Letters from the Homestead: April 2022
If anything can be said of this month, it can be said that "there were beads."
Emily Dickinson called her Amherst home “The Homestead.” I lovingly call my apartment in St. Louis the same thing (although I definitely get out more than Dickinson). This monthly newsletter is my attempt to work through what it feels like to put down roots as a writer in my own Homestead. In it, I’m honest about what’s saving my life right now, what’s hard, and what I’m pouring my energy into.
(If you hate it, don’t worry; you can unsubscribe anytime through the link in the footer. And if this e-mail found its way to your inbox by other means and you dig it, subscribe below!)
The need to be useful.
When I was a professor, I never left work at the end of each day and thought, “Well, none of that mattered.” Even on my worst teaching days, I knew that just showing up for students and being kind was meaningful enough, and it was one of the things I loved the most about my job.
The funny thing about leaving academia and becoming a Real Writer is that the work you do each day feels inherently selfish. Maybe you have a far-off vision of a reader or audience member who will feel connected to the work, but there’s no immediate feedback.
It’s hard to tell if you’re truly being useful.
So, recently I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, something that will hopefully be a little useful: I became a Notary Public literally for no other reason than sometimes people need notaries. And I wanted to feel useful.
Here is a little backstory. When I got divorced, I had to use a notary for my paperwork, and it was the most positive interaction of my whole divorce process. The notary was kind, quick, and matter-of-fact. “I was in the same boat as you two years ago, hun,” said Amy the Notary when I finished my paperwork in the middle of the pandemic. I nearly burst into tears at this small dose of kindness.
This was one of the only times in my life I’ve ever needed a notary, and I was shocked by the vulnerability of it all. After all, this stranger who’s been entrusted with “The Power of the Stamp” looks over your sensitive documents and makes sure that you’ve filled out the whole shebang. They see confidential, complicated tidbits about your personal life, and then they look you in the eye and make you prove and swear that you are who you say you are. You can’t sign your name until they say so.
I was a little bewildered after my first notary experience, and I promise I’m not exaggerating. How fascinating is it that we have a whole public servant role that centers on people affirming they are who they say they are?
If it sounds like I’m romanticizing the whole notary thing, it’s because I am. It’s an instrument of truth-telling, of affirming that someone is real and present.
Also, there is a stamp. (Mine is pink.)
Becoming a notary isn’t that difficult. It costs about $150 dollars to take the online course, buy a bond (basically your “notary insurance”), and order your customized stamp. In the City of St. Louis, you have to pay $3.50 in cash before they will swear you in as an official notary. During your swearing-in, you affirm that you’ll “uphold the office of the Notary Public as well as the Constitution.” The woman who administered my oath (I think of her as the St. Louis City Notary Queen) locked eyes with me and repeated the oath to me from memory. Absolutely mesmerizing.
All of this is to say…
Hello! I am a St. Louis City notary now. And I am first and foremost a *FREE* notary. I wanted to make sure I got this done in advance of the midterm elections so that I could notarize signatures on absentee ballots, but I’m also looking into other volunteer notary needs, too (like the library).
If you need a notary and you’re in Missouri, consider me your friendly, go-to gal. Nothing would make me happier than to be useful to you.
An unhinged moment (featuring “beads”) to mark the end of Lent.
I saw an article in the Thursday Styles section of The New York Times and had an immediate moment of recognition: this woman is making very expensive beaded jewelry that looks just like the trash me and my friends made at Girl Scout Camp in 1998.
The next thing I knew, I’d bought an industrial hardware caboodle and filled it with campy novelty beads. The objective? Make bead things. No sleep, just beads. Go beads or go home.
Twenty campy bracelets letter, I came up for air and thought, “What’s the goal here? What is happening? Who the hell let me buy all these beads?”
It turns out, the objective was to just make bracelets until I just couldn’t anymore. The beads were an impulse purchase fueled by raw nostalgia and an old appreciation for both camp and “Camp” (the aesthetic style, not the overnight variety). About ten bracelets in, I even sat down and reread Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” wondering if there was an answer somewhere in there for why I was spending so much of my downtime making funky bracelets that looked like they were designed by a twelve-year-old.
Camp style, in the eyes of Sontag, is exuberant and exaggerated; it’s flashy and artificial, seeing most things in quotation marks. It’s not a bracelet, it’s a “bracelet.”
Pure Camp is innocent. “The pure examples of Camp are unintentional; they are dead serious,” Sontag writes. Case in point: the bracelets I made at Girl Scout camp were very tacky and flashy, but all of us Girl Scouts thought they were absolutely stylin’. I remember coming home from camp that summer with a suitcase pocket full of friendship bracelets that looked like something you could get out of a grocery store candy machine. They were “pure Camp,” glorious in all their oblivious innocence.
