Time To Push Some Old Essay/Memoirs Onto The Reading Public

Yes, I'm in this picture

While on X/Twitter today, I noticed that it is now Bread Loaf Writers' Conference time. What a great excuse to remind the world about my old memoirish essay My Bread Loaf published long ago at The
Millions. It's about my even longer ago experience at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference where I...worked in the kitchen for three summers! At the time I wrote it, I thought my Bread Loaf experience was so unique and unusual because, as a general rule, when you hear about someone going there, they go on about how meaningful and literary and artie their experience there was. There are often pictures of the beautiful mountain scenery. I thought my kitchen pictures and experience were fascinating because they were so different.

I am alone in that, by the way. This memoir doesn't get a lot of attention when I toss it out into the world again.

These days, the incongruity factor of my Bread Loaf experience doesn't interest me as much as it used to. Now that I'm interested in writing about eating, the kitchen is far more meaningful to me. I was the pastry assistant to Aggie, the chain-smoking baker, and it was with her I learned about oatmeal bread. That was way too exotic for my family.

By the way, I'm working on a bread baking essay.

I used my Bread Loaf experience in another memoirish essay, not about bread baking, called Blackened Pans, published at The Bigger Picture. My time in the Bread Loaf kitchen has had a bigger impact on my writing than anything else I saw or did there.

Getting Serious About Humor: A Memoir Or Something Else?

I'm not sure how I found Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want To Come: One Introvert's Year Of Saying Yes by Jessica Pan, but it is another funny memoir. 

Or is it? 

My college professor's explanation of memoir was essentially an account of a life experience, the significance of which isn't understood until after the fact. That describes The World's Largest Man and I'm Wearing Tunics Now. But with Sorry I'm Late, what we have is not an account of some part of someone's life, their past. What we have is an account of planned experience. There's nothing wrong with that. Other books have been written with this kind of set-up. It looks as if A. J. Jacobs has written a number of them. (Perhaps he's someone I should read. There are so many someones I should read.)

In my study of humor writing, I've learned that one way to find material is to look to life lived. Sorry I'm Late, which is definitely funny, teaches that we can also create material. Because what Pan did was spend a year saying yes to a list of experiences an introvert probably wouldn't embrace. I suspect a lot of extroverts wouldn't, either.

As a self-identifying introvert, I expected to find essays in Sorry I'm Late on, say, forcing oneself to engage with people after yoga class or to speak to people---everywhere. But what Pan did was say yes to things like performing on The Moth and taking a stand-up comedy class that culminated with another performance. I had trouble wrapping my head around her choices of activities, I guess because I found them to be things that even many extroverts wouldn't attempt to do. Personally, I won't even listen to The Moth, because I find it depressing. My comedy fantasies don't run to doing stand-up, but working in a comedy writers' room. From home. On-line. Without having to be in the same room with my colleagues.

Of course, that may be the humorous hook here--the incongruity of an introvert wanting to do these things.

A couple of days ago, I signed up for a 30 Days of Positive Thinking Challenge being run by a meditation app. I realized while working on this post and analyzing Sorry I'm Late, that I might be able to do some humor writing around that. In which case, like Jessica Pan I would be generating material with something I'm going to do, instead of finding material in something I've already done.

A Personal Essay About A Book Of Personal Essays

Copy provided by NetGalley

Publication Date: June 13, 2023

I'm trying to expand my essay reading this year, which is what attracted me to Wannabe: Reckonings with the Pop Culture That Shapes Me by Aisha Harris. Plus, it was about popular culture, which I have an interest in and appreciation for. Not as deep an interest and appreciation as Aisha Harris's, though.

These are personal essays, on subjects personal to Harris, such as her name, that then reach out to connect to the larger world. Now this is significant, because Harris is a young black woman, while I am a not-so-young white woman. We don't share what you'd call a racial culture, but we don't share a generational culture, either. With some of the essays, I felt as if I was doing the reading for a college course, because the information was so new to me. I had to look some stuff up.

That's not a complaint, by the way. I found it exciting. I now know that IP refers to "intellectual property." One of my son's was surprised to learn I didn't know that. Thank you, Aisha, for catching me up on that. Seriously.

The first essay in the collection, relating to Harris's name, Aisha, is a model for the personal essay form she uses. In discussing her own name, she gets into the impact on Black parents of music and the mini-series Roots. Popular culture shaping people. In her case, it didn't shape her name quite the way she thought it did.

After reading about her TV interests when she was a girl, I felt bad, because I couldn't remember if my sons had had a similar experience with TV shows. I did monitor the TV a bit here. So I got into that with the same son who was surprised I didn't know what IP meant, and, sure enough, he could recall a Friday night lineup with programs I have little recollection of. Which may get into a generational thing--though I watched TV with my kids, the things they enjoyed were probably pretty meaningless to me, so I don't retain them. I think I only remember Boy Meets World because there was a girl in it named Topanga. Which could lead us back to names.

