Making dumb shit

Sometimes the work doesn't work out, so you should go to the movies

I know I’m not alone these days. I’ve been working on new essays for submission, which is great, but it’s not my book, which is what is actually under contract. I’m working on a fall syllabus for one of my classes, but I’m far from being done yet. In the book, I keep discarding pages. I am not really this type of writer, not usually. I tell this story all the time, but I’m going to tell it again:

Anne Fadiman once came to Pitt to visit, and she talked about how you are either a swamp driver or a diamond polisher, when it came to your writing process. Diamond polishers, understandably, need the word to be perfect before they get to the word that follows. Swamp drivers have to generate a lot of pages very quickly, driving back and forth across the swamp, before they know what they’re writing. Then, they take those pages and cut them down, rewrite, make more pages that they then revise. Diamond polishers tend to edit a lot less. Everyone who is a diamond polisher wants to be a swamp driver, and vice-versa.

Unfortunately, I am typically a diamond polisher. But with this book, lately, I keep writing more and throwing a lot of it out; experimenting on the page. Maybe this is an opportunity for me, to make new weird (honestly, increasingly, more commercially oriented—a story for another time) work. But it also means I am throwing a lot more out than I typically would.

Everything feels like it’s sort of cattywampus lately. Turn on the news, and fresh horrors reveal themselves. People are dying, being deported, can’t renew their passport, or generally live in fear. Scroll social media, and it seems like everyone I know is losing their grant funding, or their job. So many small businesses are closing or stopping orders because they designed a product partially manufactured in China and can’t withstand the burden of these new tariffs. We all know this. Me writing it is not news. But it all makes a stupid, big impact on the creative work, too. Even if you’re not directly impacted by one of thousands of executive orders.

Instead of writing, I find myself with five zillow windows open, paging between possible apartments, places we could live, ideas for our future in a variety of settings. I make ugly work, ceramics or writing, and then throw it out. Probably that is a part of the process too. Like this newsletter. I should probably edit this. I’m not going to.

This weirdo. I fixed the specific gravity on this purple, but for what? It’s basically a test tile.

Everything feels shitty right now. Which is why you should go to the movies. We saw Sinners on Friday with friends. I will not go into details, in case you haven’t seen it yet, but I want to go again soon, because there is so much I missed. I have an auditory processing delay, so it’s hard to hear things in loud settings, like the movies. We also went to the cheap theatre with bad sound, so there was a lot of distortion. But it allowed us to not be here, to occupy some other space. Message me with your favorite scene?

Currently reading:

Same as it Ever Was, Claire Lombardo — I know I’m late to this. She’s always great.