Susan Henderson

MacDowell Is Glorious

Susan Henderson — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 18:55:38 +0000

Tell me about a life-changing community or experience for you.

I just returned from a glorious five weeks at MacDowell. And I want to share a little of the magic without spoiling the surprises and traditions in store for you.

MacDowell is sleepaway camp with particularly brilliant fellow campers. My group was composed of architects, painters, sculptors, poets, science writers, fiction and non-fiction writers, a graphic memoirist, translators, filmmakers, composers, musicians, choreographers, and a linguist. They came from Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Kazakhstan, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Japan. Of the U.S. residents, there was a heavy representation from Brooklyn and L.A. They were humble despite Pulitzers, Guggenheims, National Book Awards, NAACP Image Awards, gallery showings, Netflix shows, and a MacArthur. Each of us felt lucky to be there.

My days went like this. Each morning, I walked to the Main Hall for breakfast, often past turkeys, deer, always the pen of chickens who I called my pretty girls. I never saw the bears, bobcats, snakes, and porcupines others encountered, but I loved knowing they were out there, watching us.

Our breakfasts were raucous, unhurried and almost always outside. Popovers, pancakes, omelets, bacon, fresh fruit. The chef created alternatives for everyone’s allergies and food quirks.

Wherever I went, people waved to me and knew my name–gardeners, maintenance workers, administration, librarians. Honestly, sometimes it was so friendly and unreal, it seemed like the opening to a horror movie.

At some point we all went off to work. I headed straight to the James Baldwin Library, where many of us had favorite chairs and nooks. Justin in the orange scoop chair by the window, Mahdi at the first table by the architecture books, LOUR, Corey, and Xiao took turns in the mini theater. I liked the green wrap-around couch.

Around noon, I’d leave all my stuff in the library and return to my studio, where I’d find a painted picnic basket filled with lunch. Every meal at MacDowell felt like a gift to unwrap. Lunch was never the same. Goulash, shrimp curry over rice, a peanut butter sandwich. You never knew what you’d find but it was just right and came with a thermos of soup, a piece of fruit, and a dessert.

Not once did I have a meal without thinking of the hands that made it, that cleaned the dish I was using, and that freed up my time and headspace to write.

After lunch, I’d head back to the library, where I worked another five hours or so. I’d smile at other Fellows who crossed my path and then we both got back to creating.

Time is different at MacDowell. Somehow there are more hours in the day. Without all the usual daily worries, you get to find out what moves into that space in your head that’s normally occupied by emails, appointments, and grocery lists.

Dinners were extraordinary and family-style. Often, the chef would talk about why they chose to create a particular meal. Sometimes their decision was based on what grew in the garden that day or what had become overly ripe. Sometimes they wanted to recreate a memory of something they enjoyed at summer camp as a child. Dinner was its own art form and we felt we were gulping down love and story and experience.

After, there were often presentations by other Fellows, who showed their work-in-progress–risky, groundbreaking work–and they were often unsure if they could pull it off. We sat there in awe and exploded into applause.

But, always, presentations or not, there was play in the evenings. And we played hard. 9-ball, Mafia, karaoke, dancing. My deep love was ping-pong.

Some of us raced to the ping-pong table after dessert. We couldn’t start soon enough, and the first ones there got the coveted green paddles. We played singles, doubles, and round-robin, where a dozen of us played all at once. There were never enough paddles so last ones in had to use frying pans, spatulas, or the tin lid from an UNO box. We sweat so much, we had to strip off layers.

The game was so good for my brain and my writing. You can’t overthink. You can’t just play one way because you’ll have a partner or an opponent who forces you to try something new. And you fail so often and so spectacularly that all you can do is laugh. Failure becomes a big so-what because it’s time to hit the ball again. My writing was better, clearer, more spirited after ping-pong.

One night we went into town for some contra-dancing. (I’m in all black and borrowing Anna’s scrunchie.) Again, everything about this time was about expanding my comfort zone—finding new ways to move, finding new partners, getting comfortable with someone and then changing again. We all walked home together in a downpour, and for the rest of our time there, we do-si-doed whenever we needed good luck.

My day always ended with a solitary walk back to my bed in the pitch black. I loved that walk and the shot of fear and awe it gave me. I bought some cheap string lights so I could find my place better in the dark… and to feel welcomed home.

What about the work we went there to produce?

When I say time is different at MacDowell, I mean you can pack three years of work into a few weeks. I don’t know how it happens exactly, but I finished what I’d gone there to work on. And we all celebrated with a group-dance to Marvin Gaye and The Weather Girls.

I spent the rest of my time there on something brand new. I started by building a wall of questions and obsessions that I suspected would be the engine of the story I wanted to discover. And this is how far I got mapping out the new book and writing some key scenes.

I pinned drafts to the door and to the walls of my studio. I made bad doodles of scenes that did not yet have words. I talked ideas into my voice memo app. I covered the couch in the library with my scribbled papers.

Once, when the library was empty, I cranked up my playlist and took a dance break. I danced through all the rooms and nooks for over an hour. Tupac, Joe Arroyo, A Tribe Called Quest, BTS, The Jam. I can’t recommend this enough. And lying on your back on the picnic table to look at the stars. Work and play.

All the while, new Fellows came and beloved Fellows left us. We hated the leaving.

We said goodbyes in different ways. We hugged, we whispered connections we had, we danced, we lay on our backs on the floor and read a private note together in different languages. Some wrote songs. Some disappeared without a goodbye.

I think the ebb and flow, much as it disrupts, may be part of the magic at MacDowell. It reminded us: Don’t waste your time, don’t put things off, don’t get caught up in shyness. It made connections more potent.

