Letters from the Homestead: August 2022
Farewell, "Brontë Sister House Party." Hello, creative crash.
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.
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The Creative Crash
The older I get, the more quickly the creative crash arrives at the end of a major project. I was chatting with my friend Lucy about how I used to be able to wrangle the dynamic energy of doing a Big Thing for a whole week afterward. Nowadays, I’m lucky if I get eighteen hours.
Now that the (successful! sold-out!) run of Brontë Sister House Party has ended, I’m trying to take care of myself during what will be the hardest week of my year: the week after the holy art-making moment.
It’s hard. It’s always hard. But I’ve experienced it enough times now to have a plan for taking care of myself during the hardest week of the year.
Here are some things that help tremendously:
A grocery haul the day before strike.1 I buy ingredients for all the best meals. Pasta! Julia Child recipes! The fancy bread! Jam! And then I plan out all my meals for the week. The only requirement is that they need to be meals I genuinely enjoy cooking. It’s low-hanging creative fruit, and it keeps me from eating stale tortilla chips and spoonfuls of peanut butter for dinner.
Do some “life admin” tasks. This is also low-hanging fruit. So far this week, I’ve already bought a life insurance policy, paid off a credit card, and rearranged all of the hanging pictures in my apartment. Next up is taking my car to the shop. All of these things help me remember that I’m just a human out here human-ing.
Pour any remaining frenetic energy into reaching out to friends about the next project. Yeah, I know this sounds crazy and maybe a recipe for burnout, but hear me out. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you immediately get to work on the next thing. But it does mean that you prioritize the process. My favorite part of making meaningful work with friends is the making part, not the end result. Because I know this about myself, I like to lean into it. Do I bite off more than I can chew? Always.
Take a break from social media. Leading up to the opening of Brontë Sister House Party, I posted a picture of Kate Bush on my Instagram story with a link to tickets—every single day. I was suddenly posting daily after months of not posting at all, trying to drum up excitement about the play. And now my plan is to fall off the face of the social media planet for a while. This always makes me feel better.
All of these strategies help a little, but they don’t prevent the creative crash altogether. I can feel it; she’s already here. She wants me to shut myself up in my apartment for weeks and watch endless episodes of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding on Emma’s Discovery+ account. She wants me to putter with projects that I know don’t have legs as a way of avoiding the Next Big Thing. She wants me to give myself bangs. She wants me to be still, but not the good kind.
I’ve learned that I have to give into her a little. I have to make some kind of sloth-like offering or she won’t get off my back. That’s okay. I can give her as much.
After all, look at what we made:
100 Days of Sobriety 🎉
While Brontë Sister House Party opened and closed, I crossed a milestone of 100 days of sobriety from alcohol. When I stopped drinking, I didn’t really intend to “get sober.” I honestly thought it was just a season, a chance to let my body recalibrate while I got used to a new medication. But three months passed and the recalibration proved to be more monumental than I anticipated.
I feel really, really good. Getting 100 days sober hasn’t changed my life, but it has made me feel good.
I’m a little tentative writing about this because people who claim sobriety are often immediately categorized as “in recovery.” For me, I’d not yet trashed my life over alcohol, but I certainly hadn’t gone more than a week without drinking since I was 21. In my first year of grad school, my ex and I used to buy a giant jug of Carlo Rossi red wine and four “forties” of Miller High Life, and we cheaply drank our way through each week. Ten years later, single and living alone through a pandemic, I could easily finish off a handle of whisky in less than seven days.
Now, I’m drinking a lot of Diet Coke. And saving a lot of money. And getting better sleep…
But maybe most surprisingly? My mind is in better shape to write.
My biggest reason for stopping alcohol was a bad reaction with my depression medication, but my reason for staying sober is I want every ounce of my mental and emotional capacity at the ready when it’s time to write. Since I stopped drinking, my writing productivity has soared. Turns out, Diet Coke and water make it easier to write a lot of words than wine. Go figure.
I’m still processing all of this, especially the question of whether sobriety is a “forever” choice for me. For now, though, it feels right.
What I’m reading this month…
The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self by Martha Beck. Love a little late summer self-help reading. What I like about this book is it has some great reflections on how living inauthentically can produce physical manifestations, like pain. The body always knows, doesn’t it?
Playwriting with Purpose: A Guide and Workbook for New Playwrights by Jacqueline Goldfinger. This is one of the few playwriting books out there written by a woman. It approaches the process of playwriting with a great deal of openness, and I’m definitely going to use some of these exercises in my own practice.
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running: A Memoir by Haruki Murakami. This book almost (almost…) makes me want to take up running. Murakami is a novelist, and he draws parallels between training as a long-distance runner with the work of writing a novel.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Some good Georgia fiction for the end of summer. I love the character Mick Kelly so much, and the way she rhapsodizes about Beethoven’s third symphony makes my eyes misty: “The whole world was this symphony, and there was not enough of her to listen.”
How I made money this month $$$
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 August.
Facilitating online graduate courses in literature. This is one of my biggest summer gigs: teaching grad classes for secondary educators getting content area certification or more credits for pay raises.
Playwriting. It’s a great month when you get paid for your plays. Thank you, Brontë Sister House Party and SATE!
Working with Prison Performing Arts. I’ve been working on an ongoing playwriting project with PPA Alums, a new collage/showcase play set to open in January.
Facilitating theatre-based diversity training for STEM educators. I do this gig every once in a while thanks to a National Science Foundation grant at SIUe.
Paid Substack subscriptions! I’m so grateful to all my paid subscribers. Thank you for supporting my work. (If you want to subscribe, the monthly gift is now $5!—you can scroll down to the bottom of this email for more info.)
Can’t stop, won’t stop
Brontë Sister House Party may be over, but I have so much hope for new projects. Can’t stop, won’t stop. Creative crash be damned.
Here in St. Louis, the heat is still unbearable, but the signs of early fall are here: loud cicadas at twilight, sudden thunderstorms, and wildflowers in the alleys. Wishing you cooler temps very soon, wherever you are.
Tonight starts a new month.
Yours ever & etc., etc.,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead, and Noble Midge the Cat 🐈⬛
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“Strike” is what theatre folks call the day when we tear everything down: the set, the costumes, the props, etc. It’s one of my favorite days because it lets you channel all the lingering creative energy into tearing things apart. It is closure at its finest.