Keep on Swimming

Hi, Friends.

I’m back in California and full time work after two intense months of travel and four months of unemployment. When your time is packed and you’ve been doing a lot, it’s easy to forget what happened, but I’m finding it helpful to rewind, remember, slow down, and savor. To aid this remembering, I made a list of all the places I swam this summer:

1. Big Bear Lake, California

2. Yucca Valley High School Pool, California

3. Palm Springs Surf Club, California

4. Descanso Beach, Catalina Island

5. Rockaway Beach, New York

6. Loch Shiel, Glenfinnan, Scotland

7. Seine River, Paris, France

8. Conche des Baleines, Ile de Ré, France

9. My parents’ pool, Pownal, Maine

10. … and a last hurrah Labor Day weekend at Rockaway Beach

When you swim, you get to feel the flow of a place in your body. Each swim was a unique immersion into the contours of a place: From the numbing waters of Loch Shiel, from which I only warmed up after a glass of whiskey by a fireplace at a local inn, to one of the new “pools” in the Seine, where you can feel the river current passing and I marveled at seeing Paris from river level, to the best Pacific ocean swim I’ve ever had at Catalina Island, where the beach was sheltered from the waves and I could just float, to the comforting beauty of the pool at my parents house, which is surrounded by my mom’s gardens and I swam while bright zinnias bobbed in the August breeze. Swimming is a way to absorb the rhythms of a place and feel a part of it, even if those rhythms are simply morning laps at the local pool.

Spending time near the water also had this effect. On a cloudy day in Edinburgh I traced the winding path of the Waters of Leith, half lost, but followed the river until I arrived after almost two hours of walking at the city’s port. On a hot afternoon in Amsterdam I puttered around the canals on a friend of a friend’s boat. On a sunny Sunday I sauntered along the shady banks of the Seine with my sister at her house outside of Paris, a walk we’ve taken together on my visits since I was 14. In Maine on my mother’s birthday I walked the beach at Reid State Park, where I’ve been going in the summer since childhood, watching 10 foot waves stirred up by a hurricane far out in the Atlantic crash on shore.

Unemployment created a portal of time this summer that I was able to step into. Between stressing about not working and looking for work, despite my attempt at a DIY writing residency, I found it difficult to engage deeply in a creative practice and to find any kind of sustained focus. However, traveling, walking, and swimming suited my restless brain perfectly: Moving around, discovering, absorbing, and connecting. The places I went provided the structure and the distance from any sense of my regular routine gave me freedom to explore.

I also took a deep dive into museums where I could. I used to work in museums, so entering them can feel like clocking in if I’m not careful. However, when I’m able to effectively focus, I find that seeing art is not unlike swimming: You immerse yourself in an environment that may be familiar, if it’s a museum you’ve visited many times, or completely fresh and foreign, but overall you know how to navigate.

My museum run started with Andy Goldsworthy at the National Gallery in Scotland, whose conversations about our relationship to art, environment, and impact are understated, stunning, and humbling, an antidote to a world that is too fast, too cruel, and too digital. I saw shows deeply rooted in place and relationships: Agnes Varda’s photographs of her street in Paris at the Musee de Carnavalet (whose permanent collection also boasts a pair of gold earrings depicting the guillotine and Marie Antoinette’s lifeless head); the Nikki de Sainte Phalle and Jean Tinguely exhibit at the Grand Palais, which my friend and I went through twice to see all the sculptures that “animated” (aka moved) and thought about these two artists’ wildly different styles and lifelong relationship; and the the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibit in the empty library space at the Centre Pompidou as they prepare for a 5-year renovation process - my favorite piece was old computer cartels, each with a monitor displaying a video of a person reading, writing, or studying. I went to see the sumptuous couture of Worth at the Petite Palais with a friend who sews costumes for the Comedie Francaise and got a lesson in fabrics and stitching, as well as a window in a past gilded age. The final museum I visited was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where I took in the still lives, portraits, and landscapes that seem to glow from within and speak quiet volumes about the politics, wealth, and history behind them. Like swimming, I emerged from these shows feeling saturated and tired, but refreshed.

This trip, and time, was not so much one of creating, but of filling my cup which had felt depleted from the stress of my last job, unemployment, and (waves hands) the ongoing state of the world. I was also processing the grief of my beloved cat Biscuit’s sudden departure from this place of existence in July. The weeks I spent in Scotland, France, Amsterdam, Maine, and New York visiting friends, family, and traveling on my own enabled a time for me to absorb, and acquaint myself with who I am, outside of work, outside of productivity, and outside the context of the United States, though what’s happening here is reflected everywhere. It was an incredible privilege to take a step back and the kind of break I needed to return to bring refreshed attention to my projects.

Now, back home, I find myself craving structure. I have a new job working with people in time zones spanning the west coast to Europe, so my days start very early, but I’m working to find the momentum of writing and revising my next book-length project. Creating containers of time in which to work helps me be more creative, and I am incredibly grateful to not have the stress of finding employment hanging over my head. Like many, fall will always feel like back to school - time for new pencils and fresh projects - and just the other night I had a dream that I was back at Queens College with my fellow MFA students, greeting each other in the hallways and talking about what we’re working on.

To cap off this summer, I’m proud to announce that my band Skirting released our new EP, “Wants and Needs,” recorded, mixed, and mastered by the talented Matt Shane this spring in Brooklyn. It’s a collection of four songs that I absolutely love. For me these songs explore creativity and survival in late capitalism, the insidiousness grotesque of the society we live in, and finding wild, loving, and joyful moments within it all. It’s a tribute to the music we all love, from post-punk and Riot-Grrrl to 90s alt-rock and beyond.

We write Skirting songs as a group and the process of bringing together scraps of melodies, a few lyrics, an infectious drumbeat, and a punchy bassline into a full-fledged song feels like alchemy. To be able to share it with you, and to have these songs reach their potential under Matt’s ear, is really a pleasure. It’s available exclusively on bandcamp for the next month before we release it on streaming, and every dollar we raise selling the EP will go towards pressing vinyl. Thank you for listening!

It’s so important to keep making art, keep connecting, and keep building communities that are defiant, loving, create space for the most marginalized, and stand up to those in power who are hell bent on destroying this world and everyone in it for their own gain. For desert friends, I hope that you will join me and the unstoppable Susan Rukeyser for a feminist reading and open mic at the Flamingo Heights Community Center on Saturday, October 11th during Banned Books Week. We’ll be celebrating the freedom to read and the opening of the center’s Little Free Library, so please bring a book or two for a community book exchange!

Where are you finding brave community this fall? What fresh projects are you tackling? Or what existing projects are you tackling with a fresh mindset? How do you create containers of time for your creative work, especially in a violent and noisy world?

xox,

eleanor

Currently Reading: Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton