Hello friends -
I haven’t written to you since July, when the trees were flush with canopy. I’ve been hesitant to use my newsletter as a space for experimentation, and at the same time I’ve been wanting to “do more with my writing.”
And writers write, say the writers. It’s one thing to do morning pages and document my days in a journal, but reaching out to an audience gives writing more shape, more meaning, more dimension. As my friend Peter wrote in the opening of his gorgeous new record:
No one said piano, but I’m bored
No one said hey Peter, grab a pen and press record
If I’m pushing through the cone of somebody’s speaker, I’ve made my reward
In my world, this sounds more prosaic: writers need readers and so here we are. I am going to use this space to experiment, play around and explore creative practice and process.
I’m trying to make it without expectations or a plan, because while I do love a plan, planning often gets me stuck. I can’t make promises about when notes will hit your inbox. I’m just going to make, release, repeat (the newsletter’s new name). Thanks to my friend Heather, Maria Popova, and Carl Jung for inching me toward the next right thing this week.
In the delightful gem of a movie, Throw Momma From the Train, Billy Crystal’s character Larry plays a frustrated writer who teaches his students that writers write, always - even as he’s melting down because can’t find the right descriptor for “the night” in the first sentence of the novel he’s trying to write.
As an aside, I would have sent Larry to Edith Wharton, whose sentence in The House of Mirth, “The night was soft and persuasive” will never leave my mind. Of course I’ll keep reading! I must see who succumbs to persuasion! And let’s just sit with that description for a bit and imagine what else could unfold on a soft and persuasive night. Right? It’s perfection.
Between Billy and Edith there’s some good tension: Be precise with words. Pick the best ones for the job. But don’t let the quest for perfection keep you from doing anything at all. Whether it’s finding the right piece of language or knowing where a project is heading, the way forward is out of your head and onto the page, sketchpad, lump of clay - whatever your mode.
So yeah, whether I channel Wharton or Crystal, I hope you’ll stick with me. While I haven’t been newsletter-ing, I’ve been journaling so much lately (and writing letters! by hand! and mailing them! thank you penpal!), which gives the rubble pile of unstrung ideas in my head a place to go.
Now I’m trying to sift and thread some stuff together, starting with a series of vignettes where I’m practicing using description to evoke a sense of place. I’ll send the first one soon. It’s about my current favorite excursion in the City of Boston and what’s possible in urban public spaces when they’re designed to invite us in rather than separate or exclude us.
Gold star for reading, thank you :)
XO
Leigh
ps. Can’t forget the poem.
Winter Trees, by William Carlos Williams
All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.
Literally said, "YAY!" out loud as this landed in my inbox. Welcome back.