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Category: Thinking

Starting Seeds in a Time of Darkness

Starting Seeds in a Time of Darkness

Tray Seeded with Chickory
Seed Starting, Chickories

So — the greenhouse room has pretty much become my office, which means I’m starting seeds on my desk. This wasn’t the plan when we built this room, but it’s so nice out here that well, I colonized it. I think some of the geraniums might have to migrate back into the house because this year, I think the garden is going to be more necessary than ever before.

It’s very scary out there. The President is rapidly rolling back norms we’re accustomed to, from the assault on the ACA, Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security, to the tacit approval of bomb threats at JCCs and desecrated cemeteries, to banning the legitimate press from the White House press briefings. It’s gotten to the point that my mother called the other day and said “I was outraged by something, but I think there have been two more somethings since I called you yesterday.”

And so, I’m planning a better garden this year than last year. Last year I had ankle surgery in the beginning of February, and it wasn’t until August that I could walk normally again. Planting was mostly a matter of flinging seeds for hardy greens into beds overgrown with Bermuda grass and hoping for the best. I was really laid up for a lot of the year, and so stressed out by that job I wound up quitting, that I neglected the whole thing. I grew some nice greens, the beans came in very late but were delicious, and I had a lot of flowers. But it wasn’t one of my better garden years.

As I was looking in the seed box thinking about what greens I could start early, I found a whole array of chickories — red ones and green ones and some beautiful varigated ones — all from Seeds of Italy, one of my favorite sources. I just put an order in with them last week actually. So — chickories. They’re a cool-weather crop so if you don’t start them well before the last frost, they’ll bolt when it gets hot. Fingers crossed this year for a crop of nice crunchy chickories. I also started two kinds of chard and some spinach. Those do fine outdoors, but again, its a season thing. I didn’t do a hoop house this year, but if I start them inside, once the ground thaws, I can transplant them out and I’ll have about a 3 week jump on things.

It’s the thing about growing your own — it spoils you for store produce. I’m too cheap to pay the premium for the hydroponic organic greens that our local foods store carries these days — although I do splurge once in a while. They had some lovely baby bok choi and some beautiful spinach (one of the few vegetables Himself enjoys). And well, I’m really broke this year as I try to stretch out my savings long enough to finish this book manuscript, and build up a new freelance business. And hey, speaking of expanding, don’t hesitate to contact us if you have plans to take your business abroad!

So, I’m going to need my own food in the backyard (also, looking forward to falling heat bills as spring arrives). I keep reminding myself, this was the plan. Pay off the debts. Pay off the house. Build a garden. Get chickens — all things that free me up from needing cash so I can write more. So, planting seeds, writing the book,  and keeping on keeping on even as the nation burns down around us.

Pruning and Despair

Pruning and Despair

Pruned Plum Tree
Pruned plum tree (and hand-me-down boy)

After calling in for the Orwellian “Tele Town Hall” my GOP Senator, Steve Daines held last night, and after this morning’s news that the GOP Congress has approved Scott Pruitt for EPA, I’m filled with despair and heartbreak. And anger at every single upper middle class person I know, which is pretty much every one I know, who continues to blithely fly around on airplanes and drive SUVs and buy new stuff just because they feel like it. We, the generation of selfish overconsumers, who have ruined the world for everyone else.

To all “my” kids — to the whole gang of you — I’m so so sorry for what we’ve done. We’re leaving you a blazing hellscape of a planet, with ruined water and oligarchs who we’ve allowed to buy up all the resources so they will be able to hold them hostage when you’re grown.

So I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do and I’m angry, and agitated, and picking fights with people I shouldn’t be picking fights with on Facebook. I went out into the garden. It’s been warm here, and most of our snow has melted. The ground is still frozen, but I had pruning that needed to be done.

The little plum tree in the picture (behind the charming little boy statue that Biba, my neighbor, left me about a decade ago when she upped and moved to Argentina), that plum tree suffered bad damage in our freak freeze three years ago that killed all the cherry trees. It went from the 60s, to minus 20 in less than 12 hours, then came back up into the 40s. It was the freeze/thaw cycle that apparently did most of the damage, and we didn’t even know until spring that the cherries were all dead. I planted two new baby cherry trees last spring, but I think it’s going to be a while until I get fruit. This plum tree turns out to be a greengage. It has been an uneven bearer — fruiting every three or four years. The first year, I kept waiting for the fruit to turn purple, and it wasn’t until I was sitting in the backyard reading a book one afternoon, and a plum fell off it was so ripe, that I realized they’re greengages. They are utterly delicious, and I only ever get a peck or two.

