March 2019

Dear friends, family, fellow travelers, 

Welcome to my spring vacation week newsletter! Earlier in the month I put out a call for subscribers to this newsletter to ask me a question that I would answer during my birthday week ... so here we are! This birthday week has been an at-home vacation week for me as I undertake a thorough reorganization of our personal library (which has been in a jumble since we moved two years ago), made significant progress on a queen-sized quilt project, and took in the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Tomorrow, Hanna and I are celebrating my 38th birthday with dinner out in Roslindale Village and grapefruit cardamom cake (my request) made by my lovely wife herself. 

Below are my answers to your questions!
Image: Teazle sits upon an empty bookshelf looking alertly up at the camera, surrounded by books in the process of being moved.

Question 1: "A few years ago you'd tweeted a bit about the struggle for solitude in the city - what are ways you've been finding recently to address that need? does the arboretum scratch the "woods" itch or does it feel too bounded/cultivated to be fully satisfying?"

The move to our current neighborhood and apartment did help a great deal. The apartment where we now live is in a house set back a bit from the street (by Boston standards), the street itself is quieter, and we are bound along the back of the property by the Arnold Arboretum which does make a substantial difference to me in terms of privacy and peaceful space. We are still in closer proximity to neighbors than I experienced growing up, but it doesn't feel as suffocating as it has felt in past living arrangements. 

Hanna has put a lot of time and effort in the past couple of years finding ambient audio soundtracks that provide a soothing buffer for both of us when our nerves are feeling a bit raw. Not quite the same as a real babbling brook or ocean surf ... but better than hearing every sidewalk conversation or the neighbor's endless cellphone debrief sessions. 

And this isn't new, but I have an office these days with a door! That closes! And I am getting better (slowly, slowly) at closing that door! Especially when I want to focus on something like longer-form writing or reading ... or during my lunch, when I will even turn the overhead lights off to bask in the quiet dim. 
Image: Creatively-shaped paper sheep with google eyes hanging in the window of a local preschool.

Question 2: What do birthdays mean to you? Are they special to you? What was one of your favorite birthdays and why?

As an adult, I have enjoyed celebrating my birthday with good food and good company. As I have grown through my thirties I have wondered, on and off, whether birthdays would come to be something anxiety-producing in my life ... but possibly because there's just so much chaotic free-floating anxiety in the world generally right now my own advancing age hasn't been something particularly fear-inducing for me. I have chosen to take time off -- not always an entire week but typically the day, at least, and usually a long weekend -- which has been a good opportunity to pause and recommit to the things I find meaningful all year 'round.

One of my favorite birthdays was my 23rd birthday, which I celebrated while on Easter vacation in the Lake District. Although I was traveling alone, going on pilgrimage to sites related to Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons books was a way of connecting with my family while abroad; his books were something we had shared as I was growing up. I still treasure the solitude, beauty, and inter-relatedness of that vacation.

Question 3: What's a project you've heard about in the last month that you thought was really cool?

In response to an overwhelmingly white slate of nominees for the Romance Writers of America (RWA) annual RITA awards, romance writer Courtney Milan has started an online reading group called #RomanceSparksJoy to highlight the work of the nominated women of color. I'm excited to participate and hope the conversation around white supremacy in romance continues to gain traction and force much-needed change.
Image: A composite image from a longarm quilting session at Gather Here. You can see a photo that Hanna took of me working at the machine here. 

Question 4: "As someone who frequently has to weed [myself], I'm wondering about your own book weeding process,and how you make decisions."

Weeding our household library is a bit more complicated now that our personal libraries have (gasp!) been united. Some portion of the weeding process this time around was editing out multiple editions of titles where there was no clear need (such as marginalia) to keep a copy for both Hanna and myself individually. When it comes to "my" books -- we do read in fairly distinct nonfiction categories -- the titles I divest are usually ones that I picked up cheaply yet never ended up reading (if it's been around for two years and still hasn't piqued my interest ... time to pass it along to a reader who will appreciate it!) or the ones I feel pretty clear that I will have no pressing need to refer to again. 

I review books as part of my work, so I do have a number of works that I would likely never have bothered to purchase and read for pleasure -- including some that I feel are actively harmful works -- and those are tough. This time around, I did decide to shift a few titles that I read and reviewed negatively but don't actually feel are unredeemable. A few unredeemable titles I kept because they are recent enough I feel the need to have reciepts (one I am going to use as an example in an upcoming talk about harmful LGBTQ rep).

Now that we have a little free library at my workplace (which I am nominally in charge of keeping stocked and tidy) I do feel at least comfortable about passing along books I am done with because I know they aren't ending their active lives when I am done with them, but instead passing on to new readers. 
Image: A diner mug from Claire's vegetarian restaurant filled with milky tea, sitting on piles and piles of books in the process of being shifted. 

Question 5: "I know you from AO3, so I'm naturally interested in your writing process... In your letters, I saw you and your wife writing rather casually and comfortably on the sofa or on the floor with the help of different cats and I was amazed every time. Because I couldn't write one coherent sentence like that AT ALL! I also never could write in a coffee shop! For me, it is solitude and silence. No music also. For you two, it seems to be a regular, shared part of your life together?

As a child, teenager, and college student solitude was a huge and necessary part of my writing process for both fiction and nonfiction. I used to close myself away in my bedroom for hours and hours writing (first by hand, then by typewriter, then on a laptop...). During college and even graduate school long periods of focused writing in private were a cornerstone of my creative and scholarly process.

