A Rebuild Year

Hi Friends,

This year is already a blur, isn’t it? Before I dive into the meat of this newsletter I wanted to share the news up front, because I have some community-focused events coming up and I’d love to see you there.

For hi-desert friends: This Saturday, February 28 my friend Abigail Stewart and I are hosting a meet up for writers in the hi-desert at Out There Bar in Twentynine Palms. There are so many writers in the area, but not a lot of opportunities to connect and just hang out. Come join us from 2 - 4pm on the back patio, meet kindred spirits, and find your people, whether you’re looking for a new writing group, hoping to launch a literary event, or just want to build creative community.

For friends going to AWP or in the Baltimore area: My friend Liz Flyntz and I are really excited to host Writing Our Resistance, a queer, feminist, and otherwise radical happy hour reading and open mic at Leon’s, which is one of the oldest gay bars on the east coast! I’m excited to put together an event that not only brings together some of my favorite writers from all over the country, but focuses on community and connection and just having a nice time during a large conference I find emotionally harrowing. I hope you’ll join us on Thursday, March 3 from 5 - 7pm. Want to read at open mic? Just sign up when you arrive and keep it to 3 minutes. You can RSVP, but it’s not necessary.

And more fun stuff on the horizon! I’m thrilled to be participating in the first Hi-Desert Lo-Fi Lit Weekend taking place March 20 - 22. I’ll be participating on a panel about music writing on Saturday, March 21 at Z Club in Joshua Tree and reading on Sunday, March 22 at the Desert Split Open revival. It’s going to be a fun weekend and a great excuse for friends from around Southern California to plan a visit to the hi-desert!

These events remind me of the centrality of my creative work and community in my life. I feel my creative resolve and momentum has felt difficult to sustain with the work of just living (and working). I feel like my brain has no more space, that my neurons are constantly short circuiting. I have a hard time approaching any project, whether it’s making breakfast, doing laundry, or making revisions to my ever looming essay project, with any kind of methodical attention. Overwhelm seems to be the only constant feeling lately (and the out of control weeds in my yard are not helping) which makes me freeze and then blame myself for freezing.

In so many other times in my life I’ve been able to timebox and pomodoro method and caffeinate myself through in order to balance work, school, social and community time, feeding myself and somehow getting exercise. At almost 45 with one of the most demanding jobs I’ve ever had and in an increasingly dark political situation, I have to realize how I’ve been approaching time is no longer working. I know much of this is not me, but is indicative of a systemic problem, but also,

I need to rethink.

Last year my life came apart in so many ways and while I’ve managed to puzzle a lot of it back together, it also demands rebuilding. I want to be deliberate and intentional. This, I realize, is going to be a process.

In mid-January I briefly gave into the 2016 nostalgia that was circulating around the internet for a few weeks. That internet moment has passed, like so much pop cultural weather, pushed out by more urgent, bigger, more serious moments. At first I was going to write about the dangers and pleasures of nostalgia, but mostly I was thinking, “2016? Really?!” In many ways, 2016 still feels too close to be distant. It still feels very present. There’s no techno nostalgia of the digital cameras of 2006 or the point and shoot film cameras of 1996. It was not a simpler time, and fashion was not better or even distinct. I can’t remember anything about trends or music or fashion in 2016. That’s probably because it was all eclipsed by the election and what came after.

In 2016 my apartment had not burned down. My cat Crackers was still alive and my now deceased cat Biscuit hadn’t yet been born. I was still at the beginning of my tech career. I was still writing my book Riot Woman, which took me seven years and ended up as a much different book than I set out to write. I dyed my hair a pale, millennial pink or other wild, rainbow colors, which required a laborious and expensive double process bleach and dye, which often faded out to an unflattering blonde. Living in the desert was a distant dream of “maybe someday.”

2016 was a turning point.

In 2016 I learned what it is to be a neighbor and take care of my neighbors. Though I had lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn since 2002 I had felt disconnected from the people in my neighborhood. A neighborhood made up of overlapping immigrant communities, from Scandinavian to Puerto Rican, Dominican, Mexican, and Central American, as well as Chinese, I didn’t really interact with many people there, didn’t know them, or their story. I didn’t know who my city council member was or what the community board did. Even though I considered myself an “activist” I hadn’t really pushed myself to connect at the hyper local level.

2016 changed all that. In 2016 I re-learned the meaning of the slogan that I had first heard in the context of environmental awareness and action as a child reading 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth, “Think Globally, Act Locally.” I was briefly paralyzed and then catalyzed by the first election of you-know-who. As a post-colonial and intersectional feminist studies student in undergraduate I had all the theory I needed to understand oppression as an intersection, interlocking systems. But I felt powerless to truly address them, to move from my place of privilege into meaningful action. 2016 pushed me out of my paralysis and perfectionism and I just started trying things. I got off Facebook, except for my neighborhood organizing group, and went to potlucks that were part strategizing, part socializing. I helped to host know your rights potluck dinners for immigrant neighbors in allies homes. I wrote postcards, went to protests, took bystander intervention training and experimented with how to use my skills to create the world I wanted to see.

2016 was when I attended my first artist’s residency, the amazing artist-organized CAMP in the mountains outside of Asheville, North Carolina at the incomparable Azule. It was an absolutely magic week where I got to forget about much of the outside world and really feel what it might be like to dedicated more of my time to my own creativity. It was also then that I first read Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, which had recently been reissued.

Solnit’s thesis is that no conclusion is forgone and that that action is a form of hope that propels us to a future we might be able to imagine, but cannot yet see. A balm and constant re-read in dark times.

Solnit continues to galvanize me and in a recent post on her Meditations in an Emergency blog she reminded readers,

One of the axes I grind regularly is about and against habits of thought and unquestioned assumptions that interfere with clear perception. One habit I see all too often is the assumption that the future will be an extension of some obvious force in the present: that force will continue to enlarge in power and impact or just stay steady. Thus we get the idea that Trumpism will just become an all-encompassing force of authoritarianism and there’s nothing we can do about that … In fact, again and again the forces that matter, sometimes to the point of revolution or transformation, were nonexistent or overlooked or dismissed a few years or decades before…

In 2016 I was still chasing who I wanted to be. I wasn’t yet fully settled into my adult self and trying to force it with my career and romantic relationships, trying to fill in who I thought I should be through outside validation and the choices I thought I “should” make. So when I look back to 2016 I also see someone still insecure, still trying to prove herself instead of just letting herself be. I’m glad there’s aspects of 2016 that can stay in 2016 (and many I wish would have).

This decade has been relentless. My life has turned and turned again since 2016. All of ours have. I don’t have a clear takeaway from this, except that in 2016 I started to have the audacity to really live how I wanted for the next phase of my life, instead of wishing I could. I still had so far to go, but I can see the groundwork was there. It always is.

As I muddle through another rebuild year, I’m thinking about how I often feel momentum and inspiration and sustained in community. I’m reminding myself to reach out, seek collective solutions and support instead of isolation when the overwhelm hits.

So in the spirit of Solnit I remember, nothing is inevitable and we don’t know exactly how all these moments will add up and where they will lead. May our actions this year continue to be a turning point towards hope.

xox,

eleanor

PS. A lovely new support tool for reflection and finding momentum is the Travel Tarot deck, released by Lonely Planet and created by Jeff Hinshaw aka Cosmic Cousins. I talked to Jeff about the process of creating the deck for the Coachella Valley Independent and it was a really wonderful profile to write - a balm in difficult times.

Currently reading: Easy Beauty by Chloe Cooper Jones