The Birthday Letter

Hi friends.

Happy birthday to me tomorrow. (Yes, you know I’m a Scorpio.) I’ll be 53 and basically all I know is I love to write and read and take nice walks with my dog and take care of my home and eat delicious food and drink good wine and look out for the people I love. Things have gotten more complicated over time because I see more, and I know more, and also I feel more, but also my desires and pleasures have become more simplified and refined. I would prefer to feel good rather than bad. I like a tough challenge but, even more than that, I love to figure out a solution. Life is about the simplest math in the end.

In honor of my birthday I’m offering a three-day discount on an annual subscription to this newsletter—$53. That is less than five bucks a month for these missives I lovingly craft and send your way several times a week. I appreciate your help in keeping the lights on over here. And this guy appreciates it too.

Because it’s my birthday week, one of the things I’ve been pondering is the passage of time. I did an interview yesterday where some of the questions asked were about why I had made certain decisions in the past. How I conceived #1000wordsofsummer, and why in that summer of 2018. Good lord, I thought. Had it really been that long since I had started everything?

And it got me reminiscing about this weekly letter itself. How, in the fall of 2020, I wanted to communicate and connect more with people. Like I just wanted to send you all a letter and let you know what I was thinking and what was up with me! I wanted to reach out. I wanted to say hello. Especially as we were all at home, but also because other social media outlets seemed to be failing me, or making me feel helpless, at the very least when it came to my words. And my words had always been a source of strength to me. So how could I return to that feeling?

If I was going to invest time in a new social media outlet (at least new for me), I wanted it to be useful, effective, and complementary to my artistic practice—but also fun. I didn’t know if I could make it worth my time in any sort of financial or data driven (gross, sorry) way, nor was I sure if that was even important to me. But all the other descriptors above were extremely appealing. So I made certain decisions then, without knowing where it would lead, but I felt comfortable with those choices because they remained true to the spirit of the ongoing project that is my creative life. In other words, it was all worth my time.

In fact, I am always thinking about how time works, and if you’ve read my fiction, you know that’s a running theme in it. How everything is sort of happening at the same time. A lesson we learned when we are a child can impact choices we make thirty years later. Ideas, aesthetics, emotions can get lodged in our bones and our minds. Who I am now is still the same as who I was then and who I will be in the future, and I need to love (or at least try to understand) all those versions of me.

But also there’s this: Whenever we take on new creative projects we do them with a kind of hope for the future, the possibility of learning and acquiring new skills but also an acknowledgement of everything we have learned so far. What do I have to say? What is the best way to say it? What do I hope will happen with that story once I’m done telling it?

So the version of me four years ago who thought it might be interesting and helpful to send out a letter to people on the internet was looking out for the next version of me. But also tending to the past version of me who was looking for a new way to communicate and was frustrated with what was out there.

It doesn’t have to be a letter, by the way. It doesn’t have to be a novel or a creativity book. It doesn’t have to be an essay for a magazine. It doesn’t have to be an instagram account dedicated probably way too much to pictures of your (my) dog. It just has to be the one that works for you, now.

Here’s to figuring out the right projects—for all the versions of you.

Jami

You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on twitter and instagram.