Last year I was laid up with the ankle surgery, and I was waiting to see what parts of the tree would come back. By this spring, the dead parts were very dry and dead and easy to identify. So I got in there this afternoon, in my agitation, and cut out suckers, and sawed off the dead tops, and generally cleaned the little thicket that is my greengage patch out. I also took a shot at the gooseberry bushes while I was at it, and the currents (which are pretty battered by Hank-and-his-big-blue-play-ball). I pulled the thick layer of straw off the komatsuna and the kales, which were green underneath, and in general, started puttering around. (Oh, and cleaned up a lot of dog shit).

It won’t help with the state of our nation or the world. For that, I keep making my phone calls, and registering to go pester our GOP Senator who won’t speak to us, and trying to be patient as I explain to angry white Evangelicals that no, I’ve never had any of my Muslim friends try to impose Sharia law on me, the only people who have ever tried to impose their religious beliefs on me are white Evangelicals. I feel like we’re living in any number of dystopian novels, from Orwell to Margaret Atwood, and I’m thoroughly heartbroken about it.

But the world is turning a wee bit. The sun is coming back. There’s pruning to be done, which at the very least lets me burn off a little physical energy. And maybe, just maybe, there will be greengages this summer. To eat amidst the flaming ruins of our Democracy.

When Stuck, Make Something

When Stuck, Make Something

Scallion Pancakes
Scallion Pancakes

Ugh — it was one of those days when I Could Not Get Anything Done. I mean, I got some stuff done — the chickens were mucked out — poor babies. It snowed a foot yesterday, then went into the 50s today, so my backyard is a lake. I got the chicken coop cleaned out and nice new shavings put inside, then bought them some new straw for bedding in their run, which seems to have put them high enough to be out of the wet — but my backyard was a lake, and the wind blew gusts into the 40mph range all day, and it was grey and wet and miserable.

So, I gave up on writing, and on the several writing projects on my list, and played with making scallion pancakes. I’m reviewing Carolyn Phillips magnificent All Under Heaven which means I *must* cook from it for a couple of weeks. Really, it’s my job … at any rate, I played around with these this afternoon. I don’t have them quite down yet — I’m not great at modulating the heat in my cast iron pan for flatbreads, but darn if that doesn’t mean I’ll have to try again.

And it got me out of my head, and out of the clickhole of Facebook/Twitter Garbage-Fire-of-the-Republic for a while.

So — scallion pancakes.

Process: Setting Goals, Making Plans

Process: Setting Goals, Making Plans

Weekly planner and pile of notebooks
Weekly planner and pile of notebooks

It’s Monday, which means my weekly session with the planner. About a year ago, I started deliberately planning my week — paid work projects, creative work projects, things I wanted to make — and started setting deliberate goals. My big goals for last year were to finish and send out essays for publication, and to get the mystery novel I’d set aside back on its feet again.

Sitting down every Sunday or Monday and taking stock, then setting goals for the week has helped enormously. I started out using the Passion Planner which I particularly liked for it’s large size and generous real estate per week. However, after a few months, I found the inspirational pages less and less useful — although I have stayed in the habit of doing a monthly summary of what worked, what didn’t work, what I accomplished, and what I’d like to accomplish for the forthcoming month.

Eventually, I moved back to the Moleskine weekly planner because I love the page layout (although I dearly wish they had a bigger size). I like having one blank page to sketch out what the tasks are for the week, and a day-by-day section to track myself. I wrote my first novel with little weekly calendars, where I noted down word counts to keep myself honest, and on track, and I find that essential to my process.

When I was in Milwaukee last summer, I picked up some of these softcover notebooks by Fabriano, and I’ve found them really useful for brainstorming and tracking my various projects: the mystery novel, the essays, the TinyLetter, the BlogReboot. While I still carry a general notebook, I’ve found it more useful to split up into these separate ones, as well as some smaller notebooks I use for reading notes, so I can find things afterwards. I’m not a bullet journal person — all that indexing, while useful, just annoys me — but this way, I can find the notes on say, John Berger that I wanted to roll into a TinyLetter.

