Hello, friends. It’s been a while. And, yes, a lot has happened in the past year. I read 35 books, watched 32 movies, and completed 44 seasons of television. Apparently, I listened to almost three full weeks’ worth of podcasts, but only about ten days’ worth of music. I published 9 conversations for my podcast. I had my heart broken. I found new love again. I spent time with my kids, with my friends, with my family. I don’t know how to summarize a year, except to say that I’m glad I made it through, and I’m glad you did, too.

I’ve missed writing these letters. I don’t know if I’ll be able to write more in 2024—though, then again, I’m not sure whether anyone wants or needs another newsletter filling up their inbox. But I have missed, too, sharing the things that I read or watched or listened to. Partly because I miss the sharing, and partly because I miss having the archive for my own reflections—looking back what I shared in a year tells me something about the flow of the year. I didn’t do a year-end round-up in 2022, but here are some things that I read, watched, and listened to in 2023 that mattered to me, in roughly the order in which I experienced them:

1. It took me almost six weeks to read Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, from mid-January to near the end of February. A near-future dystopian story about the prison-industrial complex, which also implicates the reader and our fascination with violence, it is not a light read. But it is a moving one.
2. If I recall correctly, I first heard about The War & Treaty’s album Lover’s Game via an NPR best-of list at the end of 2022. I liked that entire album, but the song that really stuck with me, that I have found myself singing over and over again, is “Yesterday’s Burn.” It sounds to me like a song of comfort from parents to a heartbroken child, and the strange and wonderful thing to me is that at this point in my life, I can feel it as both the younger and the older side of that relationship.
3. Actual-play RPG podcasts have been a staple of my listening for many years now, from The Adventure Zone to Dungeons & Daddies to Rude Tales of Magic and beyond. In 2023 I started listening to what might be the best-produced and best-acted D&D podcast I’ve yet encountered: Worlds Beyond Number. Moderated by Brennan Lee Mulligan and starring Aabriah Iyengar, Erika Ishii, and Lou Wilson (all veterans of the very popular Dimension 20), it strikes a really different tone from the other RPG shows I listen to. Though it’s often funny, it’s less rooted in comedy and more in storytelling, which has made for some truly wonderful moments.
4. I was a huge fan of boygenius’s self-titled debut EP back in 2017, so when I heard that they were putting out a full-length album (hat tip to Mel Thomas for mentioning it when we spoke for Keep the Channel Open), I was very excited. And what a great record it was. Each of the three singer-songwriters who make up the supergroup—Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridger, and Lucy Dacus—are talented and deservedly respected in their own right, but together they seem to lift each other to a new level. My personal favorite song on the album is “True Blue,” for what it’s worth.
5. April was a difficult month for me. One of the things that helped get me through it was listening to the entire run of my friend Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s old podcast Drunk Safari. I’ve talked about that show a lot over the years, including in this newsletter—about how funny it is, about how smart it is, about how much I like it. This year, it was a comfort to me, every episode felt like hanging out with friends. And at the time of this past year when I was at my lowest and loneliest, I really needed that.
6. It’s interesting to me that the two movies I feel compelled to include in this list are both anime. The first is Suzume—or, as it’s known in Japan, Suzume no Tojimari—directed by Shinkai Makoto. It’s difficult to describe this movie without giving much away, and just saying that it’s a story about a young woman meeting a mysterious young man and going on a magical quest together is entirely inadequate to the beauty of the animation, the potency of emotion in the story, and just the movie as a whole. It was one of the favorite movies of the year for both me and my youngest daughter.
7. As with a lot of media, I was somewhat late to Andor, the 2022 Rogue One prequel series centered on Diego Luna’s eponymous character, Cassian Andor. But I did finally finish watching it in May, and I think it was not only the most complex, interesting, and moving Star Wars story so far, but perhaps one of the most well-done stories of rebellion and revolution that I’ve seen.
8. In 2019, Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone published one of my favorite books of the past decade, their sapphic, epistolary, time-traveling, spy-vs-spy novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. The book was very well-regarded at the time, winning both the Nebula and Hugo for Best Novella, and my impression was that it sold decently well but was not initially a bestseller. This past May, due to a random tweet from a person with the screen name “bigolas dickolas wormwood,” it rocketed up to the #3 book overall on Amazon. And let me tell you: the absurdity of the entire thing, the well-deserved attention for a book I deeply love, and the subsequent avalanche of memes made me incandescently happy.
