54 Books and a New Year
A playful zine, an invitation for your own oddball projects, and reflections on this newsletter
This past summer, my dear friend Rachael Guynn Wilson and I made a zine together called 54 Books. Rachael has opened up many worlds for me as a friend, including some of the poetry I’ve felt the most connected to. Once, standing in the Portland Art Museum together, she convinced me to start a book club, although she could not join since she lives in New York. She chose our first book—Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery from 1975—which made me feel like I’d drunk most of a bottle of whiskey and then tried to fix the plumbing in my house. In spite of and because of this, I love when Rachael recommends books to me, not something most of us can say about just anyone. (The book club also changed my life—story for another day!)
Hungry to collaborate on something with each other, we decided to each choose 25 books we have a strong affinity for and write 25 words or fewer about each. (Then we couldn’t help it and added a few more books.) We aren’t totally sure how we came upon this idea, but once we’d started, we were too delighted to stop. Traveling together from New York to Provincetown by train and fast ferry in July, I sat typing and giggling while Rachael and her baby son Hart alternately grinned and napped at my side. This was the spirit of the undertaking.
We decided we’d give our zine to our friends for the holidays. I loved the challenge of trying to summarize something about a book (its mood, its contents, its voice, my favorite scene) quickly, intuitively, without fretting over the words. Rachael called them prose poems. Here are a few examples:
Natalia Ginzburg, A Place to Live, trans. Schwartz, 2002
The women have lost their teeth; how sweet! The salamis swing in the soot! We eat little boys and girls—they laugh, “yes, we do!”
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, trans. Hulse, 1995/1998
If Hamlet kept a travel journal. Is “ecstatic melancholy” a mood? For the longest time, I thought this was a sci-fi novel. (It is.)
I think of this little project as three things: First, it’s a collection of our book recommendations to each other and to you; second, it’s a playful expression that allowed us to practice new styles of communicating; and third, perhaps most important, it’s an invitation to you to make the strange, inexplicable, not-so-very serious stuff you’ve been wanting to make.
I have a few extra copies and am happy to mail them to whomever might be interested for just the cost of media mail shipping and an envelope. In exchange, send me whatever you’ve been making. I’m ready for it!
This marks the end of my first full calendar year of writing this newsletter. When I started, in September of 2020, we were in the midst of wildfires that choked Portland with smoke. I wrote at the time, entirely to myself:
I am challenging myself to be more disciplined and write with deadlines (albeit self-imposed). This is not journalism; it’s more like a notebook. But I hope it provides both you and me many opportunities to learn about things we don’t yet know about and ask questions that we cannot answer… The sky has been a sickly wane yellow—a surprisingly accurate representation of our battered spirits—and everyone I know, including me and my loved ones, are in a panic that doesn’t dull. I feel like I should be fleeing, but instead I am sitting in the living room, writing. Welcome to the chaos.
This newsletter (and the world we live in) has continued to be chaotic. I knew from the beginning that I wasn’t going to be faithful to any one subject. This isn’t a newsletter about classic cocktails, or cockatoos, or cockering parents, or cockblocks. It could be, in spirit, about any of those things if they fall within the framework of the question: how do we live together? Sometimes I approach that question more directly than other times: taking about reciprocity within mycorrhizal mushrooms or exploring why I support child tax credits. Other times, you really have to be limber to make the leaps. And I have not been good about consistency. I am not doing this the way the pros suggest. But I am still here, and you are too, which means a lot! Thank you for sticking with me. I feel like you are witnessing me grow as a writer in real time, which can feel pretty vulnerable and also very sweet.
This has been a big year for me, personally, which I’ve shared pieces of here. I got my first ever book deal, with my dream publisher, Milkweed Editions. My business, Umi Organic, is weathering the vicissitudes of life during COVID; I even hired one of my best friends to run operations full-time and we began working with a food service broker. We grew modestly, integrated sliding scale pricing into our farmers market and selling to some of my favorite independent stores in California, including Bi-Rite, Miracle Plum, Queens Superette, Cookbook, Gjelina, and more!
I completed a book project on making miso with two dear friends, Yuri and Sakiko, that was several years in the making. I feel incredibly proud of the way it expresses the work of so many people. I also started gathering with a group of Japanese American women, under the banner of the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, to help create a community cookbook that uses recipes to tell deeply rooted stories of their community in this place. Look out for more of that work in 2022! I moved my dad into a better, more affordable apartment (which nearly killed me) and helped place his Northwest book collection at Lewis and Clark. Absolutely none of this would have been possible without the interwoven support I receive from my loved ones, near and far.
I also continued to lose my hearing and committed to wearing hearing aids, which is something I’ll share more about later. I got to hug my friends and share respiratory particles with them for the first time in a year. I then had to retreat back into myself, like a turtle in its shell. Like most of us, I have been confused and exhausted trying to navigate personal behavior during the pandemic. All told, 2021 was a powerful year when a lot of my longterm efforts began bearing fruit, and I will continue to grapple with what that means and how to relate to it moving forward in the context of an unjust society.
A friend asked how this newsletter is connected to the book I am working on, also called Group Living, which more explicitly explores my experiences with communal living and that of people who I am close with. The cleanest answer is that this is my sketchbook. You (and I) may not always know why I am writing about the amazing cookbook Vibration Cooking or Japanese American home movies, but together they make up a palette of colors, shapes, and ideas that I am drawing from. I am especially interested in how we document our lives, how we build systems of support, when we show up for each other, and where we find delight and self-expression.
Portlanders, in the new year, I would love to talk with more of you who are currently experimenting with nontraditional household structures. If you or anyone you know is open to speaking with me, please reach out!
Wishing you all a Happy New Year! 2021 was unrelenting; 2022 is gonna be freaky. But we have each other, and that’s a lot.
I am so glad I know you!