My primary goal at the moment is finishing this mystery novel manuscript — I started it several years ago, then put it aside while I was working on a nonfiction memoir, a project I ultimately decided was not so much a book, as it was a series of essays. Abandoning a book is never an easy decision, but that nonfiction project just would not come together the way I wanted it to (and I *really* did not want to write a misery memoir), and after discussions with an agent, I decided to put it aside and mine those ten years of work for essays.

I’ve always been a big chicken about sending things out, and somehow, that changed this year.  In combination with a planning method that seems to work, I managed to pull together five solid essays and send them out. Four of them have been taken, so that’s pretty satisfying. One was taken as a conference paper (I need to rework it a little and send it out again), three were accepted for publication (only one has come out, in the Unearthing Paradise anthology — please buy a copy and help us fight the gold mines on the border of Yellowstone). The other two should be published in the next couple of months and I’ll include links when they do. I had one essay rejected, and I’ve sent it back out. And I have three more solid ideas I’m pulling together, but since I need to draft the mystery novel, I’ve put those aside for now.

And then there’s the new novel. I’d pretty much given up on fiction, and when I decided not to pursue the memoir, I went back to the two half-finished novel drafts I had in the house. They’re both actually pretty good — but I decided to pursue the mystery novel first for a couple of reasons. One is that because the mystery as a genre deals with murder, it allows one a natural outlet to explore in fiction topics like class and money, and good and evil, and life and death. I like people in extreme situations, perhaps because I’ve seen so many of them, and the mystery provides a great opportunity to test your characters under stress. The other reason I started with this one is that I really want to do a series — I love long long form work — and the mysteries I love the best are the ones with a core set of characters who appear across the volumes, and whose development you get to trace as the series progresses. But more than any of those idea-driven reasons for writing this novel — I’m having so much fun making people up again. There are characters living in my head again, and I’d forgotten what a joy that is.

When I quit my job in September, I had about 15k words, and I’m just north of 40K now. I think it’s going to clock in somewhere in the neighborhood of 80K — which is about what Place Last Seen came in at. The planning is necessary because, for instance, I just lost three whole weeks to political madness, and so I found I had to come back, look at the page, and make a real plan. Even if part of me thought I was going to get the whole 40k written in January, and that same part of me is bummed not to be some sort of wordcount superhero, I know myself well enough that if I can come up with a reasonable schedule, and break the project into parts, then I’ll be able to get it done. Barring more insanity from Washington (or more than the level we’ve now become accustomed to), I should have a finished manuscript sometime in the middle of April. And if I can do that, I’ll have proven to myself that I can finish a book in six months, which means that pitching a book a year isn’t totally unreasonable.

The next planning challenge I’m dealing with is figuring out the revenue end of the struggle. I’ll be saying more about that in the days to come, but I’m considering a number of options, including a Patreon. In the meantime, I’ve opened a Store page on the blog, where I’ve linked to books on my Alibris store — so if you’d like to contribute that way, please go buy a book!

Also, please leave notes in the comments — what planning strategies work best for you? Are you a planner? or not-a-planner? How do creativity and planning work in your artistic life?

 

LivingSmall Reboot

LivingSmall Reboot

I started LivingSmall in 2002 not as a lifestyle blog, but as a political statement. My original tagline was “Thoughts on Literature, Food, Faith, and the Subversive Power of Living Small.”

I moved to Montana not only because I could afford a house here, a house I managed this summer to pay off, but because I wanted to deliberately disconnect from the terrifying engine of consumer capitalism that I saw devouring the Bay Area (and pretty much the rest of America).

This has always been a political project, and now, as we see the monster who is us — the big baby in the highest office of the land, a man who does not read, who cannot carry a thought from point A to point B, who is an avatar of consumptive greed and the puppet of white supremacists and foreign dictators, a creepy rich man with a golden apartment in the sky who has, like some villain out of a superhero movie, taken over the Republic, well it seems that the real work of LivingSmall might be relevant again.

So keep an eye out here, or subscribe in the sidebar to be notified when a new post is up.

Tomorrow, we’ll have a non-political recipe for garlicky dinner rolls.

Making and Creating

Making and Creating

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So, everything is fairly terrifying right now. The election is horrific. Climate change is continuing to wreck havoc across the globe. I don’t have a job, or at the moment, even any freelance gigs signed. And the Red Sox, sigh.

So I’m making things.

