I don’t play chess.

When I was a kid at Catholic school there was a chess club full of boys, and I went a couple of times. I learned the rules and beat some of my classmates in those early games, but boy howdy, I did not like it! I quickly learned that (as a girl at a rural parochial school) winning could also mean losing.

Winning meant that other people felt bad! It meant that my classmates looked at me differently for seeing potential futures they couldn’t see, then using that knowledge to get the better of them.

Winning meant calling attention to myself in ways that felt dangerous. It meant having power, and figuring out how to use that power without accidentally hurting people with it.

At 9 years old, I began to notice something Elon Musk and his ilk haven’t really figured out yet: that over-investing in a certain kind of winning makes you a real loser.

This month’s newsletter isn’t actually about chess. Chess is only one example of how the games we play (and the things we decide are worth competing for) wire our brains to interpret the world through a certain set of restrictions and incentives.

This wiring then perpetuates the shape of the world we’re building around us. We call the results of this high-stakes group project “culture” or “policy.”

Story is the net we throw over reality to filter it into something more manageable, and games are one way that we weave and strengthen our story-nets together.

And while the pop-psychology internet is full of tips for reframing old stories we tell ourselves with language, we seem to think less about the stories that sink into us through the shape of what we repeatedly practice and consume.

The structure of the games we choose to play— and the platforms or belief systems that underpin them— wire ideas into us that we rarely bother to question.

Is it really worth trying to collect The Most Points? Does the labor it takes to win the Best Looking Female Award actually make any sense?

The stories and games that I grew up with in the ‘80s and ‘90s were mostly about winners and losers, strength and weakness. In Catholic school gym class, my teacher invented a game where the least gender-conforming students (me, and my friend Alex) were stood up against the brick wall of the school and told to stand still while the rest of the class pelted us with kickballs. I remember having the glasses knocked off my face and being jeered at for weakness when I cried about it.

Of course, not all childhood games were this clear about their intent to enforce a social order rooted in violence, hierarchy, and coercive control. (Chess, at least, does it much more elegantly!)

But… have you ever played a game of chess where pawns of either color can turn backwards against the more powerful pieces that are using them as cannon fodder?

I’m guessing… probably not.

The truth is that the psychological architecture of a lot of structured play is still built on ancient foundations. As a kid I couldn’t articulate why certain games felt like a minefield, but now I can: I’d noticed that systems run on inflexible power-over dynamics don’t just punish our weaknesses, they also discourage us from using our strengths.

If I won at chess, I upset people. If I hung back in gym class, I became a target.

I was getting stuck in zugswang.

Zugswang, in chess language, comes from the German for compulsion to move. It’s what happens when you’re backed into an impossible corner but you can’t choose to do nothing.

Any move you make will make things worse for you, but you have to keep moving anyway.

Sylvia Plath described a zugzwang-adjacent freeze state in her fig tree dilemma, where the main character of The Bell Jar can’t figure our a win condition1 for her life:

How many sacred hours of our time are spent in the grief-avoidant purgatory of Figuring Out The Optimal Fig-Eating Situation While Careening Towards Inevitable Death? I don’t know about you, but for me it’s been… a lot of hours.2

Sylvia Plath experienced Zugswang as a dead end.

But there is another way.

It requires loosening the story-nets to include dimensions of movement that our old games rarely allowed us to rehearse.

For example: earlier this month, my big boss quit and I was asked by some Important People if I wanted her job.

After a lifetime of practice in zugzwangery, I recognized the texture of the trap. Step into power and become a target. Hang back and become a target. Be guided by metrics other than money/power and risk losing your safety. Choose the “safe” thing and lose the things that were worth living for.

Because this Big Cool Job, in addition to being something I’d be good at and might even enjoy sometimes, would have required moving back to NYC full time. I would have to leave my partner and my garden and my scrappy folk arts residency and my little aging dog and my ability to swim in lakes after work— the life I’ve made many careful sacrifices to build over the course of more than two decades.

My first instinct, faced with this conundrum with no clear “right” answer, was to think about just… quitting. Because inside me there’s still a feral teen girl who learned (like Sylvia) that when we can’t control what’s happening to us, we at least can control our own power to self-destruct.

The problem is that in the face of not being able to “win” or “solve” an impossible situation, refusal can feel seductively like control. Self-sabotage creates a form of certainty, and most of us are extremely horny for certainty.

The sneakily soothing form of control that comes with self-destruction (including the insidious cool-girl kind that says “whatever, that’s dumb, I don’t care”) is why depression or collapse or dissociation or anorexia or avoidance are such common responses to being in shitty situations. Faced with a compulsion to move and a list of uncertain choices, “NOPE” can feel like refusing to become complicit in our own dehumanization or disappointment.

But refusal to choose, whether we like it or not, ends up becoming an insidious choice of its own. And self-destruction under pressure rarely hurts anyone more than it hurts us.

So how do you move when you’re stuck in a trap and it feels like every attempt to free yourself only makes things worse?

Slow down.

Stop.

Look for places where you’re snared in the rules of someone else’s game.

Because Zugswang, while it’s a familiar feeling for many of us, can’t actually exist in real life. The concept of zugswang comes from the rules of chess, which is a zero-sum game.

Real life isn’t chess, but you’ve been trained to see it like this on purpose:

Have you ever played pub trivia?

It’s not a zero-sum game, and it’s also not a game of chance. You are neither in total control of your destiny nor completely at the mercy of fate.

It’s a stochastic game, which means there are elements you can control (your own level of effort and knowledge) and elements you can’t (what questions will be asked, what other people know, how people will wager in final jeopardy.)

I’ve been going to trivia one night a week this summer with an old friend who’s back in town. It’s fun, even though we’re often plunged from the top to the bottom of the pile in final jeopardy.

One of the things I like is that it’s a game that helps us practice navigating uncertainty as a collective.

The decision I made about my dream job was to actively choose uncertainty. I’m doing both jobs at once for a while as they look for a new boss, because it doesn’t feel right to move back to the city.

It’s a gamble. But so is choosing the wrong thing in advance, just for the certainty of it.

When we leave the illusion of Zugswang and accept that there’s no win condition for life, it becomes easier to move from our values instead of from our fears.

And a life of intentional movement— whatever else it becomes— feels like the opposite of being stuck.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

1. Use up a nice product you’ve been “saving.”
   How often have you gotten some nice lotion or a lovely piece of clothing only to “save” it because it’s too good to use up? This is… a weird little form of grief avoidance. The lotion will go bad! The sweater will get a moth hole! There is no avoiding loss, so enjoy it while you got it!
   

2. Watch Lodge 49, a sleeper cult show featuring a pure-of-heart surfer dude looking for human connection while riding the waves of fate. It plays a lot with mysticism and specifically with this month’s theme— including a promo poster that shows the monad symbol as a donut. (If you haven’t seen this show yet, I envy that you get to watch it for the first time.)
   

3. Make a “loser list” and pin it somewhere prominent. Choose new things you’re going to try, with the understanding that failing at them is success. By making failure the goal instead of winning, we change the rules of the game we’re playing. For the past few years I’ve made a “rejection tracker” for applications to residencies and submissions to gigs. I quickly learned that I had to slow way down, because as soon as I put myself out there I was accidentally succeeding at more things than I could handle. If you want to learn a skill or do a thing or get accepted to something cool, setting “fail ten times” instead of “succeed ten times” lowers the barrier to action and shifts our focus to what we can actually control— paradoxically resulting in more success than trying to win.

4. Imagine some weirder game rules / metrics of success. We all have things we tend to fixate on. I used to care about brass rings like Getting the Most Awards or Being Productive the Most Hours of Anyone. This summer I’m experimenting with Total Summer Days Spent in Lakes, Percent of Income Donated to Causes I Believe In, and Amount Of Activity In The Groupchat as alternate success metrics. What about you?
   

Bonus: Folkist Summer Reads

So I’ve always meant to be one of those reading-log people, but really don’t need any more apps or notebooks in my life. I’m out of space in this email, but this month I made a reading list on Bookshop with my notes and opinions on everything I read this July. (I’ll make a commission if you buy a book, but I also encourage folks to go read the list then place a book on hold at your local library!)

Here’s a preview, the only book I read this summer too rare, cool, and precious to be available on Bookshop:

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo by Zen Cho

I was totally floored by what a freaking delight this book is. Voicey, vivid, perfectly paced, beautifully designed— everything you want from a down-in-one-gulp beach read, even including enough postcolonial perspective to prevent a sugar hangover. One of the first books released by small press Homeward Books, and an antidote to the enshittification of publishing from the cover stock down to the layout design.

Get the Reading List

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

The snow has been coming down for weeks. It’s the time of year when I eyeball the woodpile and assess our burn rate. Can we keep living this way, or do we need to make adjustments?

Walking the dog on mornings of bone-deep windchill activates an ancient script in my brain. It’s a script written by the evolutionary pressures of winter, designed to take inventory and project outcomes. How many potatoes left in the pantry? How many weeks of firewood? How slick is that ice? Do we have enough wine to host all these people or would it take a miracle?

Maybe this is why I don’t resist the urge to use these dark days to reflect and adjust; why I spend time with my journal and my planner trying to be honest with myself about what I am really trying to make out of these hours I have left.

Time is growing thin, and a new year is knocking at the door.

Friends keep calling me to talk about The Sadness, and I can feel it fluttering at the edges of my vision like a bird that has somehow gotten into the house. The Sadness always acts up at this time of year. It seems to feel cornered by all the lights and feasts and Plans. It beats its wings against the frosted windowpanes and the flickering birthday candles and the insides of my ribs. It won’t let me look away from all the doors of my life that have frosted shut forever; all my failures and losses and disappointments.

Our flabby modern consumer rituals can’t contain it. Change, change, change, it sings.

This is the time of year when my ancestors used to kill a wren and then then shake down the neighborhood to collect money for the little bird’s funeral. La an dreoilín. The old year had to be properly mourned and buried before the new one could come in.

Most winter folk traditions feel rooted in this seasonal awareness of death and lack and the inevitability of change. From burying the wren to the Mari Llwd to wassailing to potlatches to burning down the yule log, folks make sacred games out of the ways in which we keep riding a dead horse or trying to fill an empty cup or feeling tempted to confuse wealth and hoarding with real power.

When I think about ritual, I think of it as a container for something we want to carry with us through time.

Language is also a container, and so are our daily habits, and so are the analytics dashboards at my job that imperfectly contain the messy soup of human behavior and distraction and desire.

The wassailing bowl is a container, but it’s not the thing that nourishes us.

This culture has deliberately trained us to confuse containers with the thing itself. The entire business of advertising relies on our continued lack of discernment between what is a consumer product and what is a feeling you can have for free.

Is my new laser face gadget the feeling of comfort, beauty, and worthiness? Is this podcast host selling me Article furniture a soul-friend? Is this advice from an AI model the ineffable peace of feeling seen and loved by an all-knowing god?

Containers, of course, are important! You can’t drink from the cup of life without some way to hold onto the experience, or everything will be wasted in the dust. But our containers also don’t really need to be gilded and over-engineered and $3,000, and that’s what we’re too often being pitched as Next Season’s Upgraded Solution to The Sadness.

(Video: Captain Mummer singing to our neighbors)

Winter folk rituals can help us honor and mourn the death of the old year, but they also demand that we pay attention to where the fluttering alive-thing that makes life worthwhile is actually moving. These traditions ask us to notice when the bird in the bush has stopped singing, when the bowl is empty, and when the spirit has left the structure.

They also remind us to check which houses on the block are ready to join the party.

If we do it right, one window lights up— then another— then the whole neighborhood. The snacks and drinks get low, and more appear as if from nowhere. You end up, mysteriously, with more than you started with.