Each time someone left, the group was changed, sometimes in big ways, sometimes small. And we had to find new ways to be together. Because you couldn’t rely too much on one version of yourself—some comfortable spot you inhabited, routines with friends that had become familiar. You had to keep learning new ways of being. And we took these lessons to our art.

My last weekend at MacDowell, Xiao gave me a pretty red leaf that I kept near my favorite corner of the library. Each day I watched that leaf slowly dry and curl and fade. It became my countdown clock, a reminder that my time was coming.

Here’s what I carried home with me: Make time to be outside in different weather. Find whatever nature you have nearby and take it in with all your senses. Get to know the cooks, dishwashers, gardeners, and other people who populate your world. Go to the library regularly. Play more. Sweat more. Laugh more. Go to readings and galleries. Watch movies with friends. Sing and dance whether or not you have any talent. Say yes to things when your auto-response is to say no. And believe that you are worthy to apply.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Hanif Abdurraqib, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much

Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman

R. F. Kuang, Yellowface

Michael Benedikt, For an Architect of Reality

Porochista Khakpour, Tehrangeles

George Orwell, Rebelión en la Granja

Natalie Goldberg, Old Friend from Far Away: How to Write Memoir

Marlon James, The Disappearers

Kevin Young, Book of Hours

Jill Bialosky, Mock Heart

Emma Cline, Switzy

Sarah Lewis (editor), If Emmett Till Lived

Jane Alison, Meander, Spiral, Explode

Emily St. John Mandel, Exit Party

Ada Limon (editor), You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

And a couple of re-reads:

Justin Torres, We the Animals

Justin Torres, Blackouts

Okay, now YOU. Tell me somewhere you went or something you did or a community you’re a part of that changed or awakened you in some way. xx

Something Old, Something New

Susan Henderson — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 20:43:39 +0000

What’s something new you’re starting or trying? A new workout, a new habit, a new club, a new relationship? Tell me about it in the comments.

A new novel has been calling me—a sequel to Up from the Blue. I’d been toying with the idea for a few years because the characters aren’t done with me. But a few weeks ago, I was taking a walk, and an idea I’ve been obsessed with all my life collided with something current I’ve been struggling with. And I realized the story is made for Tillie.

Once I let myself imagine it, scenes rushed in, as did old characters… and new ones.

I’m excited to see where it all takes me. I’m learning to love this process again—no time table, no idea why an image or a setting or phrase won’t let me go. I’ve learned to follow seeming tangents, not sure if or how they’re related. I just keep chasing the energy of a setting or an event, and I go on a long ride with it.

I’m starting to pack for my residency at MacDowell. It’s thrilling and daunting to set off for a space that was once occupied by James Baldwin, Audre Lord, Leonard Bernstein, Oliver Sacks, Alice Walker, and Thornton Wilder.

My writer tools: thumbtacks, paper clips, colored note cards, colored pens, frog tape, playlists, hiking boots.

I’ll be off-the-grid for a month, and I’ll tell you all about it (maybe via a video) when I’m back. Given all the chaotic talk about AI these days, it feels refreshing to be deep in the woods with papers and doodles pinned to a wall, and shut out all the noise of the world for a while.

Some pics from what I’ve been up to… and what I’ll be leaving behind while I’m at MacDowell. (You can click on these pictures to make them bigger.)

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Dylan Landis, List of All Possible Desires

Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness

Radha Lin Chaddah, And the Ancestors Sing

m. mick powell, Dead Girl Cameo

Maggie Smith, A Suit or a Suitcase

Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth

Mira Jacob, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing

Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Christina Baker Kline, The Foursome

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Eagle Valiant Brosi, Black Cohosh

Jessica Keener, Evening Begins the Day

Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls

Tayari Jones, Kin

Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

Virginia Evans, The Correspondent

Barry Hines, The Kestrel for the Knaves

Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt

Ann Patchett, Whistler

Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems

Gail Honeyman, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine

Kim de l’Horizon (translated by Jamie Lee Searle), Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues

Rachel Cusk, A Life’s Work

Helen Phillips, The Need

Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch

Kelly Mustian, The Girls in the Stilt House

Stefan Merrill Block, Homeschooled

Emma Donoghue, Room

Jim Daniels, Late Invocation for Magic

And some re-reads:

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Tell me what you’re up to, especially if it’s something new! Xx

The Finish Line

Susan Henderson — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 15:51:01 +0000

Tell me about something you recently finished. It can be a race, a book, a project, a course, a sleeve of Oreos, anything at all.

This is a picture of the finished book. Working title: Shearwater.

I spent years inside this abandoned hospital, both literally and figuratively. Spent hours talking with former nurses, doctors, ward attendants, patients, foster parents, a locksmith, a night watchman, a maintenance worker, urban explorers, and the folks who shared original records and keys with me.

The result landed somewhere I didn’t expect: a story about motherhood and chosen family.

Six years of research and writing. That may sound long to you, but I’m always struck by the near impossibility of going from that first kernel of an idea to a blank page. Working and working at something that feels intangible, over your head, and never sure if you’ll pull it off.

There are all kinds of next steps after you finish a book. For now, I just want to sit with this: I did it.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song

Louise Meriwether, Daddy Was a Number Runner

Eudora Welty, The Optimist’s Daughter

Katy Butler, The Art of Dying Well

Andrea Bartz, The Herd

Kelly Link, Book of Love

Rebecca Solnit, Field Guide to Getting Lost

Amity Gaige, Sea Wife

Dan Chaon, One of Us

Mary Louise Kelly, It. Goes. So. Fast.

