Hi friends!
This newsletter is so sporadic, but that seems about right for my life right now, which doesn’t have a regular cadence outside of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and sleeping. I seem to have become a person who is always racing from one place to another, from one project to another. Is this my innate personality expressing itself? Or am I just reading in too much to summer, letting it obliterate the me I know the rest of the year.
When I last wrote, I had just returned from Italy, where I travelled with my mom and brother. I was filled with pasta and pizza, wine and beer, sky views and time to let my mind wander. I find myself wanting to update you again, but I’m scatterbrained and uncertain about what I want to say. Yet I’ve decided to embrace that and share a truly loose, free-form update about my life.
Since early June, there have been important developments for both my book and my business. And yet both are in liminal spaces. For the book, there is much to report, but it feels like saying: I finished chopping the onions; I’ve heated the olive oil in the pan; the onions are now sautéing with minced garlic; I’ve added the tomatoes, some thyme, some oregano; the water is on to boil, so… dinner in a year?!
Said another way: the line edits are done, and I expect copy edits soon. The cover process has begun although it’s at the very beginning stages. That means I have largely finished writing this book and am entering a new phase where I’ll learn about how to promote and market it. I’m excited to have been accepted into a cohort of authors who are also publishing books in 2024 through the Authors Guild (the union of professional writers). I’m fascinating by the very involved ecosystem around book publicity. There is so much left for me to learn.
For my business, I made some major decisions at the end of last year, namely to close our farmers market booth and online store and focus on retail sales and school food. The effects of those decisions have played out slowly, and at the mid-year point, my right-hand human Stephen and I looked closely at the budget and could see they had proven to be wise. Personally, I’ve loved having more time and autonomy, although I miss the rich community of the market and my team. Our yakisoba sauce has reached more stores—if you’re in the greater Seattle area, look for it at Town & Country! This school year looks to be a good one for us. But, of course, time will tell.
I think the biggest thing I’m experiencing, and aren’t we all, is a greater and greater sense of constriction around my lungs and heart due to climate change. I’m fascinated and disturbed by the way that our emotions around climate change exacerbate mental health issues that were already there, feeding on them, feasting on them, becoming hard to disentangle. We are definitely in a moment when the specter of climate change has transformed into reality—and of course you and I don’t have it the worst, not by a long shot.
Recently, I’ve been experiencing excessive joy in unexpected moments: watching my sweetheart Corey’s softball team win the finals of their local bar league; seeing the light shimmering on a bunch of barnacles at low tide; making up a game with my friend Rachael’s three-year-old son, Hart, in which we decide whether two foods go well together: “how about… chicken and frosting?” “No!” How about… ketchup and water?” “No!” And on the other side of these moments, feeling flickers of immense grief. These little moments are the ones that will be saddest to lose. The joy and tragedy are bound up together, and neither seem to arrive with trumpets and banners. (Although Corey’s softball team did receive an embarrassingly large trophy.)
When I feel lost, I often turn to books (I am my father’s daughter). I’ve been reading with a distracted mind, starting one book or article and then the next, without seeming to complete any. I am reading several books simultaneously, one chapter a time, as though I’ve decided they connect in some kind of wild fugue, and I can’t get too far into one without catching up on the others so the braid continues. (Is this how someone will someday read my book? What will the companion pieces be? Might I suggest Frog and Toad books?!)
The books and articles I have finished were not the ones I thought I needed. They are in fact decidedly not about climate change, or at least not directly: Percival Everett’s Dr. No, an absolutely uncanny James Bond inspired novel revolving around wordplay with the word “nothing” (have you read this? If you have, let’s book club it! What a trip!); a Harper’s essay, presented as a poem, about unusual plumbers (recommend!). Perhaps the funniest thing to happen to me was flying from Milan to New York with a broken entertainment console (and thus no ability to watch dumb movies) and only bell hook’s book The Will to Change, on patriarchal masculinity, with me. I read it line by line like someone in a prolonged fever dream.
The end of summer always undoes me. I think it’s the heat. I think it’s the smoke. I think it’s the dying trees, but also the partying, the racing from one friend to another (oh, what a thing to complain of!), the promises, the events. Are you also excited about the return of rain, of colder days, of colder nights, of paste tomatoes at their gooiest?
I will close this meander with a few photos of my summer, which has been, despite the tone of this unkempt newsletter, pretty incredible. I wish us all fortitude and good late summer fruit.