The containers we use to hold love and connection have never been the nourishing thing itself. They are only the sheet we throw over something invisible to give it a shape we can understand. As folks begin moving together, it turns out the spirit moves right along with us.

The will of the people swarms from time to time, like a murmuration of snow on the wind. It outgrows its last home and seeks a new one, howling from door to door.

Now and then it alights somewhere for a moment, animating the bones of a religion or a government or a social media platform or a horse skeleton with the vivid aliveness of imbas forosnai. We feel connected. We feel seen and loved. We feel part of the great dance of aliveness.

It’s easy to experience this holy communion and then confuse the container with what it once held. Grifters and power-seekers know this, and will charge endless admission to the shrine of an empty cup long after the real party has moved on down the block.

In times of change, when the old containers are empty but new ones can’t yet hold us, something in us remembers how to swarm out into the street and bang the pots and pans. We remember how to carouse. We dress up in horse costumes. We demand our rights and won’t go until we get some.

Out under the stars, we sing our way to the next humble structure where love is beginning to glow.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

1. I think the reason so many New Year’s resolutions collapse is that we pile on the new stuff without taking time to be honest with ourselves about what’s actually possible, and what we would have to let go of in order to change. If you’re setting intentions or making resolutions this year, join me in trying something new— this year I’m pairing each intention or commitment with something I’m willing to sacrifice in exchange. (I want to record a song a month, for example, so I’m taking social media off my phone to help me focus.)

2. I like seeing the big picture, so filling out a 12-month calendar helps me to process how precious and finite a year actually is. This one was made for free by Reddit user liliapop, and I highly recommend giving it a try if you want to throw a sheet over your year to see its shape.

3. The Remarkable is not the superlative joy of having a fully functioning frontal lobe but it is where I’ve kept my annual life map for the past few years, along with all my work to-dos, drafts of this newsletter, drawings of someday-saunas, admin for our artist residency, and absolutely everything else. I like that it’s black-and-white, wi-fi-free, and helpful for deep focus.

4. A (free!) resolution I actually-mostly keep each year is Yoga with Tim’s 30-day challenge. These videos populate the playlist one-a-day, are only 20-30 minutes, and the instruction is clear and helpful. If I have to miss a day I don’t beat myself up about it, but it’s a great way to re-establish a physical and meditative practice after the egg-beater-to-the-brain that is the holidays.

5. What wrens are you ready to bury this year? What new, alive things do you want to make room for? What have you found helpful for setting intentions without making your life feel like it’s All Container, No Soup? Comment or send me an email, I’d love to know!
   

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

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I used to feel like it was frugal— moral, even— to save everything worth having for later. But whenever later came, the juice had gone out of all those things I once treasured.

Christmas chocolate lingered in the cabinet until it melted and bloomed in the summer heat. Expensive lipstick wasted in the drawer until it smelled like old crayons. A favorite dress waited in the closet, too precious to wear, until it lost all its magic.

Something about this hoarding form of self-denial felt inherently religious. As a child I conflated the rosaries in my grandmother’s handbag with the way she kept her tissues torn into neat quarters to make them last forever. She had grown up during the Great Depression and lost her mother when she was a baby, a wound that never healed.

As a kid I internalized that rationing your tissues and your pleasures, like saying your prayers, was a breastplate of protection against loss.

I read the parable of the talents and the story of the wise and foolish virgins. I learned that Jesus would judge me not by my intentions, but (like a Boy Scout) by my Disaster Preparedness.

On judgment day, the Lord would know my worth by the number of re-washed Ziploc bags I had ready and waiting for Him in the kitchen drawer next to the wooden spoons.

It’s November, the season when I tackle the mending basket, fail to resist the temptation of the Black Friday goblin markets, and re-read Little Women.

If you haven’t actually read Little Women, you might have an image of demure, old-fashioned girls in hoopskirts learning charming moral lessons with their heads bent over their workbaskets. An idyllic image straight out of that viral 19th century banger The American Frugal Housewife.

It is… way weirder than that.

Author Louisa May Alcott was raised in a radical transcendentalist community of abolitionists and utopian thinkers. She spent a formative year of her youth at her father’s short-lived communist experiment at Fruitlands, where she had a front row seat to the conflict that arises when utopian theory meets utopian practice.

Left to run the commune with some random dudes while their dad Bronson went on a lecture tour to raise money, the Alcott women wrestled with the everyday domestic emergencies of trying to run a working farm full of Ideas Guys. It turns out that when it comes to Utopia, the idea is not the hard part!

Little Women is such a captivating and enduring piece of literature not because it idealizes 19th century domestic life, but because it is actually pretty honest about the frustrations, failures, boredoms, and petty compromises of trying to live as a radical idealist in a consumer society full of real-world bullshit.

Like most of the domestic tasks I decide to do the slow way, my mending basket is a way of anchoring me to something tangible in a world full of glamour and illusion. Dealing with it forces me to remember the hidden labor that goes into everything we touch, and the real human cost of all our consumer goods.

Because mending things requires real attention and tangible action, it somehow feels like the opposite of both hoarding and anorexic minimalism.

Hoarding pushes our reckoning with stuff off into the hazy future. Stashing away more than we need or can ever use is a buffer against the discomfort of not-enough; the spike of distress that arises at the sight of an empty pantry or a spaghetti-stained shirt.

Something in the hoarder— of torn-up tissues, of expired food, of enormous wealth— viscerally knows that the small grief of reaching for something and finding it gone risks opening a wormhole to the Big Grief of our collective mortality writ large.

The urge to Not Care and throw everything away can offer itself as the antidote to this hoarding, but it’s only grief avoidance of an opposite kind. If nothing matters; if everything is replaceable and nothing is sacred or loved, we are buffered from loss by dissociation. The landfills can hold everything we don’t want to think about while we rotate shiny new things through our lives, free from the creeping sense of Someday Death that a threadbare sofa or a scuffed floor would introduce to our lizard brains.

I think mending and repairing might be the third thing.

It’s work that demands both using up and caring for what we own. It asks that we look at damage and learn the specific techniques and skills required to repair it.

It forces us to deal with the real limitations of our time on earth and what we can reasonably accomplish within those sacred restrictions.

But!

It is also work that is boring, time consuming, and extremely annoying!

So it’s the kind of practical utopian magic that I can know is good for me, but also tend to avoid until my mending basket overfloweth.

Part of this avoidance is because the version of mending I learned as a kid was slapdash and shame-ridden. It was always a rush job on the way to a party when a button came loose or the hem of a skirt came undone. Unacceptable to appear in public that way!

Back then, a run in your stocking or a stain on your shirt felt equal to a blot upon your soul. The goal of repair was to cover up the damage. Mending wasn’t really about fixing, it was about hiding a shameful truth about the real state of things.

This anxious emphasis on surface appearances felt suffocating when I was young. Only in college did I begin to see that there was a broader history and context to these family taboos around tidiness and accentless grammar and wearing clothes that didn’t look—as my mother so often said about my unironed, midriff-baring tee shirts— “like a used tissue!”

But these family norms were just another litany of protection. They were the hidden legacy of colonialism and resource competition taking the form of lace curtains and collared shirts and prayers like pardon me and may I? and have a good day, officer.

We had all learned this creed without knowing its true name:

Fear.

In Little Women, this tangle of shame and fear about shabbiness is right on the page. Jo March is kept from dancing at a party because of the scorch mark on the back of her dress. Meg gets a makeover from the rich girls and wrestles with the temptations of a glamourous unexamined life full of champagne tippling and sweatshop fast fashion. Amy salivates over the trends that signal belonging at her school, eventually caving to the siren song of the pickled limes.

Little Women is a book about a white American family that is struggling with the very real costs of being on the right side of history. Living by their values has made the Marches downwardly, rather than upwardly, mobile. The indignant frustration and anxiety around this change in class status slides like a dark shadow underneath some of the more rigidly moralizing moments in the text.

Both the fictional Marches and the actual Alcotts framed themselves as champions of marginalized people. Louisa May wrote with pride about how her family’s financial difficulties stemmed from her father’s abolitionist ideals and insistence on racially integrating his school. The March girls are always patting one another on the back for helping out their shanty-dwelling neighbors.

But the real L.M. Alcott also referred to the Irish as “foreign incapables,” proudly refusing to hire immigrant servants and encouraging her readers to do the same.

It turns out that it’s hard (even for visionaries) to imagine a society without scapegoats. It turns out that even the people working to build a better world can be a patchwork of complicated motivations and beliefs.

These class anxieties in Little Women are often played out through fashion.

There’s a reason fashion is also called glamour, a word that comes from Scots language. Glamour is a form of trickster magic, a way of making things appear different then they are.

It’s not so different from the way Odysseus hides his men beneath the bellies of the Cyclops’ sheep to smuggle them out of danger. The glamour of controlling how we appear can influence people to see us a certain way. To treat us a certain way.

Sometimes this is a matter of survival, and it is nearly always a strategy for belonging. Folks trying to move inward from the margins of society know this, and so do the trust fund kids who shop at Goodwill and wear Carhartt to elide their discomfort.

But the thing about glamour is that it always has an expiration date. And folk tales tell us that we ignore the ticking clock of illusion at our peril.

Fairy-gold memecoins, fake news, plastic faces, and synthetic “consciousness.” We’re living in a world where illusion is wearing thin, and this fraying goes back a very long way— certainly back before the upheaval and displacement and rapid wealth consolidation that irreparably shredded the old fabric of society during the first industrial revolution.

In a way, we’ve been held together with safety pins and basting stitches ever since, because we’ve collectively been more invested in hiding our damage than in repairing it.

Here’s something interesting:

When I discovered visible mending, I stopped avoiding the work.

Visible mending encompasses many different stitching and patching techniques, but always begins from the premise that shredded fabric can’t return to what it used to be. It has to become something else now.

A shame-based desire to make it appear like a Bad Thing Never Happened can keep us from seeing the many creative possibilities hidden inside deterioration and decay.

Repair, if we allow it to, can create new resilience and expanded pockets of space in which to move. It can offer us the freedom to stop hiding our scorch marked ass on the sidelines so we can finally join in the pattern of the dance.

My mending basket is slowly showing me that when I sit and face the grief of what is gone, I can start to see the possibilities of what is still here in front of me.

It will never be perfect.

But if I care enough to pick up the work, I think there are still ways to make this old thing beautiful.

Folkist Practice

1. Check out our upcoming slate of artists for the next season of our funded Folkist Space residencies!

2. Repair one thing. The most interesting thing for me about having a repair work practice is how it changes what I buy, and when, and why. Investing in things that are repairable is sometimes more money up front, but I have a bag and a pair of boots that are both still kicking after 20 years.

3. This is my favorite book on visible mending. It’s a great place to start if you want to try some new stitching techniques.

4. Read Little Women, or watch this classic version or this (also excellent) version if you haven’t already! (When trying to explain Little Women to a Portuguese friend unfamiliar with New England Classics, I said that it’s a Christmas Movie the way Die Hard is a Christmas movie, and I stand by this.)

5. A couple of indie patterns I’ve enjoyed making lately are these artist overalls from Ready to Sew and this great skirt design from Daughter Judy. I live in the Arthur Pants from Sew Liberated.

6. I’ve never made pickled limes, but if you do please report back.

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

When I was a teenager, I took acting classes in an off-duty ballet studio near the old recycling plant. It’s kind of wild that unlicensed adults were allowed to break down our psyches so thoroughly just to put on a black box gymnasium production of Bang Bang You’re Dead, but… hindsight is 50/50.

Anyway, it felt good at the time. I was already wearing a mask made of kabuki-plucked eyebrows and cream-to-powder foundation at school all week. Dancing and howling and learning about the ancient roots of mask rituals on Saturday mornings helped make sense of it all.