Edward P. Jones, The Known World

Gary Shteyngart, Vera, or Faith

Liv Mammone, Fire in the Waiting Room

Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Carol Shields, Unless

Lisa Cron, Story Genius

Kim Chinquee, Contact with the Wild

Tiphanie Yanique, Land of Love and Drowning

Evanthia Bromiley, Crown

Sameer Pandya, Our Beautiful Boys

Kathryn Davis, Hell

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber

China Mieville, The City & the City

Amy Tan, The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Ramona Ausubel, A Guide to Being Born

Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World

Denne Michele Norris, When the Harvest Comes

Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading the Waves

Lydia Millet, A Children’s Bible

Lucy Lane Clifford, “The New Mother”

Shirley Jackson, Dark Tales

Michele Filgate (editor), What My Father and I Don’t Talk About

Ocean Vuong, The Emperor of Gladness

Mark Z. Danielewski, The Whalestoe Letters

Fredrik Backman, My Friends

Catherynne M. Valente, Palimpsest

Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

Jessica Anya Blau, Shopgirls

Jill Bialosky, The End is the Beginning

Sarah Bird, The Flamenco Academy

Julie McFadden, Nothing to Fear

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dream Count

Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus

Laila Lalami, The Dream Hotel

Thomas DeBaggio, Losing my Mind

Jim Daniels, An Ignorance of Trees

Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows

Dan Chaon, One of Us

David Morrell, Creepers

Claire Messud, The Burning Girl

Lev Grossman, The Magicians

Louis Bayard, The Wildes

Paula McLain, The Paris Wife

Re-reads:

Elizabeth Strout, My Name is Lucy Barton

James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

James Baldwin, “This Morning, This Evening, So Soon”

Kelly Link, “Stone Animals”

J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

Comments are open, and I’d love to hear a story about something you finished, big or small.

One Wild and Precious Life

Susan Henderson — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 14:47:36 +0000

Are you making good use of your time?

It’s been a while since I posted. (Hi!) On the eve of my birthday it seemed like a good time to take stock.

My thought for this birthday: Live like you don’t have infinite time—because none of us do.

I’m trying to be more mindful about making choices that reflect my priorities and principles, instead of falling into habit, or saying yes just to be polite or out of guilt. I’ve been prioritizing in-person visits, old-fashioned letters that travel through the mail, soccer matches, and my book.

I’ve stepped up my work with my local NAACP chapter. I’m spending more time at my two favorite libraries. I helped judge the John Leonard Prize for the NBCC (the winner: Tessa Hull’s graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts), and I volunteered at the award ceremony in Manhattan earlier this week. Some of the cool people there: Edwidge Danticat, Hisham Matar, Alexei Navalny’s editor at Knopf, Percival Everett, Teju Cole, Maxine Hong Kingston. It feels especially important to support writers, readers, and book critics right now. I know the world feels crazy, but I refuse to give in to despair. There’s too much work to do.

I was thrilled to attend Bridgett Davis’s book launch. Here’s the only picture I have of the night—it’s with her husband, Rob Fields, my friend since we were teenagers. Shout out to Troy Lambert, another old friend I was so glad to see there.

Bridgett’s book, Love, Rita, is a compassionate story of sisterhood. And a powerful reminder of weathering—the harm racism inflicts on the body.

On Monday, Mr. H and I head to Spain (entirely on frequent flyer miles). We’re staying with my high school friend and his husband and their three dogs. We’ll visit Granada, Córdoba, Seville, Tarifa, and catch a soccer game in Málaga. Then the four of us will spend a few days in Morocco. In high school, we carpooled every day to crew practice, singing to Culture Club and Rick James. And I’m hoping we have some old-time silly on this trip.

Talk to me in the comments. Tell me, as the poet Mary Oliver would say, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
Lisa See, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women
Percival Everett, James
Caroline Leavitt, Days of Wonder
R.O. Kwon, Exhibit
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Karen Russell, Orange World and Other Stories
Amy Ferris, Mighty Gorgeous
Barbara Kingsolver, Demon Copperhead
Bryan Washington, The Family Meal
Carmen Maria Machado, In the Dream House: A Memoir
Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog
Ellen Meister, Divorce Towers
James Patterson, Along Came a Spider
Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Man of Two Faces
Oyinkan Braithwaite, My Sister, the Serial Killer
Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow
Kathryn Davis, The Thin Place
Michel Faber, Under the Skin
Francine Prose, 1974
Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch
Denise Riley, Say Something Back
Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow
Karin Tidbeck, The Memory Theater
Italo Calvino, The Complete Cosmicomics
Catherine Newman, Sandwich
John Updike, Rabbit, Run
Meg Wolitzer, The Wife
Rachel Kushner, The Flame Throwers
Helen Garner, This House of Grief
Gia L. James, A Place Called There
Susanna Clarke, Piranesi
Elisabeth Thomas, Catherine House
Ann Hood, The Stolen Child
Neil Gaiman, The Sleeper and the Spindle
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message
Josh Malerman, Unbury Carol
Jane Yolen, Briar Rose
Toni Morrison, “Recitatif”
Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Kathryn Davis, Duplex
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These
Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Lisa Gornick, Ana Turns
Maria Adelmann, How to Be Eaten
Louise Penny, Still Life
Chris Whitaker, We Begin at the End
Kirsten Bakis, Lives of the Monster Dogs
Samantha Harvey, Orbital
Louise Penny, A Fatal Grace
Garth Greenwell, Small Rain
Melissa Pritchard, Flight of the Wild Swan
Miranda July, All Fours
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Kelly Barnhill, The Ogress and the Orphans
Carol Weston, Speed of Life
Erik Larson, The Demon of Unrest
Lindsey Fitzharris, The Butchering Art
Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland
Jonathan Evison, The Heart of Winter
Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments
Michele Filgate (editor), What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence
Leslie Jamison, Splinters
Tessa Hulls, Feeding Ghosts
Rebecca Nagle, By the Fire We Carry
Vinson Cunningham, Great Expectations
John Ganz, When the Clock Broke
Cindy Juyoung OK, Ward Toward
Carrie Courogen, Miss May Does Not Exist
Alison Espach, The Wedding People
Michael Amherst, The Boyhood of Cain
Bridgett M. Davis, Love, Rita

And a few re-reads (usually this means I’m studying something—POV, pace, transitions, fever dreams):
Kenneth Grahame, Wind in the Willows (just Chapter 7, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn”)
Claudia Rankine, Just Us
Joyce Carol Oates, “Heat”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Virgil (translation: Robert Fagles), The Aeneid

Oh, totally forgot to mention: My last novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams, was listed here as one of the Top 100 books of the 21st Century. Big smile.