9. I didn’t realize when I started this list that anyone would appear on it twice, let alone that a friend of mine would appear twice, but it must be said that Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s book The Siren, the Song, and the Spy was outstanding. The first book in the duology, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, was a swashbuckling adventure with pirates and assassins and mermaids and witches that was about imperialism and colonialism and the cost of violence—and I loved it. This second book picks up where the first leaves off, showing us both the allure and the oppression of empire, and both the necessity and grim reality of revolution. On top of which, it was highly entertaining.
10. The first season of Ted Lasso debuted during the pandemic, and was one of the last shows my kids’ mother and I watched together. The second season began airing three weeks after we separated. The third season started two weeks after our divorce was final. It is, in large part, the story of a man coming to terms with the dissolution of his own marriage, and so it was often a very emotional experience for me to watch this show. And yet it is a show that I deeply love, and for which I am grateful, one that made me both laugh and cry, and that ended, I think, just perfectly.
11. Marisa Crane’s debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, imagines an America where a charismatic dictator has come to power, created a morality police with surveillance in every room of every home, and where criminals, deviants, and undesirables are marked by being given additional shadows. The world it shows us is both bleak and all too plausible. Yet it is also a story about the irrepressibility of human connection, and the ways that small graces, small joys, and small victories continue even when oppression seems implacable.
12. The Heart put out two very personal, very interesting, very moving series this year: SISTERS and DAD. The first is about the relationship between host Kaitlin Prest and her younger sister, Natalie, about codependency and mental illness. The second is about Kaitlin’s relationship with her father, their history, about emotional abuse, and about reconciliation. I found both of them incredibly moving.
13. I spent much of the last third of the year or so immersed in the game Baldur’s Gate 3. And, honestly, haven’t most of us wanted and needed to escape the real world this year, at least a little? That this game was able to deliver so many different experiences in one package was kind of amazing. It was an entertaining fantasy adventure. It allowed for all kinds of player-driven exploration and the closest thing to a true role-playing experience that I’ve ever gotten from a video game. It was often hilarious, not to mention extremely horny. And it also delivered some truly moving character moments. I spent more than a hundred hours in its world, and having finished it once, I’ve already started playing it again.
14. I think that the thing that I legitimately find most enjoyable and most comforting about the internet is just when it is weird and ridiculous for no reason other than to be weird and ridiculous. And so, I present to you: “Sitting,” by TJ Mack. You deserve to sit.
15. When I posted to social media that Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars would be my next read, one of my friends commented “it’s a book that really shouldn’t work but absolutely does.” On a different social media platform, someone commented “My brain keeps wanting to describe it in terms of TV and film. Third Rock from the Sun meets Lucifer meets The Red Violin meets Tangerine. But that’s not it at all,” to which I responded that I’d been thinking of it as “Your Lie in April x The Last Starfighter x Dr. Faust.” None of that does a good job of describing it, but it does get at why a description of the book would make you think it has at least two too many ideas in it. But not only does it work, it does so beautifully. Just an absolutely lovely story about music, immigrants and refugees, and self-acceptance.
16. The other movie I wanted to mention I saw just last month: Hayao Miyazaki’s latest, The Boy and the Heron. I’ve seen it twice now, and I do have to admit that it took two viewings for me to really get my bearings with the movie. It’s a poetic, impressionistic film that isn’t necessarily easy to get your arms around. But just in the same way that poems can make you feel things even when you can’t articulate what they mean, this movie managed to say things (I think) about legacy and mortality and grief and hope and healing in ways that I can’t actually explain. I don’t know if you’ll like it—I know many people have found it vexing—but I am glad I saw it, and I plan to see it again.
17. One of the things that has been deeply important to me over the past eight years has been having friends I trust, with whom I can talk about difficult political and world events. Over that time, there have been many people I’ve talked to about many different things, and while I value all of my friends and colleagues, the truth of the matter is that there are very few people with whom I can safely talk about everything. Honestly, there may not be anyone with whom it feels safe to talk about everything. But for each thing, there’s always been at least one person I can talk to, and that has meant a lot to me. Like a lot of us, I imagine, the thing that has been hard to talk about but that I’ve needed to talk about is Israel and Gaza. And I’ve been grateful to have friends with whom I can talk, particularly my friends Rachel Zucker and David Naimon.
    
