Awaiting Spring Magic
I’ve been shuffling a certain stack of things on and off the glass-top coffee table for the past two months: a box of 5x7 envelopes, several pages of stamps, a sleeve of colored pens, and my pile of unsigned Christmas cards. Okay, you got me: New Year’s Cards. Fine. Valentine’s Day cards. Except… now it’s March. And I clearly overpurchased from my print guy.
A while back, I blogged about holiday cards as a way to keep in touch with people I love but don’t have regular contact with. I’ve lived in a lot of places. And I’m not great at social media (ask my coworkers at the liquor store how often I lament the sorry state of my Twitter presence). If anything, I’ve told myself, I can use the annual print mailer [holdover language from my nonprofit communications days] to spark an infusion of traffic to my blog! This blog, that I haven’t posted on in months. Whoops.
So the beginning of 2024 has been a little hectic. The US is funding genocide in Palestine. I spent the entire month of February hyper-focused on prepping an application for the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, which feels ridiculous, but if I don’t believe in the audacity and relevance of my writing, who will? The daffodils are just beginning to bud out in our front yard, and it snowed today. That’s March in Colorado for you. I’ve gotten a spate of lit mag ACCEPTANCES for a welcome change (keep up with those on my PUBLICATIONS page!), and it’s almost time to clean off my back porch table and start working from my outdoor office.
I’ve been watercoloring and reading poems. I’ve been clinging to words as a portal to wonder, as a way of staying alive to the world in all of its splintered beauty. I walk to work and I marvel at the chipped facade of the Flatirons and I wait for Daylight Savings Time to extend the days.
I haven’t really known what to do with this blog since I’ve started taking my writing more seriously. Anything I’m going to submit to a literary magazine has to be “previously unpublished,” even in regards to my podunk personal website—this island on the internet that I figure can only be found if you’ve been here before, the digital equivalent of Pirates of the Caribbean’s Isla de la Muerta. When I post here, consider it collected signs of life, ephemera dredged from the process.
I’ve been filling my latest literary notebook with quotes from Book Five of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autofictional novel, My Struggle. I can’t condone his choice of title, but I get the hype about these books. His prose is so immersive it’s hypnotizing: 225 pages and he barely breaks the continuous narration for more than four hours at a time, even when our protagonist is blackout drunk. Last March, my beloved and brilliant thesis advisor, Claire Dederer, told me to start with Book Five. “It’s all about shame,” she said. “That’s your jam, right?”
“This was all I thought about,” protagonist Karl Ove muses, “and the power in it was immense, it dragged me down to a place inside myself I hadn’t been and hadn’t known existed. If I could throw a glass at Yngve’s face what else was I capable of? There was something in me I couldn’t control, and it was terrible: if I couldn’t trust myself who could I trust?” — My Struggle, Book Five, p 256
How to pin down this season? Toting around that gigantic book. Eating blueberries on the winter-dead grass during my lunch break. Early mornings. Paying attention to the sky. Long neighborhood walks and cold fingers. We’ll see what magic spring brings.
