What to Read at the End of the World, November Gloom, and the Benefits of Waiting

November Gloom and Conspiracy Theories

Greetings from early November in Seattle – that’s my red maple with a little brief flash on sunlight between the glooms. The electricity went out Thursday night for about five hours, a reminder that the windstorm season is back. Tomorrow we’ll turn back the clocks, and darkness in the afternoon will start at about 5 PM – and get worse from there, until next year. (No wonder so many of us start putting up Christmas lights early in November – we literally need the lights!) The news last night – another shooting, this time in Florida, and our own Seattle downtown had a stabbing incident – was not good, either. I’ve already voted, but the political ads keep running. I hope you are planning to vote on Tuesday (or before, if your state allows it.) We need some new leadership, some hopeful voices in this country.
I have a bit of a cold I can’t shake so even though there are two poetry events (one of friends at Open Books, the other the Jack Straw reading at Seattle’s beautiful downtown library, I am going to stay in and read this morning, seasonally appropriately in their melancholy. I’m eight chapters into the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore, his homage to Gatsby, and so far it has a lot of melancholy and romantic notions of the lonely (ahem, male) artist who hides away in the mountains. I’m also reading Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, which contains a lot of reminders that the free press has been threatened by the government and that “fake news” has been around since at least the fifties. The racist and sexist history of The Paris Review is pretty shocking (like, four interviews with African-American writers in about fifty years of publishing, and women being considered as nothing more than typists and volunteers, not writers. Charming. Sylvia Plath, you were not being paranoid – the system was against you!) Also, a reminder of the importance of a free press as an essential part of any democracy. I guess I was a little shocked at how many book prizes were given out because the government wanted those books to be prestigious and make America look good, the publishing history of Dr. Zhivago, and how many poets and literary magazines and writing programs were involved in government sponsorship/censorship, CIA recruitment, etc.   On the other hand, a kid who grows up in a “Secret City” who knows her phone lines are tapped when she’s seven years old is never too surprised by government conspiracies, right?

What to Read When the World is Ending – The Rumpus

Now, a little happy news…thank you to The Rumpus for including my book Field Guide to the End of the World in their feature “What to Read When the World is Ending.”  This was definitely a nice pick me up in the November, and also seems extremely seasonally (and mood-wise) appropriate – I’m ready to read the books on the list for sure. Here’s a little clip about my book from The Rumpus:

One last spooky pic of me dressed as Poe’s “The Raven” on Halloween – a big hit with the kids, by the way!

The Benefits of Waiting

Generally I am an impatient person – you may have noticed that tone in some of my blog posts. I’m in a hurry to get my next book published, for researchers to find a cure for MS, for a better government in America (and elsewhere – whew, a LOT of fascism is happening around the world right now – feeling very pre-WW-II-y out there). But I was just musing on the benefits, sometimes, of waiting. The autumn months, which involve more hibernation and inevitable postponements due to colds and flus and bad weather. Sometimes waiting means you are able to gather more information – like getting a second opinion before starting a drastic chemo med, for instance, or maybe getting a rejection from one press means you end up discovering a new and different press that might be a better fit for your book. Even waiting for the lights to come back on, like we had to a couple of nights ago, can be seen as an opportunity to spend time being quiet and not being so goal-oriented.

I feel like I don’t talk about the benefits of holding off on things here most of the time – because of my health issues, I’m probably more keenly aware that mortality means we don’t have limitless time, so I’m mostly a hurry-up-get-it-done girl. But faster isn’t always better. Your first solution may not be the best one. And taking it slow can mean the difference between choosing the right thing and the most expedient.

Sylvia meets The Raven

One thing Murakami isn’t wrong about – sometimes spending time alone (in an isolated cabin in the mountains or no) can help us confront issues that have been bothering us, bust through any kind of artistic block, or spend time getting better at anything from perfecting a recipe to a novel. I’m spending time working on my sixth poetry manuscript before I send it out again, catching up on the very tall list of “to-read” books, and reading up on the latest MS research. I may be missing out – I’m frustrated I haven’t been able to take advantage of the many art and poetry events in Seattle recently – but the quiet rain is the best thing for revisions, reading, and, let’s face it, getting some extra sleep to fight off autumn colds and flus.

Sylvia illustrating what happens when we get overwhelmed by our “to-read” piles.

So if you are forced to stay indoors this weekend against your will, think of it as a time to rest, recharge, and revisit the benefits of waiting. And finally shorten that “to-read” stack!