What I think I loved the most about acting was (paradoxically) the way it couldn’t be faked. In English class we had to read Shakespeare, but in acting class we had to turn it inside out and shake the loose change from its pockets. To learn how to move an audience, we had to first learn how to move something inside ourselves. We couldn’t just memorize, we had to understand.

Maybe this is why acting felt like the only thing in our mall-going, crash dieting, 9/11-era teenage lives that reverberated with real Truth.

Shakespeare’s late romances are strange plays. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest break through the binary of the paired Greek theatre masks we all recognize. In these texts, comedy and tragedy are no longer hermetically sealed into their separate genres.

Some people call these plays tragicomedies. I prefer the archaic term romance, partly because I think it illuminates the forgotten roots of a genre we now sideline as feminine and unserious.

I think it’s kind of telling that a culture infatuated with dystopia and apocalypse denigrates the genre that could offer a tonic for its fatal flaw.

Because if comedy is a tale of low-stakes confusion transformed into laughter, and tragedy is a tale of high-stakes confusion that results in disaster, then romance is the third thing.

Like real life, romance is full of real grief, real loss, and real stakes. Happy outcomes do not erase what came before or soothe the bittersweet aftertaste of real suffering. More than that, romance is multivalent and complex. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. Romance— from the archaic literary form to the squishy insides of our personal relationships— somehow manages to be both petty and mythic at the same time.

In romance, mortals also cannot always engineer predictable outcomes by their own bootstrapping efforts. Sometimes you bash your head against a problem only to find yourself more inextricably tangled in a Rube Goldberg Machine of consequences.

Any couples therapist will tell you that it’s sometimes a mystery how or why real transformative change happens. Like Shakespeare’s late characters, our actions both matter a lot and we are far more at the mercy of accidents, our own blind spots, and the black swan force of Deus Ex Machina than we would like to believe.

This romance of the third thing, the weird unpredictability hiding within a locked paradox of opposing forces, feels like where we all are all stewing right now.

Halloween itself is a suspended tipping point between seasonal extremes, a time when my ancestors believed that the veil between worlds was thin. I can leave bowls of food out for them tonight and know that this old folk practice is both real and unreal, that it is simultaneously True and Irrational.

Like the audiences who sob with catharsis at the deus ex machina ending of A Winter’s Tale, I don’t feel like the impossibility of it is a problem. Have we forgotten that truth and logic are not always the same thing?

Of course, Shakespeare was writing for audiences already familiar with charivari and masques and the street theatre customs that marked out the ritual year. The holiday we’re celebrating today is connected to those festivals, and to old social leveling practices like The Wran and the Mari Lwyd, which seem designed to remind landowners and resource-hoarders of the responsibility and mortality that comes with their tenuous kingship.

Rituals like this exist in so many forms around the world, and it feels particularly important right now to pay attention to what the past is trying to tell us through the practice of them. Like indigenous potlatches here in North America, Halloween asserts that leadership and social status are defined not by how much you have, but by how much you are able to give away.

Just this morning, my colleague spoke with pride about being “the full-size candy bar house,” which is how we all (accurately) measured the wealth and status of our neighbors when we were children. And every year when I put cups of hot mulled cider into the cold hands of little goblins and Spider-Men, I think we are living better than feudal kings. I think, this is more than enough.

As SNAP benefits are set to expire and twilight descends on my small rural town, time begins to feel like a thixotropic substance. History doesn’t repeat itself— but the rhymes of the past echo through these thin hours in iambic pentameter.

The masses have put on their costumes and taken to the streets.

What next?

In high school we were taught that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, that Utopia means no such place, and that deus ex machina— literally “god from the machine,” a sudden and unpredictable plot element creakily lowered from the ceiling at the last minute—is a laughable and lazy device that no one uses any more because we are now all smart and evolved enough to know that the only real story in the world is Star Wars.

Maybe because I grew up learning living oral traditions and reading weird old books, I could never swallow the state-sponsored fables that “progress is a graph that goes up forever” and that “the only real storytelling is linear and orderly.”

And… we are definitely in a moment where we are being asked to forget that feelings shape the world just as much as facts do.

This week in a work call, a colleague was getting frustrated that he had run out of high quality data to train an AI model. It turns out that it’s not easy to accurately predict the messy behavior of real human beings! Eager to reach a point of certainty, he begged that the model only needed some more to eat.

I found myself holding back a giggle. The theatre kid inside me had started doing choralography, and I had to hold her back from belting out the finale of Little Shop of Horrors:

Hold your hat and hang onto your soul
Something’s coming to eat the world whole
If we fight it, we’ve still got a chance

But whatever they offer you
Though they’re slopping the trough for you
Please, whatever they offer you
Don’t feed the plants!

It’s easy (and fun!) to dunk on theatre kids. We are as embarrassing as a vestigial tail, a segment of the population that just cannot adapt to the jaded and dissociative timbre of modern life.

We insist on shouting incantations in the street, staging strange rites in cul-de-sac backyards, and dragging our friends into unasked-for ritual catharsis. We keep performing Shakespeare even when the closest we’ve ever been to Verona is The Olive Garden. We are the Halloween House.

But we have no choice, really. Because in those long-ago cafetoriums and damp church basements, we got to touch the alchemical stuff that hides beneath the mask of the world. Deep time and immortal myth are still singing somewhere deep in our telomeres, even if it does sometimes come out sounding like a bad karaoke version of a Steven Sondheim song.

So as modernity chases the edges of what can be rationally computed, the theatre kid in me keeps tugging at my sleeve. She whispers that we have forgotten about deus ex machina and the wisdom of fools and how important it is to sing songs that don’t seem to move the plot forward. She insists that romance can teach us something that’s still very important to remember.

Shh, I tell her. You are no good at making money.

But at the glowing portal of Work, I see what she was trying to show me.

A descending curve of everything the machine can know, flattening stubbornly against the mystery.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life.

• Go trick or treating. Or attend a Halloween party. Or hand out candy at your house in a costume. Adults so often let ritual moments and seasonal change slip by. Take a page from the theatre kids and don’t let it happen.

• Read this essay by Satya Doyle Byock. I was originally going to write this month’s essay more explicitly about different folk mask traditions and what they can help us understand about our current political moment (what is Mar-a-lago face if not a mask?) but she beat me to it and did an excellent job, focusing on Jung’s theory of personas in a way that sent me back to a deep read of his essays.

• Do a seasonal cleanout of your closet. Which versions of yourself are tattered, worn, too small for comfort? What feels like a costume, and what feels like the truth? I’ve been selling old things on Noihsaf Bazaar, and local Buy Nothing Groups are another great way to shed old selves.

• Listen to this incandescent ritual poem recited by Cillian Murphy and written by Max Porter. I knew that masks have always been used for anonymity and for subsuming individual identities into a collective, but indulging in some experimental archaeology at the pagan rave at Elizabeth Fort last month helped me to more viscerally understand this practice. I was changed by this poem— but didn’t know until later who was the voice behind the mask.

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

Before I start this month’s newsletter, an announcement:

Application for our next season of funded residencies for visionary folk artists and culture-makers are OPEN until October 20th!

Apply for a Residency

Appropriately for residency application season, this month’s newsletter was inspired by seven years of hosting friends and strangers at the Folkist Space.

One of my favorite things about reading a lot of weird old books is how often you stumble across small details that completely transform your idea of what was normal in the past.

A few of my favorite recent rabbit holes include learning about the long-running practice of charivari as a form of social control, the often-overlooked details of sanding floors and watering roads, and the 1920s kerfuffle about single women cooking over gas jets in their rooming houses. (That item is just one of many relatable chapters in the serial drama “Big Real Estate Being Shady vs. Regular People Just Trying To Live.”)

But… there’s one particular thing in old books that is hard to un-see once you start noticing it. Maybe especially if you are, like me, hosting a constant revolving door of travelers.

Modern life incentivizes keeping social interaction behind glass. We can summon everything to our doorstep without ever leaving the house.

But every plot of pretty much every novel is fueled by traveling, visiting, hosting, or boarding out.

There is an adage among writers (often misattributed to Tolstoy but more probably originating with John Gardner) that reduces literature to two plots: a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.

Because things begin to happen when we leave the house or open our home to other people. Classes mix. Cultures clash. We get lost or swindled or finally understood. We fall in love or fall in a hole or end up on an Italian mobster’s catamaran in the middle of the night.1

Hosting artist residents and traveling musicians at my house has led to plenty of quiet at-home adventures, including but not limited to being mentioned in the credits of an award-winning book, being asked to sit in at gigs with musicians much better than me, and staying up until 2AM eating cider donuts and yapping about how social music could save us all with folk legend Bruce Molsky.

But constant hosting is heavy work, and sometimes I feel like a kind of psychopomp. Everyone else is moving. They pass from one gig to another, from one life stage to the next.

I live here in the bardo. Sitting with folks in the moment between what was and what will be.

Doing the laundry like The Morrigan in a myth.

A multigenerational enmeshment with hospitality and service work means that I don’t tend to see journeying through the eyes of the hero. I see it through the eyes of whoever is washing the sheets, flipping the beds, scrubbing the floors, and hosting the meals. (Fact: I cannot watch action movies because I will become inconsolable over the upended livelihoods of fruit cart vendors.)

My people scrubbed hotel rooms and played banjo for resort guests, stayed in boarding houses or worked in them. Today, when I carry piles of linen up and down stairs for our paying guests and artist residents around the edges of a “knowledge worker” day job, I feel a connection to those Irish servants who raised the ire of some of my favorite authors by daring to treat their work like a job instead of like an identity.

Am I trying to be the writer or the servant? Is it more important to be the one who gets to dance, or the one who makes the dancing possible?

There has to be a third option.

Right now, the only thing that feels honest is to hold those questions like a paradox as I constantly fail a little bit at doing all of it.

Maybe to justify all the cleaning and bill-paying work, I have to find ways to make the art. Maybe to make peace with all the hosting and laundry, I need to remember what it’s like to go on the journey.

So this month I visited cousins in Dublin and went to a music festival in Cork. I ended up at a secret song exchange with a random woman I met at a coffeeshop and made shimmering harmonies there until my scalp crinkled. I met kindred spirit pig farmers who host storytelling shows and have the exact same meet-cute story as my husband and me. I hitchhiked with selkies named Kitty and Aisling that I met in a seaside sauna, and met a new Swedish friend at a pagan rave who actually works at IKEA, which seems a little on the nose.

From a list of upcoming friend-visits to an artist residency of my own in Maine, this year is full of experiments in journeying that allow me to return home to The Work.

When I was a kid, my parents kept a little dog-eared address book in the kitchen. The quality of each relationship inside was marked by how many times the numbers and addresses had been scribbled out and amended.

Marginalia of birthdays and anniversaries, kids’ names, and other details formed a nebula of loose connections that sometimes coalesced into stronger ones over time and sometimes didn’t. But many of them could be strengthened by a visit.

As recently as my own childhood it was normal to plan long trips this way. Not by the shortest Google Maps distance between two places, but by the scattered dots on a paper map that represented the people you knew and the places where you could drop anchor.

When I fall down the rabbit hole of the Brehon laws of hospitality and the medeival pilgrim’s Codex Calixtinus, the Green Book and the still-extant networks of guest rooms at reciprocal social clubs, I think that maybe this is how we have always instinctively moved through space.

Journeying wasn’t meant to be a straight line on a map. It’s an act of celestial navigation through a constellation of interests, identities, and relationships.

My grandfather lived in a boarding house when he came over to New York, and my great aunt ran one in the Irish Alps. When I was young I dreamed of living in a theatrical boarding house in New York like the actors in Stage Door, or at some aspirational artist’s hub like The Barbizon.

