Vol. 1, Issue 3
Two sides, one coin:
A couple of weeks ago, an old friend came to visit me. Almost the moment she arrived, we started talking and didn’t stop until we parted ways two days later. It was an intense catching up, a filling-in, a rapid-fire round of questions and things too-long left unsaid. After a full year of mostly screen-based interactions, the weekend was, for me, a crash course in re-learning how to converse in real time and space, complete with body language and facial expressions. By the end of it, I was both exhausted and refreshed. I felt re-bonded to my friend and much closer than I have in a long time. There’s no way a simple phone or even video call could have replicated that experience.
A few days after my friend left, I gave a reading over Zoom from my novel-in-progress alongside a couple of my fellow MFA graduates. I told the crowd how incredible it was for all of us to be able to gather from different parts of the country to celebrate our graduation. And it was incredible — there’s no other way my family, college roommate, and friends from the Midwest, West Coast, and Deep South would have been able to travel to central Alabama for a short, in-person reading on a weeknight. After the event, I felt buoyant and well-supported; as my husband said, “there are people cheering for you,” and the reading made me realize how true that is, even if from afar.
This sense of propinquity, of closeness or nearness to others, is something I’ve missed greatly since leaving my home state of Wisconsin. When I was young, I always wanted to move away from my hometown and follow my dreams of “a sun-drenched elsewhere,” but I wrongly assumed I would be able to easily replicate the intensity of my earliest friendships with new people at each new way-station of my life. Instead, what I have found over time is that these “old” relationships can’t be replaced; instead, they change and deepen and complicate in ways that don’t follow a clean and tidy narrative arc. All relationships have a beginning, of course, but it’s impossible for us to identify the middle or, in most cases, “the end” of them. Relationships are circuitous, convoluted, amorphous, dynamic. Some relationships are, of course, stronger than others, but is any genuine connection between two people ever truly weak?
The pandemic has stress-tested many of our relationships like never before, but what is also clear now is just how much we need each other, how crucial it is for us to reconnect with each other, again and again, in whatever way possible. Maybe you, too, are taking stock of your relationships now as many of us are finally, mercifully, beginning to see each other again in person. If so, I hope this week’s newsletter helps bring that process into your creative work, or perhaps vice versa.
Listen
In honor of my Wisconsin roots (Bon Iver is from Eau Claire!), I suggest this as today’s soundtrack:
Read
Does reading fiction make us better people? BBC Future. “People who often read fiction have better social cognition. In other words, they’re more skilled at working out what other people are thinking and feeling.”
Astronomer Maria Mitchell on how we co-create each other and recreate ourselves through friendship, by Maria Popova. Brain Pickings. “The friends with whom we encircle ourselves, Mitchell reminds us, become instrumental in the architecture of our own character … Our choice of relationships can either reinforce the limiting patterns of thought and feeling that have long governed us, or decondition them by helping us learn new patterns of attachment and orientation of being.”
Watch
“Natasha Trethewey, the former U.S. poet laureate discusses the pleasures of anticipating letters from friends and shares the poetry she is turning to during the coronavirus crisis.”
The Empathy Museum’s 1001 Books Project: “a crowd-sourced travelling library filled with a thousand and one books, each donated by someone who loves that book and thinks that other people might love it too.”
First/last words
Whenever you find your way to your work this week, I encourage you to think about the nonlinear narrative arc of a particular long-time relationship in your life. Or, if not a real relationship, then a fictional one. How do these two real/created characters meet? What pushes them apart at various points in time? What brings them back into propinquity, into nearness to each other? Can you describe the physical/digital/imagined stages on which their most important moments take place?
If you’re the sort of writer who likes a prompt, then consider yourself prompted. And as you leave this page and make your way (hopefully) to your own, here’s a parting gift:
They Sit Together On The Porch, by Wendell Berry
They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes–only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons–small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.
Connect
You can find Sandra on Twitter, Instagram, and at sandrabarnidge.com. As always, thank you for being here.