Dear friends,

I’m writing to you from from a parking lot, listening to country songs with a book across my lap that has a dog on its cover. It’s the end of the first week of school here in Michigan. I was hoping I’d have a post about an interview I heard and loved this week. I’ve been listening to a bunch of interviews, which is nothing new for me. But I’m going away and will probably take a bit longer to put that together. Instead, I’ll give you a taste of the dog-on-its-cover book and a splash of my days here at the end of summer.

The book is Monster of a Land, written by Lauren Hough. I don’t want to go into a whole thing about Lauren but she writes a hilarious newsletter called Badreads, has an amazing voice, and wrote a book of essays so good they hurt my teeth. This book is making me alternately laugh and/or sigh with something like tenderness as she travels across the US with her dog Woody Guthrie. It’s sort of in homage to Travels with Charley which I’ve never read, and may never?? although someone was very recently trashing it to me while Hough’s book awaited my attention on my nightstand. I didn’t even tell the trasher-of-Steinbeck about this modern take on that travelogue! I just let them yammer on, knowing I’d keep the good stuff for myself. You could argue that van memoirs (vanoirs??) are having a moment, since another monster of non-fiction, Lindy West, put out her own which we’ve covered - in fact, the whole internet has covered this 💩 🔥.

ANYWAY! I’ll tell you why Lauren’s on my mind.

I’d probably STILL be keeping the good stuff for myself - I don’t always like to write about books I admire because something absolutely dies in the process of putting sacred sources on the internet for me - BUT I’m trying to be in conversation with this hoarding part of myself and also, I came across a picture I took recently that made me think of the following passage from Hough’s most recent book:

I’ve never been great at American history. It used to be a sore spot. I was well into my thirties before I realized none of y’all learned anything in those years I missed [when she was home-schooled], and you learned less in college. James Oglethorpe is a name I know because you get to be my age and, along with a sudden fascination with birds, you develop a passion for city planning and a compulsion to go on field trips. It sneaks up on you. One day, you’re into drugs and whatever else I used to be into. I don’t remember. The next, you start noticing trees and old buildings. In no time at all, you’re watching Ken Burns documentaries and buying books on city planning.

SO TRUE. I know because I was on the Greater Lansing Historic Society’s website this week, and even went on its Facebook page. That’s how you know Kara’s game. If you can get me onto Facebook, you deserve a medal. Here’s the image I was researching:

I was absolutely arrested by this caduceus (I want to write “these” because they appeared in a rotating row but then I’d have to do the Latin plural and is anyone really ready for that? this is a newsletter, not a snoozeletter!!) on the side of a building that is, of course, being turned into apartments. The stonework was evenly placed, very handsome and compelling. I believe this is true no matter what age you are, but it’s especially true at my age, which is [redacted]. It reminded me of a field trip I took in high school to study architecture in New York City, and other art history courses I slept through in college. I thought I only remembered the Mountain Dew I disgustingly took to those classes but now I can’t stop thinking about different names for parts of stonework. Thoughts like Did that used to be a hospital? When was it built? By whom? When did it stop being used for medicine? flit through my mind while I’m washing the dishes. Every few days I pull up these pictures to see if the building was as cool as I remember. (Answer: a resounding Yes!)

That’s basically what I came here to tell you. There are a great many hilarious passages I could quote from Monster of a Land, but I’m also admiring how it hangs together as a book: infectious, entertaining, real. Two thumbs up! Also, I have decided to turn back on paid subscriptions. I don’t quite know how I’m going to structure it. I enjoy writing about my life. I enjoy taking ridiculous photos. I like peeling back the curtain for you guys, and/or painting shadow figures on whatever curtains we find between us. I also know I like writing about art, and books, and what terrible music documentaries I’m watching on Netflix. How will this shake out in terms of paid tiers? I’m not sure! I think I’ll start by pay-walling certain parts of my posts, especially the more frivolous and/or potentially embarrassing parts - embarrassing if you don’t know me or don’t understand that I’m goofing off A LOT of the time.

Sandy is good and ready to head back to school! Look at her with that sweet little backpack (and Spartan chain necklace, sure, okay). I hope the same is true for you, even if “school” is just a new-to-you sweater or a pretty postcard you’ve propped on your desk to remind you to breath. Fun fact: one of my (evilest) children requested that I ride Sandy on their birthday. This came out of some joke or dare they conveniently never forgot. The checkout person was laughing her ass off as I pretend-whipped Sandy for thirty seconds / a minute. The ride wasn’t as interminable as I feared it would be, and it was more than worth one cent for that lady’s audience. A deal’s a deal and for better or worse, this mom (usually?) keeps her word.

Alright loves, I’m sending you late August sun, the meals my partner’s cramming into this new kitchen before we fall into the long grief of our busy fall, and the millions of angles the blinds in this house cut in the afternoon light. If you need me, I’ll be photographing this door until my death!

XOXO

Kara

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Oh hello there! It is I, lady of suburban Michigan, back with another dispatch from the month that sanity forgot August. I am going to try to keep this quick, for both of our sakes.

The big news around here is that I went to see an art film with my husband, and that film was Super Troopers 3. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen Super Troopers 2 but you know what? I was able to follow the “plot” and the “characters,” lol. Speaking of plot, Nat Faxon plays the new police chief in this one, and I always enjoy Nat because even his face is funny, you know? There is also a semi-interesting treatment of paranoia in this movie about being called racist that I guess is timely but in fact is pretty nimbly done. I love stupid movies, I love to laugh. I bet you couldn’t guess that about me.

It’s a bit chaotic over here but there’s a piano in our house now which I watched a grown man deliver by himself. The relatives came, and though they were responsible for the piano, they did not roll it in the door by their own solo hands (we can’t all be the mover guy! who showed up with his nephew and yes I tipped more because that kid was cute!!). Cakes have been made and eaten, as one of us celebrated another year on the earth. (Cake was also bought and smeared on lots of surfaces, grocery store red icing on tablecloths and shirts, hurray.) Very few boxes have actually been unpacked but Tim found the baking sheet and there’s been lots of toasted bread.

One night shortly after we moved in, I finished my book and didn’t have my normal volcano of bedside riches to which to turn. (They are in a box labeled Kara’s Bedside Table, where I’m pretty sure I packed all kinds of library books hopefully, foolishly. Like, in what world will I unpack that box this year?) Bereft of reading material, I went to the basement and dove into historic caches, emerging with Hyperbole and a Half, Picture This by Lynda Barry, and Fresh Water, an essay collection about the Great Lakes which I adored when we first moved to Michigan.

Running across Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich I thought: Is now the time?? It has lived on my shelf at several houses. For some reason I’ve never had success with it. Reading it now, I’m like WHAT was my major malfunction?! It’s SO GOOD. Bitchy, dramatic, sexy, poetic, truly, I’m mad at my younger self for sleeping on this. I guess I was put off by the frozen death at the start of the novel?? Or the abusive dark nun in the second chapter - one of Erdrich’s favorite topics, to be honest. Anyway, I’m repenting now, drinking in these family lines and tragedies, everyone’s secrets and confessions and rambling monologues smartly unspooling within Erdrich’s dancing textured prose.

Reporting on the new principal arriving at my youngest’s school (a principal they met in the spring) they said, “She’s as nice as Governor Whitmer!” both bragging about their connection to the governor and alarming me that this child apparently only knows female leadership in pantsuits.

I said I’d keep it quick and I’ll keep my word, but I want to tell you I enjoyed this Other PPL interview with Julie Buntin (who’s just down the road! in Ann Arbor) and Brad Listi. In it they discuss the difficulties of finishing a manuscript and the ways readers scan (and bend) fiction for nonfiction truths. I found the exchange intelligent, rich, and fun to listen to while I cleaned out the grime of our mud room.

I guess the other thing I should say is that I’m thinking of turning on paid subscriptions again. There’s so much to say about this and in perfect Kara form I haven’t thought about it too deeply, but I know that writing about housecleaning in my increasingly small town makes me self-conscious and I might include more (though still selective) pictures of my kids behind a paywall. I’m just mentioning this here and will probably let you know if that’s indeed the route I’m going. The internet’s gotten really weird, though, hasn’t it? I’m wondering what the heck I’m even doing on it, but I also know that writing is part of my mental health triangle - poptarts, sleep, writing (jk about the poptarts. it’s probs reading? and rabbits?) - and so here we are.

And so there you are. Thank you so much for being here and reading my little reports. I hope your week is full of pockets of rest and friends who restore (and workers with adorbs nephews?).

I also hope everyone’s winter closets are as tight as mine right now!

Sending love and ferns and Erdrich flags,

XOXO

Kara

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Please allow me to give you an update on how moving houses has gone. (lol, girl, in what world do you think you can tell us anything we don’t already know? Your back hurts and you own too much stuff. We get it!) I thought about skipping this post but the child in me is like, “But how will we share our completely useless & fun pics?!” To which I say, you’re right, let us share our joy and regrets.

We moved into a house everyone in town, it seems, has been inside of and has (nice) opinions about, which is weird for two writers used to being big outsiders. It’s a little like dating someone a whole town helped raise: bewildering but not without its cheerful influences.

