Some notes on creative recovery.

Here is a Letter from the Homestead for May 2024. ✍️ Inside: stagnation, cicadas, pictures of Midge, etc.

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.

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Notes on creative recovery.

This past month, I prepared a lesson for my Spoken Word students (inside a men’s prison in Missouri) about creative recovery. They’d just finished a very successful production of Twelve Angry Men with Prison Performing Arts, and I thought it might be helpful to talk about how we “recover” after heightened creative experiences.

I realized five minutes into class that I’d written these reminders more for myself than for my students. In fact, my students were absolutely fine— “Listen, Courtney, we’ve got plenty going on right now,” they said. “The play was great, but we’re already onto the next thing… not sure what you think we need to ‘recover’ from, but we’ll hear you out.”

They are very patient with me.

Still, we talked through some of these ideas as they relate to living a creative life, though I do think they are especially important when you’re “coming down” from a big creative project. This has been true for me this spring—I’ve finished big writing projects and found myself flailing a little, not sure what to do next. Maybe they’ll be helpful to you?

Projects end. Let them end. Enjoy the afterglow, but don’t hang on to the experience too tightly. Creative experiences don’t like to be “clutched.” They are meant to be just that—experiences.

Don’t wait around for someone else to tell you what’s next. This is especially true for actors, I think. If you want to work, then make some work for yourself—work on your craft, write a play, self-produce, make a reading list for yourself.

Push yourself to do something challenging everyday, just for practice. This will help maintain your stamina. For instance, the novelist Haruki Murakami runs every single day. (This is not me.) It doesn’t have to be this crazy, though—my “challenging” things are really, really good housekeeping, sobriety, and keeping up my 1200+ day Duolingo streak.

If you’ve just finished a project, ask yourself, “How am I different after this creative experience? What did I learn?” I wish people conducted their own creative post-mortems more regularly.

Don’t brood. No one likes a brooder. This one is big for me— I have a bad habit of brooding my way through the weeks after a project ends, when I’d really be better served by talking a walk or baking a pie.

Fill the vault. The aftermath of a big project is the perfect time to read, watch, and listen.

Don’t fixate on being happy. Be awake. I can’t remember where I learned this advice, but it has helped me tremendously. You can remind yourself to be awake, but you can’t necessarily force yourself to be happy.

My favorite advice from Chekhov: “If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” I’d rather be a good person first than a good artist. We’re not here to impress each other; we’re here to connect.

Get lots of sleep and drink lots of water. Okay, obvious advice here, but a big project takes a lot of creative energy—you probably need some rest.

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I love the cicadas.

I’ve been having a love affair with the cicada broods this month (the only brooding I can get behind), and it feels like the loss of a lifetime that they don’t seem to prefer the dirt quality surrounding my home. I had to go hunting for them out in parks and in the county, and, listen… they are my favorite bug of all time.

I read a fascinating article on Maria Popova’s The Marginalian about cicadas in advance of this year’s “emergence,” and it’s stayed with me all month. This are remarkable insects, full of chaos and wonder and pure excess.

Illustration by Lillie Sullivan, 1898. You can even buy a print benefitting The Nature Conservancy through this link.

I love their colors. I love their little gold casings left behind on grass tips. I love their screaming. I love how they just pile on each other to soak up their 2-3 weeks of above-ground life after incubating for 11-17 years in the dirt.

When I drove home from teaching at the prison yesterday, I could hear the roar of the cicadas over the interstate noise whenever I passed a patch of forest. I love their insistence on being heard.

Did you know that the cicadas emerging this year outnumber all the humans who’ve ever lived on this planet? I didn’t, and I can’t stop thinking about this number, how it puts our own epoch into startling perspective. (I’ve also been touting this factoid to anyone who’ll listen—apologies in advance.)

Anyway. I’m here for these bugs. I know they aren’t for everyone, but I love how drawn I am to this buggy burst of delight.

Frustrated that I hadn’t seen enough of them, my partner and I drove out to the county last weekend, and I cradled one single cicada in the Target parking lot. It sat peacefully on my fingers, red eyes still, and then buzzed away into my face.

Perfection.

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the view from one of my many reading chairs

What I’m reading this month…

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin. This is the last of the Earthsea books, following the central female character of the stories. Le Guin’s early Earthsea books are very man-centric (all wizards are men); in this book, she does a little course correction. It’s wonderful.

The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson. I’m working on reading all of Carson’s books. This one is about the literal “edge” of the sea: the shorelines, the tides, the sand, etc.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan. I’m also on a Carl Sagan nonfiction kick. This one is really satisfying because it includes a lot of discussion of his own experiences with questioning, doubt, religion, etc.

The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. If you love a debunker, then you’ll love this Sagan book.

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it’s all for her

How I made money this month as a freelance artist $$$

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 May.

• Teaching artist work for Prison Performing Arts. Teaching a weekly writing workshop on Zoom and teaching Spoken Word regularly inside a men’s prison.

• Playing piano for a local Catholic middle school’s chapel service. I’m learning to play a lot of gospel tunes and Mass music. I’m a pretty mediocre piano player, but this is one of the highlights of my week.

• 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.

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Graduation morning, May 2006. Sitting at the family computer, probably updating my Facebook status.

Happy start of Pride month! 🏳️‍🌈

June is my favorite month of summer (the rest are just hot). It’s the month of Pride, Shakespeare in the Park, fireflies, and endless pasta salad. This year, it’s also a month of nervously watching ongoing overseas wars. Whenever I feel like being a writer is useless in a geopolitical landscape like ours, I take a glance at this cutout from a Bosnian filmmaker above my writing desk:

“What I learned during the war is that food and culture are equal. You can’t live without either,” says Jasmila Zbanic. When we make resistant, joyful art, we are making something as necessary as food. This is encouraging to me. I hope it encourages you.

Today starts a new month.

Wishing you well.

Yours,

Courtney, Mistress of the Homestead and Noble Midge the Cat 🐈‍⬛