Dear St. Luke’s,

I still haven’t driven down Goodwood. I don’t want to drive past and see your ashes, because right now, you exist in my mind. 

If you trust my memory, a church sits at 8833 Goodwood Boulevard, a church whose only ashes are from Ash Wednesday and the thurible’s fragrant incense.

How can you be gone? How can I accept that your stained glass exploded outward, your tabernacle melted, your lecterns dissolved? 

You have seen more of my life than anyone but my immediate family. You have held enough of my life to compete with my father, mother, brother. You know me better than a friend. You have formed me for 25 years. 

You know that saying, you can’t win them all? Well, apparently you can lose them all. Because that’s what I’ve been doing.

I am a very competitive person. Perhaps I should divide my friends into two groups: those who haven’t seen me play sports, and those who have.

After tennis recently, I had a serious conversation with myself about whether this is good for my mental health.

I lost 0-6, 1-6. I went home and took a shower and forced my mind to wander. I had to, so I didn’t think about the loss. If I stayed on that thought for one moment, I would punch the tiled wall hard enough to break every knuckle in my hand.

This rage – it’s not irrational, as much as my mother would call it such. It’s rational. I can name everything that happened in the match that made me feel like that.

Any kind of career art has long been considered a risk and a luxury. It’s certainly never been easy to get a novel published, but this is my modern requiem.

First you write a book. Then you edit it. You write it again. Then you pitch it. These steps are easier than ever with the pervasion of computers and the internet. But in counterbalance, publication swings further from every writer. The technology helps and it harms.

For example, the publishing industry is transitioning from traditional submissions to QueryManager, which is a submission form that allows writers to mass-submit manuscripts to agents, overloading them with queries. Plus, agents and publishers were closed to submissions during covid, causing a massive backlog.

But those are just practical problems. I don’t blame writers for writing more books. My bitterness fattens off the influence of virality and social media on commercial publishing. Even if your query manages to float atop the lake of submissions, procure a manuscript request, entice an agent, and sell to a publisher, you’re still subject to the modern hellscape of hype.

I recently watched Drew Gooden’s excellent commentary on the Writers Guild of America strike. Near the end of the video, he said “writing will not be a viable career path much longer,” and it has echoed in my head like a bad movie sequence ever since. Waves crash in the background, distorted visuals of a forest canopy swirl across the screen, and a deep voice echoes in surround sound: Writing will not be a viable career path much longer. . . Writing will not be a viable career path much longer. . . Panic sets in. Writing hasn’t been a viable career path for me yet. I need more time. I need more time!

Writers are facing an existential crisis. As humans become uncomfortably similar to the populace in Fahrenheit 451, I think we should all be rereading Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel. Jeffrey Somer’s article Why Fahrenheit 451 Will Always Be Terrifying calls out our “shortening attention spans, training us to seek constant thrills and instant gratification.” Yeah, that sounds like me.

I can’t remember why I started writing. I have a box in my closet with every journal I’ve ever had, and the earliest ones are notecard-sized, with a scribble on each page. Some are stories made of a few sentences and maybe one correctly spelled word. A more recent one is from middle school – a five-subject notebook containing my first attempt at a novel.

Skip to high school. I’m eighteen, I have too many feelings, and a strange woman — sorry, advisor — is making me choose a career. She asks me about my favorite classes, my hobbies, and what I am good at. Because I won a poetry contest, did well on all my school-related writing, and always dreamed of being a novelist, my advisor thinks her job is done.

At this time, the idea of writing just to make a little bit of money, or to have something to say when people ask you how you contribute to society, upsets me.

The problem with Houghton is not the 9 hour road trip with Leif. We leave Kalamazoo with the cat he’s pet-sitting indefinitely and he wants tea and snacks at every rest stop. Something about Leif is that he’s incapable of speaking above 40 decibels, so when he says we should stop at Kitch-iti-kipi and I say “kit shitty kitty?” it’s not contrived. We do stop at the Big Spring, and the water is clear as glass and the color of oxidized copper. It’s full of fish and bubbling sand, and there’s a drunk girl throwing up in it. She yells at her boyfriend and cusses at some locals, all of whom are trying to keep her from falling in. Leif and I are preferably not involved.

The heat hurts more now. Before I went north the heat just was; I’ve lived two decades in this swamp, and a hundred-degree summer must be either abhorred or accepted. Vermont poisoned my acceptance with century-old buildings and snow that falls like it’s alive.

I am not a sweet summer child. I am a rotten autumn soul, formed for a chill in the air and warm tea and sweaters with pants. I am the kind that hibernates in the warm; one that lives not for the weekend but for the months of boots and bloody noses; months where green turns gold and all feels in-between. I am a creature of dusk, of descending darkness, lover of cats October and Thursday, content in the breath before a word, in the peak of the wave not the crash, living in the space between light and dark where things are outlined, begun, and never have to end.

11.3 the invisible angel

I spent the evening by the little heater in my room, eating peanut butter crackers and drinking tea, moving from the rocking chair to the floor to the cot; leaning, laying, sitting with my knees folded to my chest. I researched on my laptop and on my phone, I penned nine packed pages of plot ideas and backstory. Around 1 AM, I laid on the bed and closed my eyes.

It’s an idyllic scene, from the outside and for me. It’s exactly what I want; it’s exactly why I’m here.

It's time to write again. No more sub shop, no more quidditch, no semester beginning this fall for the first time in nearly twenty years. For now, my Walden is a new job that fits me like bespoke spanx, one that gives me no excuses.

Every writer has a metaphor for the process, this timeless marriage of suffering and shining, this Ugly Good. Lazar said writing feels like banging your shoe against your forehead. He said we are potters, building ugly mountains of clay with our words that we remold and destroy and remold until they are something good. Like potters we are artists, beating ourselves into making something until we make something good.

It’s the end today. I came to A Studio in the Woods for my writing residency on Tuesday, and today I will leave. I’m happy, because I’m going home to my fiancé, my cats, my family, and food that I didn’t request in an anxious midnight tizzy. I’m sad, because I feel like Cinderella, whose clock has struck midnight, whose Writer’s Cabin is turning to pumpkins, and who’s not going to be a writer anymore.