August Rain, the Last Days of Lavender and Bobcats, Considering the Female Midlife Crisis Novel, and When You Know a Manuscript is Ready

Sunflowers and Blue Skies

August Rain and the Last Days of Lavender and Bobcats

It’s been a rainy, cold week that reminds us again fall is on its way. For the pictures today, they were mostly taken on the one sunny day we had! But I liked the return of the rain, and so did my garden, mostly (I lost a couple of dahlias that snapped under the weight of the rain). We did have a brief visit from an adult bobcat, and I snapped a couple of shots of hummingbirds and goldfinches, but the birds are getting ready to molt and/or migrate. Fall/winter/spring here in the Pacific Northwest all bring out different wildlife and beauty, but it’s hard to not be a little sad about the flowers winding down and the swallows and Rufous hummingbirds leaving.

The Lavender Garden down the street is closing for the year on the last day of August, so we’ve been trying to get out when it’s nice to enjoy the last week of sunflowers, dahlias, and lavender. A pumpkin farm in roughly the same location will open up in about a month, so can’t wait for that. We also stopped by a local winery—but here’s a funny thing—three places we tried to go today were “closed for private events,” including the Seattle Zoo. Sometimes having a lot of millionaires (and 15 billionaires) in your town is kind of a bummer, because if you’re not in the 1 percent, everything is closed to you. I can’t afford to buy out a zoo or a winery on the only sunny day of the week at the end of summer! And there are three new snow leopard cubs I’m dying to see. (And if I was disappointed, imagine all the children parents brought to the zoo today only to find “closed for private event” at the door. They also closed down the main bridge out of the East side over the water for construction (which they’ve been doing since, oh, no exaggeration, 2008.) So we stayed around Woodinville. Sometimes the universe says “stay where you are!” LOL. Anyway, we did walk around and enjoy the sunshine, even if we couldn’t leave the area, so can’t really complain, can I?

I’ve been trying to get back to a regular sleep schedule (who knew sleep at night could be this elusive?), but I’ve been spending my nighttime awake hours reading. I’m still a little under the weather too, so spending time under the covers while it’s raining outside is okay. At the same time, I’ve been struggling with problems with my web site, for unknown reasons. I wish I could reboot my body to fix things as easily as easily as rebooting a server. Anyway, this is the bobcat visit below.

Considering the Female Midlife Crisis Novel

When I wake up from a nap…Charlotte

Speaking of bodily reboots, I’m thinking about the female midlife crisis novel/memoir/autofiction, which seems to be everywhere right now. Maybe there’s also something in the air with the Republican animosity towards “childless cat women” and “women’s bodily autonomy” but it’s sort of a counterpoint to decades (and centuries) of men’s midlife crisis books, too. Miranda July’s All Fours is all the critics are talking about, and they’re like “a novel about perimenopause for the first time ever!” which is definitely not true, because you could consider some of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing’s books that dealt with similar subject matter, and I know Lesley Wheeler wrote a fascinating book about the subject that didn’t get enough attention called Unbecoming that came out about year or so ago. (Totally worth reading and much more fun than some of the other books I’ve read!) Also read Liars by Sarah Manguso, which belongs in the same category and came out recently, but I could also include Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful and Sabrina Orah Mark’s fairy-tale autofiction/memoir book Happily. I mean, not all of these books are exactly the same, but they circle around some of the same subject matter – women at midlife reconsidering being a wife and/or mother, dealing with lack of fulfillment in their work and home lives, reckoning with their achievements, illnesses, choices, etc. All Fours and Liars both talk way more about masturbation and sex and other bodily functions, maybe (but probably not more than Doris Lessing?) but this has been something that’s been a palpable movement in the world of memoir and literary fiction. A LOT of these books seem somewhat depressing to me—the subject matter especially of terrible husbands who cheat, then leave, but it turns out they were always terrible—not empowering, which is what I guess I would like to see instead? But hey, these things take time. The critics are right that this kind of novel is sort of…novel in the world of midlife crisis memoirs and novels. But can a woman’s midlife and perimenopause/menopause be an empowering time? I hope the answer is not NO, as I am still in perimenopause and wondering if the sleep disruptions are part of it, or any time I feel grumpy, frumpy, or disenchanted. Anyway, chime in with empowering female midlife crisis readings suggestions in the comments if you want.

How to Know if a Manuscript is Ready

Using these rainy, sleepless nights to catch up on work—making a tutorial, judging a poetry contest—and working on my seventh book manuscript, which I thought was done two years ago but then I added a lot more to it, and now I’m looking at an unwieldy hundred-page monster that I need to edit down and somehow make into a unified thing. Knowing when and if a poetry manuscript is ready is an art, not a science—sometimes they’ll need a tweak, like a title change and a shifting of first poem—and sometimes they’ll need an overhaul, which is what I’m doing right now—before they’re ready to send to a publisher, and it’s difficult sometimes to make that judgement. Especially when one is sleep deprived and half-sick. I usually write a good solid collection of poems around a single theme, but because the covid-19 pandemic happened in middle of writing these poems, it’s been tough to reign it in. Anyway, I hope to have it in somewhat finished form by October. That’s my goal, anyway.