Letters from the Homestead: September 2021
Finishing a play that wants to be a house party, reading my college diaries, and logging my novel query rejections with a glimmer of pride.
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!)
Week of Rest: on getting better at resting.
When first sitting down to draft this monthly letter, I was in the middle of a Week of Rest. Ever since I left my job as an academic, I’ve seriously struggled with allowing myself time to rest. Oddly enough, though, one of the biggest reasons I transitioned out of academia was so that I’d… wait for it… have more margin for rest.
Still not quite there yet. Despite all of the growth I’ve experienced in the past year of listening to my body, observing my anxiety patterns, and slowing down, I still cannot shake the impulse to evaluate the worth of my days in terms of “how productive” I am.
Week of Rest, in its ideal state, does not engage in “production” (hello, internalized capitalism!), but I’ll admit that the open space of restfulness inevitably makes me want to create things. The trick for me during Week of Rest is to not demand that anything gets created; but if something wants to get made, I let it happen. Case in point: I spent a lot of time during this Week of Rest working on a new novel idea that I can’t shake—no word count quotas or progress reports, though.
Week of Rest has the following rules:
Sleep as late as you want each day, with no self-shaming about the hour you get out of bed.
Sit outside as much as possible. (This is made all the better by the beautiful, early fall weather that’s just arrived in St. Louis.)
You can make a list of things you’d like to do in a day, but you aren’t allowed to make yourself follow that list.
You must follow your interest.
Say yes to last-minute invitations, especially if they are at night. (Remember, you can sleep in as late as you want the next day.)
You may read this and think, “Wow, this gal needs an actual vacation.” But setting aside a week to intentionally recalibrate is a kind of vacation to me. Ever since I switched from a weekly “professor schedule” to a freelancer schedule, I’ve lost touch with what real periods of rest can do for my overall well-being. I used to be able to rely on the enforced breaks of Christmas, Summer, and Spring Breaks—time for rest was built into my calendar, and the rest of the institution checked out of work-life, as well.
This isn’t my reality anymore. If I want a break, I have to plan ahead, say no to projects, and carve out actual time in my calendar. Although I’ve never felt more independent as a freelancer, I’ve also never felt less connected to a collective rhythm of rest. I saw a meme recently from Reductress that said: “Wow! Woman experiencing burnout even though she doesn’t work that hard!” I felt that. I don’t overwork myself like I used to as a professor, but I do fret about having enough time to do all the things on my to-do list. And the fretting is like a part-time job all by itself.
Any tips you may have for turning off the “ticker” in my head as a freelancer are very welcome. You can always reply to this email and it comes straight to me.
Finishing the first draft of my house party play.
One of my big writing projects for this year so far has been Brontë Sister House Party, the play I’m writing as part of St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s Confluence Writers Project. In terms of my work as a playwright, being accepted into this fellowship program felt like an enormous affirmation of my growth as a writer. After a long pandemic of feeling like I was making work in a vacuum, an “acceptance” raised my spirits and gave me the confidence I needed to write a play that was unlike anything I’d ever tried before.
I wrote my first full-length play over five years ago, scribbled away early in the mornings before I went to campus in my last year as a Ph.D. student. It took me a whole year to write that first play, and the play itself carried a lot of personal baggage that I worked through in the text. That first play is terribly imperfect and, at times, makes very little sense, but I love it so much. I still remember the rush of watching the first staged reading, directed by a friend of mine at Baylor. Watching a staged reading of a project I’d poured myself into—a project that was so completely different from the Ph.D. work I was immersed in—was a breakthrough for me.
It was ocular proof that I could do something else, something other than being an academic.
I committed to taking my time with Brontë Sister House Party, and I also made a vow to myself that every day I spent with this draft would be fun. After the few hard years I’ve had, I only wanted to write something fun. I had the comfort of fellowship money and a support system of a cohort, so it was like a vacation to have that space and time to write something unabashedly joyful.
I began writing in earnest in April, and let me tell you, I have never had more fun writing a play. Do I think the play is particularly good right now? Nah, it’s a mess. But did I follow through on my commitment to myself that I would enjoy every single page of this play? Absolutely. It may be messy and confusing right now, but the play is definitely not boring. I call that a huge achievement for a first draft.
The play is about the famous Brontë sisters—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. They are stuck in a purgatorial time-loop where they have to throw a house party every night. Only when they reach The Point of Celebratory Reverence will they finally be released from the time-loop. It’s a comedy. :)
It’s also a true pandemic play, written in the midst of all the emotions I felt over the past 16 months: Missing house parties. Feeling like I was living in a time loop. Deconstructing all of the myths about “romance” I’d internalized from reading the Brontë sisters like they were my own personal love manual. While writing it, I tried to think of what kind of theatre I needed to see at the end of a horrible pandemic. As it turns out, I needed something joyful and silly—not something overly serious.
