Summertime
Greetings from my desk, where I have at last spent the day writing. I stepped away from this newsletter for a time to accomplish a few things of note mainly only to myself: we took our son on his first trip overseas. A True Account came out in paperback in the UK. We hosted our 19th annual Fourth of July party (even though the town fireworks were canceled due to a fire on the barge the night before, a story which made national news, and which has been ruled an accident). And I learned how to varnish.
Note to anyone who has ever considered accepting a free sailboat as a gift: think it over. Ask yourself, do I want to learn how to varnish?
(Here’s us delivering back to our mooring in Salem yesterday. Look at that varnish! Only three coats to go.)
I’ve written a couple of thousand words over the past few days, the first real writing I have done in several months. It’s a strange kind of writing, not what I am accustomed to, weirdly meta and constrained. I am attempting to account for myself. I am fifteen years into my writing career, and spend so much time reflecting on all the things I don’t know, or haven’t read, or don’t yet fully understand, that having an occasion - a requirement - to analyze what it is that I am trying to accomplish feels both necessary and preposterous.
I enjoyed this recent essay by Henry Oliver which analyzes the contemporary “discourse novel,” a modern twist on the novel of manners which takes for its subject the limits of what can permissibly be said by a writer living in the world (and, specifically, in the digital world). As someone who spends most of her days occupying historically distant moments in time, I wouldn’t say that I am producing this kind of work, but I am certainly aware of the limits of what can be permissibly said in fiction in our current moment in time. I operate inside those constraints as much as if I were writing biting satires of life in literary Brooklyn. Less visibly, maybe. Perhaps we are all writing discourse novels, all the time.
Of that which we cannot speak, Wittgenstein said, we must pass over in silence.
So what’s next?
Tomorrow I am participating in an online event called Book Bingo. I’ll be very honest with you - I don’t know what this event is. I agreed to do it months ago, and I know other authors are involved, and I know I’ll be talking about A True Account. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. It’s at 7 pm Eastern, that much I know. Here’s a link.
Then, on August 6, if you’re free for lunch I hope you’ll join me and Roundtable at the 92Y for an online quickie class on Pirates in Fact and Fiction.
When fall rolls around I’ll have in person events again. In the meantime, there is work to be done. And three more coats of varnish.