Construction workers tore up the concrete in front of our new house. Big slabs laid on the pavement - or what was left of the pavement - like disheveled glacial shelves. Part of me likes constant, low-grade company like this: people buzzing by all day (in Richard Scarry construction vehicles, no less), not needing anything from me but waving when I see them, and getting out of my way when I need to scoot past. This isn’t real community, per se, but adjacent: the same folks saying hi everyday, trying to coexist in spite of all our ambitious projects.

In terms of my ambitious projects, it feels like we passed a marker this week that is alternately making my heart crumple and making me proud. When we first moved - furniture, beds, a few dishes and sheets - the new house was open and airy, still clean from its real estate close up. Now we’ve moved every stitch of crap from the old house: taco seasoning, hand-held brooms, myriad step-stools as if we run a school for gnomes. For a hot second, we were moving dirty laundry across town. What I’m saying is real life is starting to creep in. I was hoping I could become a new person just by leaving behind the infernal eternal expanse of carpet, but as I peer at the lamps and pictures and curtains we ported I think: how will we ever make this space cute again and why do we have fifty-five pillows for every bed? There are decisions to make, in other words, rooms to properly design. It is all stuff I like doing, and yet . . . it’s a bit overwhelming at this point.

One night I carted pots of lavender up the old sledding hill to my car and sailed across the streets to our new home, unloading trellises in the dark, wondering what critters had hitched a ride. (Answer: unknown but I did rinse out something in my after-gardening de-gritifying shower and think, I don’t know what that was, but it is bigger than something I’d normally like on my head.) I woke the next morning, thinking of the fuzzy vole that hid behind one of our metal pieces: a small gelatinous body that ran away as if rolling along a grassy track.

We broke down the garden. It was, at first, a complete and total heartbreak, then like swallowing spinach we plugged our nose and did it. My daughter cleaned out the fridge in a way I’ve never seen anyone do - it shines like the top of the Chrysler Building now. Tim cleaned the entire garage, a space I gave up on at least a year ago. My son cooed at the fat mouse scurrying along the now-empty garage, still believing in its little mind that it was safe from view - stick to the perimeter! stick to the perimeter! - even though we could clearly see it tracing the concrete edge.

It is wild that we lived with so much stuff, yet when I found a single unused bandaid cleaning out a cabinet one day - the kind printed with cats that my daughter loves - I saved it. I think it’s in my purse right now.

I’d like to never step foot in a thrift store again. I’d like to cook a single meal with pots I can find. I’d like to sleep through the night and get twelve massages.

I know I’m at my photo quota. I also know it’s a privilege beyond words to own a house in North America, where the process of buying a home - a home! everyone deserves a safe roof even that fat brown mouse - is riddled with barriers. Bringing me solace right now is the patient humor of trees as they watch us schlepp our laundry baskets full of god knows what again and again. And the hope that soon, I will have time to unpack some of our books, and find the right spot for the TV and get back to movie nights, and maybe maybe one day care about cooking again. Who knows, maybe I’ll shed that part of me like a cicada skin at the old house and start writing bestselling bodice rippers at this one.

I’m sending you cute salt and pepper shakers, four rugs for snow slush, lots of construction beeping, and the tickling memory of voles on the lawn.

Here’s a video from our old freezer that refused to work its magic on the ice-pops most of the time. After two weeks of not hardening, this last pop mysteriously froze, as if the machine knew we were serious about leaving and finally got its sh*t together. One of the kids enjoyed this last pop between riding their bike up and down the old street and absolutely not helping anyone.

Yesterday I was carting toilet paper and nail polish around in my front seat. I hope your days are full of such necessary riches!

Xoxo & kraken strength,

Kara

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In the morning, while she made breakfast, the children stood in the window in the kitchen, hypnotized by the drops of rain on the glass. Ella’s white-blond hair, mussed with sleep, was the brightest thing in the room.

-Anne Lamott, Blue Shoe

“We have to pack all this stuff!” I said one day recently to the kids. “We have to move all these ants with us.” My daughter cracked a smile. My kids are my best audience; they catch the silliness all the time. Is this sad? Should I arrange for fellow adults to also catch the show? MAYBE. For now my best audience members are the two dragonflies that flit about my days. I told a friend this year, “My children get the best of me.” I don’t know if this is wise or advisable, but it is TRUE.

I met a lovely person this week who asked me, “So what do you write?” I said: “It’s kind of uncategorizable but I write about myself. A LOT. Personal essays, I guess.”

If personal essay means writing about your grocery lists and all the shit you’re not doing!

I mean, I also write fiction and I said this, but . . . I spend A LOT of time just writing about my life and thoughts. Hello, journal! Hello, letters! Hello newsletter: weird little wonder-filled creature.

I met this person at a party and thought about them the next day, especially as they brought up wanting to write memoir. After complaining about not knowing anyone to properly circle with, did the winds sweep this friend under my door?

The big news around here is that we bought a house. The next day we saw the people who sold us said house, at that very party. It’s not every week you get to see folks to whom you just gave gobs of money cutting it up on the dance floor. It was all terribly sweet, one of those glorious summer evenings where the fireflies are in your heart as well as in the bushes. (And I guess we’re staying in this town??)

We jammed a camping weekend into a month we should have been plotting and prepping and packing. Because writing is my crutch, my vitamins, my magic wand, I’m going to share pictures. I should be doing a million other things including bringing a fork to the new house so there’s even one utensil there, but I’m going to show you pictures instead.

It was my first trip to the thumb of Michigan! My introduction to this illustrious midland mecca was someone running into/over a dog and driving on. This happened on a road to the campsite and was a terrible omen, a horrific event. The dog was alive; shaking in its owner’s arms. It wasn’t a gory scene, more of a fast-paced side clip, but STILL. A shuddering beast, no matter the form, is incredibly jarring.

This is neither a funny anecdote nor a kind way to start a post, sorry! But I had to tell you because it felt like an important part of the trip. Like: it’s all so precious and fragile. And it was a real shot across the bow, like: You are now entering the backwoods of Michigan. Prepare yourselves.

I’m reading Blue Shoe by Anne Lamott and really enjoying it. In some ways, it’s probably bad for me, because I’m trying to tighten up a specific plot and this book teaches me very little about picking up the pace. At the same time, it’s so textured and lovely. Like with Anne Tyler’s work, the characters are endearing and relatable (that old anti-feminist slur). It’s a welcome reminder of what I enjoy most, which is less to be wowed by intricately-woven events and more to be moved and to laugh; to sit by the fire of a writer’s mind and intelligence (and hopefully heart) and feel the flickering heat.

Speaking of sitting next to the writer, I’m feeling a little sheepish about my last post, especially if we’ve ever traded work. I’m not trying to shade anyone specifically - I’m just trying to explain some of the gremlins who live with me in my writing cave.1 Gremlins are cute and terrible and real. I’m trying to find snacks for them so they nibble my toes less. For some blessed reason, writing about my dark “secrets” helps neutralize them, but it is a strange thing to do. Hello! Would you like to come behind this curtain and peep a hot mess? Step right up.

I feel like that post was a dispatch from the messy middle. Like, I’m desiring a more easeful relationship to bringing things out into the world but still have to sift through some challenging habits and see what their purpose has been. I also think it’s weird that I extend so much grace to others in terms of creativity, but have parts who are freakish and punishing when it comes to finishing things. (These parts are probably some younger versions who need a little updating. Noted!)

Anyway, that’s the deal here. It has frankly not been chaotic enough, in terms of packing at our “old” house. Three out of four people have yelled our heads off (I’m sure the fourth is close behind but their halo is showing right now), but the big push is slowwwwwly coming - or I hope it is. We have to get from here to there and I’m still a little fuzzy on how we’ll accomplish that. We have so many books it’s an actual joke. I caught myself eyeing a friend’s this week thinking, Let’s just give that away. No regrets! The time of logic is leaving. A stronghold of panic descends.

My wish for you this week: sunlight on your skin, soft wind in your teeth, a friend who knows the song in your heart. May they sing it back to you when you’re jolted out of it, or tell you a hearty tale while putting you to bed.

If you know the secret to staying grounded and whole while moving, please send! Otherwise you can find me crying behind a bottle of Mrs. Meyers or laying on the ground of our new backyard in a grateful heap.

1

I have had the urge to reach out to people who have been “actually helpful” and tell them so. As I write this sentence, it feels like maybe a good idea - a gratitude journal, or a backwards amends. You were nice and I like you.

You can’t footnote a footnote (let’s be honest, that’s a good thing) but Tim saw a business once called Actually Clean. That means Actually Helpful is up for grabs as someone’s editing business! Go get ‘em.

As I make jokes about Actually Helpful professional editors, I have to shout out Amy Shearn who IS helpful and has a post about writing workshops - how they help (and things to watch out for) that nagged me previously as I wrote about collaboration . . . I didn’t link to it in my last post but am unable to resist this week.

Let us find the helpers. May they actually help!

“Self-service” = lookin good!

so gross

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My partner and I died laughing. Tell us how you really feel about our leadership!

Normally I have a lot of beautiful photos from a week at the beach. For some reason, this year I don’t. I mean, I know why. My plantar fasciitis keeps me from long walks where I photograph wildlife and/or other suburban treasures, and I left my phone behind a lot when we went out. One tragic absence are photos of putt-putting (twice!) including the time we were split up by people bragging about how many courses their grandchild played while said child absolutely, publicly, stunk up the course, lol.