I made the jacket in the photo above, from two fabrics in my stash. The blue wool is from a piece I bought on eBay a year or so ago, and has the loveliest selvage on it. I used it for the end of the sleeves, which you can see when they’re not cuffed. It’s lined with an end-piece of orange raw silk I bought a year or so ago when I was in Seattle at District Fabric, and that I’ve been trying to figure out ever since what to do with — it was too short for a dress or a skirt. I have another jacket in this pattern cut out downstairs — in heavier wool, charcoal grey color, with a grey Robert Kaufman chambray to line it with. It’ll be terrific for dog walking, and will distract me for the three or four hours it takes to put it together. I knit a Hitchhiker shawl  from a ball of ombre sock yarn that had too much space between the colors (I would have wound up with one black sock and one white sock). I’m also working up a pair of Kate Davies stranded Pawkies, which I’m doing as mittens, because winter is coming, and dog walking is upon me. I’m going to experiment with knitting a little hole for my index finger so I can select stuff on my iPhone through the mittens — I like taking Instagram shots while dog walking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about making stuff and creativity as I try to sketch out and envision what kind of freelance life I’d like to build. Sadly, I can’t retire, or tap into my savings, so I do have to find work, but my hope is to find work that allows me to write about issues I’m interested in, and in the best of all possible worlds, about people who are doing creative things.

In the meantime, I’m staving off panic by thinking about what I want to wear this winter. I have a couple of skirts I made this summer that I loved, and wore all the time. So I’ve been eyeing my stash (since I quit my job, and Can Not Buy More Fabric) and thinking about which patterns would work in which fabrics. It’s also Slow Fashion October, during which my Instagram feed is full of people who sew and knit thinking through their issues of consumption, of how clothes are made and sold in a consumer capitalist model and how, by making our own, we can strike back, even if only on small personal levels, at an economic model built on the idea of cheap, fast, and replaceable items.

Part of the pleasure in making clothes, for me, is thinking about it beforehand. What do I want to look like? And how do I want my clothes to feel? And then, can I make that happen? I have to say, three years into making most of my own clothes, I love getting dressed. I was never fashion-y, but now, I look in my closet, or more likely at my clothesline after doing wash, and it’s just so pleasing. Clothes I like, that fit me, in colors I wanted, that go together most of the time, which last, and that I made myself.

I had a friend visiting about a week ago. Months ago he convinced me to propose my first ever academic paper, nearly 20 years after I finished my Phd, for the Western Literature Association conference which was over at Big Sky this year. It was nearby, and seemed like a good idea. It was fine — I wrote about it in more detail over at my TinyLetter (subscribe here). He was amazed the whole weekend at the way the Montana writers all seem to know one another, and how, for the most part, we’re all pretty supportive of one another. And then, driving around town the next day, showing him Livingston, with our old school buildings repurposed as artist studios and theater spaces, our community garden and used bookstore/reading space, our funky little shops which exist because rent is cheap, it did strike me that we’re a pretty creative bunch of folks around here.

You can forget how important it is to live embedded in a community of creative people until you have to leave it for a while. I’m not slagging on the academics, but that conference, along with the one I went to a year ago, both confirmed for me that I was right to leave academia when I did. And my buddy who came to visit, and who is marooned in the Midwest, in a town where he doesn’t have a circle of people to help feed his own creative work, well, it just drove home for me that even if I sometimes roll my eyes when the local creative types get a little woo, I’d rather live among folks whose first response to most things is “what can I make from it?” or “how can I fix it?” or “can we use this somehow to improve our community?” It’s a small town, and like most small towns we sometimes get kind of fed up with one another, so it was a good reminder of just how fortunate we are. it’s not perfect, goodness knows, but it is creative. And for that I’m deeply grateful.

How Routine is a Creative Practice

How Routine is a Creative Practice

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I’ve been walking this same two mile stretch of road every morning pretty much since Hank-dog came to live with me two years ago. It’s a quick drive out of town, and there’s usually no one else there, which is important. Despite having made most of my close friends upon moving here through our dogs, at this point, I don’t want to chat on my dog walk.  Also,  there aren’t many cars. Hank and I are still working on the concept that cars do not need to be herded (neither do runners, or bicyclists).  So for two years I’ve walked exactly the same stretch of road, and I’m the opposite of bored by it. It’s both the same, and different every day. The colors of the vegetation change in the creekbottom below the road. The sky is a different blue with different clouds every morning. The wildlife changes —  one morning it’s a hawk and a goldfinch, eyeing one another from two branches high in a cottonwood snag, another day it’s the kingfisher diving for minnows, and nearly every day the blue heron rises out of the creek on his enormous wings. Right now, the chokecherries are coming ripe, which means I’ve got an eye out for bears.

