exploring
Fridays are the best days because they mean writing. I get to pause book publicity to write these little stories. I miss writing. I miss sitting down trying to make sense and sentences out of feeling, with feeling.
A couple of weeks ago, the morning after the launch of Brief Flashings in the Phenomenal World, Steve turned to me and said, over breakfast, “Well now that you’re not so busy anymore, are you going to have time to do____?” I won’t tell you what said because it was so ridiculous I half-thought he was kidding, and because the book process wasn't winding down, it was only just beginning.
I told him as much. I was still glad to be hustling for Brief Flashings every day. It meant my book had legs, which in magic book-speak means longevity, it was going to have a long tail. I was in it for the long haul. I loved all the sayings. I know how to suck it up and work hard. I am good at staying the course. I have endurance. I have legs.
The other morning, though, I woke up missing writing, missing this—the original, make-it-up-as-you-go, feel-your-way-along-through-a-story kind of writing. You don’t know what you are going to write until it comes out through your fingertips. It’s like exploration, discovering a trail you’ve never been on. Even then, the way isn’t always clear. Where will you wind up? Who knows? Thank goodness for that.
I sit down with only a vague notion of what to write. It comes from my body mind, not my thinking mind. I piece together strange connections and moments, breadcrumbs flung about by the breeze. The NPR story about the sleeplessness pandemic I heard at breakfast. The host was interviewing a woman, who like most women, doesn’t sleep enough. So she had started a podcast about sleep deficit. I felt like laughing, or crying. I wondered if this woman had thought about trying to get more sleep rather than taking on another project.
We are all moving so fast all the time, and I don’t just mean running (it’s good to run fast sometimes). I mean living. We are not made to process all the information, opportunities, responsibilities, and data barreling at us at warp speed. ‘The paradigm is catching up to us,” my tai teacher told me yesterday when I met him for our weekly lesson. “Humanity is so disconnected from nature.” He pointed to the carpeted green foothills rising above us. “And this, this is the top of how connected we are. Most people do not have this out the door.” I nodded, scuffing my feet on the pocked and peeling tennis court. We call it Serena and Venus’s court because it reminds me of the one they played on, at night in the rain, in the movie King Richard, slabs of sticky white line paint flaking off beneath my sneakers.
I thought about the woman with the podcast. Maybe we’re not so different, she and I. Two weeks in, I’m so grateful to be hustling for Brief Flashings every day—which remains a #1 new release—but I’m also feeling the littlest itch to start something new.
So what’s the timeline for beginning again? Unless you’re staring down the face of a deadline, there isn’t one. You begin when you feel it. Like the radio interview I did this week where the producer played a song and then faded it out, my cue to begin talking. You have to listen for the very subtle fade-out. It’s inside of us and outside at the very same time.
A flashing.
This morning, I’m on a dawn plane to Oakland for the Brief Flashings book tour—to quote Paul Simon, from “Hearts and Bones,” on my Brief Flashings mixtape: “the first leg of a journey I started a long time ago.” I fall asleep before we take off in Albuquerque and wake to see the sand sprawl of Death Valley wavering directly below us, serendipitously, a flashing burst from chapter in the book. They’re all around us: the crinkled snowcapped Sierra sloping down to soft green hills, the ocean just off the nose. These lines from Joy Williams’ story, “Concerning the Future of Souls,” in the dog-eared Paris Review I brought with me on the plane:
“When she was ten she planted a cherry tree for her mother’s birthday. It was watered too heavily and died the following year. When she was twenty she planted a palm….When she was thirty she planted a grapefruit tree and wished she had planted it ten years before…. When she was fifty she planted an oak, just a good sturdy oak.”
You can tell a whole woman’s life in the trees she planted. You can collapse time just like that if you want. Do you see where the mind goes? Everywhere all at once, and right back around to here, to the sunny kitchen at my friend Amy’s house in Marin, overlooking a canyon of redwoods. I don’t know where this will go or “what comes next.”
Now is next. Now is now.
BRIEF FLASHINGS book tour updates!
TONIGHT!!
May 3, Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA, 5 pm.
Tuesday, May 7, Orsi Family Vineyards, Healdsburg, CA, hosted by Healdsburg Running Company. Group run: 6 pm; Book talk and signing, 7 pm.
Wed May 8, Tattered Cover, Denver. East Colfax Ave store. 6 pm
Let’s keep Flashings at the top of the new release bestseller list! Please spread the word, buy from your local bookstore, review online, post to social and most especially talk it up!
We are all flashings,
katie