Hmm. Is it meaningful that I was concerned about whether or not my sons had a chance to experience the popular culture of their generation, but I didn't give a thought to what experiences I, myself, had with popular culture growing up? 

I should have, because I think the big takeaway from this interesting and readable collection is that popular culture didn't just shape Aisha Harris. It shapes all of us. 

Well, That's Done

 At 5:30 PM last Sunday afternoon, I finished a draft of a book I've been working on for four years. 143 Canterbury Road. Elevator pitch: A disgraced college student moves into a rental house, unaware that a crime committed there years ago will impact all the present-day inhabitants.

I would just like to point out that it took Julia Child eight years to write Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and she had two co-authors. And one of those co-authors started the book ten years earlier. Not that I just finished writing a cookbook.

Nor can I say that I worked on 143 Canterbury Road exclusively for four years. I started writing and publishing short humor and essays on the Medium platform during that period. I spent a lot of time last summer editing The Mother Suite, which was published at Literary Mama in December. I've made some feeble attempts to be supportive of other authors here at Original Content during that time. I've taken advantage of the great opportunities to attend Zoom workshops these last three years. Someone in the family had a baby during that time. Quite a significant number of family members had Covid during that time, which didn't really require a lot from me but was distracting. 

Still, I've been working on this freaking thing for four years, and it feels it.

Another Significant Change

Earlier this year, I said that I was going to focus on adult writing in 2023, which is what 143 Canterbury Road is. So there's a change.

Another change that should be more significant: Unless something big happens careerwise, 143 Canterbury Road will be my last novel. I will tinker with and continue to submit the five unsold book-length manuscripts I've written since before 2008, but otherwise, I'll be committing to the kinds of work I've had some limited success with during that time and try to expand on that line of work. 

But Not That Significant A Change

Writing novels is grueling--staying in the world of your story and keeping track of all the different threads that hold that world together is hugely demanding. It's not worth the effort for books that don't sell. Writing short-form work--and studying it and reading it and researching markets for it and spending time marketing published work on social media--will be as time consuming, but it will be a different type of work. 

And because it's different that's exciting.

But, first, I have to finish some clean-up work on 143. Then on to new things.

Getting Serious About Humor: "I'm Wearing Tunics Now" Is Funny And Thought Provoking

I stumbled upon author Wendi Aarons at McSweeney's where an excerpt from her book I'm Wearing Tunics Now was published last fall. I enjoyed the excerpt so much that I sought out the book. (Lesson learned--excerpts work.) I'm Wearing Tunics Now is what might be called a women's memoir, about middle class women's life stages. Aarons is genuinely funny and has quite a bit of experience writing humor. (Lesson learned--experience is good.) I often think of her reference to her primary care physician, google.com, because I, myself, keep Dr. Google on retainer.

She has a terrific chapter on blogging in the '00s, an experience I recognize and the only thing I've read that describes it. Aarons is far more extroverted than I am, however, and has actually met blogging buddies in the flesh and is friends friends with them. But otherwise we both enjoyed that period in a similar way.

While Aarons is funny, I do feel that her material may be a little traditional. She writes about PTO Moms and women of a certain age feeling they're invisible, for instance. Among many other woman subjects. This may be a perceptual thing on my part, because I'm a little older than she is (I could be her mother's really cool younger sister) so I've heard about these subjects before. For women Aarons' age and younger, however, her material is new and relevant to their lives.

While reading I'm Wearing Tunics Now, I kept thinking of my friend, Ellie, my neighbor's mother and thus a generation older than me. She would hear us younger women at book club going on and on and on about our kids and what was going on at the school, because it was the most important freaking thing in the world, and she'd say, "We did all that. I was PTO president. I was a room mother." I would think, You can't possibly know what you're talking about, Ellie. But she did. We were probably boring her to death. Nothing is more important than an experience while we're living it. Then we move on to things like going to vineyards with our adult children and posting George Santos memes on Facebook. Or, in Ellie's case, getting a graduate degree. In, I believe, theology.

I'm Wearing Tunics Now left me thinking about what my own humor writing material will be. Because I really need to be considering whether things like meditation and FrancoAmerican holidays are the endless source of laughs I think they are. I've been mulling over trying my own PTO piece. I was the PTO Science Fair mom, you know. And head room mother at least once. I say "at least," because like childbirth and the first 5- to 10-years of motherhood, school volunteer work ends up being run together, if not actually suppressed.

Wendi Aarons speaks about and teaches humor writing. You can learn more about her at the Freelance Writing Direct podcast Humor Writing and Wearing Tunics with Wendi Aarons.

And, yes, Aarons has a middle grade book out, Ginger Mancino, Kid Comedian, that I hope to get to in the next couple of months.

My First Publication Of The Year Is About...Macaroni And Cheese!

As I was just saying a couple of days ago, I am focusing on writing for adults this year. One of the things I'm interested in writing about for adults is eating. I do not mean I'm interested in food writing. For food writing, you need to know something. I'm interested in writing about eating.

My first publication for 2023 is, indeed, about eating. Mac and Me: A personal history of macaroni and cheese was published yesterday at Kitchen Tales.  

