Why stories matter in 2021 (and always)
Plus, a new creative calendar for a new year ...
I hope this newsletter finds you still feeling at least a little shiny and new, here in 2021. I love the energy of a fresh new year, the calendar unfolding before us with all its potential. If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while, you’ll know that I love the paradox of a creative calendar, and it’s been fun and exciting to create a brand-new one for 2021.
SCENE: Home on a Friday night
Me: [busy strategically tearing into a very large piece of cardboard]
W., politely: “… What are you doing?”
It probably makes more sense if I just show you a picture, but this is the calendar approach that worked for me in 2020 (yes, I’ve tried Google Calendar and Evernote and Trello and planners and bullet journaling), so I decided to bring it into 2021:
If you can tell, I’ve designated the next six months, with post-it notes underneath each detailing what I’ll write about for my newsletter and which reading theme will guide the books I select, as well as a couple of other projects that I’ve covered with flowers for creative privacy’s sake.
For the last two years, I’ve lived month to month creatively, so to speak, and it’s incredible how much I can remember about how I spent my time in 2019 and 2020 thanks to this monthly structure. Memory is a subjective, fallible, whimsical thing, but it’s strangely satisfying to be able to remember when a huge storm knocked down a tree in front of my apartment based on my memory of the book I was reading that day, which places it in April 2020, my month of reading fantasy for my adult fiction project.
I love to find themes and goals and resolutions for the year, but I think it’s key to break them into smaller chunks of time as well. A month-by-month approach (as inspired by Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project) has been working well for me. One month gives me enough time to explore a theme or try a goal while also forcing me to break bigger resolutions and ideas into manageable chunks that can be accomplished in 30 days.
2020 was my year to explore the world of adult fiction, broken down into one theme or genre that I read each month. This year, I’m making it a “year of memoir,” diving into the marvelously diverse and ever-expanding genre of memoirs and essay collections. Memoir is a book world that I’ve returned to over and over when I was sad and/or depressed and needed to reach outside of myself, but I think the perspective and growth that define memoir as a genre is valuable in every season of life.
While it’s not a memoir per se, my first read of 2021 was Happier at Home by Gretchen Rubin. A follow-up to her first happiness book, Happier at Home also follows the month-to-month structure and focuses on healthy habits and loving rituals that make home an even nicer place to be. I like Rubin’s straightforward approach and honesty about her own failings, and this book reminded me to check in with my home and not to take the objects around me for granted. We look at the things in our own homes so often that we stop seeing them, only to realize when months or years have passed that this item should have been thrown away long ago, or that beloved photo has spent too long in a box instead of being in a frame to be seen and appreciated.
My first official memoir read of the year, Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit, was many things, but for the purposes of this newsletter, I’ll focus on what Solnit has to say about books and reading.
Solnit describes the power of reading as “The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way …” When I read that paragraph, I marked the page with a bright pink post-it to return to, because it captures so well my reasons for writing this newsletter and trying to match people to the right story for them. Books – and movies and TV shows and podcasts and music – give us stories and ideas that make the world both bigger and smaller, expanding our perspective while also letting us weave connections to make sense of our lives.
A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter by William Deresiewicz sums things up fairly well in its title. A unique and charming memoir, this book is half exploration of Jane Austen’s continued relevance and timeless depictions of human nature, half memoir illustrating those points through transformation in the author’s own life.
Deresiewicz is a proud, snobby, angry young man who thinks he’s too intellectual to read that grandmother of romance, Jane Austen, but he’s required to pick up Emma for a class on English literature. In frank and thoughtful prose, Deresiewicz remembers how he was bowled over by the lesson that Emma learns in her cruelest moment – realizing that he was making the same mistakes as the character as he read the story. Working through each of Austen’s six novels, Deresiewicz becomes a better, kinder, humbler and more giving person along the way. I loved this memoir not just as a Jane Austen fan, but as someone who treasures stories and connections and believes with my whole heart that the right story at the right time can change your life.
Memoir is a powerful, intimate and messy genre, but like Deresiewicz, I also believe that fictional, shaped stories – preferably, imo, with happy endings – are necessary to show larger truths about human existence.
Speaking of fiction … I hope you didn’t think I could get by without mentioning the newest Taylor Swift album (her second of the pandemic, if you’re counting) at some point. Like folklore, companion album evermore is mostly a collection of fictional stories, or truths wrapped up in fiction.
While I’m enjoying the whole thing in its wonder and whimsy, I wanted to talk specifically about the two bonus tracks with their mirrored themes. One is about someone who goes through something hard and then digs her heels in to stay stuck forever, while the other is about going through something hard and then being strong enough to move on.
I’ve started a new series for this year called “A Creative Reckoning” that is in your inbox on the first Thursday of each month. If I could pick a theme song for this series, “it’s time to go” would be the one. Whether you realize it in a moment or over years, at some point you know when you need to either make a change or (like the narrator in Swift’s first bonus track, “right where you left me”) stay in that miserable place for the rest of your life.
It’s hard to find that moment, and it’s even harder to act on it. In Recollections, Solnit writes no like one else about that feeling of being stuck, the “conviction that what is terrible will always be terrible, that now is a flat, featureless plain that goes on forever … that what is joyous cannot be trusted, and what is feared is lying in wait for you.”
But that conviction, as real as it seems when the darkness surrounds, is lying to you. Like Solnit and like me and like Swift’s characters in the second bonus track, you are strong enough to take the first step, and then the next one and the next, until you find yourself in the sunlight again.
*Author’s Note about Goodreads links to books: I persist in linking as infrequently as possible because I assume that anyone who can sign up for a newsletter can also search and bookmark my recommendations in the way they think is best. But while I’m torn over its ownership, the fact remains that Goodreads is a free, accessible, helpful tool that has revolutionized my reading life. I'll let you make the decision from there where to buy your books, but I do recommend my lovely local bookstore, Quail Ridge Books (yes, they ship! and their customer service is great).