Letters from the Homestead: August 2021
New platform, who's this?
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 an artist 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!)
New platform, who’s this?
For the one-year anniversary of my little newsletter (a pandemic project that I just can’t quit), I gifted myself a shiny new platform and a bit of a redesign. Squarespace was a great tool for figuring out what sort of newsletter I wanted to write, but the reality was that it just kept ending up in people’s spam folders. Substack promises to not have this issue, and my fingers are tightly crossed that it comes through.
With Substack, I also have the option to add paid subscriber tiers for some other offerings I have (i.e., my college diary sharing idea that I’ve written about in the newsletter before, as well as some secret posts). Like most working artists, I’m trying to figure out the best ways to create meaningful work that people would be willing to support. This is a hard line to walk because it’s difficult to ask for support for something you’d very likely do for free, but I want to gently take some steps in a direction that frees me up to spend more time on the writing I love most.
Don’t worry, though, this monthly newsletter right here will always be free. I’m absolutely committed to that. It’s just the extras that include a paid subscriber tier now. (Read on below for more details about these fun things.)
As a truly stereotypical and occasionally insufferable Sagittarius, I love remaking and revising; this is the work that gives me a sense of momentum, and I appreciate how taking a second look at a project can be clarifying. After a whole year of newslettering during a pandemic, I slowly grew to understand that this kind of record-keeping is essential for me as a working artist. If I don’t pause to take stock of what happened and how I felt about it, then the work I do doesn’t always have the chance to build upon itself, to regenerate, or to (you know) become cooler and more interesting.
Amazing what a change in font can do, you know?
I died 20-something times this month.
For all of August, I died as Desdemona on Tuesday through Sunday nights—all for a total of 22 (maybe 21? some shows were cancelled for weather?) pretty rough deaths. Since this was an outdoor production of Othello, performed in public parks all over the St. Louis area, each death was a rather sweaty one. Hello, end of summer heatwave.
In last month’s newsletter, I wrote about how hard it was to get my bearings back in a rehearsal hall (after a full pandemic of not). I struggled to learn my lines and hold in my head all the moving parts required for acting in a play. The rehearsal period also found me unexpectedly exhausted, both socially and physically. Getting “back to theatre” ended up being rough for me, to the point where I started to wonder if I’d lost some of my fundamental enthusiasm for this work.
Once the performances got rolling, I felt the ease that comes with having a role in your head and working with a team to create a performance each night. I’d missed that. There’s so much inner confidence to be found in the execution of a project like this, individually and collectively. It felt good to show up to work and be creative each night.
And yet…
The hardest part for me was the repetition. I know, I know—the repetition is the whole point of “putting up a play.” But the work of showing up every night to perform Othello over and over felt eerily familiar to the period of the pandemic where every single day felt the same. The repetition of the pandemic’s seemingly infinite time-loop was part of what made the past year and a half feel like it almost didn’t happen (and, conversely, made every day feel like it was happening in slow motion). The repetition of a nightly performance made the month of August fly by, with little time to pause and look around.
I’m not sure what to make of this.
On August 29th, we had our last performance. We performed at a country club (a strange venue for us since most of our shows were in public parks), and spent our time post-show drinking free wine and stealing cookies and chicken fingers from the plates discarded by the country club members. I’ll always remember that night as a pause in all the repetition, a moment where the next day would no longer be the same. Even now, a few days after the show has closed, my body still hasn’t quite let go of a month of touring. I still feel the itch to get ready for performance call when 4:30pm rolls around—I wonder how long it will take my body to shift into it’s new normal.
Cheers, Othello! What a way to die (20-something times over).
Making myself feel like less of a quitter…
Before the pandemic became a true reality, I quit two very big things: a marriage and a tenure-track professorship. When you quit big things like this, it’s easy to wonder if you’re “the quitting type”—someone who can’t be relied upon to stick with hard things. Maybe even someone who can’t be trusted.
One of my deepest fears is not being viewed as a “dependable” or “responsible” person. (Hello, moon in Virgo.) Nothing tears me up inside more than forgetting an important meeting or deadline. I like being the person that others can count on, and I mark it as a sign of great value when I’m the go-to person for a friend’s “emergency contact” list. Hell, I even love it when people count on me to water their plants when they go on vacation.