While writing eating essays for adults is new for me, writing about eating is not.

My first book, My Life Among the Aliens, was built around the premise that a mom's healthy, wholegrain cooking was drawing alien life forms to the family home, which her kids than had to deal with. In the follow-up book, Club Earth, Will and Rob come up with a sugar- and additive-laden dinner that drives away the aliens using their house as a resort.

My fourth book, The Hero of Ticonderoga, includes a meal of French Canadian treats loved by the main character, but not by her guest. And food plays a big role in Saving the Planet & Stuff. 

So it's not at all out of character for me to be writing about eating. I'm just doing it now for adults.

Another One Of Those Opinion Pieces About Children's Books

Suad Kamardeen @Unsplash

Every couple of years, some mainstream magazine publishes an article trashing children's literature and creating hysteria in the children's literature world. This has been going on a long time, and I gave up responding to them, (and sometimes even reading them) a long time ago, because I felt I was being manipulated. The publishers of these things wanted me all huffy and talking about them, to create buzz for their publications. I don't like just mindlessly giving people what they want.

But here I go, anyway.

This morning, Google News carried in a section labeled "For You" a link to Are There Any Kids Books Out There That Are...Actually Good? by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, which was published Monday at New York Magazine's The Cut.  Jezer-Morton may not have been responsible for the click-bait title. Another one might have made the whole essay hang together better. And I'm not going to argue with her content. What she thinks is bad...what she thinks is good...eh.

What I'm struggling with is the essay, itself.

She may be using some kind of classic writing format that I'm just not a fan of--knocking down A to build up B. Yeah, I do think that's a thing. She spends a lot of space objecting to a number of titles she appears to be familiar with before she gets to a shorter portion where she concludes SPOILER yes, there are books out there that are actually good. But it doesn't sound as if she's read them. She knows they exist because she asked librarians, and they told her so. She doesn't even name any of the titles of the good books. She links to a list of them that she created. 

What Does It All Mean, Gail?

I'm not sure what to take away from this essay. 

• I'm definitely not accepting that the books she doesn't care for are bad or the books the librarians recommended are good, because anyone who has read here much knows I'm never going to do that.
• I keep wondering how could this essay have been written in a more meaningful, but still short, way? Maybe just stick to a piece about her frustration with her kids' reading, which may have been the initial inspiration? Waited until she'd read some of the so-called good books so she could form an opinion about them herself and not just tell us librarians say they're good? Do a little compare and contrast between a book from part A and a book from part B?
• What I really want to see now is an opinion piece trashing adult books, en masse, the way we get these pieces trashing children's books, en masse. They may be out there, and I just don't hear about them, because adult books don't seem to get people fired up the way kids' books do.

Congrats!

A few of my Facebook friends have books on Jezer-Morton's list of good books. Hurray!

 

A New Publication For Gail: Julie Powell And A Mini Blogging History

Kenny Eliason @ Unsplash

I spent a lot of time earlier this week reading articles about Julie Powell who died on October 26 at forty-nine-years-old. That's just forty-nine, folks. She was a blogger, back in the day, but her blog went seriously big time, turning into the book Julie & Julia and then the movie with the same name.

I wrote what I like to call a flash essay about how Powell is representative of the arc blogging has followed over the last twenty years since the two of us became bloggers. Julie Powell and the World of Blogging was published today at Feedium.

Maybe Don't Use The Word "Die" In A Book Review Title

Working

I am sure you're all wondering how things are going with my writing on the Medium platform. Last month, I wrote that Slow Down, You Write Too Fast was my least successful piece there. That still seems to be the case, though I thought my most recent publication there, Book Review: We Are All Going To Die, In Case You Weren't Feeling Enough Time Pressure at Feedium was going to beat it. And maybe it has.

How Do You Define Success At Medium?

When you're a small player at Medium, it's hard to define success. Anyone reading a Medium article can see how immediately popular it was with Medium's subscribed readers, because there's a little icon down at the bottom of the screen with clapping hands indicating applause and a number. (Only Medium subscribers can applaud.) We Are All Going To Die has received 2 claps, and those came 10 days after publication. So my first thought is that that review tanked.

However, if I look at my statistics, I see that Slow Down has a 25% read ratio while We Are All Going To Die has 35%. Thirty-five is more than 25. Does that mean that We Are All Going To Die is doing better? (Though probably still tanking.) Not necessarily, because We Are All Going To Die has made 9 cents while Slow Down has made 12. Twelve cents is more than 9 cents, if you follow me.

I have only the vaguest idea how payment is determined at Medium. It may have something to do with the amount of time people stay at the article, suggesting they're reading it, and not just the number of views. Slow Down, which has made more money (12 cents!!!), has had 16 views while We Are All Going To Die, which has made less money (9 cents!!!), has had 20 views. It's a mystery.

What Have You Learned From This Experience, Gail?

I've come away with two things from these latest experiences.