It’s not just the ever-changing details that keeps this walk crucial to my day — it’s actually the routine nature of our walk that opens up my head and activates both my powers of observation and creative thinking.  Because the structure of the walk is the same, the task doesn’t take up any head space, which allows my mind to wander in the best kind of way for that 40 minutes every morning. I’m not there to accomplish anything other than giving both Hank and myself a little exercise, and practicing Not Herding Inappropriate Things. And because I’ve deliberately chosen a road where I don’t usually run into people, it gives me a solid 40 minutes to talk to myself, usually in my head, but sometimes, yes, I find myself muttering out loud. This road has become the place where I think up ideas, where I outline essay and story structures, where I talk things over with myself. Sometimes I dictate into my phone — I’ve discovered that if I pull up a Google doc, I can dictate in the roughest of rough drafts, which as someone who loves editing, I’ve discovered is a great way to jump start a piece, or get myself unstuck.

I’m with Flaubert, who wrote: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” It has always been the central project here at LivingSmall — to pay off the house, to bring my expenses down so I can afford to chance a freelance life, and to build for myself the kind of domestic routines that allow my brain the space to roam, to make things up, to imagine worlds in which all kinds of things can happen — and then to get those worlds down on the page.

For me, routine is the mental scaffolding that allows the work to get done. It’s not that I go dog walking in order to produce ideas, it’s that when I go for a dog walk, when I let my mind drift — when I look at a landscape both as deeply familiar as this one but which is, because it is a natural place, is also always in flux, different colors, different birds, sometimes the cattle are in the bottom, sometimes they’re up high — all this makes space for ideas to emerge.

Our culture has become so obsessed with productivity, so addicted to the drug of busyness, that we forget how crucial daydreaming is to our mental wellbeing. It’s difficult to advocate for taking a walk, for daydreaming, for carving out time to protect those routines that feed our creative processes, when we’re all struggling so hard just to make a living.

Figuring out what routines we need seems to me one of the biggest challenges of building a creative life. For one thing, it seems so precious and bourgeois — oh poor me my challenge is not to survive and put food on my table and make sure my kids have shoes but to figure out my perfect little artistic life —  but if we’re to get the work done, it’s one of the most important things we need to not only figure out, but to protect.

I’d love to hear from you all in the comments — what routines work for you? Do routines work for you, or are you the kind of creative who needs to shock your system once in a while? It’s been ages since we’ve had a commenting community here at Livingsmall, but it was always one of my favorite parts of blogging, and I hope that (if you’re out there), you’ll join in.

Building A Creative Life

Building A Creative Life

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For many years, I thought of my maker projects and my writing as separate. More than that, actually,  I got into a bad habit of thinking of them as oppositional — as if my making was only a kind of procrastination or evasion from writing. I felt guilty about it. As if spending time in my garden, or putting up a batch of jam, or making a shirt, or learning to knit socks was somehow betraying my “real” creative work, which was supposed to be writing novels and essays.

About a year ago I got really interested in the notion of creative practice. This is quite a common idea in the art world, but writers don’t tend to think in these terms — or at least not the writers I came up with. Process was fine, but the point was publication. Where you were published was frequently not as important as the fact of publication, especially when I was still in academia. And there was a hierarchy. “Little” magazines at the bottom, then real magazines — the ones who paid — and at the top, publishing a book. That I published a book with a commercial publisher was sort of a big deal back in the day. But as the years have stretched on, and I haven’t managed to finish another book manuscript, I’ve gone through many cycles of despair and reinvention, then gotten stuck and have done it all over again.

