I didn’t write a newsletter last month. Can I blame the weather? March came and went in topsy-turvy fashion this year, in like a lamb and out like a lion, rough and roaring. I long for springlike temperatures and gentle rain. Will April showers bring May flowers? Who knows? Weather aphorisms don’t hold these days.
Last week brought dry heat and readings in the high 80s. Like migratory birds ahead of schedule, my summertime habits arrived early this year. I broke out the sun hat and the UV-protection hoodie and timed dog walks for cooler, shadier times of day. I’ve been refreshing the bird bath morning and evening. (Blame the robins, who are messy and enthusiastic bathers.) And I’ve been collecting downed tree branches from neighborhood sidewalks and adding them to the garden, part of an ongoing project to make our rowhouse yard a mini-urban oasis for birds, insects, and native plants (not to mention humans who also need sanctuary from the state of the world). Luckily we have tolerant neighbors and no HOA to worry about.
Every little bit helps, as the ecologist Douglas Tallamy says. If you don’t know Tallamy’s work on rewilding and the concept of the Homegrown National Park, remedy that now. His approach is practical and wise, and steers away from the precipice of ecological despair. Also a lovely read: the work of Margaret Renkl, who lights up the NYT opinion pages with essays like this one about why her Nashville yard still has fireflies (take a guess) when they’ve disappeared from her neighbors’ spaces.
And today’s it’s in the low 60s, and the trees have taken on that brilliant green that signals spring. I’ll enjoy it while I can.
Look what arrived in the mail recently: the Chinese-language edition of CLUTTER! (Also featured in this photo: our recently installed built-in bookshelves, a long-held dream realized. I am ecstatic.)
If you’ve read and enjoyed Clutter, in English or in Chinese, I’d love it if you would take a moment and give it a shout-out on Goodreads or that Bezos site or StoryGraph or wherever you post about your bookish consumption.
What I’ve been working on lately:
—for the Washington Post (long live Book World!), I wrote about The American Way: A True Story of Nazi Escape, Superman, and Marilyn Monroe by Helene Stapinski and Bonnie Siegler. It’s as exciting and action-packed as the title would have you believe. From my review:
It’s a fast-moving American epic with a cast of refugees and starlets, publishers and bootleggers, comic-book creators and sports legends. As it follows them before, during and after World War II, the story leaps newsreel-style from Berlin to New York to Hollywood to Ohio to Paris and back to New York.
—I’ve got my humanities-reporter hat on this month, doing interviews for a feature I can’t talk about yet but that will be out this summer. It’s been fun! I’ve missed having a professional excuse to people about cool literary-historical stuff. More, please.
—I hit a panic wall on the novel and set it aside for a bit while I collect my nerves. (Part of being a working writer is being honest about when things get bumpy.) My book-editing has ramped up again, so I have that to keep me on track in the meantime.
—My reading’s been all over the place this year, which is how I like it. A partial list: The Children of Green Knowe by L.M. Boston (a reread of a childhood classic); Leigh Bardugo’s dark-academic hit Ninth House; The Hero of This Book, a dead-mother book by Elizabeth McCracken that I didn’t think I was ready for but loved; and Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, which I only just managed to squeeze in before the cold weather departed. I’ve done mini-writeups of these and other recent reads on my Instagram feed.
I also encountered my first DNF (did not finish) book of the year. If you need permission to set aside a book that’s not working for you—this can be hard if you, like me, are the dutiful-reader type—consider it granted. Find a book that speaks to you instead.
A note about AI (ugh, yikes, I know): This spring, the air has been thick with anxiety and speculation about ChatGPT/LLM (large language models) and their promise and perils. I’m not ready to give all my attention to our new AI research assistants/competitors/replacements/overlords—the tech and the commentary about it are progressing at a too-furious pace, and I don’t think I’d emerge from that particular rabbit hole if I tumbled down it—but it also feels unwise to ignore them. For two wildly different takes, check out 1) Matt Kirschenbaum’s bracing/terrifying textpocalypse jeremiad in the Atlantic and 2) this NYT primer on how to talk to kids about AI, which honestly would work for grownups new to the subject as well. Now back to the story file and the garden.
But before I go, I want to share a pic of our cat Charlie, who died unexpectedly last month at the age of 13. My family adopted her and her foster sibling/frenemy Darcy as wee kittens. Kidney disease stole Darcy from us in the fall of 2020, but Charlie persevered on in her quiet and affectionate way. The last couple of years, she spent a lot of time hiding from the attentions of an overly enthusiastic lab/beagle, but she always adored her humans, and loved to settle in with us to watch TV or listen to music. She’d been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism but was doing well, we thought, on medication. A shock, then, when she had a crisis on a Monday morning and was gone in an hour. This kind of loss always arrives as a shock, even when you know it’s coming, but in this case we didn’t.
My husband and I have had seven cats in our time together; this is the first time in 30 years we haven’t had a feline family member living with us. I don’t think Charlie will be the last—I hope she won’t—but right now doesn’t feel like the time to add another creature to the household.
RIP, furry friend. Thanks for all the love.
Hope you and yours—furry, scaly, human, botanical—are well.
Cheers,
Jen
*I’ve run out of clever headlines that don’t feel like retreads.