The beach weather was moody, breezy, just how I like it. I wore a suit I found out too late wasn’t good for jumping waves (lots of adjusting the elastic, hoping various bits and bobs stayed in). I had some good long reading time and some time to write when I wasn’t eating meals in my bathing suit. Three cheers for children who know how to swim and entertain themselves peaceably, also for helpful grandparents.

One day Tim and I snuck away for lunch and saw a bird I’ve never seen in my life (she says hyperbolically - maybe I knew this animal once and forgot it). It looked like a snake happily tooling around the water and kind of blew my mind.

What else do I want to tell you? We were proselytized to in a Bojangles “restaurant.” Having been subjected to this behavior a ton in his youth, Tim caught on quicker than I did. I’m never getting up for a refill again! he said after he did so and our table was besieged by a man satanically possessed to tell us about his many blessings. There was something in the water at that chicken & biscuit oasis. A different woman came in and ripped the poor employees a new one for not greeting her properly. I passed a note to the kitchen (You’re doing great, eff that lady!!) which someone in the back hung up, a true honor. When we left, our daughter said: “That was SUCH a Karen” (later Tim said this was like, I’ve always heard of elephants . . . We just saw one in the wild!) It took days to shake off that moment. I wonder how it was for those involved. There was no denying the opportunity to say to our kids: We cherish a lot about the south but there are some real problems here, too. Welcome to exhibits A-F.

I’ve been watching more of Becoming Led Zeppelin since we’ve been home. My kids are making fun of me because it really is spectacularly bad in terms of pacing and maybe even depth. You would never make it past minute three if you didn’t care about the band. Luckily I am interested in their origins (and Robert Plant’s hangdog eyes) but all I can think sometimes is Wow, Jimmy Page is Mansplainer Par Excellence.

I am pretty sure I’ve seen something similar about co-writing in a book I’m reading, which I’ll get to in a second, but I tend to agree about the intimacy of writing. The composition process is a very vulnerable one, and if someone doesn’t understand your process when they are brought into a half-formed thing, it can wreck the creation, not to mention your confidence. I am often envious of other artists who have writing partnerships that work for them - musicians, sure, but also entrepreneurs or comedians or TV writers. I frequently feel, Jeez if I only had a partner to shuffle this off to, get it the hell off my desk! I err on the side of holding things close even when I could use some feedback because I have had some disastrous and/or underwhelming referendums on my work. At times it’s been too much to overcome. It disrupts the work and keeps me from hearing myself.

This is, incidentally, why I have such confidence in life-coaching. I am a NUT about the sacredness of hearing yourself. It is truly priceless and once you tap into processes that work for you, you don’t need much else (besides shelter - and maybe calories and funny friends) to steer your ship. This is not to say there won’t be setbacks, or that real glass ceilings and institutional violences don’t exist. And/but when you know how to listen to yourself and faithfully clasp your own hand, it makes seeing the obstacles and dangers (and enemies) that much clearer.

Sometimes I approach co-editing like a jilted lover. Rather than risk the disappointment of not being met with playfulness or joy or proper rigor or grammar (again!!), I just forgo the whole thing. I rarely trade off my work because it’s so painful when it’s not a good match. When I just stay home (and don’t ask someone for help), I not only save myself heartache but I also keep access to all my favorite snacks. (Please admire this metaphor that has gotten up and wandered off to wherever the hell we are now. Also, please help.) I’m not saying this is a good thing. I deeply believe we go much faster in terms of evolution when we partner with others who can help.

What I AM saying is: where is my songwriting partner? I am JUST as talented as Robert Plant!!

In seriousness, it sounds quite sweet, having people you trust or (even semi-trust) inside your writing cave. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to trade a manuscript back and forth with Tim, whose sense of humor and irony and gravity I (obviously?) trust1. And who, like Plant, is sporting some beachy Jesus waves in his hair this summer:

In more music news, I’m finally reading Rob Sheffield’s book Dreaming the Beatles and gobbling it up. I LOVE a critic with former religious bents because their heart is (usually) in the right place. Sheffield’s writing is so warm and generous and his takes are endlessly interesting to me. Here’s a taste:

The Beatles are the band that brings you flowers; the Stones are the band you catch crabs from in the bathroom line. The Beatles are the band that passes you the bong and asks your opinion on the Bhagavad Gita; the Stones are the band that borrows your wallet to score pharmaceutical groovies in the alley, then disappears with your date and leaves you stuck with the bar tab. The Beatles are peace and love; the Stones are laughter and joy and loneliness and sex and sex and sex and sex and sex. The Beatles got an A for their term paper on transgressive performance art; the Stones broke up the professor’s marriage.

LOL!! I wonder how long he worked on that paragraph. The Beatles got an A for their term paper on transgressive performance art . . . Chef’s kiss.

I almost forgot to explain the title of this post! (Paging Jimmy Page . . . ) In that same game of Taboo, I was trying to get my family to guess the word Pig by saying, “I really like these…” Everyone chimed in.

“Gods!” said my youngest.

“Coffee!” said my husband.

“Pigs!” said my daughter.

Friends, I felt very known.

Alrighty-ho, this post has been a rambler. We’re in a heat wave here in the Midwest, making me very grateful for access to water. This holiday weekend is giving me memories of last year’s trip to Michigan’s upper peninsula and the RV that flew an American flag in Christmas lights. (Of course it did!)

Here’s a video to take us out featuring some of my favorite dinosaurs (the brown pelican - more blue than brown to me). Also featured: a plane advertising bikini stores or some dinner show, and clouds over the Atlantic Ocean:

Sending lots of love,

Kara

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I’m off playing Super Mario Brothers, wishing I could send something more profound than this little snack of hello. I’m reading too many books including this one about two disappearances in the Ozarks. Spooky true crime is not my normal fare but it includes family tales, a little Arkansas history, and explorations of religion. It has a great cover and also I like learning! Even though I will forget 60% of what I just learned.

Kirk Read’s How I Learned to Snap about being openly gay in a southern high school is also on my lap this week. It is chock full of great lines and tons of idiosyncratic (beautiful) heart. I am a sucker for comedy tucked into great lines. Three cheers for funny essayists.

Speaking of, I saw that David Sedaris has a new collection of essays. I’m sure he needs my publicity, lol, but I am looking forward to getting my mitts on it.

We’ve got sunscreen on our noses and donuts in our bellies. I am sending glad tidings and will (hopefully) report more soon!

Xoxo

Kara

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It is not that I am at a loss for story right now.

It is that I am alive in one, or several.

The wordiness in my heart is a smooth line.

I want to show you pictures.

Oh, fine. I found a tale, or a snippet of one. My youngest has been extremely upset lately that no one will play a favorite game they made up called Buried In Stuffies.

Is this the name of a game you would like to play?

But one night my partner, Tim, played it before bed. His halo must have been peeking out from all that polyester. He reaped extra points, too, because I had said no minutes before. Good cop, bad cop. Codependent mom finally says no, rascally father cashes in.

The exciting news in my world is that I stumbled on a book called Men, Ships, and the Sea at a used bookstore this week. Tim was next to me, stockpiling novels potentially useful for teaching purposes, potentially useful for everyone to trip over later.

I thumbed through the pages of nautical porn, trying to decide whether to plunk down two dollars. The problem was not the amount, obviously. The problem was how how many Nat Geo treasures I already have stashed around my office like some people ward off mice with steel wool. “I mean,” I said, working up the courage to give in. “You just can’t pass something like this up!”

Tim looked at the title and said, “Well, you can’t pass something like that up.” Lolol. It’s like that time my mom asked if I wanted a lamp from my grandmother’s house after she passed away. I said, Sure. I have a soft spot for that lamp. My mom said, I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but you have a soft spot for every lamp.

Maybe I will put a May Sarton passage here because the question of thriving is on my heart, well, always but especially this week as I contemplate where I was when I started this newsletter and some developments for our family that feel like a hearty crop after many years of tilling.

“Can one be within the framework of a marriage?” It is not irresponsible women who ask that question, but often (as in this instance) women with children, caring women, who feel deeply frustrated and lost, who feel they are missing their “real lives” all the time. Has this always been true and only now are we able to admit it? And what is the solution? It is partly, no doubt, as Women’s Lib has insisted, that it is time the warm, nurturing powers, usually taken for granted in women, now be called out of the men in equal measure. Roles should be no longer assigned on the basis of sex or of any preconceived idea of marriage, but should grow organically from the specific need of two human beings and their capacities and gifts. The phrase “second in marriage” sounds Victorian. No partner in a love relationship (whether homo- or heterosexual) should feel that he has to give up an essential part of himself to make it viable. But the fact is that men still do rather consistently undervalue or devalue women’s powers as serious contributors to civilization except as homemakers. And women, no doubt, equally devalue their own powers. But there is something wrong when solitude such as mine can be “envied” by a happily married woman with children.

Mine is not, I feel sure, the best human solution.

This is from Journal of a Solitude1, Sarton’s book about living by herself in New Hampshire which features loneliness, blocks of sacred concentration, off-screen relationship drama, a parrot, flowers as main characters, and many hearty neighbors. This passage is in response to a fan letter written to Sarton, “the archetype of many, many others I have been sent lately . . . .“ The book was published in 1973 - apologies for any reinforcement of binaries by including it here. I will always muse on how to be a full person in a marriage, or how to be a writer in one. Those are evergreen questions for me.