Somewhat by necessity, I have learned to write in much more crowded -- both metaphorically and physically -- environments over the past ten years. In my worklife, I have to carve time for nonfiction writing out of workdays that are populated by colleagues and researchers and other distractions. I have had to learn to pick up and put down the text of blog posts, book reviews, presentations, and essays. Twitter and online chat conversations have actually helped me learn this skill, as I talk through ideas in rough, small chunks first to go back to and redraft and finalize when focused time presents itself. 
Image: A photograph of me working on thesis revisions in 2011 with faithful editorial companion Geraldine.

For fic, this process can happen very collaboratively when Hanna and I are writing together or with other mutual friends; we write and revise in conversation with one another. Some of my more recent work (all of the Shetland fic, for example) I wrote paragraph by paragraph in email to my beta readers, then collated that material into a document for revision. While I find that fiction drafted that way can often suffer from redundancy as I work through an idea, it does stop me from simply not writing unless a discrete period of quiet, alone time arrives (rare in my current life). 

Question 6: How do you decide what to write? ... What do you find easiest and hardest about writing? Does what you read influence what you write?

Since I learned how to write, so much of my thinking and socializing has happened via the written word that I find it's actually difficult to answer the question what do I decide what to write. I'm always writing. Even before the advent of social media and texting, my closest relationships were sustained through correspondence and my ideas flowed continually into journals and commonplace books and onto scraps of paper. 

Usually, though, something that becomes a more polished piece of writing (whether fiction or nonfiction) has something about it that I feel the need to communicate beyond myself and beyond an audience of a single person with whom I might be discussing an idea or character interaction. Maybe there's a Twitter conversation that I believe can contribute a unique perspective to, or a piece of research I think others would find valuable, or a story that brings me joy to realize in a form I can share with others.

Two things that I struggle with as a writer are 1) not losing interest in a project before it's in good enough shape to share with the world (I think through an idea and then want to move on to other things, even if I haven't written the entirely of that idea down in a form useful to others), and 2) the moment when I panic about not having anything or enough unique and useful to share on the topic (this happens more frequently with nonfiction projects). I think both are manifestations of my brain morning faster than the craft of writing and getting distracted by the next question or idea before I'm done spelling out the idea in front of me. 

In fiction form, this happens in a similar way as I move from story cycle to story cycle. I usually abandon a series of stories before I've exhausted every plot idea that I have ... but when I feel satisfied that the characters are in the place I want them to be. I've answered the niggling question of "what happened after ..." or "what if they..." and I'm ready to move on to new ground.

My reading absolutely influences my writing, both through echoes in style and in weaving together aspects of other work to create something transformative and new. Both scholarly writing (which draws upon historical sources and other scholarly literature) and fanfiction (which draws upon characters and settings in source works, and often references or even directly collaborates with other fanworks) are intimately connected to the writing of others in a dense web of relationship and communication.

Question 6A: And also: what's the state of the project for which you were collecting history of sexuality references?

I've had quite a number of "history of sexuality" projects in my life the past few years, but most recently I was working on a collection development essay on LGBTQ history for Library Journal, commissioned for the 50th anniversay or the Stonewall rebellion. And that essay was published yesterday! 

Image: The cover art for three titles in the bibliography - Queer: A Graphic History; When We Were Outlaws; How to Survive a Plague.

Another project I have on the back burner that I would love to find a way to tackle more directly in the next couple of years is an ethnographic study of how queer-identified people use their subjective experience of gender and sexuality as a form of knowledge or expertise that provides valid and valuable insight when evaluating historical evidence. I'm particularly interested in how we manage those insights ourselves (and how much we pre-emptively invalidate what our instincts are telling us about those sources), and how we do or do not share those insights with others who may challenge that form of knowledge and expertise. How much do we downplay our queer subjectivity in an effort to present more objective or unbiased-seeming analysis? 

Question 7: I'd LOVE to accompany you virtually on your trip to the museum!

Here are a few photographs to our visit to the Museum of Fine Arts yesterday!
Image: "Day," one of a pair of statues by Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia flanking the north entrance to the Museum of Fine Arts, off The Fenway. You can watch them being installed in this three minute YouTube video.
Image: A sign titled Restrooms and Gender found outside the MFA public bathrooms. The first two paragraphs of text read:

The exhibition we went to see specifically was Frida Kahlo and Arte Popular. It featured work by Kahlo and examples of the Mexican folk art that inspired her own unique style. I try not to spend all my time in exhibitions taking photographs, but here are a few examples that I decided to snap pictures of.
Image: A book titled Las Artes Populares en Mexico, Volumen Segundo (1921). You can see a couple of other images from the Kahlo exhibition here. 

Question 8: Will you tell us about one of your not-so-strangers or neighbor-acquaintances? I have all sorts of stories I tell myself about the two bachelors who live on my street; I know them less well than the rest of my neighbors, and that's the way they like it (or so it seems!).

Hanna and  spend a lot of time in coffee shops, and every Thursday morning before work we get breakfast at the flour bakery near Bay Bay Station in Boston's "Bay Village" neighborhood. In addition to being on friendly terms with many of the staff, there are two customers who are there almost every morning we visit (every Thursday! for years!). One is an elderly man in a rumpled suit who always sits with the newspaper at the same table for four; on days when he arrives after us and "his" table is taken, he is always visibly disgruntled until the occupying customers move on and he can assume his rightful place. At the two-seater table next to him sits a younger, middle-aged man who dresses casually in cargo pants and henleys, always reading a recent bestseller by the likes of Clive Cussler or similar. They seem to be on nodding acquaintence with one another, occasionally chatting from one table to another about an item in the paper, but never sitting at the same table to continue their discussion. Hanna and I feel this is a meet-cute slow burn romance novel just begging to be written. 
Image: A mug of cocoa topped with whipped cream and sprinkles.

And now it's time for cocoa and bed and my latest romance novel ... I hope you all have a lovely weekend and a start to April that has moments of respite and rejuvenation in these interesting times. 

Yours in companionship, 
Anna