I am going on tour. It starts September 22 in New Orleans with Patricia Lockwood, then September 23 in Boston with Courtney Sullivan, then September 24 in Brooklyn with Mary H.K. Choi, then September 25 in DC with Linda Holmes. There is more from there, but those are my immediate American concerns. Find the full list here. Let’s hang out!
If you want to know more about the book in general, you can read about A Reason to See You Again here.
Hi friends.
Last weekend I was walking the dog in the neighborhood and, from a block away, I glanced up at my house. The pink walls, the tidy roof somehow still intact these past nine years, through all this weather. But then where the chimney was I saw instead a mass of vines. Cat’s claw. Nowhere else on my house but decidedly yes, there. I had been invaded. Somehow the vines had made it up to the roof of the house.
These weeds are everywhere, all the time. I’m constantly fighting them back. I trim, I do not use poison. But I do fight them. I was shocked they were up there. I couldn’t have seen them if I was standing in my backyard, or in front of my house. I had to see them from a distance. Thank god I thought to look. And now I had to deal with it.
I flipped into emergency mode. A part of me appreciated a new thing to worry about to take my mind off all the other things I was worried about. (Career, election, bodies, wars; same struggles, different decade.) Then I reached out to my smartest local friends with backyards for thorough advice. I did some research on the internet. And then I got down on my knees to see what was going on underneath my house.
My house is raised a few feet up from the ground as most houses are here. But the brick of the (non-functioning) fireplace and chimney that runs through the house touches the ground. I could see where a few delicate vines raced along the length of the house and had entered the brick and then, presumably, had pushed themselves up all the way to the roof in search of sunlight. “Son of a bitch,” I muttered.
Last night’s hurricane
The next day, I found a man on the internet to come to my house and assess the situation. He crawled under my house for a half an hour and did a bunch of snipping and digging. Finally, he surfaced with a giant root. “This is the mother tree,” he told me. The enemy. He said it would probably grow back in one way or another. The man seemed pleased anyway. We had warded off trouble for now. And how could it not feel satisfying to hold something like that in your hand?
The next day after that, I found another man, this one to climb on the roof of my house and clear everything off the chimney. I knew him from around the neighborhood, doing work on other people’s homes. I secured his number from a neighbor. When I texted him I identified myself as the woman with the small dog who had said hello to him before. I thought: That is what I am. A woman with a small dog, saying good morning to people. Do you ever think about who you are in your neighborhood?
Anyway, he came over that morning. Got right up there on a ladder. It took him about an hour and a half to clean everything up. When he came down he said that there had been one thick root that had made its way up through the chimney and he had been able to pull it all the way out. He also seemed pleased. He, too, had found the culprit.
As I type this I am also satisfied in thinking about it. I only wish I could have been the one to do it myself. But I would not have wanted to go on that roof, or crawl around under my house the day before. Everything these men did had taken them no time at all and I know it would have taken me all day. (Plus I would have had to tweet about it twenty times and post pictures in my stories—how do I get anything done in my life?) Best to hire a professional.
Anyway the whole time this was happening I didn’t think about my other bullshit once. What I am still thinking about after that is the fulfillment of a job well done. Having a challenging task and completing it, and how that can be enough to get you through the day. Writing for myself, I was thinking about. And not for other people. I write to communicate with the world but that is secondary. My primary concern, always, is making a piece of art. That’s the first job, the first joy.
As I approach this book launch and all of the challenges that accompany it, that’s what I need to say to myself, to remind myself of why I do what I do, but I guess I felt like I needed to say it to you, too. Write for yourself. Write the story you want to tell. Write because it will bring you joy or at the very least a fulfilled feeling. I am telling you that if you keep digging in the dirt you’re going to find something that feels like a solution, even if it’s a temporary one.
Anyway all of this is temporary. This is the ongoing struggle to make our art and satisfy our creative and intellectual and emotional needs.
But still we keep digging.
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.
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My wife and I were walking our little dog last week up our street. And we were talking about houses in the neighborhood. And we were referring to the nicknames we have. And I said "When other people do this, it's probably 'the lesbians and then the the old lady (she's 93) and then the field". But maybe we're the house with all the flowers? Or the lesbians with all the flowers?
Other names of our neighbors and their houses. The twins (the babies that live there, who cares about the parents), napping man, Ukraine flag, middle-of-the-street walker, the Golden, the state trooper, the mean house, the young family, and the Perry the Platypus house.
So satisfying to see a problem and fix it, with the help of professional people. And I love supporting people who have worked hard at their skills in order to become the go-to problem solver in the neighborhood. They deserve it.