plants and books
it is okay to make really weird, messy shit
NB: I added a few new free subscribers. Hi. You’re welcome to unjoin if you prefer, just click the link at the bottom. I mostly write about writing, ceramics, horse stuff, and occasionally, my garden.
When I’m not writing, these days, I’m in the garden. Recently, we transformed our front lawn into a native garden, with beardtongue, some grasses—little bluestem & sideoats grama; plus blue sage, golden alexander, spiderwort, lead plant, gray headed coneflower, some lance-leaf coreopsis, wild bergamot (bee balm/monarda) and smooth blue aster. Rattlesnake master. Purple coneflower. I love these names. There are so many good native plant names. I accidentally started a native plant nursery over the winter, trial and error, learning as I go, and now here we are, with many plugs I am trying to convince my neighbors to take on (if you are local, let me know). I should maybe do more, and start an actual business. Mostly I planted for rusty patched bumble bees, which are critically endangered in the US. I have seen them here and there, over time, but fewer and fewer each year. They have a brown smudge on their backs, the rusty in their name. In the backyard, we plant lots of dill for the swallowtail butterflies. We are trying. Once the bugs are gone, our planet will undergo a rapid collapse. You can see it in how sometimes people plant zucchini but it doesn’t produce. For a couple of years, I’ve gone out to our tomatoes in the backyard, hand-pollinating with a q-tip. I don’t want to miss the opportunity for fruit.
The front yard looks like a bit of a mess so far. We dumped a truckload of leaf mulch on cardboard last fall, and let it all cook down, but there are still places where our old grass lawn pokes through. We’ve planted in clumps, in ways that look random, but part of it is about figuring out what works best in certain locations. The swamp milkweed seems happy enough, starting to flower, but I’m not sure about the ironweed. Our coreopsis is popping off and so is the beardtongue, but the blue sage is still trailing on the ground, because the soil is too rich. If something doesn’t work, I will rearrange, change the watering patterns, see what can be done to make things work better in our space. A lot of gardening, it seems, involves trial and error, a kind of messy chaos.
It is important to have other things to do. The work—the writing work—is so hard sometimes. When I’m in writing mode, as I am lately, I am often less present. Ori knows this. He says I am most present in the mornings, after initially writing for an hour or two, and then maybe I drift off somewhere else. It’s true; I know this; I am thinking about how the book is coming together, even if and when I am not writing or making pages directly. So I end up in the garden, watering, or making pots, or test tiles, or at the barn, hanging out with a horse friend (I’ll spend more time with Z this summer, which is great, a place to go when everything else feels like too much), or puttering around in the basement, which is full of crap I need to organize, projects I need to complete. I designed a new kitchen for our neighbors this week, using my extensive, often useless knowledge of IKEA cabinetry; they’ll get PDFs from me detailing the different options in the coming day or two. Plus there is other writing work, paid work that I need to finish by the fall, an essay or two. We went to pick strawberries, with friends, and then they came over afterwards and I made crepes, one of the few things I make lately. (Ori does 95% of the cooking; I make crepes or pancakes, French toast, challah, popcorn on the stove, and I grill, mostly meats). I apologized for not being as present, and my friend asked me what recipe I use for the crepes. I had to think about this: I do not measure anything. I just look at it and see what needs to be done, and then suddenly there is a batter. Maybe sometimes it is also like this with a book, or with pots.
Structurally, the book has gotten difficult, more complicated. I told my agent that this book would feel more commercial, coherent, smooth, like a continuous dream, but this is a lie and probably I am writing the weirdest thing I’ve ever made. It’s okay, I think, to make weird shit. This is probably the last opportunity I will have to write a book for a big five press (mine is an imprint of Macmillan—the five used to be six, until Penguin merged with Random House), so why not push for a weird book thing? Big, commercial presses like these tend to give you one book, maybe two books, to make a financial impression—to sell books—and then you have to go somewhere else, if you don’t become a runaway success, unless you can debut again as a novelist. I am not naive about this; so many of my friends who got big five deals initially ended up with small presses later, with subsequent books. It’s okay, really. (Independent presses make such beautiful books, and I am excited to move there whenever that time comes). But in the meantime, maybe I make the weird book I have to make, chase the strange sentences and structure. See what comes together.
"A lot of gardening, it seems, involves trial and error, a kind of messy chaos." Much like writing! 🫠