How did you make sense of everything that was changing?
Travels with Charley #1
Hi readers,
Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I’ll send these dispatches around once a month, writing on four different fronts. Namely,
· Where I’m living (the peripatetic update)
· What I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book this month)
· What I’m wondering (questions for future stories)
· What I’m writing (my recent publications)
If you feel moved to write back with answers/quotes/recipes, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.
Where I’m living
Hello from Salt Lake City, where I’ve been living for the past month, reading and writing and skiing beneath the big Utah sky. The sky here caught me off-guard—driving out of the Wasatch mountain range, the valley opens up and sun swaths grace some streets and leave others overcast. A vista that lends itself to religious fervor.
Plus, there have been some seriously weird hailstorms, like Dippin’ Dots ordered from on-high.
January has been mostly quiet on the work front, as I develop pitches and projects for the months to come. It’s work that suits the season: reading and exploratory interviews with people I’d like to write about, meandering conversations through ideas with friends and colleagues I admire. It fits in well around skiing, too, as I’m spending a lot of mornings humbled by a new sport in a new decade. Good to get my body and brain moving in fresh air in the new year.
What I’m reading
Lily King ascribing effort through description (Writers & Lovers)—
Both boys are wearing button-down shirts and khakis. Belts around their small waists. Jasper already has a few smudges on his white sleeve. All three of them have damp hair, cleanly parted.
Jack Gilbert on divorce, big swings, and the opposite of regret (“Failing and Flying”)—
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Shirley Hazzard, perfectly articulating that crushing feeling when you show someone a song that shaped your world and they respond, “Oh, nice” (The Evening of the Holiday, thanks Alec for the rec!)—
They walked in silence until she paused to shake a stone from her shoe. Then he stood still and, when she looked up, said to her: “We’ve come at the right moment—the light is so beautiful.” He spoke in a lowered voice, as if the hills were a flock of birds that might get up and walk away.
“Yes, lovely,” she replied, in an abstracted, mechanical voice, glancing toward the horizon as she walked on.
The scene might have been of Tancredi’s own creation, so keen was his disappointment. He watched her with injured pride at such ingratitude, like a chef with whose great dish a diner only toys.
Lucy Grealy to Ann Patchett, making a very good case for leafing through art books and writing letters as a better counter to anxiety than the glow of a phone (Truth & Beauty)—
The whole point I’m trying to work up to is that I think, I am sure, that this new importance poetry and art in general is having for me has to do a great deal with my precarious emotional state. Does this raise or lower, then, the everyday importance of art? Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? I would like to believe it is the latter, but does wanting to believe in something make that something valid? (Didn’t they used to use this argument for the existence of god back in the olden days?)
What I’m wondering
How did you make sense of everything that was changing—your sense of self, your relationships, how people saw you—as a preteen? Did you ask your middle school friends, your parents, your older sister? Did you read teen magazines or search on Reddit?
When was the first time you felt anxiety or dread about the climate? (As a kid? After an election or a movie or a book? After an unseasonable season?)
Know any kids (ages 8-13) who’d want to share an embarrassing story for The New York Times for Kids?
You just got home from a long day of skiing and you’re extremely hungry. It’s snowing outside and you already had jazzed up Annie’s this week. What recipe are you making for dinner?
What I’m writing
What’s it like to climb a sheer cliff of ice at twelve years old? My question exactly. Find out in print in The New York Times for Kids (January 29), then marvel at preteen athletes on YouTube and cheer for your fav (reigning champ Landers Gaydosh from Utah? returning challenger Lumi Pellikka from Finland? cheerful first-timer Nils Dolf from Switzerland?) at the Ice Climbing Youth World Championships in February.
Also in this month’s NYT Kids by me: a Very Embarrassing Story from Calee, age 10, and some extremely cool stuff to look forward to in 2023.
I’ll join journalists Wudan Yan and Jessica Estrada on The Writer’s Co-op, an excellent podcast for writers and freelancers of all kinds, on February 22 for a conversation all about how to find high-paying clients. This is something aspiring freelancers ask me about often, and it can be intimidating for those starting out. If that’s you, please join us.
yours,
Charley