DIY’d & gone to heaven

Writing, art, music, beating back the existential dread etc.

Sunday, August 4

Dear Readers,

Pulling the cobwebs off my face to say hey y’all!

Still poeming, picking at some short stories, submitting halfheartedly to a few places here and there, novel still out on its submission odyssey. Still gargoyling around town, gargling not to drown.

(It feels pretty tough out there in literature land. Is it tough out there or am I just soft? I need a harder exoskeleton.)

I’m doing a self-portrait for the first time in a few years. I always feel like I’m discovering how the outside of me actually looks when I start trying to draw it.

Here’s day one:

Here’s day two:

Can you tell the difference? There’s a few hours of work in each. One thing I like is the reflection of the windows in my eye. I’m always interested in discovering the shape of the surroundings in a portrait.

We’re all like that, taking the shapes of our containers like the water we’re mostly made of.

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You may know I have a musical project with my husband called The Oxbow Estate. We have been writing music together for several years, but just released our first album this summer. Today marks one month since we published “The Art of Saying Goodbye.”

It’s an hour-long, 13-track album begun back in Huntington, West Virginia and finished here in the attic in Petersburg, Virginia. I also created lyric videos with original footage taken in these places and elsewhere over the years to go with each song.

We didn’t set out to write a “goodbye”-themed album but it emerged as we grappled with cut strings and grief that I think hit a whole lot of us out there in pandemic/opioid epidemic/climate upside-down world. As it happened, we actually said goodbye and moved in the middle of recording. Life imitates art imitates life imitates…

When we started, we set for ourselves an idea that we wanted to write songs that sounded like a train moving away without mentioning a train. A very American sound.

We did write one song that mentions a train, after sitting at a crossing in Tupelo, Mississippi. It was one of the last songs we wrote in this set.

Life’s such a wilderness all around lately. What have you been into?

Don’t be a stranger now,

Edie