Speaking of tilling, I finally got some tomatoes and basil and flowers into the ground and it - the ground - was hard. It is so obvious when you neglect the land, so easy to do a little every day. But I have been occupied upstairs, rapping on my novel and haven’t even had a glass of iced tea on our patio. Last year I would write there with coffee in the early morning, the birds in conspiracy with my keyboard. Maybe I’ll do that once it gets fully warm (mornings are still quite cool here). I’ve been looking down at the grass, not across. I’ve been doing headstands on it, too, in the middle of our dandelions and a nearby soccer goal, willing the wisdom of the earth to corkscrew into my brain (this is not science, not even a real practice but…it is fun and does impress my daughter which, if I’m honest, drives so many of my motivations in this world).

I went through some books by my bed, pretending I can get serious about the piles there. It is now possible to reach our harder-to-open-than-a-sealed-brick window without yanking my low back too much while stretching over the piles, trying to wrench a frozen walrus out of the open sea.

I found this accident one night while turning out a lamp, which knocked over a candlestick. When I bent to pick up the candlestick, I discovered this murder. I believe it to be a collaboration between the fiddly puzzle table and a strong wind, but it could be a crime to which no mouse in this house will fess up. It is sad but also, of course that was going to happen!

The other week at dinnertime, I looked out the window and saw something in my neighbor’s long grass. I don’t mean to throw this neighbor under the bus, they are really nice and I like them a lot. And their grass in spring is like a bushy prairie (though even that brings me joy). I saw what I thought was a small bunny then looked closer and saw it was a hawk. It was dinnertime after all. Our yard doesn’t have a lot of trees from which to stage attacks. I’ve never seen that before: a hawk nuzzling the grass like a bunny. It was trippy and thrilling.

When I finally got to the garden beds this week, I found big strawberries - bigger than I’ve seen in other years. Either our plants are finally maturing or the critters normally get to them sooner (because I usually weed sooner). In the bushy grass, berries were allowed to prosper. Last night at ten-thirty, my daughter wanted to go out and get some, because I’d meant to bring them in so the animals wouldn’t raid them but forgot. I declined then but looked out this morning and saw a chipmunk dashing in, emerging with a pale green bud.

I hope this post had a sprinkle or a berry you can use and parts of your week ahead are fruitful, if not easy. Take care of yourselves! And each other.

Xoxo

Kara

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Later while flossing, I was like, omg that wasn’t a weird part of caramel, that was the crown that’s now missing from my mouth. I ran to the kitchen like the extra dramatic mom I can be. Retrieving the crown. I thought about how my day kept getting worse. This is quite the apotheosis, I thought, and remembered how I had also prayed that afternoon to be as good a writer as life. Now she was completely showing off. Look how I can hurt my characters! THIS is how you do it.

My children are looking forward to the end of school and I am foolishly joining them. Something about the warm weather finally arriving and sports seasons winding down has me sighing with relief. To skip the part every weekday where I pack bagels and pretzels (we’re very carb-forward over here) and fill up overly expensive water bottles that leak anyway? Sing me up.

Even as I write that, I think of beach days and packing gear for different adventures. Maybe I will never graduate from packing bagels and pretzels every day. A motto painted on the highschool scoreboard in my parents’ town reads Where Success Never Graduates which we always find hilarious, as if no one ever graduates from that school. Where Kara Never Graduates From Bagels and Pretzels is the nutritional motto of this phase in my life.

I wanted to get more from this beautifully titled book but it quotes the Bible which is always hard for me. I find non-fundamentalist religion very useful and am sometimes fine with scripture but we’ve all been exposed to under-intelligent summaries of Bible verses. It’s kind of like that moment someone discusses The Grateful Dead seriously rather than just enjoying them privately or in the circle of other enthusiasts. My eyes instantly glaze over: Oh no. Here they go. For what it’s worth, Yu is intelligent and steeped in a creative life, and reaches for the Bible appropriately that is to say with insight and deep thought.

I went to the grocery store with my kids this week, something I try to avoid because it takes three times as long. The youngest picked up a box of Clif Bars. “I’ve been missing these,” they said forlornly, as if the bars were an old stuffie I’d given away. You miss having chocolate cookies as a “healthy” snack, you say? How strange!

I have not wanted to disclose the following but now have to and you’ll see why. I was stricken this winter with a bout of plantar fasciitis after too many long walks in the snow, wearing not-for-exercise (but pretty!) snow boots. My feet complained and I rudely ignored them, with serious consequence.

The simple definition of plantar fasciitis is: it sucks very bad. The medical description is: you will feel like someone shot you in the heel every time you stand and especially in the morning. A yoga teacher I’m devoted to recommended getting a pair of Crocs and some reflexology. I would probably eat chocolate-covered crickets if this woman offered them to me, speaking of cultish enthusiasm. After putting it off for a few more months I bought some Crocs and called the reflexologist.

It was my first time with reflexology which is insane. I love my feet, my feet love massage, it was a match made in heaven. Why had I not tried it before? Maybe it’s one of the treats waiting for us at the end of youth. You won’t recognize your neckline but you will have this! I cannot recommend reflexology (with the right person) enough. The Crocs, however . . . Okay. They are comfortable. They do the job of protecting my sensitive arches and padding the aching heel. But Crocs are not the first choice of the fashion-conscious, a group to which I belong in a fleeting, non-dues paying way. Lemme put it this way. A guest who knows me well saw the Crocs at my door this spring and said, “Oh! You wear Crocs now?”

I guess I do, at least until my foot heals. Because we’re a house that takes our shoes off at the door, I wear them inside with an electric blue pair, and outside with ones I pretend are somehow less hideous because they are grey.

Sometimes these two pairs get mixed up. One day I dashed to school in the electric blue pair and noticed only once I got home. “Dang. I really wish I hadn’t done that,” I said to my partner. As someone whose clothes fit differently than they did five years ago, someone with a head full of increasingly silver hair, I feel like the least I can do to help my image is not wear shoes that look stolen from a nursery.

“The alarm didn’t ring?” Tim said, joking about an invisible-fence that would buzz, saving one from bad fashion choices. I was CRYING when he said it. Why ISN’T there an invisible fence that prods us when we’re about to step out of the house wearing something we shouldn’t?

I hope I haven’t offended any of my Croc wearing audience. I don’t judge comfort-footed folk, I just never knew I’d cross this line before my fiftieth birthday. The alarm didn’t sound! Should I call the repair person?

Final share: an elf who lives with us is helping the adults get ready for summer by baking a layer cake each week. We created this monster, I know, supporting endless making and baking and pasting and taping, but I’ve been coming into the kitchen every day, dismayed to discover a new baking project. Oh, the counters I’ve seen . . .

To complicate our rigorous workouts even more, we adults accidentally doubled up on the ice cream in our house, before the kids convinced me on that store run to get some packaged ice cream cones (my hands were tied).

Please admire the discipline on which this house runs:

Okay, friends, I want to say that I hope you all have a delicious week, but I’m thinking of the ongoing horrors of our global community and joking about sweets feels callous. If letting yourself eat cake doesn’t strike the right note, I’m sending courage and revolutionary seeds. Like the spider plant below, may we grow in ways that inspire each other and keep reaching out for connection in spite of our fears.

With love and sunlight,

Kara

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The subject of most novels is time, in a way. - Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game

This post is gonna be quick, a little show and tell then I’m out of here. Will it be worth it? Only you and the ducks can say.

These ducks paraded in front of me on one of the busiest streets I travel. I was happy to be the one who got to slow for them, thankful I had seen them in time. Days later, on an even busier road (basically a highway that runs through this poorly laid-out town) I was tooling along with two kids in my backseat when a pair of adult ducks crossed my lane. There was barely enough time to slam on my brakes. Somehow I did and avoided smashing them. One lifted its wings over my hood. My daughter gasped while Omfg I’m gonna murder two ducks ran through my head. I had been so happy, days earlier, breaking for a mama and her train of babies. Now these two childless fools were wrecking my self-image!!

I’ve been back on my b.s., making peace with my novel (can’t believe I’m writing that, as heartbreakingly jittery as I am), navigating the song and dance of belonging to something greater than myself (family, partnership, this town I hate am trying to not be a total jerk about), celebrating terrific news that’s fallen in my family’s lap, and - drum roll, please - signing up my kids for summer activities! This task was underpinned, of course, by months of squinting at calendars, peering into the basketball-and-crafts-shaped hearts of my children, and making sure no one has to be camping/hosting people/rescuing puppies/attending fill in the blank social engagement we forgot about months ago (Don’t forget the potato salad! etc. etc.).

Tasks like these, when finished, make me unreasonably proud. The crown I give myself every morning, made of marigolds, is really woven of feats like this.

Here is a happy anniversary pic sent by my poetic sister-in-law who is also a “real” poet, all hail. Looking for her website I was sent to a maker of custom Amish furniture whose ad copy starts with the comely phrase Create A Mood, lol. That is perfect on SO many levels. If only we understood this beautiful world! (My SIL says those ducks were actually taken by her colleague Sujash Purna, a different poetic poet.)