1. Don't bother repurposing material from Original Content into articles for Medium. Both these articles did just that. Reworking material or research in different ways is supposed to be a classic way for freelance writers to generate income and broaden their reach. It didn't work for me in these cases. (Though, of course, I have made 21 cents between the two of them.) I know I'll be tempted to do this again, but I'm going to try to stick to using my time to create new work.
2. Be more upbeat. Self-help is supposed to be the most popular writing on Medium. While I thought both these articles were self-help-ish, with one being about writing and one about a time management book, self-help may require a rah-rah attitude that my titles weren't conveying. As I've said before, a lot of Medium writers are interested in writing and publishing more, and suggesting in the writing article that they slow down may have seemed as if they were going to be told to write less. And telling everyone they are going to die in that book review title probably could be perceived as not being upbeat. Though when I came up with that title, I thought it was gold. If I break down and write an article for Medium using material I first worked with here, I must be cheery about it. 😀 

I made a submission to another Medium publication today, so I should soon have more to report, one way or another.

 

A Round-up Of My 2021 Published Writing

Satellite office; using this year

Here is an end of the year listing of  all of my 2021 published work. It was all published on the Medium platform. Some pieces were accepted by publications there, some I directly self-published.

I'm More Altruistic Than You Are at The Haven  My most recent piece, so perhaps the jury is still out. It doesn't appear to be a big hit right now, though.

A Minimalist's Christmas at  The Bigger Picture This was chosen by somebody/something at Medium for further distribution. Presumably it got a boost in exposure. My most successful essay. I did the first draft a couple of years ago.

Slow Down, You Write Too Fast Self-published. This was an attempt to rework a blog post from here at Original Content. It was my least popular piece. Medium is full of self-help articles, particularly about writing for Medium. The bulk of them are about writing and publishing more, so you can see why an article about writing slower, which could result in writing less, wouldn't attract a lot of readers there. It flies in the face of that culture's conventional wisdom.

Still Another Story About The Medium Writers Challenge Another self-published piece. This was also chosen for further distribution, even though there was a great deal published on Medium this fall about the writers challenge. Evidently people there just couldn't get enough of that subject. It did much better than Slow Down, You Write Too Fast.

What We Did There at Tell Your Story This was one of my two submissions for the writers challenge. It is also one of a series of "black belt essays" I've written over the years about my experience as a taekwondo student. It wasn't a big hit even though I had done a draft for a workshop the year before, and used the structure I'd learned there for it, as well as the feedback I received. So much for workshopping material.

Submission Boards

Enough at Kitchen Tales My second submission for the writers challenge. It was chosen for further distribution and did much better than What We Did There, even though the publication that accepted it didn't have as many followers as the one that accepted What We Did There. I had started it a year earlier. Since I am interested in writing about eating, I was pleased to get an opportunity to write this.

Daddy Is Watching The Olympics Again at Frazzled Chosen for further distribution. I was happy with this, because it was time sensitive, and I had to write it fast after coming up with the idea. That's most unusual for me.

Relieve Your Anxiety NOW! at The Haven This was very popular with my Facebook friends, but far less so with Medium members. It was my least popular piece until I published I'm More Altruistic Than You Are.

My Child Doesn't Watch YouTube at Frazzled Chosen for further distribution. It is my second most successful piece with Medium readers.

So, What Does This All Mean...

 

...other than that I wanted an excuse to promote my writing today here at Original Content?

 

You often see articles on Medium about how to write for Medium and how to get more attention there, more readers, and, therefore, more income. Given the amount of income I've generated from my writing at Medium (we're talking less than $20 for everything I've written combined), I clearly am not going to be writing anybody a how-to article.

However...

In analyzing my own experience there, it is obvious that the distributed articles did better than the ones that weren't distributed. Both my parent humor articles were distributed, as were the two, let's say, meaningfulish personal essays. 

The humor piece about meditation and the personal essay about taekwondo both did poorly. Though one was humor and one wasn't, I see them as being somewhat similar in subject in that they are both a little counterculturish, not as mainstream as parents and kids or grief and eating, the subjects of essays picked up for distribution.

Presumably, I could use this experience to shape my writing for Medium, trying to attract that further distribution designation. I have to decide whether or not I want to jump through hoops to get Medium's support, support that will probably just get me a couple of extra dollars, at best. I could also try to tailor myself to Medium's interests temporarily, until I have more followers who might be interested in sampling whatever I write. Though, personally, I stop following writers whose work drifts away from what originally attracted me to them, so I don't have a lot of confidence in followers following me anywhere.

Also, keep in mind, I'm not trying to make a living off my Medium writing. I'm trying to  use publishing there as a springboard to getting essays into publications everywhere. How much do I need Medium's seal of approval (distribution) to do that?

Next year the Medium experience will continue.

A Typical Gauthier Christmas

Our Christmas is being put off to January, because I spent the afternoon yesterday with a child whose parents found out last night that he was exposed to Covid at preschool. So we're spending the holiday week waiting to see what's going to happen, whether or not he's going to get it, and whether or not I've been exposed. Believe it or not, this is not the worst Christmas we've had.

