A (Very) Little Bit About Love
Also: re-entry, great reads, and a new feature
"Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place." –Zora Neale Hurston
In This Issue
What love looks like these days
Hearts and Snow
Re-entry sucks. Do it anyway.
A new feature coming to Spark, and some great links from the Spark community
A (Very) Little About Love
While I write this, the sound of the ice cream maker fills the house. It is a harsh, grinding noise. The motor groans as the custard thickens, the salt crystals scrape against the ice cubes. Yet, it is the music of love. I am making the special coffee ice cream that my husband craves -- all cream, eggs, Starbucks decaf vias, and vanilla and not a grain of sugar. Every groan and rattle of the motor shouts down the stairs to my husband, communicating my love for him. Not that he can hear it. He’s in the shower.
Earlier this week, though, he was entirely present. He sat quietly with me when a “grief storm” overtook me. He said little but what he said was just right.
This is not how love has looked for all the years we’ve been together but it’s what it looked and sounded like this week: the straining of a motor as it turns a handful of separate ingredients into one smooth delicious whole, and the calm silence that absorbed/accepted my tears and echoed with a few of his own.
That’s all I have to say about love this Valentine’s weekend. What about you?
A Heart Looks Even Better With a Lot of Snow Around It...
...as you’ll see from this little video by Qathy Quarantina a.k.a., Kathy Lowe-Bloch, musician, songwriter, artist, and effervescent performer who decided we all needed a valentine no matter what our current situation might be. A little heart goes a long way.
If you click only one link in today’s Spark, make it this one. Your whole day will be a little goofier and a lot brighter. ( Check out some of the other links, though. There are some great reads down a few inches).
Re-Entry Part I
To observe our anniversary last week, Ed and I breached the boundaries we’ve observed during a year of quarantine. We drove 15 miles ostensibly to view the Murals of La Jolla but really just to be somewhere pretty on a nice day. Then we got a taco and came home.
The crowds were small and the parking plentiful which alone should have made a trip to La Jolla worth it. The sky was blue, the sun shone, the murals were nice enough, and the walk itself took little exertion.
I’m embarrassed to say I was exhausted by the whole thing.
It’s been so long since I’ve gone anywhere but the food store and the regular route I take when I walk through the neighborhood, that I’ve forgotten how to be out in the world. Re-entry, even in this small way, scraped my nerves raw.
I’ve gotten too used to keeping my distance, too accustomed to peering out at the world through the windows of my house or car. I’ve forgotten how to talk to people or maybe I just don’t work hard enough. Our masks are barriers but encountering a person without a mask is also a barrier. Standing in the small cluster of socially-distanced folks waiting for their tacos felt like I was once again part of the world but it also drained me: Who are these people? Where have they been? Why can’t they close the gaps in their masks? Is this safe? Staying home and looking out felt not only safer, it was normal and much much easier.
That realization unnerved me even more than standing among the folks in the taco line. I don’t want normal to mean keeping my distance. I don’t want easy to mean refusing to make the effort to engage with people on whatever terms are possible.
A week later, I’m looking back on the little trip to La Jolla as a wake-up call, the first step towards re-entering the world as it is. I’ve taken a nap, figured some things out. I think I’m ready to try again.
Re-Entry Part II
I’ve taken baby steps back into my writing too. This week, for the first time in two months, I took a deep breath, opened up Scrivener, and stared at my novel-in-progress. After a few cups of tea, some scribbles in my journal, I actually typed a few words. It wasn’t much but it was progress.
Slowly, painfully I am re-entering a story that I believed would be finished and on the shelves of bookstores long before this moment. I’m faced with the huge gaps in the plot and the stretches of terrible writing that were only supposed to hold a place until the next draft when I could step back from the mess and then begin to refine it. It’s ugly. I’ve considered abandoning the project. I can’t. Not yet. These people I’ve made up are part of me now and besides, the stubborn part of me needs to see this book through regardless of its fate. So I am enduring the discomfort of re-entry and all the doubts that come with it.
The Writer’s Journey: Interviews About Writing and Life
Re-entry comes with the territory I’ve chosen to inhabit. I know this. I know, too, that I’m not the only writer who grapples with these problems. I know this because in the past I’ve talked with other writers about every aspect of writing and living and trying to make it all work. They have helped me with the craft of writing but they’ve helped as much or more by sharing their experiences as human beings who have chosen a path that is guaranteed to break their hearts at least once.