I finally read my friend’s book and can’t believe he was writing this beautiful memoir - swimming through such heavy topics as the bombing at Hebrew University in which he lost two friends - when first we met. To read a book like this and realize your friend was traveling foreign lands and painful territories, grappling with the entrenched violence that grips our world, with lyrical and rigorous reporting, while you were basically being an irresponsible idiot falling in deep with your future partner while trying like the dickens to figure out how to write a novel, is quite humbling.

Wait - is this the WHOLE THEME of my life? I feel like “grappling with human relationships while trying like the dickens to figure out how to write finish a novel” is STILL the plot of my life. Ack!!

(Also, this is SARCASM, people! I feel like I have to clarify that because when a woman is self-deprecating everyone is like, Phew! For a minute we thought she was going to take herself seriously!!)

I promised this post would be quick, so the last thing I’ll tell you is that I tried to give our beloved Owl Lamp a glow up, because the ring anchoring her vintage shade was slippppppping.

All I could think when I finished was “Nailed It!” My kids really like that show, where people botch elaborate bakes with hilarious results. It’s one of the prides of my life that the first time my youngest child saw Nicole Byer they said, “I love her.” Stylish, irreverent, razor sharp, also weirdly nice to people operating with endearing levels of effort? We should all bring such flash to our days.

For some reason we are still eating off this plate, I guess because we are still in the phase of loading our dishwasher recklessly and children dropping things (also me dropping things! I have probably chipped the most bowls of anyone). I clocked how on-the-edge this plate was this week and laughed. There is a clear crack down the middle forecasting the end of this story. Why do I think this plate is not going to suddenly burst open and pour hot food onto my unsuspecting lap?

Well, it hasn’t happened yet.

May we all be like this plate - still holding, in spite of things - and those two loony ducks who made it across the town highway by the skin of their fabulous bills. May we be saved by something greater than ourselves, something mysterious that operates with mercy if not caution. May we even, sometimes, make good choices (???).

Don’t lose your needle, friends, especially the sharp ones. We currently need all the mending we can get.

Xoxo

Kara

P.S. I was inspired to include quotes from A Long Game as I am reading it right now and Robyn Ryle mentioned doing so, too. As I wrestle with fiction privately, sometimes it feels good to nod to it publicly. Quoting craft books is a lifelong love of mine, a cheater’s way to say what I’m thinking about and struggling with. Thanks for the fiction-waving flag, Robyn, out there in the fields of the middle west. <3 <3

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I keep thinking about this clip from the movie Say Anything when I think about the future of Under a Spell. When Lloyd Dobbler (John Cusack in less eyeliner than later years) is grilled by his date’s father about career plans, Lloyd has this little monologue that rambles on. I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career, he says and goes into a garbled rejection of anything resembling those options. To stunned silence he then says, So what I’ve been doing lately is kickboxing. It makes me laugh SO HARD, probably because I always hear my friend Colleen saying it instead of Lloyd. She once deadpanned that line so perfectly in our youth it now belongs to her.

Speaking of friendship, I read this litmus test in an interview with the writer Francine Prose and could not agree more:

Other items of note are that someone in the customer service line ahead of my partner at the grocery store was returning a tube of ground beef this week. Now I have the following picture on my phone because this is normal marriage, texting inconsequential events to each other all day:

One day at the gym I noticed, with alarm, that Good Morning America was elucidating the warning signs of Parkinson’s. Apparently, signs include acting out dreams and/or loss of smell:

What?!? I don’t mean to make light of Parkinson’s but as a life coach I am disturbed to see that acting on your dreams is a sign of disease. (Lol?? Can we laugh at this joke or have I not properly developed it?)

In other news someone in our house celebrated a birthday. Someone also had an all-day volleyball tournament (and it was fun!). Someone went to an elementary school carnival which at the last minute the whole family attended, meaning Tim got to meet one of the characters who fascinated me last year, a joy-worker so thrillingly bizarre I am now joking we need to have a competition to see whose short story about this person is better.

Because we skipped the carnival the first few years, I once had to hear the words Can we go to the school carnival next year? with high-pitched sincerity from the backseat of my car. This request was so without attachment that it made the carnival sound like a trip to Disney World - so extravagant we might not make it. I never want to hear those words again! Reminding me what a churlish (evil) parent I can be.

I couldn’t find the picture of my original burnt spoon in time for my last post so I took this one for you. Please admire the green of our yard, now replete with dandelions. Did you know if no one sprays pesticides or otherwise gets weird with the grass, you can eat the flowers? I imagine this must be like eating the sun. Yes, please!

I have to go wake a child now. I’m writing this during the week and there is standardized testing which my curmudgeonly heart believes is a way to measure how much semi-useless crud is jammed into my sweet dandelions brains each year. My cynicism about public schools is a liability I constantly have to manage, reminding me how few vegetables my mother ate/liked when I was a kid which she successfully hid from her growing children during important, nutrient-dense years.

What’s on your heart these days? What liabilities are you managing? Sending balloons, shaved ice, tree frogs, and dandelions - unsprayed and splayed in the pancakes I’m burning.

Kara

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P.S. When the ground warmed and the birds returned to our yard, the trills tuned our bones as we sat in the kitchen one day. “I almost forgot there were birds,” my daughter said as this writer ran for her sticky notes. #AllFourSeasons #SpringHasSprung #HeartyMichiganChildren

I’m not sure what makes me the goddess of paper - perhaps my reams of legal pads and tubs of three-ring journals, the sticky notes that wait like pets on every surface. For years I made a living as an executive assistant, something that is slightly ironic. Why am I so good at organizing when my mind is on fire all the time?

I like to think I’m carrying too many narratives - my own plus my children’s plus occasionally my husband’s and also my ancestors, PLUS two to three unfinished novels that sit on my heart like tired elephants and/or tear at my skin like tigers depending on the day. I’ve now added client narratives to the ledger but that hardly counts because coaching people in their own circles of whatever they’re figuring out is an almost effortless joy. The only hang up I have is that I don’t like to take people’s money if they don’t feel real support from me. Is this integrity or codependency? A misunderstanding of the real work of healing?? I’ll report back in three to twenty years!

I like to think the nests of thought I carry make me a lively party guest. It is truly anyone’s guess which version of me will be present that day. The ebullient one bursting with humor? The one who whispers with crones and has access to the wind’s scorching rage? The sly fox or the middle aged mother or the child who likes to doodle in the corner, compliment your snacks and ask for a few more?

WHO KNOWS!!!

I once dated someone with pretty extreme ADHD and while I pointed fingers and judged all throughout that relationship, I met someone who floated the theory that I, too, may be afflicted. Um, what? I read a book or two and forgot all about that suggestion until a few years ago, when the topic of adult-diagnosed neurodivergence exploded on the interwebs. Now two of my best friends have formal diagnoses as well as many of my favorite people, the ones of whom I think I wouldn’t mind being trapped in a bunker with them if it came down to that . . . . Some days I think I am just an undiagnosed animal ranging freely. I don’t even truck much with diagnoses - they can be stigmatizing, pathologizing - but it is nice to have language for one’s experience.

Did you know that I like language? Did you know I like to describe my own experience?

I am reporting to you from the other side of spring break, where there was a delightful amount of time to dip in and out of projects. I might love painting houses/cottages now? This week I found a picture of the kitchen of the attic apartment in a Victorian house where my partner and I lived just after grad school. Yes, the house was probably haunted but the kitchen was so cute and hobbity, I might have to paint it now.

Easter craft

We went to the horse “farm” on campus and I’m pretty sure someone was zapped by the electric fence. There was a kerfuffle and my child reported they didn’t really understand what happened, but their body was tumbled and they felt like they’d been kicked. Was it a horse? A rendezvous with electricity? They were really shocked and I was sad for them. ⚡️

It’s a birthday week and guests are coming. I have to deal with all those pesky hairballs this house loves to collect so I’m going to keep this one short. I’m spinning plates of groceries and calendars and spring clothing and winter boots and the fragments of dreamed-upon creative beasts. I want to share so many things but I’m being a good girl and letting things stew and thicken and find their forms. (This is harder for me than I ever realized! Blerghhhhh.)

On that note I hope you find sanctuary in a friend or a book or a perfectly timed tea this week. I’ll be at [fill in the blank] sports practice or taking credit for the chores my partner does. And burning wooden spoons and jotting down notes on my colorful sticky pads while life spins about madly - too fast, too loud, too brilliant - and I try to understand.

From the horse farm and it’s pesky sharp rails,

Kara

P.S. On the topic of later in life diagnosis, Steve Edwards has a new book of essays from University of Nebraska called Rare Good: Essays on Art, Autism, and Astonishment. Here’s the description:

Rare Good offers insights into Edwards’s experience of the awe that only art, disability, and loved ones can bring. Raising a disabled child and delving into acknowledging his own mindedness, he explores the struggles of communicating and finding care, the joy of gathering as community, and the astonishing gifts that art and education offer us, especially when we acknowledge the contributions of disabled artists past and present. Drawing on times of heartbreak transformed into determination, Edwards describes his ongoing desire to find a way together. A singular work of lyric nonfiction, Rare Good is a reminder and balm for all who might feel different.

Rare Good is available for pre-order and Steve is available on the internet! Especially at The Big Quiet which has been his web handle for longer than this newer way of seeing himself, and a way of describing his world that I have always loved. <3 <3 <3

Go gently, go colorfully this week!

