Myriad updates

Lately, I have felt like I’m in an in-between space of some kind. I think part of this is because I’m an academic who would rather have her summers than whatever income might be provided by taking on an extra class, and so my days are (almost) wholly mine. Even when I do have work to attend to (a department chair can never check every last thing off her to-do list), I can schedule most of it in a way that suits me, leaving the rest of my time free for reading and writing.

And, read and write I have. I frequently set my phone’s screen to grayscale and have put time limits on most of the apps so as to be less tempted by its candy colors and siren song. I’ve been deep in the book again (more on that below), and I’ve written proposals that have been accepted to two writers’ conferences: the Blue Ridge Writing & Rhetoric Conference at Radford University and the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia Conference in Wheeling. Then to keep things interesting, I have started working on a novel that’s been brewing in me for a while, plus I took a class in poetry and collage at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning.

I’m also going back through all the posts I’ve made so far on this Substack, so if suddenly the archive seems a bit thin, that’s why. I’ve done this periodically with every personal writing website I’ve ever run, from my very first blog to my time running the blog for the Attachment & Trauma Network, seeing if what I said at the time of writing still constitutes something I would want the world to read. As I work through this process, the archive will repopulate, and hopefully in a way that does not flood your inboxes as though this were new work.

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Finally, before we turn to the paid section of this week’s post, I thought I’d share a short list of recent books I’m reading or have read. If you look at “current” and wonder how I manage to read six books at once, well, I have a perfectly reasonable explanation:1

• The first two titles are my morning reading: before I do anything else, I feed my pets, pour a cup of coffee, and read some poetry and creative nonfiction (essays or memoir).

• Then I’m usually reading something related to my research, either for my day job or for my book-in-progress; that’s the third title on the list. The fourth sort of fits that bill as well, though it also happens to be a beautiful book that’s easy to pick up and peruse for a minute or two—sure beats the heck out of doomscrolling.

• The last two on the list are novels. I try not to read two novels at the same time, but I’m in two book clubs, so sometimes it happens. I can manage it as long as they are different enough that I run no risk of confusing characters, setting, or plot. Trust me, there is no chance of that with these two titles!

• Within Reach by M.J. Iuppa

• How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

• Nightshining: A Memoir in Four Floods by Jennifer Kabat

• Words to Love a Planet: An Illustrated Lexicon of Landscape, People, and Possibility by Ella Frances Sanders

• Whistler by Ann Patchett

• Nuestra parte de noche by Mariana Enriquez

• The Editor by Steven Rowley, recommended to me by a bookseller (audio)

Fiction

• Life: A Love Story by Elizabeth Berg

• Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

• Waiting for the Flood by Alexis Hall (audio)2

• Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro (audio)

• Banyan Moon by Thao Thai (audio)

Non-Fiction

• Flood by Christine Klaus

• Small Fires by Julie Marie Wade

• Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Poetry

• The Natural Order of Things by Donika Kelly

• Love House by Frank X. Walker