While I'm waiting to see what's going to happen, I'm going to try to reread a little Joan Didion, whose The White Album I read many years ago. Hmm. Maybe I'll add a reference to it in that YA book that I've been working on for years.

And in really positive news (positive good, not positive Covid test), though the world may be going to Hell in a hand basket, as my mother would say, we can all be comforted with the knowledge that I made my Goodreads reading goal. We'll always have that.

Don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out, 2021.

A New Publication At Medium, Just In Time For Christmas

Annie Sprat on Unsplash

A Minimalist's Christmas was  published by The Bigger Picture, a Medium publication, a few days ago. This was a humorous essay but not a straight up piece of humor like some of the other things I've published on Medium.

What's Happening With Gail On Medium?

The Bigger Picture has a larger following than some of the other Medium publications that have published me, so that's good. While checking my stats for this piece, I noticed the line "Chosen for further distribution." This means that Medium will be promoting it in some way, beyond just leaving it to the publication's or my followers or whatever social media promotion I do for it. So that's good, too.

You know what else is good? I almost missed noticing that distribution notice, so I went back and looked at my other work published on Medium. I found that five of the ten pieces I've published there were chosen for further distribution. I am feeling quite special right this moment.

What Does "Chosen For Further Distribution Mean?"

 

Well, I'm not sure, other than the special feeling business. I haven't seen any of my selected work anywhere on my Medium reading lists or in newsletter-type e-mails coming from it. I can see on the graphs on my statistics page for these pieces that readership went up after the distribution point. But we're not talking anything going viral here, folks. Readership went up enough so that the lifetime income on some of these things is between $2 and $5 instead of much less. So the distributed pieces have made more money, but we're still not talking a lot. 

 

What this probably means for me, personally, is that I'm going to get all competitive with myself and feel bad when I publish something that doesn't make the "chosen for further distribution" cut.

Hey, but live in the moment, right? I got good news today.

My Most Recent Experience With Medium

In September I posted some information on changes coming to Medium's partnership/payment program. Otherwise, it looks as if I haven't done an update on my publishing experiences on Medium since March. I did publish a couple more humor pieces there this summer, which deserve their own post at some point. However, today's subject is the Medium Writers Challenge, which took place in August with winners and honorable mention essays announced in the last week or so.

In short, the challenge was a contest. There were four writing prompts, which might also be considered categories. I entered two essays, one for each of two prompts. Won nothing. 

Generally Speaking

However, this was a positive experience because:

• I completed an essay I'd started a couple of years ago and revised a second one. Finishing things is always good.
  
• I did this work in a timely fashion.
• My work was published at two more Medium publications, which means that I now have a connection with them and can submit to them again.
• Taking part in the challenge got me two more essays on Medium, and, supposedly, the more you can publish there the more of a following you can build up within that closed community.
• While Medium is a closed community, every time I publish there I can promote the work to the wider world and a few more readers may learn what I do.

What Have You Learned, Gail?

I don't know if I actually learned anything, but I do have some theories about what was going on with the two prompts I submitted for and what the winners and honorable mention writers did that I didn't. 

Were The Judges Looking For A Specific Length? There was a minimum word-length--500 words-- for these prompts. I did meet that. But the winners and honorable mention essays I read were much, much longer. Medium keeps track of how long it takes to read the materials published there. My entry for the Death prompt, Enough, was a four-minute read. Keeper of the Place by Randi Ragan, the winner of the Death prompt, which was also the over all winner, was a fifteen-minute read.  My entry for the Space prompt, What We Did There, was also a four-minute read. The winner of that prompt, The Space Between My Fingers by Meera Vijayann, came in at twelve minutes. A lot of the honorable mentions I read for the Death prompt were lengthy. For the Space prompt, not so much. 

Over the last couple of years, I've become interested in writing and reading both flash fiction and nonfiction. I like tight writing, as both a writer and a reader. With nonfiction and essays, I really want a feel in the first paragraph or two of what I'm dealing with. I'm definitely not a fan of digressions. Or lengthy descriptions.

But there may be a school of thought that argues more material is needed to support and expand upon thoughts. Five hundred words and four minutes of reading may not be enough elaboration. That may have been the thinking with this year's judges, particularly with the Death prompt.

Were The Judges Looking For Specific Subject Matter? That definitely seemed to be the case with the Death essays I was able to read. Or, I should say, skim in most cases, because, you know, they were a little long for me, and there were a lot of them. 

The Death prompt stated "People die, of course, but so do other things. Ideals. Relationships. Jobs. Life phases. Pieces of who we once were. A death isn’t always inherently sad, either; sometimes, it’s a positive step, freeing us from what was weighing us down or allowing us to move forward. Illusions can die. Grudges. Bad habits. Tell us about a death you’ve experienced, for better or worse, and how you marked the loss — whether it was with mourning or celebration." 

The bulk of the finalists that I, as I said, skimmed in this category dealt with the traditional process of someone dying or a survivor dealing with a death. I cannot say that was the case for all of them, because I had I had to stop reading. It was becoming too disturbing. This is supposed to have been the prompt that drew the most entries. It must have been brutal for the judges to read so many of them.

Karo Kujanpaa

My own essay was more of a celebration of someone who had passed, of her family, and of how we will move on without her. There was a lot less pain and suffering than I was seeing in the essays that did well. So putting aside discussion of quality, my essay may not have fit the prompt the way the judges interpreted it.

The Space prompt was far vaguer. "Whether we’re letting our imaginations run wild or focusing on what’s in front of us, our day-to-day lives are defined by space: living space, personal space, outer space. We make space. We claim space. We practice social distancing. We turn spaces into homes, into communities, into refuges, and we forge relationships with others and ourselves within those spaces. We wonder, with varying degrees of skepticism and belief, about the beings that occupy the space beyond our planet. However you define it, tell us a story about a role space has played in your life."

Camilla Sanabria

I really can't say I saw a recurring theme in the Space prompt entries. Topics were all over the place, which is probably a good thing. I can't come up with a theory from reading the ones I read that suggests why my essay didn't fit the prompt for the judges. I can say, though, that my entry has received the fewest views and reads of anything I've published at Medium. The space it deals with is a taekwondo dojang. It's not unusual to hear of people trying martial arts and totally embracing it. It becomes part of their lives and their identities. However, martial arts people may be too small a subset of the world. So, again, putting aside discussion of quality, my Space essay may not attract a big enough reader group, or judge group.

Some Thoughts From Someone Else

Elizabeth Dawber has published, on Medium,  a list of all the winners and the honorable mention writers for this challenge. Her article includes an analysis that addresses, among other things, the issue of the length of the winners. 

Another New Medium Experience

Today I'm trying something new at Medium, I'm going to republish this post there. The point is to both encourage new readers for Original Content and to create more content for me at Medium. 

So I'll see how that works, and if it is worth doing again.

Sickbed Reading

Where I lived for 5 days.

Well, I lost an entire week of my life to an illness that wasn't Covid. I was out of commission for four days, though, and the following two days were up and down. I imagine I'll be napping this afternoon, too. I was sick enough that I even had to give up tweeting virtual author appearances, because I tagged a random guy with the same name as an author involved. I was able to read, but I kept moving back and forth between books. Not a lot of concentration.

Though maybe I do that, anyway.

I did, however, finish some interesting things. 

The Best American Essays 2012 I've had this thing on my Kindle for, I don't know, seven or eight years? Whenever it became available as a deal. I'd read a few of the essays, but it wasn't something I looked forward to getting back to, obviously.

Recently, I've been reading essays on Medium, where I've wondered if essays aren't just a bit different. I find them longer than I'd prefer. Rambling. Not staying on subject. Sometimes more personally focused than I'm interested in reading.

The essays in 2012 were also longer than I'm interested in reading. Sometimes authors will write about something, then relate it to books they've read, which should be enlightening, but... There was one essay about boredom that put me to sleep at least twice one morning on a particularly sick day. I woke up in the night, couldn't get back to sleep, thought, I'll try some more of that boredom essay. Knocked me right out. It was great.

Another essay was of interest to me, because it was about the author's friend who was beautiful. Doesn't sound as if the guy was someone you'd want to know, though. The author veered off into discussions of beauty. I didn't love the essay, but it made me think that maybe I'm not all that interested in beauty as a subject. That's significant because there is a character in 143 Canterbury Road whose beauty is remarked upon. I need to think about that.

Two essays I particularly liked: Killing My Body to Save My Mind by Lauren Slater and Outlaw by Jose Antonio Vargas. Both these essays are very personal. But they stay on task, making them on the short side for these kinds of volumes, and they deal with subjects that I am aware of, but haven't read about over and over again.

I walked away from this book--metaphorically, because I wasn't doing much walking last week--with a question--How do you go about choosing subjects for essays? Things like boredom and beauty or things much more from personal experience?

Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater's Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate by Stephanie V. W. Lucianovic  I started this a couple of months ago, because we have a few truly picky eaters in our family, and it does have a big impact on their lives. My response to this book is interesting, because while with the essays I preferred the ones that were personal, I found this too memoirish for my taste. I was hoping for more help. Maybe there just isn't any.

I'm mentioning this here, because Lucianovic now writes children's books, and next month she has one coming out called The League of Picky Eaters. I don't think I've ever seen this subject in a children's book, though there may be some out there. This one sounds very clever. I've sent a request to NetGalley, though I'm behind on posting about other NetGalley books, so I don't know how this will turn out.

Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake with illustrations by Jon Klassen. This is an example of social media marketing working. Amy Timberlake ended up in my September Virtual Opportunities post, because she has a new Skunk and Badger book out right now, Egg Marks the Spot. While scrolling through available e-books from my library, I recognized her name on the first Skunk and Badger book and borrowed it. So the author and her book series got a reader, because of social media marketing, and now it is getting more social media marketing by way of this blog. 

