Edification – Newsletter #98 – November 28, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
Feeling pretty mopey and melodramatic around here because of the change in the season, so I’m sharing a silly poem about that (below).
But: we’re coming to the end of a long weekend in which we traveled nowhere and saw nobody! Glorious. I did make mashed potatoes and stuffing etc., wrestled the two toddlers into color-coordinated flannel shirts to take compulsory holiday pictures for two adoring grandmothers. Ate pumpkin pie with an extra scoops of vanilla ice cream. Duty done.
The days have noticeably shortened and the sunlight is now beaming in just about straight sideways from the south. Our block (and our entire town) is built on a grid fairly true to the cardinal directions. Our house faces south, her back to the Ohio River. She peeks through some shaggy magnolia tree bangs – half the day the porch is pretty shady. The mornings and evenings are our best shots of sunshine. It’s too damned dark.
Which is to say the Christmas tree is already up over here. I didn’t even put it up! My husband, usually a grinch about decorations, pulled it out Friday and did it up right. (The kids are currently engaged in a cops-and-robbers struggle over the low-hanging ornaments. Three-year-olds want order; one-and-a-half-year-olds want treasure.)
The extra twinkle is lovely even in the chaos. Just gotta get through this winter. Just gotta get back to that crack of birdsong coming a few months from now.
On the writing front, well. It’s not “one step forward, two steps back,” I tell myself when I get a big-time rejection. It’s more like two steps forward, one step back – right?
I had a full manuscript request on my second novel turn into a “revise & resubmit.” A fantastic turn of events! The revisions took weeks and then I turned a hundred circles like a dog before I laid down and sent it back to the agent. She reread the book, offered generous and kind feedback, and … declined to make an offer. Shortly after, I had a partial manuscript request from another agent turn into a form rejection. It happens.
I’ll be honest: it stung a little. So this week my self-care has been submitting queries to lots of other agents. Keep going, keep going. The setbacks are part of the climb.
On the upshot, I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Still: The Journal!!! (Excessive exclamation marks are probably a side effect of my seasonal affective disorder. Forgive me!!!) The nomination was for my latecomer story “Culling Chickens,” which I adapted as a chapter in the manuscript I’m currently querying. Maybe it’s a sign; maybe it’s a sunbeam.
I would be ever so pleased if you took a few minutes to read it and let me know what you think.
The husband and I played guitar and worked on new songs every evening of our long weekend and it really feels like we’re making progress. I think this winter we might be ready to record more formally than on our cellphones. He’s been scrolling on music sites in a state of intoxication at the sight of beautiful bass guitars and keyboards way out of our budget. Our first recordings will probably be acoustic anyway, because that’s the way the songs have been written and developed. I can’t wait to share something with you, even as I’m mortified by the thought! Such is art.
Talk soon,
Edie
--
November, Aged Dame
November was never winter; true
winter doesn’t arrive until the year’s nadir,
still a full month of darkness away. I get most wintery
in November, drag around like a chained theatre ghost,
tearful, a neighborhood embarrassment
as though we weren’t living
all our lives for this, as though
there were any other way
to end a year.
Autumn being the darkening-est season
wherefrom pleasure passes, I take in
what passes for pleasure: beauty recovered
in the drooping of it. I’ve become
the actress donning the turban and mystic airs, lying
to herself that what others lisp is true, knowing
all the while I am fin; gravity pushes me
into furs, jewels, high-pile rugs – save me
from the cold ground! I grow my nails out
corpselike, haunt the yard glamorously
picking at seedpods.
Evening becomes the gloaming, a landscape
oranger than it ever will be again. Languishing
in that late yellow light before
an ice glaze, I understand Liz Taylor’s
caftans now. I am beauty drooped,
Vaseline-smeared, never
more beautiful
than I am – by lessening degrees, oh God! –
today,
today,
today.
The garden drags. An aged dame, too,
her green rags limp and eaten through, corroded
by bugs late to the game.
What are they even eating for this time of year?
I no longer have the energy to demand, let alone
impose a shorter lifespan on the tiny
dullish yard things who have nothing
to do with me. Détente. I lack energy
to kill what goes on performing before true winter.
The garden clenches her fist, heart
in tatters, gullies of swansong mascara,
giving the performance of her life.
November will draw down
the curtains soon enough,
and the neighbors, too, will withdraw
from their windows chilled,
discovering nothing in this phantom of a month
to be so jovial about.
Brava on the Pushcart nomination!