I’ve been away from this digital home for a bit. That’s not quite true; I’ve been here, but working upstairs or in another room or with the doors closed. I think sometimes the design of this website (which I designed… hmm) makes me feel like I can’t be messy in what I share here, like it has to be perfect before I show it, so I have to stay away with the doors closed.
A few tiny updates:
Retreating to the work
Last year I was very excited by creatives! on! the! internet! I subscribed to a lot (mostly Substack), followed a lot (lit mags, publishing world updates, zine makers), tried to participate a lot (online book clubs and writing challenges and tarot discussions). Doing so brought me a lot of energy and inspiration that helped me make this website and, I think, have a very prolific summer. But right now it is all too overwhelming. It is too much. There is just too much to participate in all the time.
Novel
My process and way of carving out time to work has evolved a bit, to fit the needs of what I’m working on (and other, more prosaic changes in schedule). Because I have finally (finally!) finished a complete outline of my novel, I can work in smaller, more focused chunks—because the work of figuring out what to write has been already solved, so when I sit down, I can immediately get going. I’ve been writing in the mornings, after I do my morning pages, before my breakfast. Side effect: this is also very calming because I go into my corporate job knowing I’ve already done something in the day that matters to me.
Art
Last month my boyfriend and I stopped at the U of M Museum of Art—we had an unexpected hour or two to fill—and were blown away by the artist Jarod Lew’s solo photography exhibition, Strange You Never Knew. It’s about the Asian-American experience in the Midwest. I’d never really felt like I got photography as a medium—what it can do, the kinds of choices that photographers make to produce art—until I looked at these photographs, really looked at them. More on this exhibit soon.
Reading
I love going to Literati Books in Ann Arbor because I always find books from small or indie publishers I haven't heard of, such as The Employees by Olga Ravn (New Directions Books). What a trippy, surreal, ultimately very moving book.