    I know that this is a subject about which people disagree strongly, including, I imagine, people who may be reading this list. When people feel unsafe sharing their thoughts or feelings on the war, it is for good reason—no matter which “side” one is closer to, there is a real potential for violence. And so I have that in mind as I include the second part of David’s conversation with the writer Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger, in which they discuss the history of Israel and Palestine, the Jewish Labor Bund, and the duality of being both oppressed and oppressor. For me, this conversation was an example of people trying to hold two conflicting truths simultaneously, with sensitivity and nuance. But I recognize that not everyone will find it so—indeed, when I shared it on social media, it was met with some resistance. I don’t know how you will feel about this interview, or that I’m sharing it. What I can say for myself is that I appreciated it, I learned some things I didn’t know before, and that I’m proud to be David’s friend.
18. I’ve been a fan of Maggie Smith’s poetry for many years now, and on a personal level, she was very kind to me and very supportive when I was going through my divorce. Reading about her own divorce experience in her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, was rewarding for me, if also challenging at times. I don’t know if it is something specific to me that I couldn’t help mapping my experience and my marriage onto her story, or if that’s the most normal thing in the world. In the ways that our stories were similar, I felt seen. In the ways that they differed, I felt prompted to reconsider what I thought I knew about myself and my marriage and divorce. I think those are both valuable things that a book can do.
19. Finally, the last book I read in 2023 was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. In one way, it’s a story about video games and the way they have impacted our lives and culture. In another, it’s a story about the creative process and collaboration. It’s also a love story, structured in very much the same way as would be familiar in any romance or rom-com, but centered around a friendship and work partnership rather than a romantic relationship. It’s also about family, both the families we come from and the families we create. It’s a beautiful story, parts of which made me angry or sad or tense, but one that I am so happy to have read.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me in the past year. There isn’t enough space or words for all of it. But if you’re reading this, even if it’s been a while since we last spoke, I hope you know that you matter to me as well. I know you’re doing your best, and I am, too.

1.

It’s been 180 days since the last time I wrote. To you. Maybe at all?

A lot has happened since then.

Each of my kids had a birthday. One started high school. Another started middle school.

I got shingles. I recovered.

I made a silly TikTok video, and 12,000 people liked it enough to follow me.

I spent several dozen hours spread out over six months feeling very anxious about having so many followers.

I interviewed two photographers and three poets.

I watched 16 seasons of various anime.

I got on the dating apps.

I got off the dating apps.

I made some new friends. I spent some time with old friends.

I read 9 books.

I met a woman and fell in love.

I went to sleep on 180 nights and woke up on 180 mornings. Or, sometimes, I woke in the afternoon. I got out of bed 180 times.

2.

I signed my divorce papers this morning.

It’s been 561 days since our separation began. It will be another few months before everything is final. But, for me, at least, there’s nothing more to do but wait.

Afterwards, after smiling and thanking the paralegal and exiting the conference room, I sat in my car for a few moments in the parking lot. The shadow on the fence in front of me caught my attention, as did the plastic sign it fell beside. The mind wants to see symbols and signs, make meaning. We are just visiting. This is temporary.

Things are better for me than they were before. I am happier now than I have been in years. I wouldn’t go back to my old life if I could. But I still miss it a little.

I’m not sure what I expected to feel. One of my best friends cried after signing her divorce papers. I mostly just felt tired and heavy, though since I had stayed up to read the night before, it was hard to ascribe that to the moment.

My girlfriend and I have been dating for 97 days. For 97 days, I’ve been learning what it means to be in a relationship in which I am not afraid. To share time with a person who desires me as much as I desire her. To delight in someone who also delights in me, exactly as I am.

I still have trouble believing, sometimes, that this is how my life has turned out. But I’m okay.

3.