Xoxo

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I feel silly about offering a personal update when there is just so much aggression worldwide. But maybe personal updates are also acts of aggression? lol and just kidding. (I see you, braggy holiday letters!) As headlines weigh and give jump scares throughout the day, I hope you are safe and sound, in touch with something sturdy, even someone’s sturdy, right now.

The thawing earth is giving a little spring to my step here in Michigan. I feel especially aware of tasks and errands that undid me before, for which I now have context and energy after sending my roots into this town. It takes about three years to get your footing anywhere, I say - information I have come to the hard way, too many times. This belief is proving itself in new, welcome ways. The return of a cardinal to our yard is another gift, even though the landlord took away the bird feeder tree unceremoniously without notice last fall (I’m not bitter, you’re bitter!). Nature is throwing off her robes and showing what she’s made of these days. Yesterday I saw the first dandelion of 2026.

In a celebration of the arts at a local elementary school, I got to hear the Star Wars theme song on a chorus of recorders. Who among us could see that coming? My understanding of The Arts really expanded that night!

You know my favorite part of the evening was seeing a row of everyone’s “serious projects,” aka pop bottle art featuring historical figures from Mr. Rogers to Muhammad Ali. Cancel my trip to every museum in the county, my heart is full, I have seen the light. The spikes of joy these colorful, dogged bottles gave me should NOT be legal.

Other heroes of the week:

Someone outside the grocery store told me I was looking so good they wanted to pick me up and carry me home. LOL flattering but maybe a little strong? I scanned the lot to make sure they were gone when I finished shopping. I was buying Pop Tarts of course and avocados and candles if you must know.

This week one of my kids asked if Baskin-Robbins was a yarn shop. When I said no they responded, “I didn’t know if it was a crochet shop or something.” <3 <3 Depending on your relationship with BnR and/or stuffing your face with ice cream, this exchange made me think we’re doing something right as parents. Don’t worry, we are dairy-forward as a household, though much to my consternation we could be considered dairy-passionate. (I joke that cheese is a vegetable in some people’s food pyramid. Not naming names!) Wondering if a confectionery shop is a place to replenish yarn stores is cute no matter how you slice/scoop it.

I also put away one of the finished winter puzzles. It is truly amazing what a clean tabletop can do for my heart. When I next entered that room it felt like I’d been at a spa, versus the traditional snarl of rage I feel when I encounter a table full of school garbage / tortilla chips / pipe cleaners, as well as my cache of beautiful but unnecessary pottery (no such thing! it’s ALL necessary. My Precious).

The final thing I’ll leave you with is that among the energies of my days I’ve been following the Lindy West drama online1, about her newest book Adult Braces, with a fever some must feel when they’re tracking tornadoes. I am not a reporter - of tornadoes or of books - so I will do a very Kara summary here (please trust that I am capable of doing a proper book report but if I spend my time on this, I will not make it to the gym and these glutes don’t maxxx on their own, people. (They actually DO but I still am going to be quick, mea culpa). Basically, Lindy’s new book which I haven’t read yet2 (maybe I should before going out publicly here) and have every intention of doing so (may all the bad reviews become clicks of sales for her) includes details about her partner’s maybe kinda slightly coercive anchoring in polyamory, West’s negotiation of those waters, plus the waters of her marriage to this person in general. But also, a road trip?

I said I was going to be sloppy with my summary and I am a promise keeper! (Not a religious cult promise keeper, don’t worry.) I’m guessing there’s some truth to all of the excoriating reviews of this book. People are worried for the author’s mental health and that’s valid, we’re allowed to want that for our friends. But the amount of vitriol I have seen, especially on Substack, is kind of a wild ride. It’s one thing to write critically for money or a publication but to take time to slam another writer in your own (public) channels is kinda wack. This is, of course, personal for me (cue the Michael Jordon meme) as someone who feels that writing about your own life, much less your private relationships, is a crazy thing to do on the best of days. I also believe it’s part of a writer’s job (some would say one of their only jobs!) to be honest with their readers as much as they’re able to be. So! To treat what is inevitably such vulnerable content so brutally, as I’ve seen some people do in their newsletters, takes some balls and/or loose relationship to manners. Did Lindy West run over your mom in a past life?! I don’t understand. The amount of heat this book is receiving is something else.

Anyway, online life is weird. I hope Lindy is okay and I don’t have to circle back here and be like, welp, the haters were right.3 Before I go, I wanted to share this snippet from Jane Smiley’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel about her own bad reviews. It makes me think of this moment, of the crucifixion / barn burning of West’s partner(s) and of her choice to put out this book in spite of its messy story:

“Bad and ungenerous reviews are necessarily more subjective than positive and generous reviews, because as with any other manifestation of ill will, the bad reviewer is indulging in an egotistical display of some state of mind that is supposed to enhance the reviewer’s status at the expense of the subject of the review (and I say this having written bad reviews myself). The bad reviewer is required to be eloquent in order to be readable. Eloquence at a novelist’s expense can be quite a pleasure for a reader . . . “

Smiley goes on to describe Walter Kirn’s review of Martin Amis’s 2003 Yellow Dog in the New York Times Book Review, saying the review was “so full of good lines that it was a joy from beginning to end” but that it did, in fact, kill Yellow Dog in terms of critical reception and maybe sales. If I think of it, I’m gonna look for that review because Smiley says it was so funny it might have been worth writing the book that inspired its ire. In the meantime, I hope all publicity is good publicity for Lindy. I do not know the state of her mental health but I do know she’s one of the funniest writers we have, and even before all this rain came down on this book it sounds like it was challenging to write AND live through events detailed therein.

As one of my kids put it this week: “I’d rather have an annoying person in my group than a mean person.” SAME. Be nice to people!! In public, lol. In private, you can be as catty as you wannabe. When you’re on the commons though, geez, put your knives away? Learn the subtle art of saying, “This book wasn’t for me!” I dunno, what do you all think? Would YOU publish your memoir of polyamory with a Big Five? lol jk. How much do mean reviews get your goat? Me, they get mine hugely. Maybe this makes me an unreliable reviewer. In public, I’m gonna talk about a book’s shiny sentences. Come to coffee with me privately, however . . .

That’s all, friends. I hope you’re having an okay time out there. Take care of yourselves and each other. Feed yourself real earth when you can.

XOXO

P.S. Speaking of feeding yourself, I scorched a pancake while writing this post. This blackened, smoking fail was cancelled out by the ultimately more virtuous (and thankless) task of vacuuming under the couch this week, moving it like a big white moose and throwing away several shriveled balloons from underneath that were eight-months-dirty. Someone send me my trophy!!

P.P.S. I just got an email that my copy of Adult Braces has arrived. Game on, gossip queens, game on.

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Dear loves

The decision-making process for writing this post was touch and go for a minute. Provided extra minutes in my day, my choices were either buckle in and hack away at one of my “serious projects,” or pour a cup of tea and write to you. I think we both know what this girl will always choose **selects sachet of rooibos, drapes self in two or more blankets**

My little family of four went away for a few days to “celebrate” “spring” break. Do not be fooled by the ice on the lake! Only one of us had a fever during our time away. All of us tried the donuts we bought from the saddest, most taciturn donut shop employees you’ve met in your life. (I started to write “donut haus” there for some reason. Please join me in calling your chosen snack place this from now on.)

I have lots of fun pictures but not that many stories. It was a sweet, casual getaway. The kids got along weirdly well and we swam in a pool every day. We played our version of Marco Polo (renamed Ketchup and Mustard - that guy does not need more PR) and I cracked up remembering that I no longer locate the direction of sounds since I lost hearing in one ear. Closing my eyes while trying to find people was comically pitiful. I was laugh crying by the end of my turn, tumbling back into my new realities and the arms of my partner who has witnessed it all. The lake we stayed on thawed and then fogged and then cleared and fogged again, deeply dramatic for no real reason (a page out of my own book!). I lost multiple games of Othello after bragging about winning too much in my last post.

I started the Eddie Murphy documentary (creatively titled Being Eddie lol) and have been oddly touched by it. I turned it on out of mere curiosity, no real Murphy devotion, but was moved by his generosity opening doors for other performers, his relationship to his kids, and his takes on talent.

I also chuckled when Dave Chappelle called himself LeBron James in the documentary, referring to himself as the follow-up to Murphy’s Jordan. Even if it’s true, are you really supposed to say that out loud? On film?? LOL. Now I want to think about what chain of cultural command I fall on metaphorically and who are the touchstone above me. **Roots in files, comes up with no jokes. If only she knew more sports figures!!**

Speaking of tuning instruments (switches to area of strength), this week I recommended three things to real live humans and thought I’d mention them here:

1) The Creative Act, by Rick Rubin - an “author” I make fun of all the time because I am a shameless jerk but that book is sort of interesting and I, of course, agree with the philosophy that everyone is creative. Doing a search, I see I have already said more about him than anyone ever needs to say but here’s my recap of a pretty good interview and a throwaway post of that time I augmented a turtleneck sweater which I’m still proud of (the sweater not the RR of it all). I also found this post by an industry insider and wow, is it scathing!! Worth a read for context on which famous people are worth listening to. (Answer: none??)

