4 min read

Dead Letter Department #82

cloudy sky with bits of blue visible, dark pebble peach, grey water with birds on it, islands visible in the distance
the sun was making her best effort here, given the season, & i admire it

weather report

Well, I had exactly one good, uninterrupted workday last week before I got sucked into a mire of dentist & doctor’s appointments & bills & heavy phone conversations, leaving me with fractured days & sometimes hours to work in, but we’re up again to take another crack at it. I spent part of the weekend catching up on notes from the teeming pile of things I’ve read in the past few weeks, and some of it walking the blissfully quiet beach before anyone else got there. The tides have been so high they’ve pushed a sharp little ledge into the sand, and I couldn’t go quite as far I usually do, because the waves were nearly touching the rocks at the point and I wasn’t up for a damp-footed scramble on the way back, but it was lovely, and I found this perfect little thing.

close up of a pinkish hand holding a little square of blue seaglass, background of a pebble beach
so satisfyingly square

I try not to take many things from the beach, doing my best to admire & then replace whatever I get my hands on, but sea glass is my exception, since it’s basically beautiful trash, and it does no harm to carry it away in my coat pocket & worry it with my finger tips before it goes to live in the little wooden bowl on my windowsill.

I had lunch with my friends & my honorary niece, who is getting incredibly tall, & is just the coolest, most compassionate kid in the entire world, and a phone date with one of my best friends who I don’t get to talk to as often these days, so I felt a little more connected than I have been, which was lovely, and a good weekend for it, since I was trying a bit of an experiment after reading the book I told you about last week, Stolen Focus. I deleted the last couple social media apps off my phone, at least for now, so if I want to check something I have to be at my laptop. It’s just not as appealing to do it that way, which in turn makes me spend less time on it, and I have been strictly limiting other internet wanderings. There’s one app in particular that I use for one very useful purpose and half a dozen anesthetizing ones, so I’ve started wiping it off my phone until I want to do something active on it, and then reinstalling it when I want to actually use the damn thing.

Do I feel incredibly silly doing this, & like I should have better self-discipline than to need to take such measures? Yes. Despite that, is the world also increasingly designed to keep me locked into the endless scrolling behavior, with some of the smartest people in the world dedicated to manufacturing engagement in one addictive iteration after another? Also yes, so maybe if this is how I need to handle it, that’s fine.

This will, doubtlessly, be like other habits where I’m very smug and loyal to it for a while, and then it gradually begins to slip away & I have to hammer it back into place again, but I think that’s normal. I can’t have a handle on all the things I want to do well all the same time, and I want to prioritize the ones that make my mind a place I can work from again, as opposed to a dry little dull landscape of regurgitated content I don’t even care about.

The word anesthetizing is a conscious choice, above: these habits can be useful, necessary, even, when all you are able to do is stagger from one day to the other, when you need a thick layer of anything you can get your hands on between you and your pain. It makes the drip of it a little more tolerable, I think, when you’re not trying to receive it all at once, but that same buffer makes it impossible to be awake, really, to have new experiences, or even process old ones, let alone to write, so I can’t stay there.

reading room

As part of this habit reset, I’m trying to read more later in the evening, when I’d usually be nose-to-nose with a screen, dumping the myriad horrors of the world directly into my poor, straining pre-sleep brain. I can’t necessarily engage with new stuff that late in the day, so I decided to pick up Judith Krantz’s Scruples, which is the most golden of garbage, frothy and sexy and full of delicious detail, a wonderfully 573 pages of pure soapy drama. We have orphans (of course) and love affairs and gowns and an entire subplot about the Academy Awards, & since I’ve read it all before it hits like a bite of marshmallow fluff. Maybe I’m re-entering my Judith Krantz phase.

This is what she looked like, by the way.

close up of a middle aged white woman with very tall blonde hair wearing a pink cardigan and lot of jewelry, a couple of bright flowers in the foreground
the pearls, the cuffs, the hairdo, she has it all

I’m obsessed. I only wish she’d written twenty more books, because I would read them all.

one good thing: publication news!

My contributor’s copies of F(r)iction’s Bodies issue arrived, so I finally got to see The Pearlgrowers in print, and I cannot get over how pretty it is. The magazine is a very satisfying physical object, I love the cover, and there’s nothing like actually holding something I’ve written, getting to physically touch something that started as a little wispy fragment of an idea. I’m also still so totally blown away by the illustration Isabel Burke did for my story, and it’s the first time I’ve gotten to publish anything under my new name, so that feels fucking amazing.

If you’re interested in picking up a digital or print copy, you can do that right here—& please do write & tell me what you think at departmentofdeadletters@gmail.com

I’ll be skittering back into your inbox again before long, and until then, may you find at least one piece of beautiful trash you can put in your pocket and carry along home.