Somehow I got the impression Skunk and Badger was going to be like Frog and Toad. I wouldn't make the comparison, myself, because I think it's for a much older age group, and is much more sophisticated. Which is not a bad thing. Not bad at all. 

Skunk and Badger are two loners who definitely need each other, though they're not at all alike. The reclusive and studious Badger struggles with coming to grips with the much more outgoing and somewhat chaotic Skunk. They inhabit a world with a village populated by other animals, and they have mail! Also, there are lots of chickens. 

A really lovely book.

The Weekend Writer: New Writers/New Parents

My husband and I recently shared a laugh over the common belief among prepublished expectant mothers and fathers that they'll be able to write a book while on parental leave with a newborn. It was a cruel, insensitive laugh, since we still talk about 'the nightmare of infant care' and can't recall a lot of our sons' early years.

Gail with new baby--not writing

Author Maria Kuznetsova has a moving piece at Catapault about something slightly different. She promoted her debut novel soon after the birth of her first child. Remind me not to plan to do that in my next life.

What makes Kuznetsova's essay so good isn't that it is an account of what happened and what she went through. She also describes how the experience changed her. It changed how she perceives others, how she reads, and how she teaches. Her essay is about change and coming out the other side with something, making it far more meaningful than just "this happened and then this happened and then this happened." 

We often hear that fiction should involve a change. Maybe essays should also.

Oh, also, Weekend Writers, if you're planning to do some major writing or promoting while recovering from the arrival of a new child--give it a second thought.

 

What Does It All Mean? An Essay Possibility.

Many years ago, I bought a new sewing machine. The very first thing I made with it was a dinosaur Halloween costume.

I got another new sewing machine the week before last. The first thing I made with it was a dozen face masks. 

I feel there must be an essay topic in this situation. I'm just not sure what it is.

Yes, I do spend a lot of time on face masks, given that I'm only making them for the extended family. I didn't get an essay out of the time I've been devoting to that, but I did get a humor piece.

An Old Publication I'd Forgotten About

 I was out in the yard this afternoon, clearing storm damage (we had a tropical storm here four days ago), when I recalled a personal essay I'd had published years ago. Hmm, I thought. I wonder if I can find that on-line.

I could! I love you Internet!

The Woodpile as a Status Symbol was published in the Connecticut section of The New York Times back before I knew squat about writing. This was also back in the day when The New York Times had state sections. They were, if I recall correctly, very feature oriented.

This essay is very dated for two reasons:

1. I don't like the tone used regarding women. They seem to be treated as cliched assistants to the male woodsmen and not woods people in their own right who for years spent days in forests lugging wood every autumn and keeping wood stoves running all winter, winter after winter after winter. All I can say is I was young, was hunting for my material (I seem to have already found my voice), and, I suspect, was being imitative with my writing. Today if I were going to write about wood piles, I'd add a little historical research or something. I might go all creative nonfictionish or flash memoir. I wouldn't be so glib.
   
2. 
   I don't have any facts to base this opinion on, but my impression is that burning wood is nowhere near as popular now as it was back when I wrote this essay. I can remember driving up my road after work back then and seeing smoke coming out of one chimney after another. Not so today. However, I have seen circular woodpiles very recently, and we even had one a few years ago. So the people who are still burning wood are still into their woodpiles.

The Woodpile as a Status Symbol is a good example of life experience inspiring writing. I have spent a lot of time cutting, stacking, and burning wood. 

This was my first publication, and I remember being very happy about it. Now I go years--many years--without thinking about it. And when I thought about it today, it was with a dissatisfied, critical eye. 

Hmm. There might be another essay in there.

The Incredible Whiteness of YA

I stumbled upon Psych402, creative nonfiction by Lily Watson in an issue of Longleaf Review. Cannot recall how that happened, but it's an interesting piece about an African American college student's reactions to the YA reading list in one of her courses. It's not so much about the books, more about the discussion of these books that were almost all very white.

I've read three of the books Watson discusses.

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Watson couldn't relate to the characters in this book. As a general rule, I don't feel a need to relate to characters in YA books, because I'm older than mud and that's just not going to happen. But I wasn't a major fan of this book, either. My issue was that it was just women's stories for girls. If the characters had been adults instead of teenagers, it would have been just another women's book. 

The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Evidently there is, as Watson puts it in a footnote, a tragic love story about people named Brad and Patrick in this book. I have no recollection of that. Watson makes a very interesting point about how white depression and black depression are perceived.  What struck me about Wallflower was the lack of adults noticing anything that was going on with these characters. I found it unbelievable that "Over the course of an entire school year no parents noticed anything, not even that their brandy was disappearing faster than it should have been? Charlie has a history of mental illness and ends up seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication. He also has caring parents. They had a child that fragile and never noticed that he'd started drinking and doing drugs? They never even smelled cigarettes on him and realized he was smoking?" 

We Were Liars. This book I actually liked. Watson found it devastating, which I definitely understand. She mentions racism in the book, something that others have noted. I think I noticed it while I was reading the book last year, but I was reading it as a thriller mentor text, that's what I was looking for, and that's what I recall. I was fixated on the ending. If I had all the time in the world, I would read this book over again as a result of reading Watson's essay.