Stepping Out of the Writer’s Cave

Susan Henderson — Sat, 23 Mar 2024 22:12:06 +0000

Are you someone who tends to disappear when you’re deep into a writing project?

I definitely hole up in what’s known as my writer’s cave. And, for what feels like an eternity, that’s where I’ve been, immersed in the world of my latest novel.

It’s taken longer than I thought to wrangle this new book into shape. (Progress update coming soon!) But now I’m stepping out of my cave on wobbly legs, blinking against the bright daylight.

First stop: Vietnam. Mr. H and I took both kids and their partners to visit family there.

I felt slapped awake by the change in weather. And the wild art of safely crossing the street forced me out of my head and into my body.

I’ve pasted some photos here of Sa Pa (slippery rice terraces, a water buffalo, a woman with blue hands who braided stalks of hemp as she walked, and occasionally stopped to pull me from the mud), …

Ha Noi (Hang Bac Street and squid on a stick), …

and Ho Chi Minh City (post office, jeans factory, my favorite lamppost at the Buu Long Pagoda, and the much-visited noodle cart outside my brother-in-law’s apartment).

Back in New York, it’s soccer season. We hit every NYCFC home game. I love Los Templados, with their constant drumming and singing. It’s so different from the cave’s quiet, where victories and defeats happen alone. At the stadium, we’re in it together—crying out in suspense, frustration, and ecstasy.

Today’s cold and rainy, but I’m seeing purple crocuses all over the place and birds gathering at the feeder. My dogs are going wild with the smell of spring, and I’m glad to be out of the cave!

Before I go, I want to invite you to my reading on Tuesday, March 26, 7pm at Joe’s Pub in NYC. It’s been a long while since I’ve read my work in public, and I’m excited to be a part of Generation Women’s upcoming show! The theme: “It’s a Living: Stories about Work.” I’m a little nervous about standing before an audience again. But this is why we write, isn’t it? Not to be alone with our stories in a cave, but to use them to connect, to be part of something bigger.

UPDATE: It was a sold out show, and I’m allowed to post only my reading. But I encourage you to find the link to the whole show over at the Generation Women website and hear the incredible range of stories!

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Ed Yong, An Immense World
Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time
Roxana Robinson, Leaving
Claudia Rankine, Plot
Ben Okri, Astonishing the Gods
A.K. Small, If I Promise You Wings
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You?
Pedro Lemebel (translated by Katherine Silver), My Tender Matador
Jim Daniels, Comment Card
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Tracy K. Smith, To Free the Captives
Kwame Alexander, This is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets
Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck
Anna Quindlen, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake
Trevor Noah, Born a Crime
Neil Gaiman, Stardust
Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Claudia Rankine, The End of the Alphabet

And a few re-reads (usually this means I’m studying something—POV, pace, transitions):

Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
Earnest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Let’s hang out soon. Whether I see you at Joe’s Pub or here in the comments section, I’d love a story about your writer’s cave and how you navigate the world outside it.

How We’re Really Doing

Susan Henderson — Tue, 12 Dec 2023 12:48:22 +0000

Hey. Are you doing okay?

I wanted to give some space here to talk about the loss of Gabe Hudson, who was a friend and inspiration to so many of us. If you were a listener to Gabe’s podcast, Kurt Vonnegut Radio, you know how positive and generous he was to other writers. He was always reaching out to check in with people, and so it was a real shock to learn he’d taken his own life.

If you’ve read my debut novel, you know I have a book’s worth of feelings about suicide. And writers, it seems, can be especially vulnerable to feeling as if they’re always failing, collecting rejections, and trying to explain to others why they’re not finished with their latest project. Add war, politics, holidays, and the stress can feel overwhelming. So I wanted to check in with you.

How are you managing? Are you doing okay?

I pulled myself off of social media a while back and it’s caused me to pay more attention to people in the real world. Rather than talking online to everyone all at once, I’m meeting with friends face-to-face, one person at a time. It’s amazing how different it feels to just have a cup of soup with a friend. Just the undivided attention and how there’s space for silence, for breath, for all the non-verbal ways we communicate. I don’t know why it matters so much but those little things, like trying to get a waiter’s attention or wind blowing a napkin off the table or a bird preening nearby, turn out to be important. And if your friend’s not doing well, it’s easier to see that or to make space for them to say so when you’re hanging out in person.

A little over a month ago, my family and I were invited to Carnegie Mellon to support the new, endowed fellowship in my dad’s name. It was a very sweet event, attended by his friends and colleagues, who shared their memories him. Imagine having to speak after a number of Turing Award winners and pioneers in speech recognition, artificial intelligence, robotics, and the internet. Very humbling!

My bit begins at 1:10.56 if you’re interested.

Anyway, I mention all of this because writing that speech for my dad reminded me of a lot of the simple things in life we used to do together. Simple things I’m trying to consciously make more space for and hold with as much importance as my career. My dad, despite whatever fancy business he was working on, stopped and took joy from the free things we could enjoy any time. He loved long and mostly silent walks. He loved when I tagged along to mail a letter. He loved to cook soup together or check out the farmer’s market. There was always time to play fetch with a dog or snip something in the vegetable garden. And while I work on my book every day, I’m careful not to lose sight of these important little things.

