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

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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. 

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

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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.

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

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

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.

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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

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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.

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, Taika 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! 

Yes, I’m still alive. I know I haven’t been very visible online since November, but I’ve been trying hard to keep my mind free of clutter while I work on this new novel. Up until now, I’ve been doing the bulk of my writing in New York, but I’ve begun to pack for my stay at the Hawthornden Castle (in Scotland), where I’ll be living this fall, thanks to very generous funding from the Drue Heinz Foundation. This week, they sent a packet with details about my stay, including the fact that I can get a hot water bottle delivered to my room if I get cold. The picture above is one of the caves I’ll have access to while I’m there. I can’t even tell you how excited I am to go on this writer’s retreat and get some serious work done! Mostly I’m packing flannel, sticky pads, pens, that sort of thing, but I also want to take your good ideas with me.

Because I haven’t been playing on Facebook or Instagram during this break, I’ve had more time in the real world—visiting book clubs and radio shows, attending dinner parties and plays. It’s been a great wake-up call to reconnect with a world I can physically touch.

And while I’ve had to learn how to say no more consistently, in order to protect my time, I did blurb this book that was physically pressed into my hands… pretty sure it will be made into a film.

“I spent much of my childhood inside DARPA, where my father was Deputy Director, and this book captures the imagination and double-edged sword of our greatest scientific leaps. The same technology that can cure the world’s ills might also cause us to spiral into our own greed, selfishness, and vanity. Charles Soule’s Anyone is a remarkable, consequential novel and a terrifying wake-up call.” (Susan Henderson, author of The Flicker of Old Dreams)

My family has been moving in some new and interesting directions. Mr. H and his pop-punk band, Bad Mary, toured Japan, playing six gigs there before he had to return to the much more normal life of a professor. My youngest is now living in Brooklyn and working for a company that uses stop-motion animation in commercials and short films. And my oldest has been presenting research papers. Here’s a link to his first publication (just be sure to turn your math brain on before you click).

Once I’m off to the castle, only my family will be able to reach me via a landline phone reserved for emergencies. Other than that, I’ll be completely off the grid, hopefully doing a lot of writing and saving up stories to bring back home. (If I don’t come back, please have someone check the caves!)

Before I go, some thank you’s are in order… First of all, The Flicker of Old Dreams won some awards and some kind praise, and I’m grateful for everyone who helped bring the book to other readers. And thank you to these awesome folks: Yellowstone Public Radio, Women Writing the West, Billings Gazette, Byron Reads Now, NBCC’s Critical Notes, Roundup Magazine, Foothills Sun-Gazette, Book Bound with Barbara, Writing Unblocked, Daily Inter Lake, Western Writers of America, Great Falls Tribune, High Plains Book Awards, Billings Gazette (again), Lively Times, Front Porch Books, The Belle of Cowbell, Reading Glasses, USA Breaking News, AuthorsInterviews, Montana Book Award, Vanderbilt News, and Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who said of this about TFoOD “A lyrical meditation on life lived outside the city; this powerful novel of resilience, redemption and human imperfection will leave you breathless.”

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

Emily Fridlund, The History of Wolves
Ken Follett, The Pillars of the Earth
Tommy Orange, There, There
A.K. Small, Bright Burning Stars
Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering
Laila Lalami, The Moor’s Account
Oliver Sacks, Gratitude
Anne Rice, The Witching Hour
Alice McDermott, Charming Billy
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Richard Powers, The Overstory
Lisa Wingate, Before We Were Yours
Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Yuko Tsushima, Territory of Light
Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends
Marcia Butler, Pickle’s Progress
Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner
David Oshinsky, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem
Tara Westover, Educated: A Memoir
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits
Ryünosuke Akutagawa, “Rashömon”
Jim Ray Daniels, The Perp Walk
Ann Hood, The Red Thread
Yuyi Morales, Dreamers

And a few re-reads:
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Kate DiCamillo, Because of Winn-Dixie
Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere

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Talk to me about ways you keep inspired on your long projects. What are your tricks for keeping the work fresh and exciting? Let’s help each other stay inspired.

Marcia is an oboist, a filmmaker, a memoirist, and now a novelist. She has fought depression and addiction to create a life filled with extraordinary art and extraordinary artists. Her newest book (Pickle’s Progress, out last week!) is a story of identical twins–equally reckless and vulnerable–struggling to figure out what they want from life. Check it out, as well as her poignant, lyrical memoir, The Skin Above My Knee, about her 25 years as a professional musician.

