Things That Make Me Happy

and I hope make you happy, too!

My Initials in Gum

A former student send me a photo of a very disgusting kind of graffiti she encountered in an alley in Portland. So first off, THIS. This makes me happy. And now the question: WHY does this make me happy? Because I am a narcissist? Because I love turquoise? Your guess is as good as mine. Comments welcome below.

Summer Reading!

We are here, y’all, this season of books. Here’s this lovely painting by Milton Avery I encountered last summer in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, called, you guessed it, Summer Reading.

Looking for a good book rec? I just finished Rebecca Makkai’s novel, I Have Some Questions for You, about a 40ish woman who teaches podcasting and gets a short-term gig at the boarding school she attended as a teen, which prods her to revisit a murder that took place when she was a student. I just looked it up on Amazon (though you should buy it at your local indie!) to get the link for you and was surprised to see it’s average is only 4 stars—I thought it was very compelling, both a sort-of-murder-mystery and a story of reckoning with the past.

Writerly Advice from Unlikely Places (My Nike+ Run App)

Whenever I head out for a run, I open an app on my phone that keeps track of my mileage.  At every mile, the app tells me my pace and distance, which is sometimes useful, but the part that I like the most is when I’ve finished my run and I hit the “end” button.  Then a voice comes on, one of the Nike+ run coaches, sending me some words of praise—and who doesn’t like praise—words that are generic as a fortune cookie but, in the same ways that a fortune cookie always seems to apply, applies.  The last time I ended my run I heard, “Hey!  Coach Sally here from Nike Plus Run Club!  Way to get out there today!  Think of this run like change I the piggy bank.  It will all pay off when it’s time to cash in.” 

On reason running feels so good its that it’s the opposite of writing.  You can clearly see your progress, your accomplishment—especially when your app records your every step. To the contrary, writing has no such linear progress. There are days (I seem to be having a lot of them lately) when nothing interesting is coming from my hands onto the paper. I want to get out of the chair.  These hours I spend trying and thinking and reading—all that activity seems so inefficient. There’s nothing tangible to show for it. So I’m trying to take a cue from Coach Sally. The effort, while invisible,  is change in the piggy bank.  And one of these days surely it will be time to cash in—to write something amazing I hope, made possible but these seemingly unproductive hours—and these small change mornings will payoff.  Ka-Ching.

(The photo above shows my May stats for my Nike+ run app—though that month is better than they usually are in terms of miles clocked, because the running paths were amazing! We were in Hawaii! No fooling! We renewed our vows on the beach to celebrate our 25th anniversary. I highly recommend 1. running in Hawaii, 2. Renewing your vows, 3. Being married to Tommy for 25 years.)

The Moth

My pal, the poet Ann Fisher-Wirth, (whose fab new book Paradise is Jagged was just pubbed by Terrapin Press) asked me to tell y’all how I got involved in telling a story for The Moth.

It started with a phone call from Catherine Burns, who is the Moth’s longtime artistic director. (Every story teller works with a different director, but I think I got the best one 😘). She told me she liked my work (which I always find hard to believe—it makes me want to grill the person just so I can say, “Bullshit! You’ve never read me,” though I’m aware that is a strange reaction and really it would be much nicer to smile and say thanks, so I do). And she told me she thought I was a good story teller, and would I like to tell her a story? I would like that. We agreed on a time a few days hence. Then she called me back, and I told her a story on the phone. I figured if she didn’t like it, I had a few more in my back pocket, but she did like it, got love her. So then she asked me to tell it again, and I did, and we talked about shaping it and trimming it down to 12 minutes. Twice more she’d call me on the phone and I’ll tell her the new version of the story, and once I told it to her colleague, and finally we were satisfied (or Catherine was—I still thought I was heading for a mortifying fail). Then I flew out to NYC (the Mainstage show was at NYU) and we had a rehearsal in which I met the other story tellers—there were 5 of us. Everyone had a different path to getting on The Moth. My new friend Kelli Dunham is a comedian and story teller, and she’d worked her way up by winning story slams in smaller venues. (Her story will blow your mind when you hear it, but our show won’t be aired until maybe next year.). Another very cool story teller, Dr. Ian Kerr, is a whale biologist—his story was amazing—and he got on the Moth by using their pitch line—so if you’re thinking about giving it a try, you too can follow this link and tell a brief story because they actually do listen to those!

When I have a link to the podcast, I’ll share it. Meanwhile, I’ll mention that in preparation for the MainStage event, I read this book, How to Tell a Story, put together by The Moth directors, and found it pretty helpful.

It’s better in audio because you get to hear the clips of the different story tellers. Get the audio version! You can do that through Libro and designate your local indie and they will get the profit.

The night of the show was magical, thanks to the prep by The Moth staff and the loving audience who came ready to laugh and affirm. And thanks to my little cheering section—several old friends from The University of Notre Dame, where I got my B.A., a friend from FaceBook, and 4 beloved NY cousins. When I was freaking out with nerves backstage in the green room (the auditorium holds 850!) I spotted the monitor and could see my honey, Tommy, and my cousins Johnny and Diana Fennelly and Tommy and Kathleen Fennelly, all happy and visiting and excited to support me. It helped. Here is my ninja photo I took by photographing the monitor, with them unaware:

It was a really beautiful evening. I’m so glad I took the chance to fail.

Can You Believe I Got to Live Here?

In 2016, my husband had a fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin, and we got to spend the semester there with out three kids. It was amazing in so many ways—the AAB folks were incredible. The other fellows (10 of them) were brilliant intellectuals, I mean seriously BIG BRAINS. We got to live in this amazing villa, and our kids—small town kids from Mississippi—got to take the S-Bahn to the International school. All of it was too dreamy to even be real.

A funny thing about memory—it chooses its own subjects. Which is a way of saying that, in the years since, what I seem to remember about that time is not the brainy discussions at 3-course dinners, but one strange small girl I met while volunteering with refugees. I decided that if I kept thinking of this girl—whom I probably spent less than an hour with—I needed to figure out why. This short essay is the result.

When Mississippi Is So Hot you Want to Pluck Out Your Eyeballs, I’m Teaching Memoir Writing in Maine!

Come join me July 17-21 in beautiful Rockport. Everyone who’s gone to a class here says it’s amazing. So excited for Build Me a Hummingbird of Words: How to Distill Your Life in a Flash! Yay. Class will be super small—as in 4-5 people—so lots of love for all, and if you’re a former student of mine, please spread the word to your people! If you know, you know. ❤️

My Memory Sucks

You might remember my last newsletter talked about Mary Karr’s writing schedule, and how I fall short. I mentioned how much I adore Mary Karr, though we’d never met IRL. Well . . . I heard from my friend, the talented writer Susan Cushman from Memphis, who wrote, “Just read your newsletter, and when I got to the part where you wrote that you never met Mary Karr IRL, I guess that means ‘In Real Life,’ right?. I've got a picture of the two of you together at Off Square Books in 2010, in this blog post:

https://susancushman.com/lit-accommodating-joy/

So apparently I’m a big fat liar. You should not believe anything I write here. But thanks for reading. Happy summer, you beautiful people. We made it.