When Walt Whitman was briefly the editor of the New York Aurora in 1842, he wrote about Americans that:

If we were called upon to describe the universal Yankee nation in laconic terms, we should say, they are ‘a boarding people.’

By the numbers, boarding houses represent a longer, broader history of “traditional” American life than single-home nuclear families and interstate highways do.

But we don’t remember this, probably for a couple of reasons.

One is that this omnipresent feature of everyday life disappeared almost overnight. It was killed by a combination of labor-saving devices, accessible take-out food, the affordable suburbs of the GI bill, and a rash of mid-century zoning legislation that made many boarding houses illegal.

Another reason is that while boarding houses were necessary and functional and plentiful, they were always seen as a place to pass through rather than a place to land. They catered to our needs but not our desires, our survival but not our comfort. They served the American Reality, not the American Dream.

But… hear me out.

Maybe a place that forces classes and cultures to mix, a place that serves everyone while pleasing no one— a place like a boarding house or a public school system or a democracy— was never about getting it exactly right, or being perfectly comfortable.

We can take the superhighway or the scenic route. We can get Doordash or go on the meandering errands in the light of a September afternoon. We can detour to a friend’s house or sleep in identical white beds at hotels in different cities, missing nights spent cross-legged on somebody’s floor in our glasses and that unmoored feeling of visiting an unfamiliar version of Normal.

Maybe being unmoored now and then is an important part of making a home.

It’s a hard sell to suggest going back to doing a bunch of uncomfortable things that take more time and effort and energy and also, sometimes, feel pretty bad! Boarding houses were derided when we had them, but they made nimble movement possible and things happened in them— precisely because they were not private homes or hermetic hotels.

They were both and neither.

They were, like so many folk adaptations to our perennial problems, a wilder third thing.

Folkist Practice

• Do you know a visionary folk artist who could use a fully-funded week of rest and creative work in upstate New York? Forward this newsletter, or send them directly to our artist residency application. Applications for 2026 Folkist Space residencies are open until October 20th.

• Do you tend to be more of a traveler or more of a host? Try making a plan (even if you’re not sure if you’ll act on it yet) to step into the opposite role for awhile.

• How close do you have to be with a person before you’re comfortable asking to crash at their place? Is this different than the level of closeness you need to feel before you offer to host someone? If the answer to that last question is yes, journal about why you think that gap exists.

• I travel a lot for work, and this combination of carry on and backpack have made my life much easier. The carry-on rolls smoothly and switches quickly into old-fashioned suitcase mode for subway stairs, and the built-in strap on the backpack slides quickly on and off the extendable carry-on handle for long walks.

• For single-bag travelers I have friends who swear by this cute duffel backpack, but to be honest I’m still using a 20-year-old BaileyWorks Bag (size XL) that’s comfortable to wear while rivaling Mary Poppins in storage capacity. It’s left over from my car-free biker days, is made by hand in the U.S., and is so indestructible I’m pretty sure it will outlive me.

• Hosting doesn’t need to be fancy, but small touches can make people feel cared for. I used to put small treats on pillows when we hosted friends on the air mattress in Queens. At The Garret, both paying guests and artist residents get a hand-poured candle to remember their stay. And this two minute YouTube video changed how I fold guest towels forever.

• The entire text of The Physiognomy of New York Boarding Houses can be found here, including Thomas Gunn’s write-up of the “Boarding House That Gives Satisfaction to Everybody.”

• Yes, the title of this newsletter is from Anne of Green Gables. Anne would have really hated that millennials have killed the guest room.
  

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

It’s been generations since someone in my family lived a lifetime in the place they were born. My parents didn’t. My grandparents didn’t. The workers of the world are pumped through the landscape like sap, circulating life through this system. The adaptability required for this kind of life was taught as a survival skill.

Any job that needs to be done is dignified work.

A change is as good as a rest.

The only constant is change.

I used to keep a go-bag under my bed and prided myself on how quickly I could pull up roots and rebuild a life in the next city. Stability felt like danger then, like putting my full weight on a branch that would only break. To have something worth keeping only meant that it could be taken away.

There are gifts to carrying a life on your back this way, and I’ve tasted their sweetness. Novelty. Knowledge. New perspective. Strangers who become family.

But lives and landscapes transform with the seasons. During this summer’s drought I watched my austere perennial herbs thrive in the adversity, touching secret sources of nourishment with deep, hidden root systems that had taken a long time to grow.

I used to think that living as fast and bright as a shallow-rooted annual plant was the only way forward.

Now I see that it was just the only way I knew.

It came at a cost.

The other day I went to pick up my dog’s water dish and my wrist failed. The dish crashed to the floor and water splashed everywhere. A stab of pain tore through my arm. Ugh.

I knew immediately what was wrong. I’d spent weeks practicing guitar and banjo and fiddle in every minute of free time I could scavenge around work and the outdoor obligations of sunny summer days. Preparing a new solo set for some local festivals required pushing myself through more new skills than I could reasonably master all at once.

To make up for the lost time taken up by Responsible Adulting and Seasonal Rituals in Lakes, I’d pushed too hard, too fast.

It felt embarrassing, to be so unskilled at something and yet to take the development of that skill so seriously.

It came at a cost.

It’s a kind of paradox that deep root systems make plants both slower to establish in the short term and more resilient over the long arc of a life. I think about this as I make friends with the maples in my backyard and stock the woodshed, all while feeling restless for a life more like that of the folks I know who are traveling the country with their fiddles and songs, living in perpetual stress about approaching winter.

For years I’ve been trying to evade this paradox by cheating time, imagining that I can do the double work of stocking a real woodshed and an intangible one at the same time.

Because “woodshedding” is what artists call the kind of slow, private work that addresses the gap between where we are and where we would like to be.

Like the foresight required to split and season firewood a year before it will be needed, woodshedding is a kind of structured, deliberate devotion to the version of yourself that you want to summon up from the future.

It requires looking straight at weak spots and true desires and attempting to create harmony between them.

In my experience, it is The Absolute Fucking Hardest Thing In The World.

Unlike noodling (which is limp and floppy and has a tendency to bend away from areas that threaten identity and old patterns) or grinding (which denies space for the slow breath of time through the process, leaving it unseasoned) I see woodshedding as a more present kind of practice. One that requires an honest reckoning with finite capacity, finite hours, and unfinished business.

Stacking and seasoning skills one by one makes us face the ways that we are at war with time. It makes us really look at whether our idea of who we want to be and the reality of who we actually are are versions of ourselves that will ever be able to live in the same room.

Woodshedding strips away any fantasy of painless mastery or the protective armor of dilettantism and puts us right up against the places where our stated desires and our actual actions are misaligned.

To be honest, my first solo festival gig went terribly. Delicate tunes on a loud street corner next to a clicking walk sign under a tent constantly trying to blow away, with an amp on the fritz and instrument pegs slipping from being baked in the sun.

For the week since, I’ve struggled to practice or even to write this month’s newsletter.

Because go-bags don’t just live under our beds.

They also live tucked away in corners of our psyche. The adaptability to go anywhere and do anything and pivot over and over again to become what the world demands of you requires a kind of aloofness that doesn’t usually stand up to scrutiny.

To admit you actually want something different is to face the likelihood that you won’t get it. To wholeheartedly love the work is to have your heart broken by the work again and again.

Dreams can be protective, like a layer of bark grown between a person and the harsh reality of their environment. To start to turn dreams into tangible matter can feel like becoming skinless and wounded. Not everyone wants to do it.

Maybe not everyone needs to. Maybe not everyone should.

My mom didn’t go to art school, though she dreamed of it. My dad never played drums in a band, he sold his cymbals to fund his education. My grandfather, whose banjo I now play, was a professional musician who pushed it aside to lay carpet and support his family.

The work of physical survival, like the work of filling a real woodshed, is simple in its restrictions.

Here’s what you have to do to not die.

Mapping this other, more slippery work onto something I can understand— like a garden, or a wood pile— lets me approach something unknown in a way that feels familiar.

I’m sitting here in a sunny corner of land I hold the deed to, cozy on yet another broken chair; a little maple syrup in my morning coffee. The wood stove next to me is cold, but won’t be for long.

I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams, and I am also growing in directions they would never understand. Writing this has felt dangerous, and that in turn feels… extremely dumb.

But I’m sending it out anyway, because a full woodshed is only one product of woodshedding.

The other is us.

Most of us grew up in a culture that prioritized speed over substance, blooms over roots, harvesting over planting. It came at a cost.

My years of filling the woodshed while the world burns is unteaching all that.

Trees have both roots and branches, selves and systems. When I’m with the maples, the slow groove and pulse of time feels less like something to fight and more like something to dance with.

After they die and I lay their bones to dry in the woodshed, the light these trees give off in the end is directly proportional to the work they did in life, transmuting the world of energy into matter.

Making something from the intangible stuff of life is work that warms you twice.

A few days after the Terrible Gig, I picked up my four string fiddle at a session. I was feeling discouraged and disillusioned and extremely foolish.

But then I had one of the rare experiences we live for when we are sweating it out in the woodshed.

I’d leveled up.

My wrist was more fluid, my shoulder more relaxed. Tunes were flowing like spring sap through my body, not stopping to ask permission from my brain. I felt my feet rooted on the floor. I felt a new level of trust in myself.

Spending so much time on unfamiliar instruments and new skills hadn’t resulted in the outcome I was chasing, but it had done something.

If only for an hour, I’d tapped it.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to integrate this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

1. If you are an artist with a wood pile, this kindling cracker will make the actual wood splitting go faster so you can get back to woodshedding.

2. What’s your version of The Woodpile? Woodshedding isn’t just for artists and musicians. Most of us have a protected idea of ourselves that is a little misaligned from how we actually spend our hours. Is there something you’ve been yearning to do, but haven’t done? Is there a skill you want to build, but keep pushing aside? Maybe try journaling about the gap between your desires and your actions. (Don’t be surprised if your desires start to shapeshift as you try to honestly pin them down.)

3. See the Flotsam River Circus if you’re close enough to catch them as they move down the Hudson. There are some kinds of skills that demand so much of us that they shape our entire lives around them. Spinning from your hair over a river seems like one of those things.

4. Read Quarterlife by Satya Doyle Byock if you’re struggling with the balance of stability and meaning. While it’s targeted to new adults, I think it can also be helpful for mid-life crises, folks from immigrant families, and more.

5. Read Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting as a practical guide and poetic paean to the woodpile.

6. Get some good maple syrup from the Northeast and try it instead of sugar in your coffee. You’re welcome!

A few years ago, I was in a successful local band. We had fun practicing, wrote original music together, and sang in three part harmony. This made us unique in our hometown scene, which was (as many are) mostly made up of solo guys playing guitar.

I remember wondering why more people didn’t play this way, in bands. To me it was more fun to do and more interesting to listen to than playing solo. I’d grown up going to Irish trad sessions and singing in choirs. It felt natural that music was meant to be played communally.

Around this time, the data was circulating that bands are disappearing from the charts in favor of solo acts. As better production and recording tech became available, artists mostly stopped working together. Why?

In the Irish language communities I follow, the word meitheal has been resurfacing a lot lately. The popularity of the word feels like an expression of our collective yearning for a different way to work together.

A meitheal is a group of people that gets together to accomplish a shared task. It’s the many-hands-make-light-work feeling of a quilting bee, a waulking party, a barn raising, or a group of folks cutting turf or harvesting a crop. It’s a word we don’t have in English, one that feels like an antidote to the kind of hierarchical, status-based, extractive ways of working that we now conflate with work itself.

I do think meitheals are a folk tool that can make our lives better, and writing about it now at Lughnasadh (the kickoff to the co-working party that is harvest season) feels right.

And also…. ugh.