This play is very much the kind you write when you’re ready to heal.
***
(If you are a St. Louisan, you can see the staged reading of this play in January with the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival!)
A quick novel-project update… (spoiler alert: it’s all rejection, but we’re coping over here)
Longtime readers of Letters from the Homestead know that my big creative project of the (still ongoing) pandemic was a science fiction novel. For whatever reason, this was the project that helped me cope the most with the Groundhog Day effects of pandemic life. It took me about 9 months to draft and revise my 87,000-word book, and those were my happiest (it’s all relative) months of the pandemic. This project sustained me. And, since I’ve published a book before (albeit an academic one), I thought that I’d try my luck at gaining an agent through this manuscript.
This is… a lot harder than it sounds. Since late April, I’ve been sending queries to literary agents and getting lots and lots of rejections. Mostly rejections, in fact. Some of the rejections have been kind (“You have something really great here, but I don’t have the contacts to sell science fiction”), but they are all no’s.
I am much more zen about this than I expected. As it turns out, opening myself up to constant (like, once or twice a week) rejections from literary agents has thickened my skin considerably. Their frequency has given me the ability to shake them off, and I’ve queried so many agents that I often don’t remember their names when they write me back to reject me.
Here are my stats so far:
41 queries sent
30 rejections
1 full manuscript request (that was eventually rejected). Full context: a full manuscript request is a big deal! So, it was a real bummer to ultimately get a rejection on this one.
Traditional publishing is hard. My book fits the category of “science fiction,” but it really falls more under “literary speculative fiction,” and I’m finding that this is a really hard genre to sell to agents. I’m proud of this book, though, and I’m sticking with it.
I’ve committed to sending 150 queries for this novel by September 2022, and I’m *hoping* that I’ll have finished my next novel project by that point. If I need to shelf my current book, I can do that with the knowledge that I didn’t sit on my ass for a year while querying.
We’re struggling over here, y’all, but we are coping and doing the work. Sigh.
Salad Days—how I’m feeling one month into reading and analyzing my college diaries.
If you are a paying subscriber of this newsletter (THANK YOU, KIND SOULS!), then you’ve been receiving my weekly Salad Days letters, excerpts from my overly pious college diaries that I’m sharing and analyzing as a sort of “well, how did we get here?” reflection project.
Honestly, I can’t believe I finally had the guts to do this.
I’ve been “feeling the feelings” about this project for a long time, but I carried intense trepidation about how mortifying these entries are. Listen, I was not a brilliant nineteen-year-old. And it shows in these diary entries. The writing is mediocre, the feelings are repetitive, and the appeals to god are cringeworthy. (Yes, the entries are often written “Dear God.”)
I used to swear that these journals would never see the light of day, but I never once thought about destroying them. I’ve always kept them close, carrying them to each new place I’ve lived in my adult life. Now that it’s been almost fifteen years since I first starting seriously keeping a diary, I’ve realized that I now have enough distance to pick at these old notebooks, trying to see what they have to offer me.
My practice has been this: 1) copy out the diary entry itself, and then 2) use that entry as a prompt to respond to, a kind of writerly exercise in mining an artifact from the past for something valuable and new. It turns out that the hardest part is just copying out the diary entry—not because my handwriting is bad, but because it’s so terribly hard to face a version of yourself that you’ve decidedly outgrown. It’s still you, but it’s like the beta model. Lots of glitches to work out.
In one of my recent Salad Days posts, the entry included an original song—very emo, very bad, and very nonsensical. Looking at it, all you can really see is mediocre, sophomoric “art.” For my subscribers, I even put the lyrics to ukelele music and tried to make some sense of it. But even with my passable uke playing, the song was still bad.
It made me write a little about what I remember of being a nineteen-year-old who wanted to be an Artist—an Artist who made Meaningful Things—but, for the time being, was making very mediocre things. This is what I wrote:
I’ve been thinking a great deal about what it means to encounter mediocre art that our past selves once thought was the greatest thing. I remember writing bits and bobs in my college diary thinking that they were deeply profound and original, including things like this raggedy emo song. There was also an awareness that not everyone on the planet scribbled poems and songs in their notebooks; this was an activity reserved for a special group of souls, and I wanted to be a part of that group. […]
No one will think that my college notebooks are profound.