All of this to say—quitting is hard for me.
Now, I’m certainly not against quitting things that a person needs to release themselves from; that’s a valid impulse. But I am in favor of being intentional about what things one might truly commit to—projects, self-care, caring for community, meaningless streaks on an iPhone app, etc. Over the past year, I found myself cataloging in my mind the things that I really did feel committed to, things I was intent upon not quitting. It made me feel like less of “the quitting type” and more like someone who had a clear idea of what they valued.
Here are a few things I did not quit:
Volunteering at Planned Parenthood. This month, I celebrated one full year of volunteering as a patient greeter/clinic escort at my local Planned Parenthood. I signed up to do this volunteering gig on a whim when I was just looking for a reason to get outside during the pandemic. All of the cultural conditioning I experienced from growing up in a “service-oriented” evangelical space makes me take volunteer work very seriously, so I knew on a deep level that I would probably stick with this. I’ve prioritized those two hours every Friday morning as non-negotiable, and it’s one of the best volunteer gigs I’ve ever done.
Propagating pothos (i.e., “Devil’s Ivy”). This plant is impossible to kill, spreads its vines relentlessly, and stays green despite the worst of conditions. But propagating it takes a lot of patience. I’ve spent most of the pandemic clipping vines, letting them grow roots in wine bottles, and planning for my own personal pothos greenhouse in my apartment. This is the only houseplant I’ve ever been able to keep alive and propagate, so I’m leaning hard into that. There’s also something about the extreme resilience of this plant that makes me want to surround myself with it, filling my space with an organism that appears to be delightfully un-killable.
This newsletter. Letters from the Homestead was a true pandemic project, something that I started in the midst of social isolation in order to feel more connected to people. Writing a monthly newsletter felt like a strategy for wrangling time, for writing each month into existence when the blur of the pandemic was at its worst. My first secret checkpoint for this newsletter was six months; once I reached that point, I would reevaluate. I ended up loving it so much that, after reaching the one year mark (yay!), I decided to switch platforms to something that could hold it a little better. Hello, Substack!
Writing a novel and then querying it. I’m still a little alarmed that this project was one of my chief pandemic fixations. It took much longer than I expected, stretched me creatively in ways I didn’t expect, and jumpstarted me onto a new artistic path that was totally surprising. Even when I thought the book was truly horrible, I didn’t quit. To be honest, I think the querying process is harder than the actual writing of the book—there’s so much rejection on this end of the process. It’s demoralizing. Once again, I find myself trying my best to just not quit.
My Duolingo steak. This is nerdy, but I’ve been doing one of those short Spanish lessons on the Duolingo app every day for over a year now. I’m not sure how much it has helped my messy Spanish, but it has given me a sense of micro accomplishment I didn’t know I needed.
Therapy. I believe that therapy is a way to welcome healing and take responsibility for one’s character. And, like Joan Didion wisely says, this work can be the foundation of self-respect. I started therapy in earnest in October 2019 and I’ve stuck with it ever since. There were a few times during the pandemic where I considered quitting, mainly because of the financial cost (therapy is pricey!), but I stuck with it and I have no plans of stopping.
Pub Night. Every week, a close group of my friends gathers at our favorite pub. I vigilantly plan my weekly schedule around these nights. Even when we did “Zoom Pub Night” before we were all vaccinated, I still made this weekly time a priority. In some ways, this commitment to Pub Night is a commitment to the care and keeping of this wonderful group of friends: the people who go on each other’s emergency contact lists, the people we call when we need help, the people who can tell when something is amiss.
Full-time freelancing. It would have been very easy for me to walk away from my professor job and into another 40-hour a week, full-time position. But instead of immediately tying myself to another company or institution, I decided to stick out the work of building an artist-adjacent freelance workload. I won’t lie—there were times where I was very worried about this working out and considered just looking for “a real job,” but the reality is that I’ve never been healthier (mentally, physically, and creatively) than when I decreased my weekly work load. I’ve been on “the grind” (especially the “academic grind”) for so long; releasing myself from that was one of the hardest decisions of my adult life. And I’m so much better for it.