I wonder how you are, though. We don’t talk a lot, you and I. What are you dreaming about right now? What have you struggled with? What made you happy most recently? What mattered to you today? What are you proud of? What do you wish could have turned out differently?

It’s none of my business, really. But I do wonder. I know you’re doing your best, wherever you are. I am, too.

I had the pleasure of being in the audience for Amanda Marchand’s Second Sight lecture at this year’s Medium Festival, back in May. I was, of course, immediately struck by the simple and elegant compositions of her lumen prints (an example of which is shown above—her image “Roseate Tern”), but it was her process that truly fascinated me. I’m always interested in the separation between what can and can’t be seen in a photographic image, and in her Lumen Notebook series, Amanda mostly uses books to create the photograms. And not just any books, but specific books that have specific meaning to her. It turns out that both she and I have a fascination with the way that language and image interact, so it was a real treat getting to pick her brain for this episode.

Here are some handy links for the episode:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• Show notes
• Transcript

In the course of our conversation, we mentioned several of Amanda’s books, which you can purchase:

• The World is Astonishing with You in It (2021, self-published, contact artist to purchase: amandabethmarchand@gmail.com)
• Nothing Will Ever Be the Same Again (2019, Datz Press)
• Night Garden (2015, Datz Press)

Some additional resources you may enjoy in conjunction with today’s episode:

• Amanda’s Medium Festival lecture is a great overview of her work and process.

1.

My friend Brandon Taylor wrote recently about why the new Netflix adaptation of Jane Austen’s Persuasion is neither a good adaptation nor a good movie. Most of the tweets I’ve seen about the movie are from people who feel similarly about it to him, though I have also seen a few who found it pleasant.

Most of Brandon’s letter is about the ways that the film departs from the source material, but he also wrote a bit about adaptation in general:

At its best, that is what adaptation does—it is not an act of mere preservation, but of translation and modification. It’s always so gratifying when you engage a work and recognize the smart ways it’s playing with a source text. It’s rewarding if the adaptation is smart and engaged with the underlying story. . . . Where it goes wrong is when the adaptation betrays a lack of interest or real understanding of the source material.

I suppose what this puts me most in mind of is the ways that I’ve thought about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films over the years. As you probably know, I’ve been spending a lot of time on TikTok over the past 8 months or so, and there’s a thriving Tolkien fan community there. I find it fascinating that the Tolkien fandom, both on TikTok and at large, seems to have more or less reached a consensus that the movies are different from the books, but both are good in their own right. I’ve long since past the point where I want to argue about the movies—people can and should like whatever they like without any interference from me, and I am legitimately happy for them to do so. But I’ve also never personally been able to enjoy the movies because of the nature of the changes they make. It has always seemed to me that Jackson either didn’t understand or didn’t care about the parts of the story that were most important to me, to Tolkien, and to the story itself. And while I’ve always acknowledged that Jackson’s visual presentation of Middle-Earth was stunning and perhaps even perfect, I’ve also always felt that his interpretation of the text, characters, and interactions was surface-level and superficial. I’m certainly in the minority in this opinion but, to me, these movies are not good adaptations. Still, does that make them bad movies? I’ve found very few people who say so, except people who are generally uninterested in fantasy or adventure.

I can’t help thinking, too, about some other movies that play very loosely with their source material, but which I love. I’ve never read The Orchid Thief, but it couldn’t be more obvious that Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation is an entirely different story. And I love both Diana Wynne Jones’s and Hayao Miyazaki’s versions of Howl’s Moving Castle, but the two stories not only have wildly different plots, they also have almost completely different central themes. I think both Kaufman and Miyazaki’s movies are artful, beautiful, moving, and well-crafted, but are they good adaptations? Are they engaged with the source material, or are they just using the books as jumping-off points to make something entirely new? Or are those incompatible? I’m not really sure, to be honest.

2.