Interesting personal tidbit: Lily Watson attended Wesleyan University here in Connecticut. I live about 40 minutes from there. I also live about 40 minutes from the University of Connecticut. I'm not sure if I've ever driven by the Wesleyan campus. I've been to any number of events at UConn, as well as taking a graduate class there. I am definitely a state university woman.

More Of This Year's Essay Reading

This year I've done a couple of posts on books of essays and other short form writing that I've been reading in support of my 2019 goal to work on short-form writing. (If you are one of my Twitter-followers, you've noticed that I've been posting links to other short-form reading I've been doing nearly every day. You have noticed, right? What am I thinking? Of course, you have.)

Well, today I'm going to do another one of those posts. I chose to read Shauna Niequist's Bread & Wine, A Love Letter To Life Around The Table, With Recipes, because it was a Kindle sale book sometime this past year, it was a book of essays, and it was a book of essays about food. I am interested in trying my hand at writing some essays about eating. Not food writing, which is a totally different thing. I'd have to know more about food than I do and eat better than I do to write about food. I want to write about eating, for reasons I will spare you now.

In Bread & Wine, Neiquist does what I'm interested in doing. She writes about eating, but in relation to something else. In her case, we're talking eating in relation to connecting with others and spirituality/faith. She would probably be described as a Christian writer rather than a food writer (she has written other books that appear to have nothing to do with recipes), and Bread & Wine was published by Zondervan, a Christian publisher. If you enjoy reading about someone living their Christian faith, you'll enjoy this book. If you'd really rather read about food, you'll enjoy this book. Because Neiquist comes across as one of your seriously Christian friends who prays for you but doesn't try to convert you. I will be very surprised if you don't have at least one of those.

What kind of freaked this introvert out about Bread & Wine was not the religious aspects of the book but the number of friends Neiquist has. And how often she gets together to eat with them. And she often gets together to eat with large numbers of them, at once. For a large part of the book, I felt as if there was something wrong with me, because I don't live like that. But by the end, I'd turned around and was thinking, "What is wrong with these people? Don't they ever stay home? How about dinner in front of the TV once in a while folks?" And then I felt better.

The book was definitely a good choice for my purposes.

Gail And Bread

It's been a long time since I've included any cooking pictures in a blog post, but this one involves a book called Bread & Wine, and I used to be a serious bread baker, so I think a photo is appropriate. I've been off gluten for a year and a half now, which has tossed a wrench into my bread baking, though I do have one gluten-free bread machine recipe I make a couple of times a month. Also I am surrounded by wheat-eating philistines who prefer brown-and-serve rolls to bread made in the kitchen. You see why I'm interested in writing about eating? About eating bread, anyway.

So, at Thanksgiving I tried a peanut butter twist recipe. Did not go over well. As one person said, "It's essentially a peanut butter sandwich. Why go to all this work for a peanut butter sandwich?" Yeah? Well, next year they can eat peanut butter on their brown-and-serve rolls!

I put half a pan of these twists out on a rock for the sweet little woodland creatures. The next day a flock of crows came for them. They also took most of the artisan bread I made for Christmas. My giving up gluten is the best thing that ever happened to the local crows.

The Tuscan toast triangles you see to the right of the twists turned out better, by which I mean someone will eat them, though not me. (I do gluten free Tuscan toast.) 

I'm also taking part in Weekend Cooking at Beth Fish Reads today. Haven't done that in a long time, either.

Mmm. Writing about eating. This feels good.

Reading Short Form Work To Support This Year's Goals

I am reading an essay or short story a day this year in support of my first goal for the year, "Work on short-form writing, essays and short stories." You can follow my reading on Twitter. Additionally, I've been able to knock off a couple of short story and essay collections. I'm thinking of this as research, the adult essay/short story equivalent of mentor texts

American Housewife: Stories

I thought a book of short stories called American Housewife would be more...housewifie. Hellen Ellis's short stories are edgie and often unique in subject matter. But I'd say they are more women's stories then housewife stories, more about women's experience than housewives' experiences. Yes, I feel I'm nitpicking, too. I'm sure that if the collection had been called something else, I would have felt differently.

How did this book work as research? The end of the book includes a list of publications where these stories were originally published that I'll be able to check out. Otherwise, I don't know that I experienced any kind of writing revelation reading them.

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life: Essays

Samantha Irby's essays in We Are Never Meeting in Real Life were eye-poppers. These are definitely personal essays in which Irby comes across as funny, self-deprecating, and approachable, just to get started. She is very memorable as a writer, and if I can grab singleton Irby essays to read, I will.

How did this book work as research? Well, my understanding of personal essays is that they involve taking some element from writers' lives and using them to relate to something universal. I don't know if Irby is doing that here, but that may be because her life is so different from mine that I just assume that many of these experiences aren't universal because I haven't lived them. The lesson here, I guess, is that if you're writing something that some of your readers can't relate to, you better be damn good and funny.