What is Happening Here?

“A pretty sight, a lady with a book.” 

                                                                - Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Me a year ago, reading in the hallway of the Historic Central Hotel in Burns, Oregon

This is where I write a nice, easy introduction regarding who I am and what I’m doing here with a new blog. I’m typing one-handed because I’m holding my sleeping daughter, who was worried I’d go back out into the night and who “can’t get warm without you, Mummy.” I’m at a cheese-filled table in an apartment in St. Louis (not supposed to eat cheese but we are traveling), where I’ve watched so many horror shows since arriving last week that I’m almost as scared as my daughter at night, with the long, skinny hallway and blinds that do not close. My husband is opposite me, catching up on work at ten p.m. that he couldn’t do during the day because everyone else was on a Halloween hangover and quite short on patience and very quick to scream. 

Getting sugared up on Halloween in St. Charles, Missouri

I intended to begin a travel blog quite some time ago, mostly because my social media posts were getting quite long and I thought I was probably being quite annoying. I was fresh off the back of taking several poetry classes with the very excellent Barbara Henning, who tried her very best to get me to work on brevity, and in the end threw her hands up and told me I was probably best as a prose writer (disclaimer: this was in a prose-poetry class; still, it stung, a bit. Still, she is brilliant and you should take a class with her). So here I am, ready to write too many sentences and over-elaborate on everything. I promise I’ll do my best to delete superfluous words but please, for the love of God, expect tangents.

My family and I have been traveling around the US since August 2020; I’ve been writing rough half-posts for some places we’ve stayed, and then got caught up in the flurry of moving on before I had time to edit and polish up anything—and then I was too slap-bang in the middle of the next place to look back. I have some very half-baked impressions of our time in Meeteetse, Wyoming (where I first formulated the idea, as I watched a herd of cows watching me, before we got stuck in snow-related drama), Lead, South Dakota, and the north-west Chicago suburbs, where we’ve just left after a summer in a slightly depressing apartment. I doubt I’ll ever finish up and publish these posts, based on past experience and better self-awareness (nothing like traveling with your young family during a pandemic to really work on self-awareness). But! I do have some still-too-wordy poems and paragraphs from my time in Oregon and Washington state, when I got really into local history and digging stuff up from the ground and trying to insert myself into it all, so I might end up scrubbing some of that up and sharing.

Digging in the snow in Richland, Washington

Mostly I’ve been writing creepy little short stories. I do have a few novels in various stages of completion, but had to put them all down because I realized I couldn’t commit while our life was in such flux—I am a homeschooling, full-time mum of two young, neurodivergent children, traveling the country in a pandemic with a husband that works full-time and no other adults anywhere to help out, and I realized this year I had to scale back my writerly ambitions, for now. So, after my poetry classes finished in early 2021, I continued journaling and jotting down ideas for short stories and otherwise focused on the kids. I’d use calls for submissions prompts and themes and just go super dark and strange. Wyoming was full of inspiration for weirdness, where we found ourselves for far longer than we’d planned. 

It was in a bookstore in Woodstock, Illinois, that I came across the Best American Short Stories 2020 anthology, and committed with the levels of analysis I typically reserve for novels or episodes of prestige TV. There were no Reddit sub-threads for these stories, but there were a couple of bloggers writing astute analyses: Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense and Jacob Webber at Workshop Heretic. I quickly became addicted to finishing a story and reading their thoughts on my phone, gone midnight. I could join in next year, I thought. 

So I have. I cannot be trusted to learn from the best short stories of the year by writing my own private analysis so must have a publicly accountable publishing schedule, and here it is. There’s some other stuff here too, because I’m finally going to try writing some travel and other life bits (we’ll be back to California for good for now in five weeks). My daughter Mabli likes to write offbeat fantastical stories too so, if she's up for it, I'll share some of them as well. In all likeliness, the intersection of people who are interested in reading about my life (hello, Mum!) and people who read the BASS anthology is probably zero, and yet I am going to charge on forward, sporadically. Better here than on social media, I reckon.

This pretty sight is my co-editor, Mabli

Thanks for making it to the end, Mum! 

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psssst...

Note: If you are not my mother and have also made it to the end and are a bit confused by vocabulary/location clashes: I am British—Welsh—and have lived in California since 2012, before I upped and left with the fam to explore the rest of the place.   

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Second note: Karen Carlson at A Just Recompense is writing her analyses for the BASS out of order this year, using the thematic groupings that Jesmyn Ward, the guest editor, has created. I liked the idea in theory but don’t think I can commit in practice. Her first category is for surreal, changing place stories—if they were all about moving around I’d be into it, but because they all seem to be just grouped by their surreality, I can’t do it. I’m discombobulated enough as it is. Besides, I don’t have the impulse control to stop reading when I get to the next story, and am already halfway through The Miracle Girl and enjoying it too much, despite telling myself to stop it and make a plan. My plan is going chronologically, which was how I enjoyed them last year. If I loop around to common themes, that’ll be an extra pleasure. So I’ll be out of sync with Karen’s analyses, but that might be fun too. 

November 1, 2021