We’ve been taking friends and family to see live soccer games. And I’ve been trying to limit how much news I watch and replace any TV time with some good fiction. We’re loving the series, Reservation Dogs. And we watched a great, low-budget zombie comedy with the kids last time they were home. It’s written and directed by Shin’ichirō Ueda, and this is the link to the trailer, but it’s better to watch it not knowing a thing about it.

And I’m happy I got some time with the newest little ones in our family tree.

I had two mini writer retreats lately—one with my friend, Jessica Keener. We crashed at her brother’s for a long weekend and it was beautiful and quiet and we wrote and walked and I read her chapters from her beautiful novel so she could hear her writing as I do.

And I spent a second long weekend with Georgia Clark and company in the Catskills. I work so much in isolation, so it’s a real gift to see how everything about the work changes when you have company. Some of us talked about having Zoom work sessions, not to talk but just to hold each other accountable for how we’re spending our time.

If you ask me how the book’s going, I can say I love this book. It’s going at its own pace and it’s got magical bits in it and I have no idea when I’ll think it’s done or what it will look like in the end. But I’m enjoying the process, and that’s different for me.

I’m trying to remember—both for myself and my friends—that this is not a race. That life is not on pause while we toil away on a book. And before we’re writers or teachers or students or whatever, we’re humans. So, today, check in with a friend and check in with yourself… just as a human.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners

Kiese Laymon, Heavy

Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife

Hernan Diaz, Trust

John Green, Turtles All the Way Down

Jill Bialosky, Asylum

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Elizabeth Crane, This Story Will Change

Nick Cave and Sean O’Hagan, Faith, Hope and Carnage

GennaRose Nethercott, Thistlefoot

Elana Ferrante, Troubling Love

Emma Cline, The Girls

Josh Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Percival Everett, So Much Blue

Laura Dave, Hello, Sunshine

Bryony Gordon, Mad Girl

Amy Kurzweil, The Flying Couch

Tara Conklin, The Last Romantics

Helen Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird

Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See

Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, Trauma Stewardship

Diana Goetsch, This Body I Wore

Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie

Sara Gran, Come Closer

Bassey Ikpi, I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying: Essays

Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven

Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful

Anthony Ray Hinton, The Sun Does Shine

Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Isabel Allende, A Long Petal of the Sea

Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Jonathan Rosen, The Best Minds

McCracken, Elizabeth, The Giant’s House: A Romance

Sarah Audsley, Landlock X

Dennis Lehane, Small Mercies

Dennis Lehane, Since We Fell

Jessamine Chan, The School for Good Mothers

Jonathan Escoffery, If I Survive You

Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch

Zain Khalid, Brother Alive

Maud Newton, Ancestor Trouble

Morgan Talty, Night of the Living Rez

Vauhini Vara, The Immortal King Rao

R.J. Palacio, Wonder

Jennifer Baker, Forgive Me Not

A.S. King, Dig

Robin Benway, Far from the Tree

Liane Moriarty, Big Little Lies

Elizabeth Strout, Oh, William!

Matt Bell, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here

Rachel Cantor, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister

Magogodi oaMphela Makhene, Innards

Maggie Smith, Keep Moving

Ali Smith, Autumn

Mona Awad, Bunny

Alice Walker, The Color Purple

Rene Denfeld, The Enchanted

Colleen Hoover, Heart Bones

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables

Julia Heaberlin, We Are All the Same in the Dark

Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings

Damon Young, What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker

Rebecca Makkai, I Have Some Questions for You

Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

And a few re-reads (usually this means I’m studying something—POV, pace, transitions, prologues, magic):

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street

Comments are open, and I’d like to hear from you. Tell me what you’re up to, what struggles or joys you want to share—big or small. And if you have any wisdom about bringing balance to your day or making headway on a long project, I’m all ears. Mostly, hi and thanks for being here.

Living in the Real World

Susan Henderson — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 18:31:04 +0000

How has your relationship with social media changed since the pandemic?

I’m not sure exactly why I’d reached my limit this year, but I didn’t like having one foot in the real world and one foot online. I felt like I was never fully in my body or in the moment. I felt like my head was cluttered with so many of other people’s thoughts and moods that I couldn’t find my own. I spent so much time scrolling that, when I sat down to work on my book, my brain stayed in scrolling mode—skimming through images but never having complete, sustained thoughts. So I jumped ship.

At first, the idea was only to stay off social media for a few months. Except I felt better and better the longer I stayed away. I realized how much I loved time with friends and family in the real world.

I slowly shed the instinct to document these moments and just lived them. Game nights, dancing, NYCFC matches, crazy giggling in restaurants, long walks, long arguments, writing old fashioned letters, visiting loved ones in hospitals. It feels good not to have my heart half here and half there.

I worked my book in Mexico, where I saw newly-hatched sea turtles make their long and dangerous trek to the ocean.

I wrote my book in snowy Vermont. And if you’ve never visited the whacky Bread and Puppet Theater, I can’t recommend it more. These are some puppets on a piece of the ceiling.

I taught fiction at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley, California. In-person teaching! And what a difference it’s made to both my teaching and my writing to start each day with my own thoughts, rather than letting social media steer my mood and where I turn my attention! (By the way, I did an interview with a writer I met there, and I hope you’ll head over to her Aspiring Author site to read it and leave her a comment.)

