Letters from the Homestead: January 2024
Finishing plays and books and throwing a lasso around the sun. ☀️
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.
When you can’t finish a play on your own…
Years and years ago, back when I had barely finished my first-ever play, I thought it would be lovely to write a play about Charlotte Cushman. Cushman was a nineteenth-century American actor beloved for playing male Shakespeare roles, especially Romeo. She was also one of the most famous lesbians of the Victorian era. A personality like hers is a near-perfect recipe for a good story, historically accurate or not.
I clung to stories like Cushman’s before I even came out as queer. Her skill and artistry catapulted her to independence and a life on her own terms, and I’m surprised that my interest in her didn’t make my then-husband wonder why I was writing a play about a famous queer woman (and listening to Indigo Girls on loop).
When I first tried to write this play, I did it over winter break while working as a professor. In the days between Christmas and Epiphany, I wrote a blazing seventy pages of fighting sisters and vengeful lovers who wanted to put on a production of Romeo and Juliet. I remember that first draft being skeletal and cliched. I remember a lot of easy jokes. I also remember getting to the end of the script and thinking of it more as an “accomplishment” than a play.
This is usually a sign that it’s not a good play.
When the semester started again, I finally heard back from a press about my academic book, so I put everything else on the back burner, determined to finish my scholarly monograph and release myself from whatever hold that project (which started as my dissertation) still had on me. In the midst of that project, my imperfect play about Charlotte Cushman was put away.
It stayed put away for a long time. Every now and then, I would glance at its first few pages, cringe, and then relegate it back to its folder in the cloud.
Sometimes you have to cringe over something for six years before you’re ready to address it, revise it, and make it what it needs to be. That’s how it’s been with Britches! A Play for Lady Romeos, which finally found a place to land with Women’s Eastern, Reception, Diagnostic & Correctional Center.
But it didn’t get there with me revising all by myself—it required input from my colleagues who’ve spent time (sometimes lots and lots of time, sometimes still spending time) performing men’s roles inside of a women’s prison.
I’m proud of this play’s journey. And I’m even more proud that I realized I couldn’t finish it by myself. It needed collaborators and commentators. It needed the input of incarcerated and justice-involved artists. Sometimes you aren’t meant to write a play by yourself—you’re meant to help the play get to a place that best suits the artists who will embrace it and make it their own.
Britches! A Play for Lady Romeos will have two public performances at WERDCC in Vandalia, Missouri on March 14! You can RSVP through Prison Performing Arts at the link below!
The endurance required for revising a book
The novelist Haruki Murakami says becoming a long-distance runner helped him develop the stamina required for writing. I don’t even think I could run for three minutes. 🏃♀️
Here is what he says:
“Whether you write novels or short stories, to maintain creativity over a long period of time you need the kind of staying power that makes this continual process possible.
Well, then, what do you need to do to acquire that kind of stamina?
I have but one answer, and a very simple one: you have to become physically fit. You need to become robust and physically strong. And make your body your ally.”
—from Novelist as a Vocation
He goes on to explain that it requires physical stamina to stare at a computer screen and write all day—though it may not look like it, you have to have your body on your side in order to commit to the work.
Murakami is careful to point out this is all his opinion, not writerly dogma. Taken at face value, this advice could be considered ableist, of course. The message I take away from his advice is that you have to have a deep understanding of your body’s rhythms, capacities, and needs—and then you must find a way to work alongside it while honoring those needs.
It makes me think of Flannery O’Connor. When she was experiencing the worst symptoms of her lupus, she realized she had about three good hours of writing in her a day, and those good hours were between roughly 9am and noon. To do her work, she built her day around making that handful of hours sacrosanct.
Now that I’m deep in the final stages of finishing revisions on my novel with my agent (an insane sentence), I’m seeing the limits of my own stamina. I’m staring at my computer for hours on end, trying to see the words I’ve written with an editor’s eye. The critic’s brain I spent so much time developing in graduate school is in full effect, but the focus is my own work. It’s vulnerable, it’s methodical, and it’s hard.
One of the biggest things I learned last year as a writer is that revising requires more stamina than drafting. I’m facing this hard in the first several weeks of 2024.
What I’m reading this month…
I’ve struggled to read this month. So much of my reading brain has been taken up with my own writing during the revision process. Here are two books, though, that I found myself returning to.
Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and its Challenge for Our Times by D.L. Mayfield. I listened to this as an audiobook and absolutely devoured it. This is probably the most honest and careful account of Day I’ve ever read. Dorothy Day was resistant to being called “a saint,” and Mayfield does a superb job of resisting the hagiographical impulse. Highly recommend.
In this House of Brede by Rumer Godden. I re-read this book every year, often in the darkest months. It’s probably one of my favorite novels, in part because Godden reveals the collective humming of the mind/soul of a Benedictine convent in the years leading up to Vatican II. I never get tired of this book.
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 January.
Teaching artist work for Prison Performing Arts. Teaching a weekly writing workshop and teaching Spoken Word regularly in a men’s prison. This month, I also started leading some writing sessions at a probation/parole center.
Playing piano for a local Catholic middle school’s chapel service. I’m learning to play a lot of gospel tunes and Mass music.
Facilitating online graduate literature courses. Every day I’m grading, grading, grading.
Script writing gig for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. Put together the script for their education tour on Grace Bumbry and Robert McFerrin, Sr., two Saint Louis opera trailblazers.
Paid Substack subscriptions. Thank you to all of my paid subscribers. It means the world to me that you make a financial contribution to my work.
If I could these days, I’d put a lasso around the sun.
The sun comes out for a few hours once a week, it seems. The darkest days may be over for the winter season, but it’s not over yet.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve struggled to metabolize the last 100+ days since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict with the diminishing sunshine. I follow the news, I miss the sun, I despair, I am distracted by my own small troubles, I read the news, and then I despair again. There is no way to metabolize this, maybe. I don’t know.
I am proud of the little life I’ve built for myself around my community and my creativity, but the world is large. Very large.
Today starts a new month.
Yours,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead, and Noble Midge the Cat 🐈⬛