Writing an essay about the joy of work parties and actually working together in groups are… well, let’s say they’re two really different things.

Most folks I know light up at the idea of working in a meitheal.

But be honest. Given the choice between writing a solo essay or suffering through a group project, which do you pick?

There are whole genres dedicated to the drama that happens when people try to work together towards a shared goal. Cheerleader documentaries. HGTV. Every piece of media ever made about Fleetwood Mac. The content is popular because it is so damn relatable.

Dealing with other people is like trying to drink water. Somehow we’ve been doing it every day of our lives, yet still manage to fuck it up pretty often!

I live in a small rural town full of community organizations, and the truth is that the pool of folks who keep the lights on here is pretty small. The same couple clearing knotweed off the walking trail is moving chairs for concerts at the community center. The same retiree helping out at the library is working a shift at the food co-op. The volunteer fire department folks fuel the food pantry.

Having this kind of community means small town drama. It means short tempers and long memories and chaotic politics. It means that plenty of people feel unsafe or unseen, and that plenty leave volunteer projects in frustration, never to return.

There are splinter groups and petty grudges. There are lots of folks with strong opinions on what should be done and far fewer people who roll up their sleeves to do it. The other day at our new food co-op I was laughing with one of the volunteers about the number of people who come in with their passive “you should reallys” and “have you ever thought abouts.”

I told her about the sign I used to have pinned above my desk at work when I sat at the intersection of six departments and their competing priorities:

The idea is not the hard part.

Because ideas are really only as useful as the actions they inspire.

And what use does the volunteer fire department have for an “ideas guy,” anyway?

When I worked for a fancy story factory in New York, people came out of the woodwork to pitch me their books at cocktail parties. They had great ideas. Bestseller ideas! They just were so busy, they didn’t have the time to sit down and execute them. Someday, someday they would. Or maybe… I would do it for them?

Anyone who has worked in publishing or the arts learns that everyone has a masterpiece stuck inside them. Because all humans are inherently creative.

The internet suggests that we’ll feel better if we buy that next streaming subscription or pants shape or anti-aging cream, but in my experience the only thing that actually calms the howling void is doing a hard and meaningful thing.

I used to think that what set artists apart wasn’t having greatness in them, but the commitment to digging the greatness out. I still think that’s true. But I also think that what gets work stuck in us is rarely about discipline or talent. It’s more about fear.

Because to commit to becoming a maker requires actually facing our grief and disappointment.

When we begin to move from the ether of fantasy to the tangible matter of reality, we risk discovering that we are, in fact, pretty ordinary.

Technology makes all this harder. It’s been a couple of centuries since it felt like a flex to be the best weaver or cobbler or fiddler in any given hamlet. There used to be room for our efforts to feel full of utility and meaning at levels somewhere below the pinnacle of all human achievement.

As a high school ex said about my conservatory audition tape: “It’s not that you’re bad, you’re just no Maria Callas.”

Our ossifying culture of hierarchies and supremacies, winners and losers, tells us that it’s kind of embarrassing to do anything at all if you won’t be able to bodyslam other people with your mastery of it right away. In this way, overconsumption and procrastination and outsourcing our brains to big tech are all self-protective acts.

Because the masterpiece we’ve never begun can remain perfect and unassailable, and if Lady Catherine de Bourgh had ever learned piano, she would be a true proficient.

In the same way, the fantasy version of community and connection that we yearn for can remain free of the injustice and injury and compromise and annoyance and shit work that has plagued group projects since the dawn of time.

The dream that there is a place somewhere out there where we will feel perfectly seen, safe, and supported without a heavy lift of effort remains in the protected realm of disembodied ideas.

Imperfect and ordinary as it was, my July has been full of magical little meitheals that felt better than the brass rings I used to chase after.

The group of musicians who gathered to honor the closing of a local third space. The neighbor who invited me to harvest green walnuts and make nocino in the kitchen with her young niece. The old friend who came to visit and joined me at the co-op to move a chest freezer down the block on a dolly. The wood guy who insisted on helping Rev stack all our wood for the winter. The community theatre troupe that I played music for at a garden party and whose Macbeth we went to see, a family making space for folks to try and fail and learn and grow and connect through art.

Maybe what I’ve been struggling to explain to you here is that everything that sounds annoying and disappointing and bad about Doing Group Projects With Flawed Humans is that… what makes it hard is also what makes it good.

This messy work of learning to lean and be leaned on without creating collapse requires not just thinking about other people as pillars of support, but becoming load bearing ourselves.

And as it is with our bones— which become stronger under pressure but under too much will break— this process requires developing an honest sense of our own capacity. It demands that we build tolerance for acting a little beyond our limits or a little below our desires. We all know a person who holds everyone while withholding their own pain. We all know a person who is willing to inconvenience, but not to be inconvenienced.

You know in your bones whether you’re more prone to spiritual osteoperosis or to repetitive stress fractures. And seeking out meitheals is a helpful way to experiment with distributing that load and practicing that balance.

We don’t have to be good at it right away.

My little band endured for about five years, which was a pretty good run for a group project. During that time there were plenty of struggles and frustrations and there were also moments of hard-won satisfaction and pockets of total joy.

I’m tempted here to gloss over how awful it feels when a communal project like that collapses. But the identity-shaking intensity of losing your place in a group touches our deepest lizard brain and all its gnarly survival wiring.

This is the reason, I think, that bands have been disappearing from the charts in favor of production robots, and why an old-world idea like meitheal never made it into modern English. Our protective fear of rejection and judgment keeps us choosing the ease and comfort and isolation of tech (including syncophantic AI companions) over the connections we claim to want.

The paradox of building connection and trust with other people is in this ancient dance of what we owe one another and what we have capacity to give. How much is too much to ask, or too much to sacrifice? How do we negotiate these strange spaces between me and you, us and them, ideals and realities?

There is no binary answer.

There is only the work, common as mud.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

• Is there a project you’re been meaning to do that would be easier with help? Can you make it into a work party?

• Maybe loosen up about having people over. I used to not invite folks to my house unless I could welcome them like the prodigal son. (A friend coming to Queens from Brooklyn once texted THERE HAD BETTER NOT BE THREE TYPES OF CAKE WHEN I GET THERE.) Now I’m ok with more casual connection—just some tea and easy snacks like popcorn made in the whirlipop. This weekend it was really nice to have an old friend stay over for a restorative hang that lasted three days.

• If you’re more comfortable asking for help than being challenged to stretch your skills, maybe practice doing something that feels beyond your capacity this month. If you’re more comfortable doing something alone than asking for help, maybe practice inviting someone in.

• Give a listen to Forsyth, the project of a couple Boston folks I know who are defying the odds and starting a spine-tinglingly good band… in this economy?!

• Tine chnámh is the name for the fires we’ll have this weekend to celebrate the shared work of the summer. Bone fire / bonfire. If you have the space, light a campfire and invite some friends. Share the load.
  

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

Dear Friends,

June nights have always made me restless.

When I was a kid, June made me feel like a hermit crab that had grown too big for its shell. As the school year with all its failures and disappointments inched to a close, everything from the clothes in my closet to the positions of my bedroom furniture would begin to feel unbearably tight and confining.

The old ways weren’t working for me any more, but new options had not yet arrived.

Something about this feeling has always driven me to rearrange my room. I find myself in that state again today, washing walls and baseboards as though eradicating the film of dust that coats my life will cleanse the world of all evil.

When I was a teenager, my Dad would hear these rumbles and crashes coming from my room late at night and would comment that it reminded him of his mother. Apparently my Nana was possessed by a similar furniture-arranging demon, and my Dad and his brothers would occasionally come home to find a house cleaned and re-shaped in a frenzy of fey energy.

The qualities I share with my Nana have always made me feel strangely connected to her, despite the fact that during her life we treated one another a lot like a pair of cats who couldn’t manage to settle a territorial dispute.

My Nana was vocally opposed to education for women and made it clear that there were immutably right ways— her ways— to think, look, and behave as a Good Catholic Girl. I was both desperate to please and constitutionally incapable of agreeing with her, which led to a disorganized approach of taking her advice about hair sets and girdles and Never Showing Your Shoulders In Church while self-loathingly remaining in the Honor Society.

I sit here now in my fresh-smelling, recently rearranged room on a muggy June night and I think about the sense of suffocating confinement I always feel in the lead-up to these frenzies of heavy housework. I wonder if my Nana— a mid-century housewife whose oldest son had a car before she did— felt something like this when she began tugging at the edges of the sofa.

There is a feeling, right before the furniture begins to move, that it would be impossible to continue living with things the way they are. That some thwarted force of change will rack my life apart if it does not find a way forward, a way through.

It feels anachronistically housewifeish to say, but there is something about moving matter in physical space that opens up new channels of efficacy and imagination.

In the end, I don’t think the mysterious force that wants my bed moved against a new wall is all that different from the force that moves us to rearrange the structure of the wider world. Allowing distress to spur us to tangible action is a powerful practice, and it is infinitely available at our fingertips if we stop thinking and start doing.

Imperfect as I am at it, cleaning my own space connects me, a person whose intellect-driven day job deals in digital ether, to what the scrubwomen and housewives and laborers who programmed my DNA knew in their bones: that the work of the body is essential work.

When I finally lie down exhausted on a bed of freshly laundered sheets, I have reminded myself of what I am capable of: clearing a path where there wasn’t one before.

Look— a way around, where before there was obstruction.

A breath of fresh air where there was rot.

Our sphere may be small, but we are not powerless.

This past week, Rev and I went to Opus 40 for the first time. I didn’t know much about it before we arrived, and it was unexpectedly stunning. Built from an old bluestone quarry, the whorls and undulations of a massive sculptural landscape took nearly 40 years of one man’s ceaseless labor to create.

The place felt like a reminder of the force we have available inside us when we bend it to a purpose; however small, however strange. There is something very satisfying about the way the sculpted landscape feels both solid and moving, like a visual representation of the outward ripples of an intentional life.

Our labor does not need to result in a nine-ton obelisk to have this kind of power. I have known musicians who stir people to ripples of ecstatic dance and chefs whose symphony of flavor moves people to tears. Any job well done reshapes the world, a sculpture just makes this truth immediately visible.

Opus 40 also felt like a reminder of what we can each accomplish if we repeatedly re-orient our labor and attention to our own vision in spite of all the forces working against our sense of agency.

The sculpture reminded me of a project I did a few years back, when I had a series of conversations with people who seemed particularly satisfied with their life’s work.

A theme kept reappearing in those conversations, one that irritated me at first. All of these people said something along the lines of:

At some point I became clear about what I really wanted to do, and then I did it.

It took me awhile to accept what they were saying.

It wasn’t that they didn’t encounter obstacles, or that they had secret wells of money or time inaccessible to the rest of us, or that they knew all along that things would work out. It wasn’t even that they ended up accomplishing what they set out to do in some precise way, without having to bend and compromise and adjust as part of the bargain.

No— I think what these satisfied people meant is just that there is really something about a wholehearted commitment to a job of work that opens up inner resources to do what is required.

So when I tackle the basement or the attic or the piles under the bed, maybe it’s a kind of etude for this way that I want to live. An exercise in learning to trust a vision and my ability to carry it out.

Two years ago, a chronic illness I’d been refusing to deal with caught up with me. Finding myself unable to effectively work, think, or do much of anything but be exhausted and in pain, I started sitting quietly each day with the comforting certainty that at least I would die someday, and on that day the pain would end.

I watched all the things that had propped up my identity: my band, my writing projects, my ability to do my job or my community volunteer work— drift farther and farther away until they were gone. I became nobody.

Before that time, so much had seemed impossible to change. Any time I wanted to accomplish a goal, there seemed to be a thousand things working against it. I was hit by a car, my house flooded, my car bit the dust, a professional license wouldn’t transfer to a new state, my health collapsed.