2) Lisa Weinert’s newsletter Writing the Body which explores writing with a trauma-informed lens <3 <3

3) and Catherine Newman’s novel We All Want Impossible Things, which I read last week and laughed and cried through. It’s about hospice and friendship and marriage and grief and parenthood and snacks and texting everyone all the time. I went into it with closed fists for some reason which is probably a secret to enjoying everything. (Tim likes to say low expectations are the key to happiness. SPOKEN LIKE A TRUE MIDWESTERNER.)

The last thing I need to tell you (it was actually the first thing) is that I complimented a man in Meijer (the local grocery store) this week on his sweater. It was that thick, creamy, real-wool stuff: fisherman sweater patterns, grids of dots and waffly diamonds. (Mama wants!!) The man stopped what he was doing and went into a prolonged backstory about the market he buys these sweaters from, how they’re from Peru and he wears them from September to May, and he would give me one if he had a second sweater in his car. Yes he was from Canada! And yes I found a friend for life in the grapes aisle (who said goodbye three seconds later). I left that interaction recalling a different man whose hat I complimented in a bookstore this winter, whose face lit up like a Christmas tree. I got to hear all about that hat, how he knew it was coming home with him the moment he spotted it. After the grapes aisle I thought, retired people are really my people. Why am I trying to hang out with anyone else?

As Tim would say: this is why we leave the house! To have adventures like these.

Okay my friends, that’s it for now. Enough pictures, enough non-travel-recaps, enough celebrities entombing themselves in glory. Enough recommending and then trashing Rick Rubin. Like RR’s beard, it is very intense in the world right now. I hope the snacks and new friends and free sweaters are many. We are here to be the light in each other’s days. What is making it through your windows right now?

If you need more Watching Documentaries with Kara, I wrote about the haunting moment in a sweet little doc called Secret Mall Apartment in my last post. I didn’t include this picture but here’s a piece of that moment:

Did I do a non-job of summarizing that movie for people who haven’t seen it? Yes! Have I fixed that in the post yet? No!! It also contains spoilers with no spoiler alert, but go read it if you haven’t!

May your feet find the soil today, friends. May you hear the wings beating behind your back (and may it not be Rick Rubin’s beard!!).

Xoxo

Kara

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The best thing to pray for, instead of money and everything: pray for peace of mind. Pursue peace of mind. If you get that, then you got it all <3 <3 <3

“Right now I’m doing my serious project,” my son said to me last week.

He was working on a project about Blackbeard. I hope everyone’s “serious project” is about Blackbeard, especially one made out of plastic bottles and black yarn. Construction paper, yarn, glue, maybe a swipe of paint you refuse to clean off the desk? Good to go. Serious projects commenced.

One of the things I am admiring between now and when we saw each other last is the determination with which this Blackbeard unfolds. Ten minutes before bed? Why not craft some weapons. More time after school? Let’s get a nice long coat on him. Twenty minutes past bedtime and your parents are breathing down your neck? Now seems as good a time as any to complete that impressive beard. The focus, the zeal! This will always inspire me, even as the artist actively ignores my requests. Why can’t I dash off my novel in the same manner, one day have it gloriously done? Type out three sentences before leaving for the gym. Two more while the pasta boils. Why must I cleave such sanctimonious writing hours from the rest of my life? The mother here knows the answer loud and clear - I’m not able to fly into the dream state in those moments because I may not come back, may in fact burn the kitchen down. That’s the fear, anyway. (A wooden spoon with a black butt - everyone thinks it’s hilarious I did this - shows it’s more than a slight possibility.)

I’ve been watching a documentary on Netflix called Secret Mall Apartment and falling down a rabbit hole of questions about the focus it takes to create art, the damage one does occasionally to relationships in doing so, the privilege of making it, who it is for, eventually - who we help and who we imagine we’re helping. Who we’re talking to, really, when we make our art, and how much more cohesive and big a conversation we can have when we change the audience even slightly.

This last question, of audience, is especially on my mind as I watch young people in Secret Mall Apartment set up domestic space in a blank hull behind the mall’s front-facing veneers. I thrill at their ingenuity and focus while also wondering, what if they weren’t talking back to soulless developers? What if ogres were out of this conversation entirely? What if building a thing wasn’t about power or subterfuge but instead about spreading resources and care?

As soon as I write that, though, I’m thinking about a scene where the main artist Michael Townsend1 (different from that guy in the picture) compares the mall apartment to a barnacle on a whale - an arguably neutral thing, no subterfuge here. I also recall the backdrop of this time, the artists taking on other projects grounded in tragedies like 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing. I haven’t finished the film so this isn’t a comprehensive take, just to say that this documentary is giving me soooooooo much to think about. Isn’t that what great art does? <3 <3

Another thing I’m thinking about is a scene in which the new wife of Townsend complains that she wants to work on their actual house and buy goods for their real home, rather than spend money on this make-believe apartment.

In a present-day interview on camera, Townsend says these complaints are absolutely valid. And they are. But there’s a look this woman gets in the food court, filmed by a little portable camera someone held at the time, where her eyes get distant and her face takes on both a hardness and a blurred softness, like she and her gaze are falling off the end of the table into an abyss of emotion. Frustration? Disbelief? I can’t even with this guy-ness? A chill comes over her in real time. You can almost see her thoughts in a bubble above her head. This is the person I married. Uh-ohhhhhhhh.

To be fair, every married person ever has probably had this moment.2 Some of us may have them several moments a week (Tim, watching me bring yet another piece of furniture into the house). When I saw that scene, I thought how every woman (or child or disenfranchised person) knows that stare, that far away, this’ll never do, no-one-is-listening-even-though-I’M-EXTREMELY-RIGHT stare. Something happened in my body watching that scene where a woman had to swallow her voice and go underground, start making preparations for a different way. It was like a fracturing of the soul in real time, or a coalescing of it, I’m not sure.

Later, on-camera, she says something like, “I was able to realize that wasn’t what I wanted, it wasn’t a good relationship for me.” These two people are no longer married, a fact I am neutral about (like a whale and a barnacle???). But good for her, being able to realize such a pivotal thing. It isn’t always a given that we will realize anything! Especially so momentous a care-taking as what we really need. I loved the way she said that and kept playing it in my head throughout the day. It sounded so gentle in her articulation, both to herself and maybe to her former spouse, while also protecting what is probably a much longer, more drawn-out story.

I’m definitely not saying everyone needs to leave a situation when the cracks start to show. As mentioned in my last post, there are plenty of epoxies on the market. I happen to LOVE epoxies. I should probably be investing in them right now! (please send NASDAQ info.) And/but man, that stare. I am haunted by the possible loss of potential inside of it.

I also don’t think every struggle ends in fracture, in leaving, in blowing apart. And/but the struggle is real (I don’t mean the struggles of marriage although let’s be honest, the ability to stay in right relationship with beloveds can be trying sometimes). I mean the struggle of change, of becoming, of evolving. Even the struggles of dreams.

Speaking of dreams, this movie has inspired me to wonder who I would assemble for my A Team of weirdos. I definitely have them scattered across the country which, as you can imagine, isn’t convenient when you need help painting a cabinet or hanging some tapestries. I’d love to find more people to call on locally, someone who wants to go to a river or a movie or help me paint a mural on my ceiling (is this just called a friend? lol). Shout out to my mom who lives far away but will help with arts and crafts in a heartbeat (this woman sends half the flare featured here - if you see a colorful thing there’s a great chance she sent it). Also to my dad who, as the last post attests, is handy with several brands of epoxy (even if the search for one that stands up to marble is ongoing).

And now for our regular feature titled What’s In Kara’s Freezer??

Also, I saw this book at the library and thought, alternative title for Under a Spell?

Last thing: I was on a stationary bike at the gym next someone who brought knitting to their workout. I love all humans but may love retirees most. I also forgot to tell you that our coat rack heard me call back to our old broken one and fell over in a big splat. Like all of us, it needed in on the drama!

Okay, last last thing. Speaking of partnered life, it was my birthday this week. On the day before my daughter said, Enjoy your last day of being 47! I knew I’d forget so I wrote myself a sticky note and put it on a shelf. Later I was like, what happened to that note reminding me to enjoy my day? I found it under a pile of junk mail which Tim had plunked onto it. (Thanks, love!!) I did have the sweetest birthday, though. One of my kids had a fever and was in and out of sleep on the couch, like a friend who had too much to drink. It was a quiet and bizarre day, but I drafted this post - spending time thinking about other people’s art - and Tim brought home dinner and a cake (the regular baker was passed out on the couch). I was given the best hand-crafted present and also slaughtered one of my kids in a game of Othello (twice!!). My inner ten-year-old cherished that gift, lol.

Be well, my friends, stay soft and wild, whenever possible. Thanks so much for being here!

XOXO

Kara

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2

I feel the need to add here that in the same food court scene, Townsend somewhat sweetly explains why the secret apartment is so important to him, why he would want to allocate resources this way. His explanation makes A LOT of sense to me. He says something like, he is creating something special with people that are important to him. He throws it up lightly, somewhat tenderly, like: I know you don’t agree and I see that, and this is why it still matters to me.

In some ways it is a perfect moment of partnership: two people trying to agree on how to spend their time and money, in other words trying to agree what dream they are (consciously or unconsciously) creating together. When I re-watched that scene to make sure I got her words right, I felt compassion for both of them. I also saw what I had missed in the first watching: Townsend’s nurturance of this group in addition to his own mad dream.

