Hi Friends,
This newsletter was supposed to be about something else. Honestly, most of them are until a more pressing idea steps forward and takes over, usually quite aggressively. Like I had planned to use these hours writing my novel and instead, hi! Anyway, it’s been a ride of a few weeks. First, Back Talk turned 5. Here’s what I wrote about it and an incredible follow up post by the writer Brandon Taylor about the book but more importantly about the ways we have built our literary community, the ways we see each other.
Then, about a week later, I learned that Catapult is shutting down its classes and magazines. I’ve taught at Catapult since 2017. It’s where I learned to love teaching, to trust my authority as a writer while also yielding it to students, who are their own authorities, to be more engaged in that profession than I had ever been. I’m not as concerned with replacing what was my primary source of income (I probably should be, but the shock is new, and there are other places I’ve taught and can and want to teach) as I am about the absolute loss of that community of teachers and students and staff who were absolutely a dream to work with. More about what I have to say about working there here.
Both of these things had me thinking about transparency, and how important it is to how I am in the world as a writer and teacher. I put the facts about not earning out my advance in the anniversary post because I know what success looks like from the other side of a screen. I have open conversations with students and writers about financial realities and what it feels like to be in an industry that can see you as a part of a product. Keeping the numbers people need to know to live their lives secret doesn’t protect anyone worth protecting. This is true in all industries.
And until this recent news (which came to me via the internet as I was having a lovely solo lunch on a wonderful NYC day), one of the reasons I loved Catapult was their transparency with me. About their expectations and pay scale and what could or could not be done. Though the days since hearing this news have been a cycling through grief and rage and gratitude, I don’t really want to dwell in the way this news was shared; it’s upsetting enough, and the people I worked with at the organization one on one were absolutely a dream to work with (and how often, if ever can you say that?) Because I was grateful for that forthrightness, and it was its own reminder that when I can be transparent, I should be. Because why not be? Who, always, does it serve to keep something locked down?
I know my commitment to transparency is also the way my fiction-writing brain works: thinking always about what to do with the information I have, exactly how to dole it out to create effects: images, feelings, engagement. This choice can be playful or suspenseful but it should never be cruel. It should never cause, as much as one can, disappointment, heartbreak, shock. Yes, I’m still talking about fiction. *winks*
If you’re new here maybe you don’t yet know how much this question of what we can and cannot know obsesses me. I’ve written about it here, and here, in various ways. It is oversimplifying it and not at all doing so to say that a lot of my work is centered on the question on what we see and what we don’t, what we don’t know and how we handle that, and what the impact is of secrets (my brilliant friend Lee Thomas asked me about the role of secrets in my collection during this interview). The older I get, the more I see the endless conversation between my imaginative life and my lived life. The more I want to share and also the more careful I am about how I share.
Reading, Thinking, Feeling
At dinner with a friend recently we discovered our mutual deep enchantment with the film Dirty Dancing, and she turned me on to this podcast, which goes through the film scene by scene. It’s called Butt Out, Baby! and if you don’t get that reference, you probably need to watch the film about 38 more times and catch up. We will wait here with our watermelons and slipping spaghetti straps. In classes I have used the film’s opening line to demonstrate using the retrospective voice to its fullest. It’s a truly perfect open.
I spent a part of my weekend dealing with taxes, which meant dealing with expenses, which I was bad at last year apparently. An incomplete list of perfectly legitimate working expenses for me last year: a visit to a Ouija Board museum, noise-canceling headphones, museum tickets, pens, so many books. It was a good reminder in the midst of panicking about what the loss of Catapult means for my income (and the lolsob moment of including my $3 royalty earnings from UK sales) that my day to day life as a writer can be pretty great.
This interview with the editor Rakia Clark in Poets & Writers (halfway through before I realized it was conducted by my other brilliant friend, the editor Vivian Lee), and was once again awash in the belief that the most important thing we can do is build solid spaces for one another in community. See each other. I loved how Clark can so clearly see what is both very broken about publishing and how we can always do better. And read more. Read more.
Ironically, I haven’t been very good about sharing my reads lately. I’ve been slow, and some of my reads are top secret novel research ones, but I did finally get to Raven Leilani’s Luster and really loved it.
Rewatching Succession. It’s…funny? this time around. There’s a lot in the much-discussed Jeremy Strong profile about the range of comedy and tragedy the actors embody the roles with. This cast is, as my teen says about good albums, no skips.
Where To Find Me
Figuring out what’s next for teaching. If you want to keep up with my course offerings, you can subscribe to my likely fairly infrequent newsletter with those listings here. And if you’d like to weigh in on what kinds of courses you’d be interested in taking from me, I’d love to hear all about it via this survey (or replying to this email).
And a link, now, to my essay on time tracking that went live at Catapult Magazine at the start of January. I don’t know how long it will live there. Read it while you can?
Working on my novel, always, forever. Well, hopefully not forever. But forever, for now. It’s going well, thanks for asking.
Talk Soon,
Danielle
PS: This subject line makes no sense for most of this newsletter and yet I could not resist, and also, yes, I see the irony of my misdirection, given my subject. Welcome to my brain. It likes to laugh at its own jokes.