It was in those down times about a year ago when a manuscript I’d been struggling with had come apart, again, that I discovered a group of knitters in the UK who were building these really vibrant networks of creativity. They had podcasts and book projects and were starting their own lines of yarn and making patterns and researching the history of knitted textiles in the British Isles in ways that seemed enormously exciting. Kate Davies, for example, who writes these beautifully-researched books on Fair Isle knitting, or yoked sweaters or haps … books that include not only terrific patterns, but these essays about the history of these handicrafts, and the women who made them, and the economic conditions that helped turn these things into the luxury items of their days. Turns out that Kate has a PhD in 18th Century History, and an academic career cut short by a stroke she suffered in her early 30s. She reinvented herself entirely — took the thing she loved doing, and in exploring it deeply has built a truly creative life for herself, as well as a business. Felicity (Felix) Ford is another one I’ve been slightly obsessed by, because again, she has that combination of true enthusiasm and academic and artistic expression that just makes my heart sing. Also known as Knitsonik, Felix is a sound artist and knitwear designer who wrote the absolutely astonishing Knitsonik Stranded Colorwork Sourcebook which is my very favorite kind of how-to book. There are patterns, several really wonderful ones, but just as my most beloved cookbooks are a collection of recipes in service of teaching a person how to really cook — how to think about flavors, how to acquire the techniques needed to make those flavors and textures happen, how to set you free to truly cook on your own, Felix’s Knitsonik Stranded Colorwork Sourcebook is all about learning to really see, and then to translate what you see and love into patterns that can be knit into any number of garments.

I am not a particularly visually adept person. My mother is a talented visual artist who can draw and paint, but that’s never been my strong suit. And what I loved about Felix’s book is that it is rooted in place, which has always been the source from which my writing begins. The book is a workbook of sorts, leading the reader through several of Felix’s projects where she takes elements of the landscape that she loves — whether it be the brickwork of her hometown Reading, or an ancient stone wall, or the meandering highway over which she commuted to a University job — and rethinks them as colors and patterns that can be translated into the medium she loves, knitting. I was set on fire by this book. I was SO excited about the way it had me looking at colors, and patterns, and the contrast between colors and patterns — every morning for weeks. My morning dog walks took on a heightened sense of thrill as I tried to translate the shapes and colors of the mountain ranges, the sky, and my beloved creek bottom where we walk every morning with it’s willows and bullrushes and blue heron and cows. And while I’ve yet to knit anything from it, that it opened up my creative mind again, got me thinking and seeing and simply being excited about creating again — that was enough. (Although I do have plans for a very special pattern I want to develop using her methods.)

Felix has a terrific Knitsonic podcast, which seems to be on hiatus at the moment as she works on a project for the Dickens museum on Catherine Dickens, Charles’s long-suffering wife who he both divorced and erased late in life. And that podcast led me to a few others that also felt really inspirational — KnitBritish and A Playful Day in particular — podcasts that take on the big question of how do we build creative lives that will also support us? They’re women telling stories about making up their own lives, and interviewing others who have done the same — built creative businesses that not only support them, but feed their creative practices.

All this has been in my head this year as I’ve been planning my Great Leap into Freelancing. I have a stack of writing projects, and for the first time in decades, I’m sending things out. For ages every manuscript submission felt life-or-death to me, as if it was the Final Judgement on whether or not I was any good at this. Maybe its getting to that age where a woman famously doesn’t give a shit anymore what other people think, maybe it’s having a solid footing underneath me for the first time ever — a settled domestic life, a safe home — or maybe it’s just a very belated sense of confidence in my own talent, but sending things out no longer seems like such a big deal. The next challenge is going to be figuring out how to find paid work that isn’t so divorced from my creative life as that I’ve been doing these past fifteen years or so. It was a deliberate choice on my part — I wanted a job that didn’t creep into those creative parts of my brain because I thought it would compete. And perhaps I was right, or right for what I needed at the time. Now I’m in a different space, a space of really exciting creative brainstorming. The three things I love: making, wilderness, and writing are all right here — and my goal is to bring them into some sort of constellation that allows me to pay my bills while doing good work — work that brings creative energy into not only my world, but becomes an expression of that energy out into the universe. I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish this, but the challenge has me waking up mornings with a head full of plans, plans that it looks like I’ll have time now to start putting into place. It’s so exciting. Terrifying, but exciting.

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On Quitting my Day Job

On Quitting my Day Job

 

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I took the leap.

I gave notice at my day job.

It’s pretty terrifying. I have a few things in the pipeline, but it’s a big risk. I’ve got another month of steady work, then it’s me and my little freelance shingle, hoping I can make it work.

