As the times change, so do I. After hitting a recent milestone of subscribers on Substack, I felt it was time to shift my intermittent internet writing (what we used to call “blogging”) to that platform. I’ll still be here, too, though it’s meant to be more of an “about me” page on the internet. So: if you want to continue receiving my writing — only this time, delivered directly to your inbox — then please consider signing up for my Substack.
If you’re on the fence, here are a few recent posts to help you make up your mind:
My DIY Writing Retreat
I spent the whole of last week writing about ghosts, and being among them.
It happened like this: after a year of fits and starts with my own creative writing projects, after saying I was going to “go away to write” one too many times, I finally committed to going to my parents’ farm for a week. Well, sort of. I had a nudge. M. finally said, go — you need to go and do it. It was his urging that finally made me submit the PTO notice, put the dates on our shared calendar, and write out a plan for my own DIY writing retreat.
And while that quieted the nagging voices in my own head that I’m so needed everywhere, that the world can’t go on without me (newsflash: it very much can), the chorus shifted its nagging to another area: what if my writing retreat was a failure? Even though I was working toward defining “success” at the outset, I was still caught up in a paralytic fear loop that somehow I’d fail. That somehow, I was an imposter after all, and who was I, really, to even take time to do this thing called art? How dare I.
I have no sense of time (this newsletter is practice)
I’m having a problem with time. It’s like I’ve lost all sense of it. Just yesterday, I had a conversation with someone where they asked me, “when did that happen?” I realized it was impossible for me to say. It could have been three months ago, or just as easily 15 months ago — either was plausible. This felt uncomfortable to me, as I’ve usually been pretty good about keeping things attached to some big mental timeline in my head. But over the last year, it’s become more difficult to do that. It’s not as easy to place events. My calendars and my journals are the only ways I tether my experience to some sense of recorded time. As I’ve gotten older, that relationship to time has only become more complicated.
It also brings up the bigger question: what am I doing with it? Time, I mean. In The Writing Life, Annie Dillard wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim.” And this is true, especially in terms of cultivating a practice around something you love, around something that you feel is one of your missions in life (in this case, writing). But it’s also true that schedules and calendars can become a sort of cage. At its best, a means of self-regulation; at its worst, a self-imposed prison.
ashley bethard 