There’s a pretense in trying to force Camp on something (Sontag even says that it can be “harmful”), but I found satisfaction in trying to replicate a very old thing that genuinely made me happy.
Why beads? Hell, beads are fun! Why not beads?
All of this bead-frenzy happened at the end of Lent. I even brought my caboodle of “bead things” to Easter lunch with some of my friends so we’d have a craft. (The lesson? Everyone loves beads.) My bead moment turned out to align well with the end of the forty-day season of fasting, which I use as my yearly recalibration. Even though I don’t identify as Christian anymore, I really do get my religion back briefly during Lent, in part because I understand that it’s good for my soul to stop and self-assess.
This Lent, I tried to fast from alcohol, and mostly stayed the course (except for when I didn’t). And yet my Lent ended in pure excess in a different area with The Great Bead Purchase of 2022. This lapse in self-restraint left me surrounded with more beads than I knew what to do with and a new craft that I could very well turn into my whole personality.
What do the beads mean? Who’s to say?
I think they mean that at the end of the long winter, I wanted to make something colorful and useless, nostalgic and easy. I wanted to do something with my hands that wasn’t writing. And I wanted to make something that was not-quite-beautiful but not-quite-a-disaster either.
Next time you wish to lose your mind, may I recommend beads?
***
You want some beads? I got beads. You come to my house? You’re leaving with beads.
What I’m reading this month…
This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett. This is a collection of Patchett’s nonfiction essays. The “happy marriage” in the title is more of a reference to her long-term relationship with writing, even though she does write about marriage from time to time. The essays are collected mostly from pieces she’s done for various magazines, which is the main way she supported herself as a novelist at the beginning of her career. I’ve loved reading this book. It’s a beautiful testament to how a full-time writer has to make a living in addition to making a life.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor. I love the way O’Connor writes about the writing life: dogmatic and salty, chock-full of opinions and smart ways to say them. This is a new development for me because, in graduate school, I resisted reading too much O’Connor. I bristled at how so many of my peers referred to her as Saint Flannery, as if her books were holy writ. (I don’t think O’Connor would like this posture.) Now far out from grad school, I feel like I can finally read her works on my own terms, meeting her where she is not only as a Southern writer but also as someone who was concerned with how a sense of place shapes the work we make.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. I read this incredible near-future, diary-style novel last summer, but I picked it up again this month. I’m fascinated by stories that tell the origin of a new religion, especially when that new religion is trying to responsibly remake a crumbling world—that’s exactly the focus in Parable of the Sower, the first book in the Earthseed series. If you’ve never dipped into the Earthseed series before, this is a great addition to your summer reading list.
Telling Secrets: A Memoir by Frederick Buechner. This is one of the memoirs of the novelist and preacher Frederick Buechner. Sometimes, I get interested in the intersection between writing plays and writing sermons, and I have an underdeveloped theory that they have more in common than we’d think. For instance, I love what he has to say here about the act of writing a sermon:
“I realized that if ideas were all I had to preach, I would take up some other line of work. […] I had never understood so clearly before what preaching is to me. Basically, it is to proclaim a Mystery before which, before whom, even our most exalted ideas turn to straw. It is also to proclaim this Mystery with a passion that ideas alone have little to do with. […] It is to speak words that you hope may, by grace, be bearers not simply of new understanding but of new life both for the ones you are speaking to and also for you.” (Telling Secrets, p. 61)
How I made money this month $$$
I believe freelance artists should be more upfront about how they support themselves financially, rather than pretending they are “sustained fully by their art.” (Usually, they aren’t.) Here is me trying to live out that principle of transparency.
Voiceover work. More audiobooks, as usual. This month, I did my first ever Young Adult novel gig. After doing so many adult romance novels, it was odd to shift gears here and try to find the right “tone” for YA narration.
Romance novel writing. A few weeks ago, I submitted my newest Miranda Markwell manuscript, Stealing the Scholar’s Heart, and got started on a new novel titled Valerie Falls in Love with a Voice. I’m planning to increase my Miranda Markwell writing over the summer—the work is fun, flexible, and it keeps my writing muscles in good shape.
Facilitating online graduate courses. Ongoing online facilitating for an education platform that offers graduate-level literature courses.
Substack paid subscriptions! Thank you so much to all my paid subscribers. It means the world to me that you would invest in my work like this.
Happy Spring from Midge, my own May Queen.
Thank you, as always, for reading this newsletter. I hope the beginning of your spring is full of color and impulse-bought craft supplies.
Tonight starts a new month.
Yours ever,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead, and Midge the Cat 🐈⬛
P.S. - Consider becoming a paid subscriber of this newsletter!
