The Best Laid Plans

Making schedules (ick) and what I'm reading now, two residencies you should apply for, etcetera.

6/16
The grey-brown hare the color of the gray brown earth stretched in the warm sun, warming themself. Smiling I think it was.

6/18

Now that I’m actually here, maybe I am getting to the questions that have been consuming me or maybe just making some hard choices or maybe just falling down the rabbit hole of this book (there is a bunny that visits me every morning).

But the ghosts I’m conjuring are more Titans than Gods (and Bunnies) (and Sweet Weather) and I am next to dunes now and the ocean and a few drinks in the evening maybe.

I like projects that become projects from the small bits of every day dabbling. The ones that sneak up on you through the side door.

I like projects that lodge in your skull and don’t come loose so easily. The long project is often for lone otters (like myself). But also I tend to complicate my projects to the point where I must ask, but are you a finisher Deb?

And if anyone out there can help organize me, welcome!

As I wrote yesterday, self-discipline disappears once obsession takes over and everyday life at hoke interferes with my obsessions. Damn it! So I set up a schedule hoping for the kind of self-discipline that I find difficult on the home front. The home-front meaning to do’s and to-don’t’s and work things and the social aspects of life and sewing on a button when one breaks off (don’t ask) and this feeling that I want to darn my socks as well and make an installation and give talks about imagination and water and color at prominent universities and also forgetting and remembering a birthday and of course then there is the pleasure of any dinner you might invite me to or lying down prone and tired from the swirl of it all.

Here’s the plan I made (and remade) for my residency:

1. I only had a few intentions: to consider what the scaffolds of this book even are. Also to learn what scaffolding even means when it comes to structuring something that at the moment seems unstructurable. A book seems to be a unit. of time, like a song is or a poem but a painting seems static to me so how do I stop thinking in paintings?

2. Supposing this residency is simply interim time and space to expand what needs expanding, to slow down what is too quick and to quicken what is too slow—to examine what I’ve already made and see if the point of view could work better in another person—a first person rather than a third person and who is this third person anyway and can they co-exist on the page with this first person? I mean, where else can omniscience take place when you need it the most?

   

   See the bunny? Color of dirt!

This is a version of the schedule I made before I left…its working!

6am or 7am Awaken yourself, shake it off, make tea, drink, read, and if it hits right: write, make notes, research what is necessary. Write to the place where the writing is.

8am-9am yoga, walk, beach, anywhere, move. Time to discuss with the grandmothers or don’t even discuss this with your grandmothers or hell…do discuss this with your grandmothers. You aren’t one to do this but maybe it’s worth a try. Will them to reappear. Bring a pencil and your notes. Walk into the extra help that walking brings. Ask questions and do NOT expect answers. Have few expectations except to walk and for there to be sand between your toes and perhaps a sea creature or a fox.

10 or 11am Studio Time/ Get to the notes / get to the writing / be in the research, make a few tables for yourself. Get in the studio and use the wall. Draw. Bring the big paper, bring the black and white stuff, bring the supplies that will make paint from seaweed. Write in coordination with the drawing. Draw in coordination with the writing.

Pin it all to the wall.

1:30 ish pm or so Lunch—get lunch, make sure to eat something green, also protein. also potato chips (which always taste better near the ocean).

3pm coffee or matcha, emails, substacks, read.

3-8 paint, draw, notes, eat oysters on the beach, look at notes from the day, look at the day, maybe pop out, watch the sunset, watch the moon set, whatever it takes to get a good night sleep, do that too.

After That: Studio or write or sleep, whatever takes over the moment.

And some books I’m concurrently reading this week:

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad —The poetry of her writing and the story of her grandfather is so compelling, gorgeous, a masterclass. I just started but wish I was three people who read faster so I could gobble it up and then talk about it with everyone I know.

Tone by Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno—Finally I am reading this, found on a field trip to Paper Nautilus in Providence pre-P-town (and where I finally met in person, friends formerly only from outer space, Amra Brooks and Victoria Restler!) in the question of what is tone in writing is such a beautifully written meditation on what is, how is, why is, tone in anything at all. I have never felt happier to be reading a book as I do snuggling up with this one.

Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) by Etel Adnan—recommended by my friend Amy, I find myself engrossed in each letter, deep rabbit holes revealing her relationships to politics, war and art, the artists who came before, working through the issues of their time as well, resulting in revelation after revelation, ideas pushing themselves far out to sea from the shore of the self to reveal something that only writing through an idea can do, my favorite kind of journal writing. I love this quote by Barbara Harlow on the back of the book: “Of Cities & Women are in their turn now letters to cities and women—that we, that is, women and men alike, might eventually, before it is too late, ‘find the right geography for our revelations’.”

One of my favorite writers, Ed Wolf wrote an extraordinary group of three essays for the Pride Issue of Khôra, edited by Leigh Hopkins. Ed’s work is astonishing—these are part of his memoir of the intense labor of his days working in the AIDS hospice ward in San Francisco in the beginning of an epidemic that spread like fire, the research for its cure was denied funding for too long and his work is a testament to front line workers facing the weariness, the frustration and the terrible normalcy of watching innocent people die unnecessarily. His work questions the inside and outside world amidst trauma and reveals rolling days of love and dedication to care, and endings, humanness and ongoingness.

I read so many great pieces published yesterday for Juneteenth but this piece by Nicolas Boggs in Vanity Fair got inside me, all the ways Baldwin had to deal with and appease the system when the system is a monster and every step was a heart break. I love James Baldwin. His work, his truth-telling, the life he lived and the way he is reported to have lived it is always a reset for me to pull my head out of my ass and get to the real work.

And this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Did Kamala Harris’s Silence on Gaza Cost Her the White House? a reckoning yes and, if you read nothing else today, please read this.

Other Things:

A few days left to apply for this residency at Derek Jarman’s house, Prospect Cottage in Dungeness. Good luck!

Oh..and this one…in the dunes!

And hey New England folks: If you’re in or near Providence, RI , go see Dynasty Handbag in conversation with my beautiful friend Amra Brooks at RiffRaff. They’ll be talking about Dynasty’s new book Hell in a Handbag!

Anddddd one more thing: Amra Brooks (see above!) is offering Summer Friday Writing Hours to founding members of her Substack…believe me when I say, she is a national treasure whose new book is also coming out this Fall. If you are in need of quiet time to make space for yourself for two hours on a Friday—she is a beautiful human with whom to work alongside…