Creative summer goals
Lemurs, Greta Gerwig, and LOTS of reading
What I’m working on:
Design Your Summer
Author Gretchen Rubin (best known for The Happiness Project) coined this sentence/goal several years ago on her podcast Happier. It’s the idea that if you approach a season with specific goals, you’ll shape it in a special way and capture distinct memories instead of letting it be a 3-month blur.
I’m making my own Design Your Summer list, a mix of creative and personal goals that I hope will make Summer 2022 fun, productive, and memorable. Here are some of the goals on my list:
I want to see family, so I’ve been making specific, concrete plans to spend time with everyone I can.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a creative body of work and the examples that inspire me, and I’d like to watch/rewatch a bunch of Greta Gerwig movies (especially Lady Bird and her 2019 take on Little Women, two of my favorite movies of all time).
I’d like to do the lemur tour at the Duke Lemur Center sanctuary in Durham. I’ve lived in the area for more than four years, but I still haven’t seen the famous lemurs!
Craft
In pursuit of a new idea, I’m taking an online writing course created by author Nina LaCour to give me structure and open up new ways for me to approach my stories. If you’re not familiar, LaCour has written several acclaimed and bestselling young adult books and recently published her debut novel for adults. She also promotes a healthy, gentle, accessible view of the writing life.
I’ve listened to (and previously recommended!) her lovely and practical podcast on writing, Keeping a Notebook, and I’ve read her newsletter for years, always thinking I’d do one of her online writing workshops “someday,” when I felt I needed it for a specific idea. Someday and that idea are here, and so far, the workshop has been both a source of comfort and the push that I need to become a better writer. (Please reply to this email if you’re a writer who would like more details!)
What’s inspiring me:
Mythic Quest
I know I’ve already written too much about how much I love this show, but it’s been a while since I’ve experienced a TV show where I wanted/needed to talk about specific episodes because I’m still thinking about them days or weeks after watching.
No spoilers, but I put off watching a specific episode because I could see from the AppleTV episode description that it was a character flashback that would take me out of the present-tense storyline. When I ended up pressing play … I loved the episode. If Mythic Quest in its present tense takes me into another world, this episode took me into another another world, somehow instantly introducing me to brand-new characters and making me care about relationships I hadn’t realized existed a few moments ago.
But more than that, this specific episode gave me a nudge that I needed: the reminder that creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If I want to keep growing as a writer, I’ll have to ask for feedback, and I’ll probably need to go beyond the close friend and fellow writer who’s been my beta reader for a few years now. That’s a scary thought, and I’m glad I got to see it played out in a funny show that I love. A creative warning goes down a lot easier when it comes in a Mythic Quest episode.
Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian
I put off watching this Netflix special only because I assumed it was a full-length comedy special and I wanted to make sure I had an hour to focus on it. So it was bittersweet to realize that this is just a half-hour set, filmed in December 2021 for a small (surprised) audience at the Comedy Cellar in New York.
Nightclub Comedian is obviously not as fleshed-out as Ansari’s last full-length special, Right Now (one of my favorite comedy specials), but it still holds some gems. Watch it if you could use some perspective on *gestures at everything* that manages to be fresh and funny even though jokes about the pandemic and politics really shouldn’t be.
Thanks, as always, for reading! I’ll be taking a summer hiatus, so I may not be in your inbox much for a little while. If you’re a full subscriber, you’ll receive my Summer Reading Guide on June 1, and you’ll keep getting my inspiration list of what I’m reading and watching on the 1st of each month.
If you need some creative inspiration, please feel free to go through the People Who Like Things archive or the tinyletter archive for almost three years’ worth of older newsletters. You can also find me surrounded by books in regular episodes of my reading life podcast, Reading Like an Adult.