And this is the photo I’ve been looking at every time I get spooked. That’s my friend Dennis, who died last month. Denny was the first person outside of my family who truly saw me. We spent the summer after I graduated from high school leading canoe trips in the Boundary Waters and talking. It was one of those summers you hope for any young person you love — we were besotted with each other. We spent every waking moment together, and most of it we spent talking (no surprise to anyone who knows either of us). He was never my boyfriend — he was three years older than I am and had a girlfriend at college he was moving in with, and I was a very young 17 year old that way. But we loved one another. I have the letters he wrote me on birchbark to remind me. And then, years later, when I was suffocating in New York City, and flailing around trying to figure out what to do with myself and frightened I’d made a terrible mistake and had ruined my life, Denny came to the rescue again. He got me a job at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, and backed me up when my mother was furious I’d left a good job in New York City to go be a raft guide, and loaned me a boat so I could learn to really paddle. Denny was in love with Nancy by then, who he married, and had two gorgeous girls with, and just left behind.

Dennis lived every single day to the fullest. He was the most enthusiastic person I’ve ever known, and the most authentic. He spent a lifetime teaching wilderness EMT courses, and saving people’s lives. He and Nancy took their girls on an adventure of a childhood, living in an RV while they taught courses all over, from the Southeast, to Alaska, to Arizona and finally settling, in a real house, in Maine. That Denny could get a chronic illness, and then a very quick cancer and then die has shaken even me, the woman who has lost so many people I really love, to the core.

There is no time to waste.

And so, I’m jumping off the rock even though the timing is not ideal. Look at that photo. It’s cold in that photo. Denny’s jumping in even though it’s so cold there’s no leaves yet on the trees – that water is COLD — and yet, there he is, leaping into the river — for what, I’m not sure. To demonstrate something for a river rescue class, perhaps to actually rescue someone, perhaps because he’s Denny and he always jumped in.

The house is paid for. There are two half-written novels and a pile of essays that might, someday come back into a nonfiction book. There are environmental issues I want to write about and essays I’ve been dictating into my phone on morning dog walks about knitting and sewing and creativity. I went to a reading last week, and for the first time in fifteen years looked up and thought I’m ready to get back up on that stage.

I accomplished my goal at my day job. I paid off my PhD. I paid off my house. I have money in my retirement savings.

And now it’s time to leap.

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On Paying Off My Mortgage

On Paying Off My Mortgage

Livingsmall Goal # 1 Done! House is paid off!

On Friday, I wired the last payment on my house.

I own my own house. No one can make me move, ever again, if I don’t want to. For someone who went to six grammar schools and moved pretty much every 2 years until I was 35, this is huge.

This has been the primary goal of LivingSmall since day one. I moved to Montana because it’s beautiful of course, but primarily I moved here because I could buy an inexpensive house. A house I could afford to pay off. For anyone looking to achieve similar goals, consulting with experts at Cishomeloans can provide invaluable guidance and support.

I did my masters degree at UC Davis, where I applied in large part to study with Gary Snyder. I’m not a poet, but I figured if Gary was there, something cool must be going on. Gary’s biggest advice to us budding writers was not about poetry, or even about writing. “Find a cheap house,” he said. “Someplace you can pay off. If it’s cheap and you want to live there, there’s probably also other artists there.” That’s what he did all those decades ago on the Yuba Ridge, and what I was looking for in Livingston was something similar.

So that’s what I did. I came up here in 2002, seeking a cheap house, and a found one in a town full of artists, and writers, and musicians, and fishing guides, and electricians and carpenters and schoolteachers.

I built a garden, and fixed things up bit by bit. I paid cash for everything I did on the house and while I’ll need a new roof next year, and I have to repaint some things, and while there are always things I want to do in the garden, I own my house, free and clear.

In the process I built a life. A life that as some of you who have followed me a long time know, was nearly derailed entirely the first year I was here. As I tell people when the story comes up, if you’re going to have a disaster, have it in Livingston. Everyone came. My kitchen filled up with people that first night, and they’re all still here. I’m still here. We are all here together. We’ve seen one another through other disasters. We’ve all brought food to the Elks club for funeral parties, but we’ve celebrated kids birthdays, and book launches, and year after year of rodeo parades.

It was not a mistake, my project of living small. There’s more big news to come, but for now, I’m going to take a moment in my back garden, where the beans are shooting above the trellis, where the sunflowers and hollyhocks are blooming great shoots of color into the sky, where the chickens I just deloused are clucking around in their coop while I wait for Himself to come home for dinner and a Red Sox game on TV. It is not the life I thought I wanted, but it is a better life than I ever could have envisioned.

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