I'm tired. I'm a little worried, despite still believing everything will work out. I had a job interview on Saturday, but I don't think I got it. I haven't heard anything. I'm a little disappointed, too: I had hoped to be able to take a course here, starting in the fall, but because you sign up for full years of study at British universities and not terms, the one I had my heart set on is not legally viable. There's a host of other options I can look into, of course, but the thing that made this one so perfect, aside from the actual things I'd've been studying, is that it would have actually have been a first year of uni in credits.
Right now, though, I’ve got my cosy sweater and a quilt. I’ve got tea, and spinach & chickpea soup, and walnut cake for later. I’ve got Dylan Thomas, and Alan Garner if I finish him, and Seth Lakeman. I’m in lazy, cozy, easy, soulfood mode.
On the way home today my umbrella got turned inside out and in the few moments it took me to right it I went from vaguely dry to absolutely soaked. I squelched and shivered (it is cold for July - I had been worried it would be too hot!) myself the rest of the way to a hot shower and an hour with my notebook that turned into two-and-then-some. I've been forcing myself to spend at least six hours every day doing nothing but jobhunting. I've also been trying to force myself to get fuller nights of sleep. It's paid off in at least one way: as Eliot once said, having a limited amount of time in which to write leads to discipline in doing so. You don't faff about as much. I'm writing a lot right now. In the evenings, when I come home. A lot of it in notebooks, a lot of it probably never to be shared, never mind published, a lot of it more about experiments in figuring out my writing, my ideas, and my thoughts around it than actually producing something whole, but there is, too, quite a bit that will work its way into other things. Honestly, even if nothing ever comes of it, it's still what keeps me sane, and most days it's enough of a gift just to have this part of my voice back.
Vaguely relatedly, I'd really like to share something. It's this story:
The wolves have eaten people. Why be coy about it? Not a lot of people. But it’s happened. As near as anyone can figure, the first one they ate was a Russian girl named Yelena. They surrounded her and she stood very still, so as not to startle them. Finally, she said: “I’m lonely”—it’s weird but you tell the wolves things, sometimes. You can’t help it, all these old wounds come open and suddenly you’re confessing to a wolf who never says anything back. She said: “I’m lonely,” and they ate her in the street. They didn’t leave any blood. They’re fastidious like that. Since then, I know of about four or five others, and well, that’s just not enough to really scare people. Obviously, you’ll be special, they’ll look at you with those huge eyes and you’ll understand something about each other, about the tundra and blood and Brooklyn and winter, and they’ll mark you but pass you by. For most of us that’s just what happens. My friend Daniel got eaten, though. It’s surprising how you can get used to that. I don’t know what he said to them. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know Daniel that well.
This excerpt is amazing and beautiful and just the thing on a cold rainy evening all on its own, and I knew from it that unless the author completely let me down I was going to love the story, and then I clicked through, and…
This story? Is written by Catherynne Valente. Only one of my absolute favourite writers not only working right now but ever. And even though some of her works resonate differently for me, she has never ever let me down (in what I’ve read, which is not all, but I have faith).
This story does more than just not let me down. One of the reasons I fell in love with Valente is that she so often seems to write stories tailor-made for me, for my obsessions. (There was Palimpsest, with its trains and its maps and its dream cities and its bees, for instance.) I feel like I was meant to read this tonight, here, curled up in my grey wool and drinking tea and thinking long and hard about this city.
This is a story by Catherynne Valente about Brooklyn and the huge, uncanny wolves that live there, and a girl that is very much not Little Red Hood. It is about cities and the villages and wildernesses within them, about the way some of us are called to them, and how we don’t belong until we do (or at least we don’t belong anywhere else, either), about fashion and self-presentation and the feeling of being looked at, about tribes, about how we move apart and fall together. (I won’t tell you any more, for fear of ruining it, but please, if you read one story on the internet this month, let it be this one.) It is, on some level, exactly what I needed to read right now.
(And I mean, well, is it any surprise that a story like this would mean a lot to me?)
This story? Is written by Catherynne Valente. Only one of my absolute favourite writers not only working right now but ever. And even though some of her works resonate differently for me, she has never ever let me down (in what I’ve read, which is not all, but I have faith).
This story does more than just not let me down. One of the reasons I fell in love with Valente is that she so often seems to write stories tailor-made for me, for my obsessions. (There was Palimpsest, with its trains and its maps and its dream cities and its bees, for instance.) I feel like I was meant to read this tonight, here, curled up in my grey wool and drinking tea and thinking long and hard about this city.
This is a story by Catherynne Valente about Brooklyn and the huge, uncanny wolves that live there, and a girl that is very much not Little Red Hood. It is about cities and the villages and wildernesses within them, about the way some of us are called to them, and how we don’t belong until we do (or at least we don’t belong anywhere else, either), about fashion and self-presentation and the feeling of being looked at, about tribes, about how we move apart and fall together. (I won’t tell you any more, for fear of ruining it, but please, if you read one story on the internet this month, let it be this one.) It is, on some level, exactly what I needed to read right now.
(And I mean, well, is it any surprise that a story like this would mean a lot to me?)
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