But today she is here with some hard-earned wisdom just for you…

My Lovelies,

Sit at your computer for ten minutes. You can endure almost anything for ten minutes.

In the event that you do not produce words, sit there for another five minutes. This is meant as punishment. But you might write something, in which case, view it as a gift.

Proceed to the next task in the event that you do, or do not, produce words.

Take a bath. Bubbles are preferable. Gandhi believed in restorative ablutions. I think. (Or maybe that was a commercial I saw in the 80’s.) In any case, this bath is meant as a reward for having produced words. It is a one-time only avoidance tactic for those who did not produce words.

Towel off. Get dressed. Notice how awful your nails look. Get your emery board out and file the nails, followed by washing the hands. Then apply lotion. Understand that this whole nail thing is also procrastination.

Resume sitting at your computer.

Think about your novel/story/essay. Read through what you last wrote (maybe this was months before, though maybe it was yesterday) and decide whether you will produce new material or edit what you already have. Strongly err on the side of producing new material. If you do this, you will feel better. If you decide to edit (against suggestion) you will feel fine, but not as good as when you produce new words.

In either case, work for thirty minutes.

At the end of thirty minutes (regardless of whether you actually produced words or edited old words, or did neither) you will have an overwhelming desire to check email/social media (if you have not already done so during the thirty minutes you were, or were supposed to be, writing.)

Think about this deeply for seven seconds. Do not give in to this urge. It is the devil.  When you dogive in, go ahead and feel moderately awful.

Wonder briefly whether you are a grown up or an addict.

Decide you are a grown up. Install Freedom (or like program) on your computer and lock yourself out of all internet for the preset time you have given yourself to write.
Face your computer with the Freedom all set to go. Get up and stretch. Bend over and allow the blood to flow to your brain. Run in place really hard for fifteen seconds. Shake out your hands. Sit back down at your desk. Face your computer. Be that adult you know yourself to be.

And write.

Write, because you have a great story to tell. Write, because you are the only one in the world who can tell that story. Write, because someone once, when you were very young, noticed your talent and encouraged you. Write, even though your parents would rather you become a dentist or take over the family business. Write, because now you can actually admit that you have talent. Write, in spite of the fact that you’ve understood that talent is not enough. Write, like a ditch digger in chains because you know that is what it often feels like. Write, because you know that this is also, exactly, what it takes. Write, because once in a while your private alchemy floats across your brain and you are in heaven. Write, because you know how words have changed your life. Write, because you have a secret notion that your words will mean something to others. Write, because you suspect that words in general (including yours) can change the world. Write, because you feel you might die if you don’t. Write, because it is the only way you can truly live. Write, because everyone in the world is waiting for the beautiful gift of your voice.

Remember all of this as you stare at your keyboard.

Review the above as much as you need: every day, every hour, every minute, every fifteen seconds.

My darlings. Write.

With love, Marcia

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Marcia Butler has had a number of creative careers:professional musician, interior designer, documentary filmmaker, and author. As an oboist, the NewYork Times has hailed her as a “first rate artist.” During her musical career, she performed as a principal oboist and soloist on the most renowned of New York and international stages, with many high-profile musicians and orchestras – including pianist Andre Watts, and composer/pianist Keith Jarrett. Her interior designsprojectshave been published in numerous shelter magazines and range up and down the East coast, fromNYC to Miami. The Creative Imperative, her documentary film exploring the essence of creativity, will release on June 9, 2019.

Marcia’s nationally acclaimed memoir, The Skin Above My Knee, was one of the Washington Post’s “top ten noteworthy moments in classical music in 2017”. She was chosen as 2017 notable debut author in 35 OVER 35. Her writing has been published in Literary Hub, PANK Magazine, Psychology Today, Aspen Ideas Magazine, Catapult, Bio-Stories and others. Marcia was a 2015 recipient of a Writer-in-Residence through Aspen Words and the Catto Shaw Foundation. She was a writing fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2018. Her debut novel, Pickle’s Progress, is published by Central Avenue Publishing. She lives in New York City.

I needed to devote more time to the new book I’m writing, and cutting back on FaceBook and Instagram seemed the easiest way to find an extra hour or two each day. At first, I limited the time I spent online. Then I thought, Maybe I should just log out for a few months.