But I would argue that attempting to “be profound” is antithetical to the whole point of keeping a diary. At its best, diary-keeping is non-judgemental, unstructured, and only functions in service of where you are right now—not some hypothetical legacy you wish to leave. I’m trying to remind myself of this when I encounter rather mortifying tidbits like this.
This, this right here, is what I’m enjoying most about the Salad Days project: space to practice love for an old self so that my current self can take notes and show up when I need that love myself.
***
(Psst… you can become a paying subscriber for $7 a month through the link at the bottom of this newsletter or the button below. Becoming a subscriber gives you access to all past and future posts, so you can start at the beginning of Salad Days and catch yourself up. This subscription also includes my monthly Secret Letters, where I get a little more vulnerable. Becoming a paid subscriber is one of the easiest ways you can support your friendly neighborhood writer.)
What I’m reading this month…
Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free by Linda Kay Klein. I highly recommend this book if you grew up in 90’s and 00’s evangelical purity culture. Hell, I recommend reading this book even if you didn’t. There’s a whole subculture in the United States that was affected by dangerous and woman-shaming aspects of purity culture (i.e., an obsession with “saving yourself” for marriage and the patholigization of normal feelings like attraction, arousal, and questions about sexual identity). I am still deconstructing these messages today (which you can read alllll about in Salad Days).
The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America: The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality, Access, and Practical Support by Robin Marty. I’ve been very discouraged by the abortion bans in Texas, and I’m increasingly worried about what the future will look like for abortion access here in Missouri. Reading this book has been a great reminder that access to information/resources is one of the best ways to fuel your autonomy—we must know all of our options if we are to acknowledge our own human dignity. If you are a longtime reader of this newsletter, then you know that I am 100% pro-abortion and a proud clinic escort at my local Planned Parenthood—but you might not realize that I was once hardcore “pro-life” (now, I can see how problematic this label is—what I really was was “pro-birth”). My transition to being pro-abortion was complex, but it ultimately came down to my belief that no person should ever be forced to be pregnant if they don’t want to be. **If this is an issue that carries a lot of emotional/psychological/religious weight for you, then I cannot recommend enough doing the work to understand the full conversation regarding abortion access in the U.S., especially if the only voices you’ve ever heard about abortion are connected to religious organizations—and if reading this makes you want to write me an angry email reply, then you’re probably better off just unsubscribing, dear one.**
The Need for Roots by Simone Weil. I will be honest here: this book by 20th-century French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil is a hard book. It was assigned to me in college, and I don’t remember understanding much of it then (even though I had to write whole term papers about it). But, for whatever reason, I find this book terribly comforting. I keep reading it even when I don’t understand every word, and it’s passages like this one (on “the spirituality of work”) that keeps me coming back. I don’t fully understand it, but I like having new questions:
“A civilization based upon the spirituality of work would give to Man the very strongest possible roots in the wide universe, and would consequently be the opposite of that state in which we find ourselves now, characterized by an almost total uprootedness. Such a civilization is, therefore, by its very nature, the object to which we should aspire as the antidote to our sufferings.”
How I made money this month $$$
I believe freelance artists should be more upfront about how they support themselves, so here is me attempting to live out that principle. These are all the ways I brought in money to the Homestead for the month of September.
Playwriting fellowship. Part of my income this month came from my fellowship money from the Confluence program with St. Louis Shakespeare Festival.
Voiceover work. Lots of voiceover work, as always. I recorded/produced three romance novel audiobooks this month and one “coaching” audio program.
Consulting for an education company. I’m working a bit as a subject matter expert for an education company, which means I occasionally do some small projects (writing samples, facilitating courses, etc.) that are related to my academic background. Yes, it feels very funny to write, “I do some consulting.” I now actually understand what “consulting” means.
Playwriting for an NSF grant. I’m working with a group of other actor-writers who are creating pieces about discrimination in STEM fields for a colleague’s National Science Foundation grant.
Podcast interview. I’m a friend of the pod! A theatre friend reached out for a podcast interview about Shakespeare, and, listen, I happen to know a lot about Shakespeare.
Substack paid subscriptions! This was a huge surprise this month. People actually upgraded to the paying subscriber option for Letters from the Homestead, which means they receive Salad Days posts and my monthly Secret Letters (this month’s was about “love”). I was shocked that people other than my parents became paying subscribers. Realizing that people genuinely wanted to support my writing made me feel empowered to keep going—it was just the little push I needed to press onward.
Come to me, October.
Lucky for me, my black cat Midge is a year-round spooky season decoration. She did not realize that this is what she signed up for when I adopted her. (Full Halloween photoshoot forthcoming.)
Thank you for reading, friends. Tonight starts a new month.
Yours ever & etc., etc.,
Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead (and a disgruntled Midge)