So I guess that’s all I wanted to pop in to say: Hello from the real world. And in the spirit of not stressing about the things I don’t need to stress about, I’m not even going to proofread this post. It just is what it is.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Ocean Vuong, Time is a Mother
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Paul Tran, All the Flowers Kneeling
Walter Lord, A Night to Remember
Heidi W. Durrow, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
Stefano Massini (translation by Richard Dixon), The Lehman Trilogy
Melissa Febos, Body Work
Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath
Jenny Zhang, Sour Heart
Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes
Kim Chinquee, Pipette
Myriam Gurba, Mean
J. A. Baker, The Peregrine
Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark
Pauli Murray, Song in a Weary Throat
Ellen Raskin, The Westing Game
Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty
Min Jin Lee, Pachinko
Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children
Brandon Hobson, The Removed
Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man
Maggie Nelson, Bluets
Amanda Jetté Knox, Love Lives Here
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Katherine Dunn, Geek Love
David Baldacci, Memory Man
Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America
Hilma Wolitzer, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket
Yona Harvey, You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love
Alexander Chee (editor), The Best American Essays 2022
Ted Chiang, Exhalation
Willy Vlautin, Don’t Skip Out On Me
Elizabeth Strout, Anything Is Possible
Yiyun Li, The Book of Goose
Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can’t Survive
Anthony Doerr, The Shell Collector
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Sally Koslow, The Real Mrs. Tobias
Philip Schultz, Failure: Poems
Moïra Fowley-Doyle, Spellbook of the Lost and Found
Zadie Smith, White Teeth
bell hooks, All About Love
Diana Goetsch, This Body I Wore
Natasha Rao, Latitude
Ling Ma, Severance
Maggie Ginsberg, Still True
Laura Dave, The Last Thing He Told Me
Sharon Olds, Odes
Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic
Marie Kondo, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up
Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan, Mad Honey
Elizabeth McCracken, The Hero of This Book
Jamie Ford, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
Ruth Ware, In a Dark, Dark Wood
Felicia Rose Chavez, The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop
Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
Ellen Meister, Take My Husband
Megan Miranda, All the Missing Girls
Fatimah Asghar, If They Come For Us
Jennifer Haupt, Come As You Are
The Moth, How to Tell a Story
Lee Kravetz, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P.
Antoine Wilson, Mouth to Mouth
Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain”

And a few re-reads (usually this means I’m studying something—POV, pace, transitions):
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist

I’d love to hear from you. Drop a note in the comments section and tell me what you’re up to, what your relationship with social media is these days, or anything else that’s on your mind.

A Summer of Make-Up Memorials

Susan Henderson — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 20:13:16 +0000

How is your summer going? Are you stepping back into the world?

Art by Chloe Cushman for the New York Times.

My summer has been one of make-up memorials for loved ones lost during the pandemic. Only now have we been able to gather and celebrate their lives.

Last month, in Virginia, I attended a memorial for someone I babysat for many years. I started working for her family when I was in middle school. When she turned four and I was, I guess, fourteen, she developed a brain tumor. Her whole family is terribly important to me, and I wrote about them here. Later this month, we’ll be in Pennsylvania to celebrate the life of Mr. H’s college roommate and to spend time with folx we love dearly. And I have just returned from a trip to our family cemetery in Montana, where we finally buried my father. Can’t tell you how badly I needed hugs and time with people I love.

Those of you who know me or have read The Flicker of Old Dreams know our family does old-school burials. I posted more Montana photos here (let me know if you need help getting past my privacy filters).

Other than these memorials, I’ve ventured out only a little. My first outings were for the Pfizer vaccination and a proper haircut. I quickly visited my mom, my kids, and a few friends. I started going to the grocery store again instead of ordering from Instacart, and was surprised how much that simple act revitalized my creativity. There’s something about spontaneity, chance encounters, or maybe even the shapes and smells and colors in the produce aisle that awoke my senses and my desire to write.

But re-entering the world hasn’t felt as natural as I’d hoped. On a purely physical level, my feet—after a year and a half without shoes—are rebelling with blisters. And while I’ve gone to a restaurant here and there, I find it stressful relying on others to keep an environment safe.

I’m way behind on sharing writing news. Grateful to The National Book Review for publishing my interview with the brilliant Marcia Butler. It was an honor to judge the High Plains Book Award for Fiction, which I awarded to Joe Wilkins for his extraordinary novel, Fall Back Down When I Die. I taught virtual workshops for Hampton Roads Convergence of Writers, 14:55 Literary Arts, and the Brandeis National Committee. And, soon, I’ll be offering private consultations through the Community of Writers.

What else? I did readings and panels with so many amazing writers, including Jennifer Haupt, Steve Yarbrough, Richard Blanco, Ada Limón, Pam Houston, Gina Frangello, Stephen P. Kiernan, Susan Rich, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Ron Block, Caroline Leavitt, Ruben Quesada, Anna Quinn, Kristen Millares Young, and Dawn Raffel. Oh… thank you to Joan Frank at The Washington Post for mentioning my contribution to the Alone Together anthology. A big hurrah to the narrators of the Alone Together audiobook for winning the Independent Audiobook Award for Nonfiction. I’m grateful to One Book Billings for choosing The Flicker of Old Dreams to read city-wide this fall. And thank you to 14:55’s Executive Director, Sean Murphy, for this interview, which was lots of fun:

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Emily St. John Mandel, The Glass Hotel
Claudia Rankine, Just Us
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic
Mary Karr, The Liar’s Club
Tosca Lee, The Line Between
Luis Alberto Urrea, The Devil’s Highway
Ursula LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness
Joe Wilkins, Fall Back Down When I Die
Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Tea Obreht, The Tiger’s Wife
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
Therese Anne Fowler, A Good Neighborhood
Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories
TaraShea Nesbit, The Wives of Los Alamos
Aimee Bender, Willful Creatures
Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down
Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet
Jessica Anya Blau, Mary Jane
Nedra Glover Tawwab, Set Boundaries, Find Peace
Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides
Ellen Meister, The Rooftop Party
Herman Melville, Moby Dick; or, The Whale
Leslie Lehr, A Boob’s Life: How America’s Obsession Shaped Me … and You
Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds
Walter Mosely, Devil in the Blue Dress
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
Douglas Stuart, Shuggie Bain
Anita Diamant, The Red Tent
Salman Rushdie, The Golden House
Christina Baker Kline, The Exiles
Sophie Mackintosh, The Water Cure
Christina Baker Kline, A Piece of the World
Noel Obiora, A Past That Breathes
Garth Greenwell, Cleanness
Hannah Pittard, The Fates Will Find Their Way
Amy Ellis Nutt, Becoming Nicole
Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright
Kate Bernheimer, Horse, Flower, Bird
Marcia Butler, Oslo, Maine
Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing
Amanda Stern, Little Panic
Clare Pooley, The Authenticity Project
Jodi Picoult, House Rules
Jacqueline Woodson, Red at the Bone
Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
Paul Auster (graphic novel adaptation by Paul Karasik & David Mazzucchelli), City of Glass
Cynthia Ozick, “The Shawl”
Rebecca Curtis, “Hansa and Gretyl and Piece of Shit”
Stuart Dybek, “We Didn’t”

A couple books I read for a second or third time…
Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Say hello in the comments section. Would love to hear about your summer and how you’re transitioning out of pandemic-mode.

Our Collective Breath

Susan Henderson — Mon, 22 Jun 2020 16:15:47 +0000

How are you doing? I feel like I need to check in with you. What are you actively doing to keep safe and emotionally well? What are you actively doing to keep others safe and emotionally well?

Artist: https://www.instagram.com/iamfake/

I thought I’d spend much of 2020 on my novel-in-progress. I have 33 wobbly chapters pinned to my bulletin board, waiting for my attention, but life had other plans. In March, my father got terribly ill. I went back to my childhood home in Virginia to spend time with my folks. Then a pandemic swept across the world, and I decided I’d better get to New York before it locks down. After only a few days back home, I broke my hand—naturally, the one I use for writing. Then, one night while my husband attended a Zoom meeting in one room of our house, I took a call in another room and learned my father had died.

If I sound emotionally distant writing all of this, it’s the only way I can tell the story right now.

I went back to Virginia (this time in a mask) to stay with my mom for a month. When I returned to New York, exhausted and unmoored, I flipped on the news and watched another black man murdered as he called out, “I can’t breathe.” I can’t get the image out of my mind of that cop looking so nonchalant, one hand in his pocket, as he killed a human being.

My heart feels called in too many directions.

Let me first speak about my father, whose death still doesn’t feel real to me. Here is a clipping from The Washington Post—I wrote this one. Supposedly, there will be a formal obituary written by one of their reporters, but it’s in a backlog since there are so many deaths these days.

This newspaper clipping doesn’t speak to my grief. I put that into an essay I was asked to contribute for the anthology, ALONE TOGETHER: Love, Grief, and Comfort During the Time of COVID-19. The book comes out September first, and I hope you’ll read it.

If there’s anything I can clearly take away from the past many weeks of heartache, pandemic and protest marches, it’s how we’re all connected. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, our actions, our very breath, can either harm or strengthen the lives around us. That is both terrifying and empowering.

The sign above helps me re-examine the way I thought I was battling racism in the past. Like COVID-19, we must assume we have the racism virus, and we must take active steps to flatten the curve and, if we work and work at it, to bend that curve. Simply being kind people won’t do. Posting statements of love and equality won’t do. One time gestures won’t do. Policy changes that nibble around the edges or focus solely on law enforcement won’t do.

Cries of “I can’t breathe” call out in compelling shorthand America’s enduring racial chasm in every measure of well-being: health care and infant mortality, wages and wealth, unemployment, education, housing, policing and criminal justice, water quality and environmental safety. These are words from the recent NYTimes op-ed entitled What the Courage to Change History Looks Like, and the entire piece is well worth reading.

Let’s talk in the comments section about how to engage in, rather than shrink from, this moment. Let’s talk about the uncomfortable work of holding ourselves, our friends and colleagues accountable. How can we use whatever power and platforms we have to change the systems we’re a part of? What are some ways to get (and stay) active in local elections, school boards, city council? Share your thoughts. And let’s give each other the space to be clumsy and make mistakes because that’s the only way to break old habits and build better ones.

Some thank you’s are in order… I was honored to be a part of the judging committee for the 2019 John Leonard Prize. Congratulations to all the brilliant finalists and to the winner, Sarah M. Broom, for her memoir, The Yellow House. I’m grateful, as well, to Jack Smith, who elicited my thoughts about character change for his article “Change of Heart” in the June issue of The Writer magazine. More thank you’s: Greg Olear’s Sunday Pages, National Book Critic’s Circle’s Critical Notes, Robert Gray’s Shelf Awareness (where he featured books that discuss mortality), FSG’s Work In Progress, the Big Sky Journal, TTC Books, Harper Academic, Changing Hands Bookstore, Bookhounds, Wishful Endings, and Jean Book Nerd.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Wayétu Moore, The Dragons, the Giant, the Women

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch

Seamus Heaney, Aeneid Book VI

T Kira Madden, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls: A Memoir

Ann Napolitano, Dear Edward

Anna Burns, Milkman

Sarah M. Broom, The Yellow House: A Memoir

Julia Phillips, Disappearing Earth

Victor Hugo (translated by Julie Rose), Les Misérables

Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

Jodi Picoult, My Sister’s Keeper

Alice Hoffman, Faithful

Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing

Cameron McGill, Meridians

Ethan Watters, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche

Sarah McBride, Tomorrow Will Be Different

Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories

Harriet Shenkman, The Present Abandoned

Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Hannah Tinti, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

Ellen Meister, Love Sold Separately

Esi Edugyan, Washington Black

Elizabeth Alexander, The Light of the World

Marie Mutsuki Mockett, American Harvest

Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day

Caitlin Moran, How to Build a Girl

And a few re-reads:

Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Max Porter, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

Heather O’Neill, Lullabies for Little Criminals

Last thoughts: As we learn to engage more in the urgent issues of our time, how do we also take care of ourselves and make time for our own dreams? And where is that line between self-care and simply exercising the privilege to disengage? Would love to hear from you in the comments section. I’ve missed you.

The Gift of Silence

Susan Henderson — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 17:49:03 +0000

Have you ever tried tuning out the noise and discovering what you hear in the silence?

I’m back from Scotland, where I stayed at the Hawthornden Castle this fall, working on my new book. My fellowship was funded by the Drue Heinz Trust. Drue Heinz was the publisher of The Paris Review from 1993-2007 and there is a literary prize named in her honor.

I lived at the castle with three other writers (poets!) and each of us stayed in rooms with a particular writer’s name painted on the door. My room, Boswell, was in the attic (second doghouse from the left in that first photo), and my room overlooked this pretty courtyard (the oldest section of it built in the 1400s).

We had our breakfasts and dinners together. Breakfast was porridge served in a pewter bowl and the coffee was so strong I think my teeth are a little browner for it. At dinner we ate things like cottage pie and fish pie and treacle tart. But the time in between, from 9:30am to 6:30pm, was spent in silence. That was the rule.

Many of you know I do the majority of my thinking and writing as I walk, so my days were mostly spent exploring the castle grounds—trails down mossy steps and through the woods, along high cliffs or down beside the River North Esk. (I wish this photo could show the sheer drop you could take off the path!)

Other days, I went out of the castle gate and walked where I might run into some dogs or friendly Scottish people who would greet me with a “Hiya, pal.”

After a walk, I usually came back inside via the boot room, kicked off my muddy wellies, and climbed the much-hated spiral steps to the attic. Outside my door would be a picnic basket. Each day, there was a thermos of homemade soup, a sandwich, and carrot sticks. Usually, I’d go out again after lunch and walk some more or sit on this great mossy chair overlooking the river.

At first I wrote a chapter a day, the story sort of falling out of the sky as I hiked through the woods and talked into my voice memo app. It was an unexpected gift, experiencing my head without all the clutter and to-do lists, without the worry of grocery shopping, meal planning, laundry folding. I’d end the day feeling satisfied, and then, just before dinner, I might hang out with another writer in The Garden Room, across from paintings of Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, and Aldous Huxley (friends of Mrs. Heinz), where we talked or read or were encouraged to drink a glass of sherry together (except, blech, cooking with sherry is one thing, drinking it straight, no!). Then, at night (and on rainy days), I transcribed the voice memos and gathered my questions for where the story might go next.

I wrote the first nine chapters of the book this way and thought I might keep going in this direction and at this pace. But I began to feel a little twitchy, a little sick of porridge and soup. I desperately wanted to watch the news and play my online Mahjong game, and I couldn’t get to sleep without a dog pressed against me. And so, instead of sleeping, I paced the castle and took showers at three in the morning. About this time, I found some music hidden on my computer (I thought I’d come without any). In the middle of the night, I played it as loud as I could stand over my headphones.

This is what my husband knows to be my bored-to-rage work ethic. It’s the huge burst of writing I do when I’m in the mood to, say, chew off my own arm. And, in this weird and uncomfortable state, I mapped out every beat of every scene of what I now know is a 36 chapter book.

I wouldn’t dare call these 36 chapters a first draft—they’re too wobbly, too sketched, but the shape of the novel is clear and solid. It has a strong emotional heart, high stakes, and now I get to do the fun work of diving deeper into the characters and the scenes.

It was the silence that helped the most—being away from the news, the internet, all the ways I could escape the work when it got hard. I thought other people were keeping me from my work, but it turns out that I was the culprit, reaching for distractions just when I got close to pushing past a barrier.

I’m deliriously happy to be back in New York. It’s good to be playing too much Mahjong again, eating spicy food, and hearing my husband’s band rehearsing in our basement. While I was away, these awards came in the mail. I’m so very grateful for them and sorry I couldn’t be there to pick them up in person!

After almost a year away from social media, I’m happy to be returning… but this time I’ll be more mindful of what all the noise and clutter does to my creativity. (That’s Mr. H and Douglas hanging out where he can run off-leash.)

A few thank you’s are in order: Billings Gazette, Havre Daily News, Lone Star Literary Life, MSU Billings, Hodder and Stoughton, Jean BookNerd, and BookNAround. Also, thanks to everyone who helped keep me focused on my work during my hiatus. It was good for my writing and good for my head.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post:

Ann Carson, Nox
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer
Rene Denfeld, The Butterfly Girl
Clive James, Sentenced to Life
Philip Pulman, Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm
Czeslaw Milosz, Bells in Winter
Philip Larkin, Great Poets of the 20^th Century
Anna Quinn, The Night Child
Gore Vidal, Selected Essays
Sophocles (translation by Robert Fagles), Antigone
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths”

And a few re-reads:

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck
Tana French, In the Woods
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Grateful for Hawthornden. Grateful to be home again. I’m writing this post with a dog beside me, and tonight we’re going out for poké and then the movie, JoJo Rabbit, by writer/director, T aika Waititi. And now to YOU… catch me up on what you’ve been up to… I want to hear about your writing, your pets, your heart!