Just My Type

Colonics for our neural pathways. Or not.

I am becoming rather peculiar.

To be clear, I’ve always been odd. Most writers are odd. Writing is not normal. I always tell people that if they can be happy without writing, they should not write because people who need to write to be happy are living a weird kind of vicarious existence. The Magritte painting “The Human Condition” sums this up neatly. Do you want to live in the beautiful view, or do you wish to sit inside, recreating it?

But I am getting ODD. And rather quickly. I am so odd that I feel as if I’m a secondary character in someone else’s novel, the quirky, misanthropic neighbor whom a young person eventually will befriend and lure out of the house to go ice-skating or drive bumper cars or eat exotic street food. (I’m really shocked that there is not a movie about a shut-in who learns to love life again by ice skating, driving a bumper car, eating exotic street food. Spec script? Not until the WGA strike is over.)

The first odd thing I started doing was typing a poem every day, inspired by Austin Kleon, whom I know only via Twitter. I pick a poem, preferably a short-ish one, type it on a piece of paper, and then tape that paper into a journal designated for that purpose. (I started by taping them into my regular journal, but it made them bulky and besides, my favorite notebooks are not cheap.) Sometimes they are poems I already know and love. Or I might search for poems by poets familiar to me. Sometimes, poems just fall into my lap. I am particularly indebted to the Tiny Letter, Pome, produced by Matthew Gilbert, and recently back from hiatus.

My friend and fellow Substacker Michael Ruhlman recited this poem at his 2018 wedding to Ann Hood

In 2021, I tried to memorize a poem every week. This lasted for . . . a month? It took so much effort and I wasn’t sure it was worth it. Memorization didn’t deepen my relationship with the poem. But when I started typing poems, I felt my neural passageways go WHOOSH. One day, for example, I was copying William Butler Yeats’s “Easter 1916,” a poem I thought I knew pretty well. But as I typed, I became fixated on one word choice, and I noticed that the source I was using had a link to an essay and the essay was SO SMART and happened to be written by a poet I did not know and her poems were SO GOOD and my brain was suddenly crackling with a dozen small fires. In a good way. Another time, I chose to type Billy Collins’s “Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited” and realized I knew nothing of Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Anthony, so I went down that rabbit hole. Typing also helps me connect to the meter of a poem.

Meanwhile, I passed my qualifying tour at the American Visionary Art Museum last month and I am now allowed to lead tours on my own, although my training continues. At a recent training session, in which docents were asked to present works with an emphasis on technique (as opposed to the artists’ bios) I became fixated on the color pencil work by two vastly different artists, Margaret Munz-Losch and Elizabeth Layton. Six days later, I bought some colored pencils on a whim and began drawing little thumbnail pictures based on photos in my camera. My drawings are, well, not great, but making them feels great.

“Buttons” by Elizabeth Layton because there’s no way I’m sharing one of my drawings

“You get so obsessive about things,” my kid observed as I sat at the table, sketching a picture of her stuffed penguin. I knew this to be true, but I was curious about how they saw it. What was I obsessive about, in their opinion? “Well, you were obsessive about Spelling Bee,” my kid said. I’m still obsessive about Spelling Bee, I said. I just don’t talk about it anymore because everyone in my life made it clear that it was boring AF. (Thank God for my Twitter family, organized by Peter Kramer, who love to bitch about the Bee.)

I am keenly aware that I long have had a reputation for flirtation, not so much with people — I couldn’t flirt my way out of a paper bag — but with pastimes and hobbies. I took voice lessons before my kid was born. I have studied languages, with varying degrees of failure. I took tennis lessons from 2018 to 2022. And I suspended these activities because: a) I had a newborn b) I’m not great at languages and c) I had a bad injury. Still, I often feel like a dilettante for not sticking with things.

And yet — I’ve been unswerving in my commitment to writing: 20 years as a journalist, 26 as a novelist and still going. My exercise habit is a streak of 40-some years; the last time I went a week without serious movement, it was the 1980s and I was on crutches.

These carvings, bought in Mexico for about $5 total in the late ‘80s, are among my most cherished possessions.

My interest in visionary art is rooted in the Mexican folk art I began buying in my 20s because I loved it and I could afford it. As my income improved and my tastes broadened, I began putting together a not-bad collection of American visionary art and even some fine art. So, what am I truly obsessive about, the hobbies I try and abandon, or the interests/passions to which I have been faithful? Also, is a passion not serious just because it ends? Was my kid not serious about Shopkins and American Girl dolls? Are they currently not serious about Sephora? (They spent more at Sephora last month than I spent on colored pencils and typewriter ribbons.)

NARQ as I write on student papers when I teach writing (something I’ve been doing since 1998, FWIW.) Not a rhetorical question. Feel free to respond in the comments with tales of your obsessions and flirtations.

Read/Reading: Ozark Dogs, Eli Cranor; You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith. Windfall, Wendy Corsi Straub.

Listened/Listening: I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy; Keep Moving, Maggie Smith.

Reread: The Marx Brothers at the Movies, Paul D. Zimmerman and Burt Goldblatt.

Me, Me, Me:

“Just One More,” a story inspired by Columbo and Covid, has been long-listed for the CWA short story “dagger” award. Given that it’s the only truly new thing I published in 2022, I’m quite pleased.

Please, pre-order Prom Mom, which received a starred Booklist (“absolutely brilliant) and a darn good Publishers Weekly review.

Last but not least — on May 3, Scribd will publish The Summer of Fall, a very long essay (or very short memoir) that details my very long summer of 2022, a summer so long that it actually started in May and ended in early October. If you use this link, you can get a 60-day free trial at the site. The Summer of Fall is long, personal, sometimes a little poignant but mostly funny, and it features a giant stuffed penguin named Wilbur. What more could you want?

We are all obsessed with Wilbur in my household.