What happened was a startling discovery in what social media had been doing to my brain. But first, let me tell you some of the places I’ve been since we last talked…

In December, just after Christmas, David and I traveled to Japan. We took a bus to the bottom of a big mountain in Nagano. And for 45 minutes, we rolled this suitcase uphill, through the snow, toward Jigokudani Snow Monkey Park. It’s one of the prettiest walks I’ve ever taken… tall pine trees and sometimes heavy snow fall.

And then we reached our hotel (Yudanaka). It was all traditional… shoes off as soon as you walk in; a room with a sliding door, thin mattress on the floor, little pillows that were like sandbags, and a hot pot of tea waiting for us.

But this is why we chose the hotel…

Imagine it’s 18 degrees, and you’re in the hot springs with this guy. If you click here, you can see more photos.

David is standing outside a restaurant in Shinjuku we loved so much we went two days in a row.

My favorite city in Japan was Kyoto. (I could totally live there!)

Of course, the reason we were in Japan in the first place is because it’s on the way to Vietnam, where my brother-in-law lives. Packing for both snow and 80-degree weather was complicated, but it was also fun to go from one extreme to the other. Check out the view outside my brother-in-law’s place in Ho Chi Minh City.

This woman sets up a noodle truck in the alley six days a week, beginning at 4am. Yes, we had noodles for breakfast.

We did lots of tourist-y things (the War Remnants Museum, antique shopping)…

but also normal things like buying groceries and cat food.

And then we took in two days at a gibbon sanctuary, where they rescue and rehab abused or neglected gibbons, returning some to the wild. Some are forever damaged and so will live out their lives in this place.

If you want to hear what gibbons sound like when they sing each the morning, click here.

Back in New York (and sometimes in Boston), we had some pretty glorious times with our boys. We also have enough downtime to watch The Passage and Samurai Champloo. We’ve seen a number of plays, and I’ve had time to hang out with writers in the flesh.

But mostly, I’m fully immersed in writing the new book… with Douglas usually at my side. Sometime later I’ll talk about the book (set in this building), but for now it feels good to keep it private.

Let me say a little something about unplugging. The hour or two I’ve gained back each day is the least of what’s changed.

It was scrolling through feed, interesting as it was to me, that had created a never-ending ticker tape of clutter in my head. It left no room for my imagination, for the robust brain I once counted on.

After about a month offline, I started to remember what it felt like to have my fully-functioning mind back. I had time again for quiet, for my own thoughts, and for a life free of wondering, How many people will like this thought I just had?

I am deep in the process of creating something from passion and a blank page. Writing a novel is hard, hard work, but infinitely easier when you have head space. And I’m going to keep at it. I will be back, but it will be a while. So thank you for everyone giving me the space to think and write without distraction. And if you’ve ever considered unplugging, I suggest you give it a try.

Let me end with some news and some thank you’s.

I was so honored to receive news that The Flicker of Old Dreams won the Western Writers of America Spur Award in the category of Best Western Contemporary Novel, and was chosen as an Honor Book for the Montana Book Award.

And I’m grateful to these folks for mentioning me or my books: Western Writers of America, Belmont Books, The Philadelphia Tribune, KPVI News, The Missoulian, LitHub, Benzinga, Idaho State Journal, Erie News Now, Cision PR Newswire, America Reads, Syosset Library, The Doubting Writer, Turn the Page Podcast (Turn the Page is also here), Literary Speaking Podcast with Crystal-Lee Quibell, One Mom’s Musings, The Island Now, Bookish Lifestyle, Otter Down, Oh The Books She Will Read, Broken Teepee, Cover to Cover Cafe, The Spoken World Podcast, More 2 Read, The Doubting Writer, and Reading in the Dark.

As always, I’ll end by sharing the books I’ve read since my last post (this list does NOT count books I’m reading for research):

Debra Magpie Earling, Perma Red
Anne Korkeakivi, Shining Sea
Bridgett M. Davis, The World According to Fannie Davis
Jeff Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter
Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Bloodroot 
Kim Chinquee, Wetsuit
Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars
Kristina McMorris, Sold on a Monday
Donna Baier Stein, Sympathetic People 
Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth

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How are you? Tell me in the comments section before I’m off again.