a beach read classic & a psychedelic experience without the psychedelics
Plus a writing invitation.
Hi, friends.
Today you will write.
Your ability to write right now is good enough to build what you are trying to make. You’ll revise over time and the work will become even more what you are hoping for, layer by writing layer. Perhaps you are in the generative stage? Your work is to write rather than judge the writing. Maybe you are trying to add another layer to that scene you wrote from last week’s newsletter. Or perhaps you are working on a book and feel at sea in too many pages? Word by word, you will find your way. Writing: always taking a bit longer than we think it might take.
I took a two-week break from writing—except this to you now—and it has been glorious. Freeing not to try to fit in the writing time I don’t have, though I feel a little antsy to get back to it, which is a feeling I like to build sometimes, especially during seasonal transitions. I’m enjoying two popsicle days with small people who are rapidly outgrowing sandals and their want of a mother’s presence at sports practice and the pool.
Speaking of the pool, a summer classic, I might have found the perfect summer read: The Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. Have you read it? It has sold over 31 million copies so likely many of you have. The edges of the pages are pink. It’s a plotty novel set right after WWII that follows three women from their twenties onward as they embark on adulthood and their careers in entertainment. Neely is a vaudeville teen orphan lying about her age, Katherine is an emotionally cool New Englander who has things handed to her because of her classic beauty, and Jennifer has been taught by an emotionally manipulative mother to swindle and lie out of necessity to survive. I’m reading it to think about working women and how female friendships can be a central part of a narrative and not be the primary source of narrative tension. In Valley, the women support and care for one another in vital ways (with a few exceptions from secondary characters) within the context of the late 1940s and 50s. I haven’t seen the movie, so nothing is ruined for me about the plot. There are surprising lesbian love story moments (Happy Pride Month!). I’ll say more about the book when I’m finished with it.
It’s synchronized firefly week in the Great Smokey Mountains right now, near where Richard Powers lives. I look for him on the trail. That did not happen, but I highly rec seeing the fireflies at least once if you want to have a psychedelic experience without the psychedelics. Around 9:30 pm the male fireflies, at the end of their life, begin blinking in unison. It starts low, near the ground, and lifts upward. It’s one of those experiences where being there does way more than words can. I left the night feeling changed.
A workaround to the lottery, and in my opinion a much better viewing experience, is to book a campsite at Elkmont campground around the official lottery dates, which gives you backdoor access to the fireflies via a very short trail, with no lottery ticket required and no large busloads of people.
Below, I’m sharing a revised craft chat that I gave the second week I started this newsletter, just over a year ago, back when there were about a thousand fewer of you:
Deepening characters by writing their relationships to non-human living things.
Writing with animals, plants, and a stone.
Today, may your words wear swimsuits and glide across the cool water of the blank page. May your words flash in patterned unison with one another.
Love,
TS