I’ve been reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass for the past few weeks. It’s as beautiful and wise as everyone has said, but for whatever reason I’ve just been taking it slowly. (And feeling mildly guilty about not being more engaged, and about letting some recent galleys languish in my inbox, though really none of this is really here or there.) The other night, I was reading the chapter “Allegiance to Gratitude,” which is about the Onondaga people and their Thanksgiving Address, which they also call the Words That Come Before All Else, a form of gratitude, consensus-building, and ecological list that begins any meeting or school day in that culture. Kimmerer writes,

You can’t listen to the Thanksgiving Address without feeling wealthy. And, while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea. In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. The Thanksgiving Address reminds you that you already have everything you need. Gratitude doesn’t send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That’s good medicine for land and people alike.

I can’t help thinking of the Buddhist concept that desire is the root of suffering, a concept that seems so obvious on its face to me, but one that I’ve struggled with a bit. Entirely leaving behind desire and attachment has always seemed to ultimately imply a total passivity to the world and its injustices. (My understanding is that this isn’t true, that Buddhist teachers like Thích Nhat Hanh have shown how Buddhism and activism can be compatible. Though, my understanding is also that at least in the beginning, some teachers did find the concept of engaged Buddhism to be controversial.) Perhaps what appeals to me about Kimmerer’s words is she shows me that I could reframe the conundrum by focusing on moving toward gratitude and contentment instead of away from desire and attachment.

The whole idea of contentment does seem to be one that’s incompatible with the American way of life. It’s one that my kids’ mom and I used to argue about sometimes, before the divorce—I thought contentment seemed like a goal, she thought it seemed like giving up and selling yourself short. I can’t say that I was right or that she was wrong, but I can say that it makes sense in many ways for us to have moved down separate paths. That, in fact, we had done so for many years before our divorce started.

3.

My friend Martha Crawford wrote about moral failure in a newsletter a couple of weeks ago:

The evil urge, temptation, sin, error, failed moral reasoning are the mechanism that grant us humility, for how, without such failures, would we ever modulate our self-righteousness? This is the negative virtue that emerges from moral failure. There is no way to be humbled without failing ourselves and others. The sweet relief of humility is only attained through guilt, error, and failure. We can only come to understand and have compassion [for] ourselves and our fellow human beings, by failing to be good.

Those last three words put me in mind of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” which in turn reminds me of one of Summer Brennan’s recent newsletters, in which she pointed out that one must understand “Wild Geese” in the context of being paired with the poem “Rage” in Oliver’s 1986 collection Dream Work:

Rage is the scorched internal landscape on which the “sun and the clear pebbles of the rain” from Wild Geese are falling. Rage’s dark sky is what clears to become “clean and blue”, with wild geese flying across it, “announcing your place in the family of things”. It is what happened to the “soft animal of the body,” of her body, before it found a way to simply “love what it loves.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about my own moral failures. I suppose this is nothing new for me—I seem in many ways to be most comfortable picking at my own emotional scabs. But it is no surprise that during an ongoing divorce, I’d be especially inclined toward this sort of introspection. It is nice to think that some good might come out of having hurt someone else, and, of course, it’s true that everyone fails in this way sometimes. I nevertheless find myself a little suspicious of anything that makes it easier for me to let myself off the hook. I don’t think this is what Martha intends here, but I can feel a part of myself drifting that way all the same.

What I can never quite settle in my mind is how to both hold myself accountable for my harms and failures and how to feel sincere compassion toward myself. How to live with myself after hurting someone, failing them, and failing myself. It is easy enough to remind oneself that shame and self-flagellation help no one, that they are a form of ego, of self-centering, methods by which we keep ourselves from growing. It’s harder to feel it. But I suppose that one’s own moral failure is a bit like loss, in a way. You live with it by living. You don’t get over it so much as you, hopefully, make peace with it.

4.

In Devin Kelly’s newsletter last weekend, he wrote about Hieu Minh Nguyen’s poem “Heavy,” and about shame:

Shame muddies our certainty. It throws all of ourselves against the backdrop of the world and makes it difficult to remember what we want, what we need, and what we love. And I think this shame is exacerbated by living in a society that continually markets new ways for us to live. Not just for us to live. But how we should live. It’s a society that commodifies our attention and then, once it has our attention, throws our attention away from our ordinariness, which is also our complexity, which is also our wholeness.

