses can reveal what’s hidden or what we’ve been hiding from ourselves. They can also usher us into a collective sense of awe, which I think we all need a little more of right now. 

In the spirit of eclipse season, I wanted to quickly remind you that tomorrow, April 9, I’ll be hosting a workshop that will be facilitated by my friend Tracy focusing entitled “Reflect, Reframe, Refocus.” It will use this “three R” technique to help you holistically identify and align with your goals and take action. If eclipse season has opened something new for you, this is a great way to follow up! 

Learn more and sign up and don’t worry, if you can’t make it live, you will get access to the recording! 

To hear more about what this workshop covers and what to expect, Tracy and I made a little video to explain. Check it out! 

In addition to eclipses, as spring settles into the desert I’ve been thinking a lot about gardening and tending plants as metaphors for writing and cultivating our creative projects and lives. Of course, gardens are convenient metaphors and there’s a whole sub-genre of “garden memoir” that extrapolates on this further (and gets into, shall we say, the weeds of planning, planting, and tending a garden). Two versions of this kind of writing, which I also think subvert the “traditional” garden memoir, are Camille Dungy’s Soil and Eula Biss’ Having and Being Had. Each is also a reflection on the larger forces that shape our society, class, race, and gender among them. I’m also very much looking forward to Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time, “An exploration of paradise and its limits” so much so I’m thinking of ordering the UK edition to get it earlier. 

But anyone who has talked to me or texted me lately has heard less about gardens and more about weeds. After two rainy winters in the desert they are everywhere. While I got a handle on the invasive mustard in my yard, the redstem stork's bill (also invasive) has absolutely taken over growing lusher, larger, and taller than I have ever seen it before. They grew so tall they blocked my view of some of the cactus and yuccas I planted. These plants send out deep tap roots, so the only way to deal with it is to hook it with a “hula hoe” (a desert yard essential I learned soon after moving herein 2020) or pry it out with a weeder. I have been spending hours a day yanking these things and my yard is still covered. 

I have stress dreams about weeds. In my dreams I find new, innovative ways to rip them out or am simply overwhelmed by the tasks (dreams imitating real life here). 

Every time the wind blows I see the purple flowers of the stork’s bill waving, mocking me, threatening to make more seeds if I don’t pull them out in time. Even worse, the plant’s mechanism for scattering its seeds is to “spring load” them to scatter them more effectively. The seeds are spiral shaped, enabling them to work their way deeper into the soil, where they can remain dormant for years. If I wasn’t so angry at them, I would admire their resiliency and adaptation. Just writing about these plants gives me anxiety.

The abundance of stork’s bill has even united me with my usual fuzzy garden menaces (who of course I always delight in seeing anyway): The cottontail rabbits and the squirrels. I have seen them gleefully snacking on stork’s bill (instead of my tender new garden plants) and I rejoice. “Enjoy!” I cry, “Come back for more!” 

My weed-choked yard is forcing me to reconcile with my deep seated perfectionism. Even with my hours of weeding, my yard still looks patchy. The weeds poke up through my gravel patio that I just weeded, weeks ago. I need to let go of an idea of a perfectly realized desert yard, full of blooming native plants, and free of invasive pests. I need to embrace that a yard is an ever-changing environment and work in progress. I realize that I attach a lot of value judgment to the outward appearance of my yard and it’s making me think deeply about how certain types of “proper” home keeping relate to the gender and class roles I’ve been socialized with. It also makes me think about how I want to spend my time: Do I want to do a larger, imperfect sweep or obsess over removing every weed from a smaller area? What will serve me better in the future and prevent the spread of weeds? What’s the best use of my limited time and energy? 

I’ve also been thinking about this in relation to the new native plants I’ve welcomed into my yard. I swore that I wouldn’t buy more plants this season, but then the Joshua Tree Water District announced a native plant sale, with plants from the nursery in the national park, and well, I just went to look. And came home with 14 plants. Even with precise, careful tending and a watering schedule to help these newcomers put down roots and acclimate, it’s still a tossup on how many of these plants will survive. 

There are so many factors I can’t control: Weather, the chemistry of the soil, insects or fungus, being eaten by rabbits despite my efforts, but I can give the plants my best attention and let time do the rest.

The metaphors here to writing and creative practice are fairly obvious, so forgive me for being cliche, but as I’ve been spending obsessive hours in my yard, here’s what I’ve been meditating on: 

A beautiful garden of well-adapted, fully established plants looks natural, but it’s the product of countless hours of care and a little bit of luck, just like a finished work seems effortless, but is the product of infinite hours of work, editing, luck, and life experience. 

What you weed out is just as important as what you put in. I need to clear the weeds away from my plants so they can shine and get the sun and water they need to grow. Good editing and making clear choices makes good writing. 

What’s below the soil is just as important (if not more so) than what’s above. Desert plants generally put energy into their roots first, establishing a solid foundation and access to the water and nutrients they need to grow. Putting in the effort to cultivate your craft and make your work before pushing yourself out into the world can mean that you have a strong foundation to weather whatever happens when your work is out in the sunlight. 

What is considered a “weed” is often in the eye of the beholder. A weed in one context can be a welcome plant in another. Not all of your ideas are going to fit everywhere, but with writing and creative work, it’s often about finding the fit between the idea, your motivation to bring it to life, and the audience for that work. A tricky balance indeed and one we spend our lifetimes attempting to discover, only to have it shift.

I know that for my plants, just like for my writing, the future is uncertain and nothing is a given (especially in a desert where it snowed one day and is going to be 80 degrees the next). The best I can give is hope, care, attention, and energy to provide the best future possible within my control and let go of what is not.

What are you growing (or weeding out) this spring? 

xox,

eleanor

Currently reading: Path of Totality: Poems by Niina Pollari