Letters from the Homestead: April 2023 💐
Update: winning a playwriting prize does not cure your melancholia.
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.
Brontë Sister House Party won lots of prizes!
This was a big, big month for my play Brontë Sister House Party! Commissioned in 2021 by the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival, it had its first professional production by SATE in 2022, and we took home awards from the St. Louis Theatre Circle for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Comedy, Outstanding Ensemble, and Outstanding Supporting Actor. It was a really amazing night. I wore a suit!
I was (and am) very proud of this play. It marked a shift in my writing style, it was written for a specific community that I love, and it genuinely helped me heal from the roughness of the pandemic and the reverberations of divorce.
But the funny thing about winning prizes is that the elation you feel over your “big win” can be short-lived. At least, this is how it goes for me. I’ve learned that prizes don’t sustain me when it comes to my energy for writing. There was a time when I thought they did, but it’s taken me 10+ years of sustained writing practice to realize that the thing that keeps me going is the writing itself. I promise I’m not trying to be idealistic here; I really mean this.
Winning prizes also does not (surprise, surprise) cure one’s melancholia/depression. I’ve been in and out of a funk for the first quarter of 2023, swinging between high periods of productivity and days where I stare at the world blankly. Being an award-winner, for me, doesn’t make me more motivated to write. It makes me feel a swell of gratitude and pride, but it does not ameliorate the root cause of my melancholia: which is that enthusiasm must be cultivated and the cultivation of enthusiasm takes hard work. Enthusiasm is not just given to you by an award. Enthusiasm must be scratched for every day when you sit down at the desk to write.
I’m so proud of our big win. But I’m reminding myself this month that the thing I love the most is just sitting down at my desk first thing in the morning and doing the work.
What I learned this Lent.
I’ve written in this newsletter before that the forty days leading up to Eastertide are my favorite part of the year, liturgically or otherwise. I love watching the worst of winter give way to early spring, and the solemness of Lent is grounding for me. This Lent, I made it a point to go to Mass every Sunday with my friend Evangeline, and I also committed to cutting down my impulse spending (I see you, Jeff Bezos, and I will overcome you).
Mass-going was my favorite part of this year’s Lent. I even experienced my first (3 hour!) Easter Vigil. Now that Easter has come and gone, I’ve started going to my closest Catholic church, which is just down the street from me. It’s a funny thing—I don’t believe in a limited vision of the divine, one boiled down to human-made creeds and dogmas. But I love the focusing qualities of going to Mass: the kneeling, the quiet, the repetition, the ritual. It’s becoming a centering activity for me, and I’m curious about the fresh grace of it all.
My other commitment for Lent was to not buy any unnecessary stuff. I failed big time on that one. I outfitted my “camper car” with random accessories; I bought books that I could’ve just checked out from the library; I got a little wild with buying seeds and plants for spring; I made the mistake of going into the Gap factory store; etc. and etc.
I’m a full-time freelancing artist. Unnecessary spending is not something I can go wild with. Part of leaning into this vocation (and I really do believe that writing is a vocation) is to embrace a more frugal lifestyle, something I’m very familiar with after so many years of living on a graduate student stipend. I’d hoped that Lent would be a recalibration time, but it wasn’t in this area. So, going into May, I’m committing to doing this over again with a “no buy month”—in other words, a month where I only buy necessary things, rather than “treat myself” to extras.
I’ll report back. 🫡
Clarifying my freelance workload.
Here’s a little self-employed creative *business update* for you. I transitioned to full-time freelancing about three(ish) years ago. After six years of graduate school and four years into a stable tenure-track university position, I decided I was ready to make a change and lean into my career as a writer. This was such a big leap for me, especially as an academic who was trained to believe that the tenure-track position was the ultimate boon. For me, though, being a professor felt like a safety net—a very time-intensive safety net that I knew was keeping me from making all the work I wanted to make. And I had a strong sense that I could recalibrate my income sources to make more time for writing. That was always the goal: just make more time for writing.
When I first became a freelancer, I did lots of diverse gig work that aligned with my skillsets (but not my passions). The goal was to build my income and create margin for writing, and I wasn’t picky about the work itself. Lesson number 1 about shifting to freelancing: you cannot be picky at the beginning. This meant that I worked challenging acting jobs, recorded dozens of audiobooks, wrote several romance novels under a pen name, and did intensive academic editing work. It took a while before my income started to be made up of the work that most excites me: playwriting commissions (for organizations or through the support of grants), work as a teaching artist for creative writing, and curriculum work for arts organizations.
I’m really happy to say that my freelance load has finally settled into a space where I’m pretty much only doing work that’s aligned with my identity as a writer. 2023 will be the first year that my income will exclusively come from these sources: playwriting commissions, grants and fellowships, working as a teaching artist, and (my sort-of safety net income source) facilitating graduate literature courses for secondary educators. This last one is an excellent remote job (part-time) that I’m able to do because of my PhD; while it’s not technically a “creative” job, it keeps my teaching resume up to date in case I ever were to take on a one-year visiting professor position in the future.
The short version is that I’m really doing it. I’m a writer. Hard pivots are possible.
What I’m reading this month…
Reading hasn’t come easily for me this month. I’ve been distracted by all of the writing projects I need to finish, and my schedule got quite busy with the start of two new rehearsal periods. But here are a few of the books that I found myself returning to this month:
Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard by Joan E. Strassmann. Did you know robins can literally hear worms underground? Neither did I, and now I’m obsessed with this knowledge.
As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks by Susan Sontag. I love these random and wandering journals of Sontag. There’s a particularly dramatic section where she breaks up with the playwright Maria Irene Fornés.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Every single sentence of this impressionistic novel is intentional. What a writer Woolf was. I truly read it just a sentence at a time and then put it back down again.
I believe freelance artists should be more upfront about how they support themselves financially, rather than maintaining the illusion that they are fully supported by their art (they usually aren’t). This is me attempting to live out that principle. So, here are all the ways I brought in money to the Homestead for the month of April.
Teaching artist work. Working with both Opera Theatre St. Louis on a mini opera for youth and facilitating a writing workshop with Prison Performing Arts.
Rehearsing my own play! In Prison! I’ve started going into Northeast Correctional Center with PPA to rehearse the play I wrote/adapted for these artists, called The Caverns of Wingwood. 🐉
Facilitating online literature graduate courses. This work gets very busy as the summer approaches. It’s the time of year when secondary educators are pursuing their continuing education requirements for certification. Lots of grading!
Substack paid subscriptions! Thank you to everyone who is a paid subscriber of this newsletter. I so appreciate it. For $5 a month, I always send out an extra Secret Letters post, and I occasionally send out a Salad Days letter (where I share excerpts from my college diaries). I’ve struggled with Salad Days lately because they are very emotionally taxing to write, so I’ve slowed down on those posts. I’m trying to find a replacement for this content—maybe a rec list? maybe writing/freelancing advice? maybe a monthly photoshoot of Midge? 🐈⬛
Spring is here in all her glory.
And although I’m up to my eyeballs in allergy meds, I am so happy. May we hold this golden time with gratitude.
Tonight starts a new month.
Yours ever & etc., etc.,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead, and Noble Midge 🐈⬛
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