Mary Oliver makes an appearance here, too—as she seems to be doing more and more in my life and thoughts lately—where Devin points out that that one line from “The Summer Day” is so often taken out of the context of a poem in praise of idleness and attention, and deployed toward a sense of mortal and capitalistic urgency.

I suppose that lately I have been skeptical of answers, of salvation, of comfort, of soothing. As skeptical as I am hungry for them. I keep returning to Anahid Nersessian’s essay about John Keats’s ode “To Autumn,”> from her book Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse:

That we can be here—on this planet, in this time, confined by these exact habits of survival—and still find things to call beautiful and to love or to be unable to stop loving is indefensible. But we are here, and we do.

Though, I suppose also it is my own tendency toward self-criticism that keeps me stuck on that passage when, just a few pages later, Nersessian gives us the example of Diane di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #7”:

Here is how di Prima inches past Keats, as far as loving the world goes. Whereas Keats makes us sit in the discomfort of our own receptivity to beauty—the beauty of nature and of his poem—di Prima reminds us that we have to live for something and then orders us to do it, and to do it with each other. . . . Di Prima’s language is not Keats’s (how could it be?), but they are making the same promise: to hold so tight onto poetry it surrenders its shape, to hold so tight onto us that we do, too.

Maybe this is what I’m circling toward, or what I’ve come to and left and needed to be reminded of again. Kelly sees in Nguyen’s poem a generosity, a reminder that the world can be a salve. Nersessian sees in di Prima’s poem a call to take the salve of the world and use it to keep the fire of revolution burning. The world is bigger than the part we touch. One person’s life is more than any one thing they’ve done, any one thing they’ve felt. Comfort and salve are verbs as much as they are nouns. What you do is more important than what you are, and at least it is more within your control.

Ah, hell, I think I’ve managed to tie this up more neatly than I expected.

The world is mostly awful, and probably getting worse. I’m sure I’ll write about that at some point. In the end, if we’re lucky, we’ll have the opportunity to take care of the ones we love, and share the happinesses that will always remain. For now, I think maybe taking care means giving you something that you can use, or that might make you smile. The world is mostly awful, but it will always be beautiful, too.

• This impromptu choir built over a few days this week on TikTok, and looking forward to each new part was almost as lovely as the song, itself.
• Maggie Smith’s poem “Sitting on an Old Bedspread Under an Oak Tree, Watching My Son’s Soccer Practice” described a feeling that I know all too well lately, and it made me feel a little less alone.
• The anime Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori is about a café in Japan, the four men who work there, and how they nurture and care for their customers through beautiful and comforting food and drink. It is soothing, sweet, cozy, and filled with a simple decency that felt like an oasis.

1.

It’s been a year. Not since I last wrote—though that’s been long enough. A year ago, I lay in bed in a studio apartment and recorded a video of myself staring morosely into the camera, a string of Christmas lights over the window behind me next to bare white walls, Lucy Dacus’s “Night Shift” playing in the background. I never posted the video—there’s some level of public wallowing that’s too much even for me.

2.

The other morning, as we were walking out the door on the way to school, my youngest stopped on our walkway beside one of the rose bushes and exclaimed, “Oh, I love this flower! It’s so pretty! I think it looks sad.”

I looked at the rose, which was well past its full bloom and starting to slide toward decay, the petals starting to curl and thin and dry at the edges. “It does look a little sad,” I said.

“It looks sad because of the color,” she said. “The pink and red are spotty.”

Then we moved on with our morning. We got in the car and went to school.

3.

It’s been a year. Not a good year by any measure. But not entirely bad, either. I have eaten well, certainly. I have left unreasonably long voice messages for my friends, who have not only listened but responded with great kindness and support. I’ve sung with strangers> on the internet, and with myself. I’ve gotten to hear my kids laugh and feel their hugs, to talk them through the past year as well. I’ve demonstrated to myself that I have nothing to prove as a homemaker or parent, and I’ve started to learn to appreciate the freedom that comes with not having to spend so much of my time and energy trying to appease someone who didn’t, ultimately, like me very much.

4.

I went for a walk in my neighborhood yesterday (for my stupid mental health, as the TikTok youths like to say). Rounding a corner, I passed by a woman, perhaps in her sixties, dabbing her eyes with a tissue as she walked to her car. It took me a few steps before I noticed, but I stopped and turned and asked her if she was okay.