There you have it. These are the things that I decidedly did not quit.
On the gratitude of writing without a filter.
This is my second year in a row of “not going back to school” after resigning from my professorship. From the start of my graduate studies in 2010 to the day I sent my resignation letter in 2020, I spent ten years associated with academic institutions that necessitated a “filter” of sorts. Both institutions were faith-affiliated, and they functioned with very specific codes of conduct and statements of belief that put pressure on students/staff to monitor their speech.
I kept so much to myself over the course of that decade, terrified of losing my fully funded graduate position and eventually my tenure-track job (which I worked so hard to get). I repeatedly told myself that all institutions generally become more progressive with the passage of time, and that surely things would change if I just stuck it out.
And then, at my university, I watched as the school repeatedly silenced LGBTQ+ voices and uplifted dangerous “God saved me from being gay” messages that were sponsored by the administration itself. This kind of anti-queer rhetoric kills. It was my breaking point, especially since I knew that there would come a point where my newfound singleness would eventually make space for my own queerness to be visible.
Case in point: I once gave a chapel talk titled “What do you actually like?”, a sort-of admonition for students to be honest with themselves about where their preferences really lie. I spoke of it in broad, harmless strokes: choice of major, choice of partner, choice of next steps post graduation. I even went so far as to challenge students who claim that the Bible is their “favorite book”—did they actually like reading the Bible, or did they say so because they felt pressured to? After the talk, I received a full-page, single-spaced letter from a colleague reminding me that the Bible very well could be someone’s favorite book and that doing “what we actually like” promotes the sins of the flesh.
I was dumbfounded. But it gave me all the information I needed: at the end of the day, this was not a safe place to be honest.
It became increasingly clear that living under the stress of a filter was a dangerous game. And after the final day of my contract working for that university, I felt a sense of profound relief over no longer needing to police myself so vigilantly. In that same month when my contract ended, I signed up to be a clinic escort at Planned Parenthood—my advocacy for reproductive freedom would have likely resulted in a strong reprimand at my old university.
Looking at all my friends’ and former students’ posts about the start of the new school year makes me grateful that I’m no longer tied to that filter. In so many ways, this little newsletter has given me a new forum for writing myself into a space of authenticity.
I’m grateful for that—and so grateful that you’re here with me, however you found me.
Newsletter Housekeeping: some fun, new paid subscriber perks :)
It’s a new era for Letters from the Homestead. New platform. Groovy redesign made at my kitchen table. And now some new perks for paid subscribers.
There is no pressure here, of course. If you are happy to receive my free monthly newsletter and think, “huh, that’s nice, good for her,” then I love you forever. But if you’d like to support my work as a freelance writer/actor/artist, then this is one of the easiest ways to do so. I love writing in this space, and I’m excited to lean into this a little more.
There’s also a big part of me that wants to start sharing some more personal life updates/insights (the Secret Letters), and there’s an implied “opt-in” safety that goes along with putting those musings behind a small paywall. I have never been a fan of extreme vulnerability on the internet, but there are a lot of things I want to explore over the next few years in writing that feel a little scary to write about in a free newsletter. Things like divorce, singleness, late-blooming bisexuality, money and art, childfree living, obsessions with camper vans, and anxiety—these are all important, but I’m trying to exercise some careful boundaries in how I write about them.
And then there is Salad Days, a weekly blast from the past that shares excerpts/commentary from my college diaries. Yes, I finally settled on name! I’ve been writing about this idea for a few months now in Letters from the Homestead, and I’m finally putting it out there. (“Salad days” is how Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra describes her “youth”—love a Shakespearean allusion, of course.)
Curious what I was listening to in 2007? Here is a wild Spotify playlist.
So, here are two tidy tiers for Letters from the Homestead subscribers:
Free! - This monthly newsletter right here, sent on the last day of the month with lots of love. This newsletter is about putting down roots as an artist in my own homestead—it’s always free, always sort of grandmotherly, and guaranteed to always include pictures of Midge the cat.