At the very bottom of it all, I looked around and saw a hundred thwarted paths and no clear way out. I had spent my youth ceaselessly grinding after a life that had never materialized. Half-finished novels in a drawer. An album that I was too sick to shape into something worth listening to. Bills for a long list of surgeries and miscarriages. Half-woven cloth, half-sewn garments, half-learned tunes.

Half-formed commitments.

So when I took medical leave from my day job to get treatment for my illness, I also began cleaning out my closets.

I didn’t have the energy then for the kind of whirlwind transformation that summons the ghost of my Nana. But one item at a time, I began this cleaning as an act of kindness to whoever would have to deal with all my shit when I was gone.

Gone were the girdles and vintage tradwife dresses I once wore to thread the needle between subverting and pleasing the patriarchy. (I had never succeeded at pleasing anybody, anyway.)

Gone were all the ugly things I would never have time to mend. Gone were the uninteresting books I would never have time read, the hair curlers for hair I didn’t want to grow back, the craft projects that felt more like obligation than joy.

I released it all to the internet and the neighbors and the local buy nothing group.

I am still in that process of letting go. And as my house becomes less jam-packed with reminders of the past, I begin to more fully occupy the present.

What keeps each of us from orienting our life around some clear and chosen purpose?

Here in the U.S. we’re sold a seductive fantasy of endlessly unfolding options in everything from pasta sauce to romantic partners. Chasing the fantasy of a single best answer instead of rearranging the furniture of our lives to transform how things actually are right now becomes a way to stave off disappointment, which is the annoying little brother of grief.

If what we are tasting of life right now does not satisfy, well— there are endless other versions to reach for before we commit to anything. If we’re unhappy, the fantasy of a perfect city, a perfect job, a perfect partner dangles like the proverbial carrot just up ahead.

Like a fundamentalist vision of rewards in the hereafter, this consumer fantasy keeps us sleepwalking through our work here in the world of matter. There are no incentives to do the housekeeping of improving a workplace or a relationship or a home space or a planet when another better option might lie just up ahead, just out of reach.

I’m not a practicing Catholic any more (sorry, Nana) but in the mornings when the birds are singing in my imperfectly tended garden I like to read monks and mystics, sufis and poets. In the wake of wrecking my little boat of ambition on this reef of a regular life, I’ve come to understand that there’s a reason why contemplative orders spend so much time doing menial housework.

Because the more I clean the house, the more I see that everything is cleaning the house. And the more I let go of chasing satisfaction, the more it starts catching up to me.

A job well done takes time. And as the dust settles, a path begins to clear.

Speaking of dust settling: While I decided not to write about it in this month’s newsletter, a tornado recently struck my town with devastating effects. Our home and family are safe, but many neighbors are not so lucky. Our community foundation has put together a relief fund that you can donate to here if you have the means and the inclination.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to integrate this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

1. Rearrange the furniture. I like to travel partly because it means I get to return home again and again and see it from a new angle. This doesn’t require a big travel budget (this weekend we stayed at a friend’s house in the Catskills while he was away). It doesn’t even require leaving town. How could rearranging your living space shake you out of a rut?

2. Make a cleaning solution that smells good. I’ve made an edited version of this simple vinegar cleaner from my friend Kate.

3. Move from theory to practice. Some of the smartest people I know talk themselves out of taking concrete steps to do what they care about. Meanwhile, the world is full of jerks who are very good at moving matter to suit their vision. Think about those things you think about, post about, dream about. What tangible actions can you take to align thoughts with actions in physical space?

4. Carry an orienting object. Rosaries, worry beads, charms, talismans— these are all tools to get grounded when our attention or intention wanders. If you have something you want to remember or accomplish as you swim upstream through the day, a stone in your pocket or a little amulet on a chain can help you remember your internal sense of direction.

5. Call a friend while you clean the house. Some of my favorite conversations with old friends happen when I’m folding the laundry or flipping The Garret. Menial tasks become easier when we use them to connect.

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again.

I was radicalized by a piñata in 1988.

Back then, birthday parties were not held in the class-equalizing, emotionally beige purgatories of mall arcades or trampoline parks. Instead, they were a kind of sociology experiment that happened in peoples’ backyards. On Saturday afternoons, packs of children were just… dropped off in a foreign country for a few hours. Another family’s house, where all the rules and food and unspoken norms were unfamiliar.

It was a little like playing parenting roulette. At one house you could get mocked for shushing a swear word. At another, you might have a bar of soap shoved in your mouth for saying one.

By the age of three when all this went down, I’d learned to be observant in new environments and to pay attention to instructions. I’d already started to understand that different people and places demanded different codes of behavior— though what those codes exactly were was a perpetual mystery.

I’d learned that my own house, where TV and refined sugar and Barbies were looked on with scorn, was weird. Everyone else at preschool seemed to have the same Uncle Jesse and the same favorite Ninja Turtle. Meanwhile I listened to Mozart’s horn concertos and believed that Jesus was literally always with me, like a very high-status invisible friend.

I was very sensitive to the teasing and shunning that came with a miscalculation about how to behave. So when the piñata game began, I listened carefully to the instructions.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

Please remember two things about the piñata situation:

First, that I was a toddler and my parents did not keep candy in the house, so I was kind of a fiend for high fructose corn syrup.

Second, that there are unspoken rules of piñata that would be impossible for a three year old to know without being told.

Because it’s really an unusual game, when you think about it. Being good at kickball means getting the most points. In a three legged race, you’re trying to win first place. Even in the gentle game of Go Fish, playing well means trying to beat all the other players.

“When the piñata breaks,” Lauren’s mom said, handing Nate Pliskin the stick, “everybody’s job is to RUN RUN RUN to grab the candy!”

What is the difference between sharing and stealing?

This question is being asked at my day job, by artists, and in the courts as AI companies use the language of shared resources and public good— the language of gift economies— to justify a devastating consolidation of economic and social power into the hands of a few people who prioritize synthetic brains over human bodies.

From a distance, the unattributed open source products of our folk memory (fairy tales, traditional tunes, proverbs, recipes) do seem to have a lot in common with what AI can do. Both are a kind of thought soup made up of vast amounts of knowledge that has been separated from individual creators.

But when we look closer, there are critical differences.

One thing I’ve noticed in the process of learning hundreds of songs and fiddle tunes by ear is how much of folk memory takes place in the body, and how much of its acquisition is based in a kind of reciprocal generosity.

We learn tunes because we play them for one another and pick the ones that give us a thrill of joy. We ask for a recipe because we have tasted something delicious that someone created for us and we want to share that gift. We pass on a proverb because we have tested its utility like a blade against the fabric of life and found it to be a tool worth keeping.

No one coerces us to do these things. There are no Consumer Funnels forcing us to make our friend’s recipe for homemade soap or to start seeds the way our neighbor taught us. This shared knowledge co-created by populations is slow, refining work. And these living traditions are just that. Alive, not frozen in amber. The lack of a single author is not a void, but a presence: the presence of endless bodies sharing and evolving useful information across the long arc of time.

Knowledge can come from the written word, sure. But as we discussed last month, the written word is fragile and easily misinterpreted. It’s also unstable. The meaning of language bends into an ouroboros as ideas are twisted into their opposites. Conservative. Woke. Regulated. Community. War. Peace. Freedom. Slavery.

Wisdom comes from bodies that have been tempered with time and practice to take in and transform information with discernment. It combines what is known with what is unknown. It knits what has been to what is still becoming.

This is not a process that can be rushed or growth hacked. It’s not the spinning of a single thread of facts or answers, but the weaving of a complex web of interdependencies between us. For this reason folk knowledge is both unusually resilient to the antisocial forces that corrupt other institutions and incredibly fragile in its inability to move quickly or scale fast.

This process of weaving complex relationships between our bodies is what most of us misunderstand about how gift economies actually work.

The piñata broke open, and I was ready.

Unlike the other children, I did not limit myself to what hands or pockets could hold. I made a bucket from the skirt of my dress— an advanced technology that gave me a competitive advantage. I was an innovator! I threw elbows. I moved with the singleminded force of a person who holds nothing sacred but consumption.

Behind me, the birthday girl stood by her table of presents and sobbed.

I WIN!

Have we forgotten what gifts are really for?

The small amount of research on gift economics (here’s a paper that gives a great little overview) reveals enormous complexity within gifting systems. Resource sharing is a form of insurance and a tool of diplomacy. It’s a sophisticated way of gathering and revising what we know about one another, and of assessing the tensile strength of the ties that bind us.

We all love to bitch about credit scores, but I find it interesting that they’re a blunt tool that has replaced something actually useful: an old school reputation. When the world began to open and expand beyond the size of a village, we lost the orienting quality of relationships that are built over a long arc of time and a large data set of interactions. This kind of knowledge of one another allows for more nuance, more mistakes, more qualities of character beyond the balance of a bank account. We gained freedom of movement and expression, and we lost our social net. How do we know who to trust in a world moving at the speed of quantum computing?

There’s a reason that con men and abusive partners tend to move fast. It’s possible to fake trustworthiness for a short time. But the longer a reciprocal relationship lasts, the more our bodies learn and discern. With time and proximity, if we know how to pay attention, we begin to judge someone less on what they promise and more on what they deliver. Less on their words and more on their consistent actions. With time, we can notice the difference between bluster and quiet competence. We can notice whether generosity is reciprocal or one-sided.

What enormous trust there is in a relationship where it is safe to offer, to accept, to give, to take, and to refuse.

How many of those relationships do any of us have?

It’s a kind of wealth that the stock market doesn’t know shit about.

I WIN!

The adults were horrified.

I was ashamed and confused.

No one knew what to do.

Piñata is a game where unequal distribution is a certainty. But this was too unequal. The skirt bucket was surely cheating? But there hadn’t been a rule against it!

I should clearly redistribute the candy? But how much. And to whom? And wouldn’t an exactly equal candy distribution negate the whole point of playing piñata?

Somehow, none of it felt good, or fair.

In the car on the way home, my candy pile repossessed and my mother clearly ashamed of me, I felt devastated and betrayed.

What were adults thinking, designing games where following the instructions too well made you into a monster?

I never wanted to feel this way ever again.

I began to see the power in being a loser.

As I grew up, being generous became a kind of strategy to make up for my deficiencies. There was a lot about me (the size of my vocabulary, the speed of my thoughts, my off-putting test scores, my weirdly intense and serious interests) that seemed to threaten the social order of my peers. No matter how I tried to fit in, I was just way too much.

Giving away homemade cookies, throwing elaborate parties, playing dumb and self-deprecating, never taking offense, giving gifts and compliments and indiscriminate physical affection— these were all ways to make up for being a threat to the status quo.

In retrospect, the cliques in my small rural town were engaging in classic strategies for maintaining social order. Like the !Kung practice of insulting the meat, my peers found leveling mechanisms to keep me in my place. You’re not better than us!

And like the Oneidas whose land I was raised on, I was using generosity as a form of diplomacy. What I give you weaves a relationship between us despite our differences.

Giving is not an unmitigated good, and taking is not universally bad. Gift economies, in all their subtle complexity, account for this.

To prioritize acquisition without considering the true cost is a toddler-level mistake. King Midas comes to mind as I look at the folks passing for leaders these days.

But to give too much can also make us untrustworthy. There’s an implied hierarchy in being the kind of over-giver who refuses to accept help that reminds me of the young hunter too proud of his meat— I don’t need you, you need me. No one likes being patronized or made to feel small in their indebtedness.

So, like most of these old folk ways I’ve been exploring in this newsletter project, gift economies are not simple, primitive, or naïve— though that’s how most of us were taught about them in school. Like oral tradition, gifting is not just the way we used to do things before we knew better. It’s still as useful a skill as it ever was. It’s a force acting on the world in the spaces where accounting will always lead us astray.