As someone who has often craved a sturdier circle behind my days (don’t get me started on the lack of formal support for young mothers, I will probably jump off a cliff), that made sense to me. At the end of the film, it is revealed that most participants still carry the key to that long ago apartment. I mewled at the screen, my sick child with me on the couch, as if I were watching a nature documentary about cute baby bears. I was deeply touched by that fact.

I have zero judgement for people who divorce. I don’t care how closely your values and talents align (and this is before we tackle malevolent people or any number of real problems like addiction or family tensions or poverty or abuse) marital rapids are really difficult to shoot. And our culture gives us toothpicks for paddles while throwing alligators into the water, asking why we’re so stressed.

I’m sorry (not sorry) to end on a rant. Here’s a joke if you made it this far:

Happy to report that this sticky note is for someone else in the house, phew. In spite of the many things I’m working on right now, hair brushing is a skill I have mastered. ✔️ ✔️

Hello loves

I’d like to do a little check-in while also saying something that satisfies more than four chips at the bottom of a bag you realize too late was mostly full of air. With any luck I’ll avoid disappointing you but if you end up feeling cheated for opening this email, my apologies. On the other hand, I hope the calories and minutes are worth it!

(In writing circles that paragraph would be called throat clearing - get to the story already, Kara! sayeth this Substack workshop table.)

The duct tape on this broom (with a rainbow shooting off the end) reminds me of a story I wanted to tell you. I have about 10% confidence this will make any sense or anyone will care. Here goes!

My grandmother passed away in 2021 some days after my surgery to remove the largest part of my benign tumor. Sorry these surgeries come up in every post. I go weeks, nay months, without talking (or even thinking!) about them in real life, but writing is a way of integrating all the parts of me, including and especially the granular levels of an embodied life. And so here we are, discussing medical life on the webs while never mentioning it to the neighbors. Shrug emoji, modern life emoji, writers emoji, cute hedgehog of inner life emoji.

Like most Americans, my grandmother left behind a treasure trove of material goods, many of which were distributed amongst her kin in a never-ending fount of furniture, scarves, vases, and kitchenware. As you know, I like a vintage thing and I like grandmothers even more. I do not count myself an overly sentimental person but it depends on what the object is. Did it come from one of my dad’s many relatives? I will mount it immediately on a necklace, even if it’s a rusted-out shovel.

This is all to say our house increasingly looks like a 90 year-old lives here and you know what? I’m for it.

Two years after my first surgery, a marble-topped plant stand arrived with my parents while I prepared for a cute second brain surgery. Having a piece of your skull ground down so surgeons can enter it and put back material from your own abdomen as protection = what do I tell you, friends? I am consistently grateful for western medicine and almost always giving alms to nurses and admins and occasionally surgeons themselves because thank goodness for these ones. Any miracle of which I am capable is mostly invisible, requiring little but lead pencils, maybe a candle or a song. If I were more trained mechanically, would I be less impressed by the people who stand for untold hours in freezing rooms stitching together various human lives? Why this one body, why this one life? The grace is overwhelming…

My dad traveled with this plant stand in multiple pieces, retrieved from the cache of my grandmother’s things. Like the construction in my head (too clunky of a metaphor?) he glued the wobbly stand together in our garage. As it dried, clamped and padded, my parents watched our kids, bribed them with games, and cooked and cleaned for everyone. A card trick worked (once?) to get them to school. When more than two of us are involved, my kids will be twelve to thirty minutes late anywhere. We’re on time now that they go to separate schools but contrast this to previous years where the number of tardies at the top of their report card was impressively high.

Some weeks after my parents departed, I brought the stand in and put it in our bedroom to hold a jade plant. After this plant tried to die over the summer (and I repotted it and pledged to ignore it/stop drowning it in water), I brought the stand downstairs, pretending I might put a new plant there as if the myriad soccer and volleyballs our kids insist on juggling on that floor weren’t T-minus-2 seconds from throwing a potful of leaves and dirt to the ground. I kept putting off finding a new use for the stand until one day the inevitable happened: while leaning over to turn off a lamp, we heard a soft crack! and the carefully glued top broke from the base. We admired the marble now floating in my child’s hands, even more admiring that it hadn’t demolished anyone’s toe.

If you read Under a Spell during our days of taping together a coat rack over and over, you know I don’t quit a thing until I’m good and ready. I left the broken stand in its happy corner and went about my business, occasionally appreciating the roundness of the marble as it rested against our records.

In the intervening days I occasionally rested our stereo remote on the crest of the broken stand, a little wooden platform for our little, somewhat annoying, Bluetooth remote - annoying because I always move it while slicing food stuffs on the counter and then lose it in its new locale amongst the yarn tails and recipe books and puzzles and paints.

I didn’t think anything of my little hack until one night the four of us were eating dinner and Tim saw it resting on the broken stand. “That is the perfect thing to put there,” he said. We all looked and burst out laughing that this tiny remote got its own glory like that.

Debating now whether to repair the stand (which has also broken off a leg, of course) or move on and cut our losses Tim said, “If This Old House has taught us anything, it’s that industrial epoxy can fix anything.” Our kids like to watch Kevin O’Connell and crew rip up perfectly good houses and overhaul HVAC systems to make their ancestors weep. I’m tempted to go the mega-epoxy route and am also daunted by future toe-crushing potential, should my efforts not take.

Sidebar: one day last month, the gym played This Old House reruns. That was the fastest, most pleasurable workout of my life.

Okay, we made it. How’s everyone doing? Was it worth it?? That was the story I wanted to tell you. But the real reason I showed up here was to share a couple of pictures when I proposed checking on what I call the turtle pond and my kids call the duck pond where I’ve seen a heron, a turkey, and a policeman scouring the woods while flashing his lights. This all happened over a couple of years, of course, and that night we were there to see if the water had frozen. We’d had several days in the negative temps and were safe, I knew, but I also knew we could use a quick nighttime adventure.

Did it make me think of my youth, sledding with a neighborhood full of children in Connecticut and their willing, middle-aged parents? It did. Will my own children remember this? Who knows, who knows. This pond makes me think of the marsh in the woods near our old house before we moved which would sometimes freeze and provide reed-enshrouded adventure, too.

On that note, here’s two things to go out with: 1) a picture of me wearing a baby while This Old Housing our old foyer, and 2) a video I made this week when I found the freezer door open and investigated.

Oh, and I really liked this conversation with Whoopi Goldberg in Interview magazine in which she said she loves to be around people making things and wants someone to make a roller coaster. Gah, that made me so happy. This is the energy I love though, to be honest, my vibe is more: “I wish someone would make a skateboarding clip down the block right now or a pan of whole wheat rolls tonight. Maybe a little mural on this bathroom wall??” lol

In case it’s not too much whiplash to end this way, the subtitle of this post is a nod to my brother who lodged that Fletch quote in my brain at birth.

And now, friends, (cue real ending) shall we make something wildly overambitious that no one sees coming that brings people loads of glee? Maybe it’s not a roller coaster. Maybe it’s a kiss. Whatever it is, I wish you joy and unselfconscious hours making your special thing. Be safe out there and safe inside. Remember to tend your body and each other and the earth that holds us all.

I’m sending icicles in the kitchen and surprisingly elegant supports for your needs, industrial epoxy, and (separately?) clovers reaching for the sun.

XOXO

Kara

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Hello my loves

I am thinking of our lives and our sanities. I am thinking of our freedoms - I don’t mean only constitutional rights, though of course there is consideration there, I mean the real freedom that exists inside, the light that never goes out. I am inspired by octogenarian activists. I am checking on friends, teachers, countrymen. I am doing a lot I normally do plus things that amp up my footing when it’s windy on the cliffs (unfortunately neither drugs nor escapism, rather ritual and the sacred work of grief).

Two weeks ago I said I might show up here, peacocking around Substack just as frequently as before I paused paid subscriptions, and that still feels true. At the time I also thought: it will be nice to go longer with my novel, it will be nice not have to show up if I’m feeling off, but the truth with Under a Spell has always been that it’s part of my therapeutic support team, so to speak. Does it embarrass me that writing about my life brings such joy? That girl has ZERO shame! etc etc. Yes, but the joy outweighs the insecurities. That is one of the great boons of that emotion - it feeds the soil around it, like a nourishing flood plain.

With that, I’m going to try to dash off a quick email capturing some of the lines, small moments, and mouse in the woods notes I have been setting down on my cheap scratch pad so I can share them with you.

One of you lovelies asked what helps when I am sad. After my initial brain tumor news, our friend Joe asked me what was cheering me up. I always think of that question which felt so generous at the time, so helpfully guiding my heart toward a window full of light. My answer then was the same as now: I make pancakes. Like someone who loves pigs and also imbibes pork, this fact is confusing because I make pancakes when I’m happy. You can’t judge my mood by the activities of my person. The real math of life is: if it’s past 6am, Kara is making pancakes.

One morning this week, slinging my customary pile on the skillet that we joke my grandfather used to heat bluegill on because at some temps it gets a weird fishy scent (though not for pancakes, don’t worry, they are delicious), Tim came in the kitchen and said: “Halfway down the stairs, in one perfect spot, our house smelled like a VFW hall: butter and griddles and all those Marlboros you’ve been hiding around here somewhere.”

Ahhhh, home, where your wife makes it smell like a linoleum-clad room full of crusty old men chain-smoking and playing bingo all day!