I want to share some of these people and their journeys with you. Over the next year, I’ll be interviewing writers of novels, nonfiction, poetry, comic books, memoir, and more. Some will be published writers, others are still working their way towards publishing. Some make their living from their art, others work in the margins of days filled with full-time jobs and families. Some spend as much time supporting the work of others as they do on their own. The writing life can be as varied as the people who seek it.
We’re kicking off the series next week with Nikki Dolson, author of the collection Love and Other Criminal Behavior. I met Nikki a little over five years ago when we met at a Writing By Writers workshop in Tomales Bay, CA. We reconnected last week in person (or as in-person as Zoom can make it) and talked for two hours. I’m looking forward to sharing the highlights with you. I’ll be announcing more of the folks in the series soon. In the meantime, here’s a taste from next week’s interview when she talked about her first story and how a single sentence kept her going.
“My teacher, he looked at it. It needed lots of work. He said I think you need to do this and that. But then he goes, this sentence right here, this is a sentence I wish I had written. And that, to this day is a just a thing that I hold close. I don't have a degree and don't have an MFA. I spent all of my 20s, you know, having kids and working. And so there's a certain part of me that feels like I'm behind, and to have someone I respected whose work that I read, say, ‘this is a great sentence.’ It validated me as a writer, and spurred me on.” - Nikki Dolson
A Short Read and One New Book for Your TBR List
This “Letter to a Stranger” by Jackie Desforge was perfectly timed as I considered how I’ve adapted (or not) to the isolation and possibilities of quarantine. Here is her letter, To My Upstairs Neighbor Learning How To Play the Piano from the “Letter to a Stranger” feature in Off Assignment.
I’ve just added Leesa Cross-Smith’s newest novel This Close To Okay to my TBR list. I enjoyed her lively, funny, thoughtful writing in her collection So We Can Glow. This novel focuses on a rescue of a would-be suicide that leads the counselor who intervened to look more closely at her own life.
Recommendations & Letters From Sparkers
More On Letters
Cindy G. of San Diego adds 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff to our list of books based on correspondence, in this case the years-long, lively exchange between Helene Hanff and the proprietor of Marks & Co, a London bookstore. I’ve downloaded it - it looks like a wonderful read. I may try to find a copy of the film adaptation starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.
From Mary E. of Florida:
“Before my uncle died a few years ago my sister and I went through trunks full of family photo albums, and other memorabilia. I brought home a box full of letters my grandmother had written. Some to her mother about her fiance, marriage and following his ship around Europe) Some about the day my mother was born. Some to and from my great grandmother and her husband. Written on nice paper undoubtedly with a fountain pen, they were full of stories about the women I loved but never really knew.”
Book Festival
Janice M. of San Diego and New Jersey shared this link to the upcoming Morristown Festival of Books which run entirely online for our viewing pleasure on February 20 and 21. The lineup includes Kristin Hannah, memoirist Nadia Osuwu, biographer David Michaels, and novelist V.E. Schwab.
Nonfiction
Rob C. of New Hampshire is deep into nonfiction and recommends the following:
Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage - by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew
Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the History and Future of Nuclear Power- James Mahaffey
Too Much Magic: Wishful Thinking, Technology, and the Fate of the Nation -James Kunstler
The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland’s Buried Past and Our Perilous Future - John Gertner
Six Easy Pieces: Essentials of Physics Explained by Its Most Brilliant Teacher by Richard P. Feynman.
Well, that’s it for this week. Thanks for checking in. Let me know how you are, what you’re reading, and what you’d like to see more of here in Spark. Remember, all books mentioned here are available through our Spark Community Recommendations page at bookshop.org where every sale helps independent bookstores and, eventually, to help literacy programs near and dear to your heart.
If you’ve been enjoying Spark, please share it and invite a friend to subscribe.
See you next week. Until then, be well, keep reading, and keep in touch! I love hearing from you.
Betsy
P.S. And now, your moment of Zen… Make ‘Em Laugh
We could all use a laugh. Here’s a video and a memory from Kate in New Jersey: “I will never, ever forget my son seeing this for the first time, and laughing so hard, in a crescendo of infectious laughter with each additional "bit" in the scene. Those were days -- before playback was possible, but it didn't mean that he didn't have the same response every time he saw it, and so did --- and do --- I!”
Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”
What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.
Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.
I can’t wait to see what you send!
What a beautiful newsletter this week. And, "Make 'em laugh" is wonderful! Thanks for the reminder to show it to my kids. :)
so happy you are finding your way back, and I love the ice cream maker story