Yet there is no immutable rule for how to give and how to take. There’s nothing I can pretend to know with authority about how to ask and how to receive and how to not fuck it all up.

I have taken the whole piñata, and I have driven myself to illness and collapse by giving away more of myself than I could sustain. Like all worthwhile things, successful practice means being open to getting it wrong.

But I keep trying to offer what I have. And I’m learning to ask for what I need. Because I don’t want to live in the kind of world that only knows (as Oscar Wilde would say) the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to integrate this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

• Join your local Buy Nothing group or Freecycle network. We’ve been part of our local gifting group for a few years now, and it’s been an incredible way to get rid of things we don’t need without them going into the landfill.

• Make a gift shelf or some other dedicated place to keep a stock of cards and thoughtful things to give people when the right time comes. I make my friend Caitlin Pike’s homemade candles and soap because consumables are the perfect gift that doesn’t feel like a burden— they’re thoughtful, and they eventually disappear.

• If you tend to protect your time and your peace from too many overwhelming obligations, experiment with giving an uncomfortable amount to something worthwhile, either a cause or a personal relationship. Inconvenience yourself by visiting an old friend, helping someone move, or driving somebody to the airport. Stretch your budget by donating a little more than you can afford to a worthy charity. Volunteer for something that will be annoying, but will benefit your community.

• If you tend to overcommit and over-give, think of a relationship that could be strengthened by you asking for help. Is there a task you’re avoiding that would be easier if someone came to assist you? Is there a burden on your heart that you’ve been hiding from people while you listen to all their problems?

• Experiment with being a good lender and borrower. Do you really need that specific thing, or do you know someone you can borrow it from? Be diligent about returning it in good condition, and maybe add something from your gift shelf as interest. Think about what you’re willing to offer or lend to others. How unattached can you be to the outcome?

• Pay it forward. Think about moments you felt held and supported by mentors, family members, or strangers, and look for opportunities to pass it on. My old band had a funded Kickstarter awhile back, so I’ve funded a few in return— today I recommend The Bucolics Project, which features recent Folkist Space resident Erin Shea Hogan.

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or share it with a friend.

My grandfather never graduated from high school, but he could do complex mental math in his head and play countless banjo tunes by ear. Sizing up a room, he could often estimate how much carpet his shop would have to lay even before he pulled out a measuring tape.

I can sometimes feel a ghost of this way of knowing things in my body. A cousin once dared me to estimate the square footage of my apartment in Queens without measuring, and I got it exactly right on the first try: six hundred and eleven, if you include the closet. And every now and then when I play next to a really good fiddler, I have an experience I can’t explain— a kind of riding in the slipstream of someone else’s mastery. If I don’t think too hard, I’ll find myself playing tunes I’ve never actually learned with a fluency far beyond my usual skill.

But I’m the only one of my 13 cousins on that side of the family who still plays “trad music” like Papa Pete. While staying at my cousin Kiernan’s house in Boston last week we talked a little over burritos about why before I headed out to a session at The Sea Hag.

Kiernan’s dad and mine are brothers, but our shared stories quickly spin off into different variations with different shades of tone. No sibling grows up in the same family. So as we compared our notes (and his observant teenager Paloma listened) it went without saying that there should never be one definitive version of a family’s truth.

Why do we include certain details in a story and throw others aside? Why do we instinctively tell the same story to different people in slightly different ways? And what is hidden in the secret territory that hides above, around, and beneath our shared texts?

A few illicit moments of Sea Hag session, a trad space for queer & femme musicians. (Courtesy of Kiernan being sneaky.)

In trad music, we talk about tunes and “settings.” The first is a bare scaffolding of notes, and the second is all the texture of ornamentation and tone that occupies the space around them— the little side quests and digressions that a skilled practitioner adds to make something their own.

Settings are a living thing, and often change from performance to performance and from audience to audience. The energy of a specific room is like a wind that catches the sails of a player or storyteller and carries them in one direction or another.

One of the delights of live performance is this electric quality of co-creation with an audience. To write down or record a performance like this and carry it elsewhere might increase its reach, but dilutes its power.

The thing loses its flexibility and aliveness. The moth is killed by being pinned down for observation.

Performing with Seanchoíche, where cell phone recording of our stories isn’t allowed.

I once spent eight years working for a story factory called The Moth. There were so many things about the work that felt like what I was made for. I became a tuning fork, a folk therapist, a confessor, a healer, a mechanic.

But most of the colleagues I worked with there had learned about story differently than I had. They had studied books and formulas and academic theories. I’d learned by listening and absorbing, by having an enormous extended family and lingering in shadowy doorways after bedtime. The stories I heard then, like the tunes I play now, were shared in circles. They were full of digressions and interruptions. They could never be mapped without losing the movement of light across their landscape.

These were stories more full of fools than heroes; a teller puffing themself up only to be cut down with a devastating joke or a correcting detail. I remember a story like this that involved my Irish uncles Tim & Dick co-narrating their war against Tim’s groundhogs. It had all the twists and turns of the siege of Troy. (It finally resulted in catching a skunk.)

To tell a story alone still feels, in some ways, like an act of hubris. So when The Moth would ask to put my work on the radio or the podcast, my stomach would clench and my throat would close up. It was a visceral, full-body feeling of NO.

I knew there was something wrong with me because I was not interested in my stories leaving the rooms I told them in. (Just as my high school music teachers had intimated that there was something wrong with me because I could only learn by ear and not from paper.)

After all, why would I decide to work for a story factory if not to center myself in a narrative? Why did I strive to be a good singer if I didn’t want to perform in proscenium theatres— or struggle to be a clear writer if I didn’t want to be published by a big press? Most people I worked with at The Moth seemed to be there to launch themselves.

Into… what?

The hot flame of the sun?

I’d grown up listening to enough myths to know how that goes.

While simmering on this newsletter— one I knew would make a paradoxical attempt to explain in words what I know in my body about practicing oral traditions— I started reading Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet.

This timing was total coincidence. I picked it up on the strong recommendation of someone I trust (thanks, Avery!) without knowing anything at all about it, least of all that it is about the Greeks who stood in a doorway between oral tradition and written language.

Like me, Carson is interested in a gap we’ve forgotten how to see between our actual sensory experiences and the symbols and codes we’ve been handed to make sense of them.

This feels more relevant than ever in a world that asks us repeatedly to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears, prioritizing a flattened digital reality instead of a three-dimensional one that requires a kind of embodied agency to navigate. I stumbled across these passages of Carson’s that stopped me in my tracks:

An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.

and:

Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read. For Plato this notion is a dangerous delusion; he believed the reach for knowledge to be a process that is necessarily lived out in space and time. Attempts to shortcut the process, or package it for convenient reuse, as in the form of a written treatise, are a denial of our commitment to time and cannot be taken seriously.

This was a thing I had viscerally known all my life, but struggled to communicate to friends whose identities were bound up in Good Test Scores and Straight-A Behavior and the idea of Right and Wrong Answers.

Whenever I tried to get the thought across— reading and writing are tools for remembering, not tools for learning or knowing— the idea always bounced back at me like a bad email. People asked me to explain again and again. They didn’t understand.

Maybe I don’t get it because I haven’t experienced this oral tradition thing you talk about, my husband says. In school they told us that civilization really took off once writing was invented, and I always believed that was 100% a good thing.

My Papa Pete and the banjo I have out in the other room.

There’s a family story about my grandfather’s arrival in America that haunts me.

Soon after he arrived in New York City, my Papa Pete went to a dance at some local hall. Maybe sponsored by the church? I don’t remember, or maybe I never knew.

Anyway, Papa Pete had always been kind of a dandy. He had worked in a draper’s shop back in County Meath and cared about what was popular and fresh. But the natty clothes that were cutting edge back home immediately looked provincial in New York, and he would have had enough of an eye for textiles and fit to know it.

So maybe he was already feeling in over his head when he navigated the city streets to get to that dance. I know that when I moved to New York many decades later, the sounds and smells and textures of the place rolled over me like an annihilating wave. So I can imagine that my grandfather, too, might have been feeling the undertow of a decision to move to a place as indifferent to his talents and ambitions as the cold Atlantic he’d just crossed.

He asked at the ticket table about where he should leave his shoes— a normal question for an Irish dance. The pair of smooth-soled leather dancing shoes Papa had in his hand were perfect for Kerry sets where you spin like a top across polished floors. It was only civilized not to grind the asphalt of the outside world into a dance hall floor.

But this, apparently, wasn’t the way they did things in America. He was mocked in some way by the boys manning the ticket table— maybe for his accent or his clothes or his ignorance in not already knowing the secret codes of a city that does not open easily to strangers.

Always a little hotheaded, my grandfather responded to this teasing by throwing his beautiful shoes in the trash bin. He walked into the dance hall with his head held high.

And that’s how I became an American, is how Papa framed that moment when, decades later, he told the story to my father.

To my grandfather, it was a story about how ready he was to shed his old life like a snakeskin. It was a story about how much he was willing to shape himself into whatever his new country needed him to be.

Film self-portrait of sixteen-year-old me, a few months after 9/11

Willfully forgetting history is the cost of becoming an American.

This is what I thought when my father (decades later) told the story to me. The first time he told it I was a middle schooler being relentlessly bullied for differences I didn’t yet understand. Though my father told the story casually, I felt it in my guts.

In the few sentences it took him to tell it, I felt an outsider’s lick of hot shame at having your secret wrongness seen, recognized, and mocked by people you would like to impress. I felt the desperate, survival-driven desire to belong. I felt what it meant to be both too cool to stay in your narrow-minded small town and too old fashioned to belong to a place that casually discards history and ritual into the trash bin.

To me, the story was about a kind of painful severing. The devil’s bargain of choosing acceptance at any cost and relinquishing what you know in your bones.

It wasn’t until much later that I pieced together the ways in which my high school capitulation to flat irons and contact lenses and anorexia and ingenue roles was a faint echo of this bargain my grandfather had made.

Or is this just how spoken stories shift and change as they touch us? The transmutation that happens to tunes and sentences when they are moved through bodies instead of across a page?

This newsletter finds you on the last day of the month because it was almost impossible to write. I threw thousands of words and stories in the trash bin as I tried to write towards the territory that lives outside of language, and explain why it is still worth walking off the map to find it.

I know I have written in a kind of circle, refusing to stab the thing through the heart for you. Is that a flaw of execution, or…?

The thing is, our sensory world is a matrix, and language is a line. Some things were never made to march in single file.

At their best, are sentences just maps to the edge of their own capacity?

There are no shortcuts to the hidden treasure. We get there by doing things the hard way, the slow way. But every now and then a holy ghost of wind blows the screen door open like an invitation.

Maybe the most I can do is leave it creaking here on its hinges.

A reminder to step through the doorway and—

My leather sean nós dance shoes by the back porch door.

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life.

• Spend a whole day— or as much time as you can— without reading or writing. I know, I know. This is almost impossible these days. But try getting as close as you can to a day without words. Notice all your non-visual senses. Notice how it feels to sever yourself from language for awhile. Peaceful? Restless?

• Learn something with your body. Set aside time to practice a skill you’ve left aside. Learn a new tune or song by ear, dig in the garden, spin a thread, sew a seam, mend something that’s broken, cook a new meal, or try a new dance. (Bonus points if you learn from another body and not from YouTube.)

• Make a plan to experience some good art in person. Music, theatre, an art museum, a dance party— whatever you love.

• Retell a family story. What did it mean when it was first told to you? Does it mean something different now?