“Oh, I’m okay,” she said, sniffling, “but that’s so kind of you to ask, thank you.”

I gave her what I hoped was a sympathetic look and told her to take care, and then walked on. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to divulge details about their private life to someone they don’t know, of course. But I do find myself wondering often what it might look like if we stopped saying we’re okay when we’re not. And what a shame it is that a stranger offering the simplest moment of care might be seen as uncommonly kind.

5.

It’s been a year. I’m still waiting for things to be finalized. The end of a divorce feels a little bit like the last few weeks of college, when you’re both excited and apprehensive about what the future will be like, knowing that no matter what you are on the cusp of a new era of your life, except that it stretches on for months. And there are a lot more emails “just checking in to see where we are in the process,” and each email costs $35.

There are things that are going to remain difficult for the foreseeable future. Co-parenting seems like it’s almost always harder and more frustrating than it needs to be, and as much as any of us hope to be the exception, few of us actually get to be.

But people keep telling me that some day I’m going to meet someone who appreciates everything that I am. I’m starting to believe it, if only because I’ve come to realize that so many already do.

Every day, each of us gets to decide how we will be. Not for anyone else, but just in order to get closer to being the person we want to be. I’m doing my best, and I know you are, too.

Take care.

I have been a big fan of Sarah Hollowell both as a writer and as a person for many years now. She's one of my favorite presences on Twitter and with the publication of her debut novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, she's become one of my favorite YA writers as well.

There's a lot that I love about the book. Sarah excels at creating an atmosphere of magic that is full of wonder while also feeling eerie and dangerous. In terms of representation, this book also features a fat protagonist as well as queer characters, which I very much appreciate in a YA novel. Mostly, though, it's just a well-paced and extremely satisfying story.

In our conversation, Sarah and I talked about her writing process, about abuse dynamics, about fan fiction, and about how she engaged with anger and violence in A Dark and Starless Forest. In the second segment, we talked about the Alpha Young Writers Workshop, how it was such a formative experience for her and why she loves working with teens. I hope you enjoy the episode!

Here are some handy episode links:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• Show notes
• Transcript

And some purchase links for the book! As always, I recommend picking it up from your local independent bookstore, but if you don't have one of those available, here are some other options:

• Viewpoint Books (Columbus, IN)
• Mysterious Galaxy (San Diego, CA)
• Bookshop.org

Some additional resources that you might enjoy in conjunction with today's episode:

• Sarah's short story "Crow's Eye" was featured in episode 2 of LikeWise Fiction. It's a great example of her short fiction and has a very similar style to A Dark and Starless Forest.

When I first started reading Ayesha Raees's debut book of poetry, Coining a Wishing Tower, I had a certain feeling of being unmoored. The form of the book (fragments that might be fable or might be prose poetry) and the tone (which varied between the fragments, some strange and Borgesian, others quite concrete) all contributed to that. But the further in I got, the more it began to cohere into an experience that, if I couldn't fully articulate what it was doing or how, was nevertheless potent and resonant. What was clear at that point was that this was a book that I'd need to return to more than once, and which would reward me if I did with new insights. That turned out to be entirely true, and I discovered threads about loss, about grief, about religion and ritual, about belonging and separation, and of a certain optimism in the face of devastation. Needless to say, I was pleased to get to talk with Ayesha for this week's episode.

Here are some handy episode links:

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Goodpods
• Stitcher
• TuneIn
• Show notes
• Transcript

And some purchase links for the book! As always, I recommend picking it up from your local independent bookstore, but if you don't have one of those available, here are some other options:

• Platypus Press (publisher)
• Bookshop.org

Some additional resources that you might enjoy in conjunction with today's episode:

• This interview at CutBank between Ayesha and Josh Wagner was an interesting starting point for me in thinking about how I wanted to approach my conversation with her.
• Ayesha's Vimeo page has a number of examples of her hybrid work, combining image, text, and sound for a fascinating artistic experience. I particularly recommend her four-part video "A Manual (or memoir), For Learning (or knowing), About a Tentative (or fleeting), Ticking thought Machine (or being)."