Dead Letter Department # 16
(did you miss dead letter department #15? catch up here!)
weather report
A windstorm is rolling over the county right now, powerful enough that the oldest trees on the block are all tossing their arms in the air and swaying together. There are little pauses where everything goes still and quiet, followed by great oncoming roars, like traffic rushing towards you, as groves of distant limbs begin to shudder at the same time. I watched a fat, perplexed robin try to figure out its footing to get at the remaining mountain laurel berries, but it kept pausing and stretching its neck out, like it was testing the air current, ready to fly away at any moment.
High winds always makes me think of L.M. Montgomery’s lovely descriptive writing about nature, which I think is in every single one of her books. Even her saddest characters find refuge out in the woods or along the sandy beaches, away from judging relatives and inexpressibly bad marital choices. Anne of Green Gables is all very good (at least until the very last books in the series, when it becomes very bad), but give me the grittier, more relatable Emily of New Moon any day. I have a truly colossal pile of paperbacks, most of which I’ve read more than once, including collections of the approximately one trillion short stories she wrote back in a time when writing short stories could substantially increase your income as a writer (from the depressing perspective of today’s publishing landscape I can only say: lol), but it occurs to me as I’m writing this that I’ve never looked at any of her biographies or journals. Maybe she’ll be my next deep dive into another writer’s brain—if you have any lesser jewels among her works you’d like to recommend or a biography that’s particularly good, please let me know at the departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com.
every day i write the book
The big fiction project is rolling along much more smoothly now that my incredible agent has given me her initial feedback on the first nine chapters. There’s a feeling accessible sometimes, on the good days, when the characters line up behind me, just out of sight, letting me know we’re headed in the right direction & all the navigation equipment is working as intended. The goal is always to get to that place, whatever mental landscape it is where I could see them if I just learned to turn around fast enough. I have a print hanging over my desk that I bought as a present/reminder when I signed with my agent: a houseboat on an expanse of silver grey water, but the only things in the room, wide open to the air, are a merrily burning wood stove and a blank white canvas standing against the wall. It’s a visual shortcut for my anxious, addled brain: go here & work.
I also finished a short story recently, the first one in a long, long time, & I’ve gotten some very helpful notes on it already, so it might be time to break out the old submissions spreadsheet again.
sounds fake but ok
The other day I was hanging out in downward dog with my close personal friend Adriene and when I tried to come up into a majestic, towering mountain pose I found myself lurching precipitously forward towards the kitchen table instead. “What a weenie,” I told myself, internally, of course, because you don’t talk about yourself that way around Adriene. She would never stand for it. I did the rest of the (extremely short, beginner level workout) & ticked off the increasingly pointed section of my daily list that says YOGA, right next to SPANISH LESSON and GO OUTSIDE, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.
I assumed it was just the ol’ bod protesting my attempts to stretch various muscle groups or whatever it is yoga is supposed to do until I rolled over in bed that night and had the same thing happen: a weird spell of dizziness, only this time from within my nest of blankets. This is obviously an outrage, because bed is sacred. Weird medical things are not supposed to happen to you when you’re lying down far away from your various devices with screens, accompanied by the siren song of your white noise machine.
It turns out it was probably just an episode of benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which sounds very fancy until your panicked late night googling tells you that it is the result of your ear crystals becoming dislodged. First of all, nothing has made me feel quite as much like I know nothing about how anything works as the phrase ‘ear crystals’ abruptly becoming relevant to my life. If you had tried to talk to me about ear crystals a couple of weeks ago I would have assumed it had something to do with rose quartz & probably something requiring a moonlight bath. They sound completely imaginary. It's like learning that my toaster is actually a teensy tectonic rift that just happens to be the right temperature for making breakfast.
Secondly, there’s nothing quite like the missed-a-step-going-down-the-stairs feeling of something that used to be completely mundane suddenly & unexpectedly becoming fraught. Since my sleep troubles started, I spend a good portion of the night spinning like a little rotisserie chicken & now every time I change positions I wonder if my goddamn ear crystals are going to act up.
Of course it hasn’t happened since then, which makes both this slightly unhinged screed & my semi-panicked questions to a knowledgeable friend faintly ridiculous, but we’re all friends here at the Dead Letter Department, right?
one good thing
When I was putting gas in my mom’s car for her the other day I found this tiny nest, tucked up against the inner door to her gas tank, firmly adhered to the metal with a papery stem that I had to carefully slice free with my pocket knife. Probably the wasps built it & abandoned it as soon as they discovered that their great new apartment was actually going to take to the roads, but it’s nicer to imagine that they were just hitching, doing whatever the insect equivalent is of riding the rails looking for adventure.
write back
If you like the newsletter, please share it with a friend. I hope to see you back here at the Dead Letter Department again soon & in the meantime I hope your ear crystals continue to do what they have always done & offer you no surprises whatsoever.