• Watch Don’t Eat the Mangos if you ever have the chance, a new play by our friend Ricardo. We saw it at the Huntington Calderwood while we were visiting Boston. It’s an electric representation of how family stories live and evolve as they pass through our bodies. (If you know someone who can bring it to NYC, call them. If it comes, see it!)

• Happy Bealtaine! Tonight is a doorway between seasons. It’s a good evening to light a campfire, tell stories with friends, and assess your outdoor spaces for any projects you want to accomplish this year.
  

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

Hi, Friends.

Every year my father-in-law marks the first warm-enough day of the year by having a ceremonial beer on his deck. I mark it by hanging my laundry out on the line for the first time since November. Like sugar weather, it’s not a day marked on the calendar but more of a feeling in the air; a kind of moveable festival we all instinctively celebrate when it arrives. Maybe it’s because the cycles of deep freeze and returning bloom make our blood up here in the blizzard belt run like maple sap, slowing and surging with the seasons.

It’s hard to tell you that I love this inaugural laundry festival without risking some misunderstanding right from the beginning. A laundry line can be a kind of lightning rod for lambent beliefs about class, gender, menial tasks, and the muddy territory between a sustainable future and a fun-house-mirror of a past. What kind of unhinged modern person spends their one wild and precious life centering the fucking laundry?

But my life-long obsession with laundry didn’t begin from any cottagecore fantasies or tradwife ideals. It began because laundry was something I just couldn’t seem to escape.

Housework aside, washing and folding has been part of most day jobs I’ve ever had. From dealing with the pee-soaked sheets of bedwetters as a babysitter to making silverware rolls as a bartender to stripping and washing linens as a spa janitor and later as a massage therapist, the laundry followed me wherever I went. These days I’m still bookending my day job with the laundry line as I try to keep up with all the tasks of hosting guests and artist residents at Folkist Space.

The service and care industry is an ouroboros of dirty work. And while the jury is still out on whether a couple of decades spent doing that work ended up expanding or eroding my faith in humanity, I still think there’s a kind of magic in the impossibility of solving these circular jobs— the same way there’s a mystery to solving for Pi.

It’s endlessly interesting to me that we live in a culture that denigrates cyclical work and consigns it to the margins when these jobs— laundry, food, cleaning, care work, taking out the trash— are a kind of engine purring under the hood of all humanity. Even the smartest artists and culture-makers I know tend to chafe at these tasks as though they are a burden or some kind of trap.

Maybe they are. It’s true that most creative workers, including me, fantasize about having unlimited time and resources to make something really, undeniably good— and having to wash your towels and feed yourself three times a day around paying your bills sure gets in the way of that. It’s also true that waiting to make anything until the last bill is paid and the last sock is retrieved from the dryer is a pretty foolproof way to stop yourself short.

(I had to step away from writing this essay to strip the beds in the Garret and fold three loads of laundry while starting a fourth— because a band is arriving at Folkist Space to work on their next album, and residency spaces don’t clean themselves.)

It’s a way to stop yourself short, and.

If we want to transform the world, I’m increasingly convinced that we have to solve for the laundry.

Let me try to explain:

It’s the nadir of the recession. We’re hanging out in one of those basement break rooms or back-of-house nooks where shift workers let the circulation back into their feet and fuel up with an extra large iced coffee from Dunkin. Maybe we’re doing inventory on a shipment of backbar for the spa or folding bakery boxes for the restaurant. We’re shooting the shit and sharing our dreams.

I start to see that not everyone dreams the same way.

In the future some of my coworkers imagine, a shadowy someone else has taken over the to-do list. The fantasy feels seductive, untethered, like floating in a beautiful cloud. Maybe we’ll win the lottery and never work again. Maybe the band will somehow hit it big and the rusty van life will be replaced by a manager, a driver, groupies. Maybe charisma and beauty will pay off in marrying rich— housekeepers, nannies, a personal chef.

A dream of comfort fueled by power.

The rest of us fantasized about lives that seemed, at the time, equally impossible. We wanted days of not always running on fumes and paying off student loans or credit card bills from the last disaster. We wanted some kind of meaningful work that would leave us with enough time to do what we loved with people we cared about. We dreamed of having enough energy to not collapse into bed at the end of a shift only to wake up aching and start again the next day.

We didn’t want a world without janitors and servers and hairdressers. We took pride in our work and saw its necessity. We just wanted a world where the janitors and servers had as much respect and time and basic resources as anyone. We didn’t need yachts or status handbags to be happy, we just wanted “service” to not be a synonym for “subaltern.”

A dream of contentment fueled by freedom.

During this time in my life, I was also struggling to work on a novel around the edges of my double shifts or outcall clients. For research, I read all the books I could find about selkies and split selves and Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries. And the more I learned about that carceral state for “bad women” and how it was expanded (ironically!) by a newly free Catholic Ireland, the more I had to question the stories my little node of immigrant culture had raised me with about good and bad, oppressor and oppressed, labor and leadership.

In the early days of a new Republic, the idea of a free Ireland had been hidden in Aisling songs and poems for so long that the architects of the nation felt its very existence to be synonymous with idealized womanhood.

And, after all, who would be left to do our dirty work without an “other” to pawn it off on—with a good story about how they deserve it? Ireland’s 20th century policy of confining women who didn’t fit a Catholic ideal to the laundries and stripping them of parental rights did what all carceral states do. It created scapegoats and laborers. It incentivized “the good ones” to align with structures of power that promised to protect them but eventually eroded their own humanity.

The reading I did during those years wove itself into the fabric of my day jobs. It transformed the flattened stories about history that I’d been raised with into a vision of a great turning wheel; a kind of revolving washing machine barrel of power.

Dragging duffel bags of laundry as big as me from the delivery van with forearms spattered by chemical burns from scrubbing pedicure tubs, I found myself thinking… how many of us, when we rail against injustice, really want freedom? And how many are just jockeying for power— the chance to reap the benefits of treating others how we’ve been treated?

A decade later, going to work meant walking in leather pumps through ornate doors on the Upper East Side and tick-tocking across marble floors that shone with the expertise of their custodians. The little trash can next to my desk emptied itself as if by magic overnight and made me uneasy. There was a sense of being served by invisible hands like a captive in a fairy tale.

I’ll talk more about it another time, but the most startling thing to me about leaving service was the dawning understanding that there are many people who live their lives shuffled from room to immaculate room like actors on a set, the techies scurrying around corners with their hammers and ladders and mop buckets. In the beast’s castle, food is prepared by invisible hands and doors open effortlessly before you. The cost of all that comfort is carefully hidden. There are many incentives to forget.

From the bowels of the engine-cum-break room that operated the lifts and pulleys, I had once imagined power very differently. I had seen it as a monolith of intelligent malice instead of as something much stranger and more insidious: a foreign culture of people who have been indoctrinated to a belief that reason can master passion, that the body is separate from the mind, and that the profane and immutable truths of the world can be stuffed away out of sight without incurring any terrible cost.

To bring it back to laundry; I thought a lot before writing this about whether people would “get” a newsletter about folk art and practice that begins with our most hated chore. What a bait and switch! I promised you tools for healing and resilience rooted in folk practices and ancient ways. You were probably expecting me to talk about chanting or fiddle playing, sauna or community dances or ritual excess or ritual deprivation or gardening or making your own tisanes or dreamwork or keening— not about staring at your laundry pile a little differently than you did before.

We'll get to the rest of it, I promise.

But I had to start here. I had to begin with the most difficult and transformative and mundane thing that I struggle with every day— the challenge of digging for little scraps of joy and agency in the muck of what cannot be avoided.

Because what I’ll be calling folk art from here on out lives not in life’s binaries but in its unsolvable paradoxes. It’s rarely found in blue chip galleries but it often waves at us from unexpected places, like a beautifully mended pillowcase flapping from the line on a spring day. It’s been ossifying in the extractive institutions of our modern arts industrial complex, and so now might be more present in a spontaneous silly dance party under tonight’s worm moon eclipse.

It’s what Hildegard Von Bingen would have called Viriditas— the animating, greening force that inhabits everything that is truly awake and alive.

The washing machine of history keeps turning, and this ancient lost-and-found bag of human survival skills keeps turning up like dirty laundry under our feet. The structure of our modern lives has been carefully constructed to help us forget what it is when we stumble over it, like dismissing a grail made of wood.

But there’s something about the smell of fresh sheets dried in the sunshine that feels like it is part of the answer.

And spring, despite everything, is coming around again.

With love from your friendly neighborhood washerwoman,

Nora

Folkist Practice

Little side quests for folks who want to weave this month’s theme into everyday life. These aren’t affiliate links, just things I want to share!

• The best laundry line for people with outdoor space. It’s zinc coated, so it won’t corrode with weather.

• My favorite laundry dryer for small apartments. These fold neatly away when not in use. I found mine vintage at an estate sale, but this family company in MA still makes them new if you can’t scrounge for one.

• A secret for when your whites get dingy. Sometimes cheap, old-fashioned things are still the best solution. Dilute a couple drops of bluing in an old jug and add it to a load of whites that have greyed or yellowed. (Remember to dilute to avoid blue spots!)

• Learn more about the legacy of the Magdalen Laundries from the Justice for Magdalens project. (You can also watch The Magdalene Sisters and add this Joni Mitchell song to your playlist.)

• Great writing about the isolating failures of “labor saving” household technology can be found in Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s excellent book More Work for Mother.
  

Folkist Work is a slow-pulse monthly newsletter from me, Nora— a haver of day jobs, maker of folk music, do-er of laundry, and founder of the Folkist Space Residency in Upstate New York. I share resources and mini-essays about using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again. Like the solar and wind power of your laundry line, this newsletter is always free. If you liked it, I hope you’ll say hi or send it along to a friend.

I grew up with trad seisiúns and tamagotchis, feral hours in the woods and unsupervised hours in early chatrooms. In my daily life, the slow work of growing my own food or knitting a sweater weaves into a day job spent making the internet: training an AI chatbot on customer service skills I learned as a bartender, or designing a website inspired by the feeling of reading behind the couch as a small child.

In a culture that has set up a false binary of either abandoning our backwards past or returning to the imagined fantasy of a perfect one, I think there’s a weirder and wilder third way. As we all try to survive the world as it is while shaping the world as it will be, I think it’s about time to remember and redefine the folk arts.

Artmaking, after all, pre-dates agriculture. Painting has always been a form of memory and music a form of medicine. Beauty can still be a form of currency. Dance is a survival skill. By turning “the arts” into professions and trapping creativity behind the glass of a computer screen or inside an academic ivory tower, we’ve quickly forgotten that the arts are not just a way of making a living for a talented few, they’re supposed to be a way of making a life that is accessible to all of us.

In 2019, my partner and I started a small grassroots artist residency for folk artists and culture-makers out of my home in Upstate New York to experiment with solutions to a pervasive problem. I’d noticed that the institutions we’ve built around the arts quickly ossify around fundraising and staffing and maintaining brick and mortar assets. I wanted to know if it was possible to actually center artists and makers in systems of creative support, and I suspected that it would require methods that looked very different from the art world we’ve come to know.

This newsletter feels like a little green shoot pushing up through the compost of years of this experimenting. It’s informed by decades of my own attempts to balance creative vocation with bill-paying work, and by countless dinner-table conversations with painters, dancers, podcast producers, fiddlers, storytellers, and other visionary seekers. It’s a bit of a commonplace book of what I keep stumbling on while rummaging through the trash heap of folk history. You can expect little essays and curated resources for using our ancestors’ mostly-free, mostly-analog folk practices to endure a difficult world, work for a better one, and make modern life feel worth living again.

So many of us know that something is missing from the way we live now. The algorithms will try to sell the solutions back to us as products and apps, but the best things in life used to be free.

Get folkist with me, and we’ll try to remember together.

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