$7 - In addition to Letters from the Homestead, you’ll also receive Salad Days installments, weekly excerpts from my mortifying college diaries from 2007-2010 (with unrelenting commentary). They are very embarrassing but also weirdly fascinating, especially if you grew up in Christian evangelicalism. They are heavy on the “repressed queer kid trying to be a good Christian and a good artist.” It’s a whole thing, y’all.
Paying subscribers will also receive monthly Secret Letters (more personal life-updates that feel a little too vulnerable to share in a free newsletter, some current diary entries, and more gritty details about full-time artist freelancing for folks interested in doing the same.)
Your support means the world to me, whether you upgrade to being a paid subscriber or not. I’m just happy you’re here.
If you’d like to upgrade, just click the button below to update your subscription. :)
What I’m reading this month…
The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay. My writing group has been mentioning this book for months now, and I finally checked it out from the library. I love Rich’s poetry, but I love more this story of a woman who spent her life recovering from being a relentless people-pleaser. A good read about the creative life even if you are totally unfamiliar with Rich’s work.
Midwest Foraging by Lisa M. Rose. I have a Black Walnut tree in the alley behind my apartment, and I randomly got fixated on the fact that… there is a real live walnut tree growing in my “backyard.” Now, I have since learned that this type of walnut is notoriously difficult to process, but that hasn’t stopped me from “foraging” whenever I take out the trash. Thanks to this book, I can now also identify “nettles” and “dandelion leaves,” so yeah, watch out, I’m a full-on botanist now.
The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer. I read this book early last year at the start of the pandemic. I’ve been reading it now before performances of Othello during our half-hour call. I’ve always appreciated Amanda Palmer’s hotblooded honesty and her commitment to not letting the haters get her down. This book is a great reminder that art-making doesn’t go very far if you don’t intentionally care for the community that receives that art.
The Lucid Body: A Guide for the Physical Actor by Fay Simpson. Getting back on my feet in the rehearsal room made me realize how deeply out of touch I was with my body. This is a book about Chakra work in relation to acting. Of all movement practices, Chakra work makes the most sense to me in an embodied sense, probably because it relies so heavily on specific zones of the body.
How I made money this month $$$
I firmly believe that artist-freelancers should be more upfront about how they support themselves, so this is me trying to live out that principle. Here are all the ways I brought in money to The Homestead for August.
Performances for Othello. For six nights a week, all through the month of August, our company of traveling artists performed Othello all over St. Louis and the surrounding area. This was my first “live performance” paycheck in a year and a half.
A bit of contract work for an education company I’ve worked for before. I occasionally do contract work for an online education platform, mostly writing courses and doing a little facilitating/consulting. I will forever be shocked by how consultants in for-profit education companies are better resourced than employees of non-profit institutions.
Some playwriting work for a colleague’s National Science Foundation grant. I’ve been onboard with this project for a few months now, and we’re currently finalizing some short pieces we’ve written about discrimination in STEM at the faculty level.
Playwriting Fellowship. I’m about 60 pages into my play I’m writing for the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Regional Writers Project. Brontë Sister House Party is coming together!
Voiceover work. I scaled back on audiobook narration this month in order to save my voice for Othello and not completely overwork myself. The heatwave has also made working in my bedroom closet home studio (which isn’t ventilated) pretty rough. This month, I finally invested in a mini air conditioner to cool down the studio.
It’s starting to feel like things are “getting serious” with voiceover work. For a while, I viewed these gigs as a side hustle, something that I leaned into as a way to diversify my freelance income sources. But working on a contract basis for Scribd for almost a year has given me a couple of unexpected things: a long resume of narration credits, union options, and the potential for finally building my ACX profile so I can apply for other work more confidently (I’ve been putting this last one off for a long time since I’ve been so consistently getting work with Scribd).
One of the things I love about artist freelancing is just this: you never know what opportunity might turn into something truly substantial and freedom-giving.
Hello, September. Watch me make fall my whole personality.
Yes, I am one of those fools who arbitrarily asserts that fall begins on September 1st. I love the way it sounds outside this time of year: the birds get quiet midday and the crickets take over. It truly is the harbinger of fall, even though it’s still hot as blazes here in St. Louis.
Tonight starts a new month. I’m grateful for your company as we plod along through the latter half of this year.
Yours ever & etc., etc.,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead (and Midge the cat)
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