Special bonus dispatch to share a story that published today!

For Bloomberg Businessweek, I wrote about a controversy playing out in Rockridge, a wealthy neighborhood in Oakland where I grew up. Lefty homeowners, many of whom have protested governmental and corporate overreach for half a century, are up against their latest foe: Developers proposing tall apartment buildings of market-rate senior housing. Is it a story of righteous middle-class activists fending off greedy developers who would charge high rents, or wealthy seniors prioritizing neighborhood character over ameliorating the housing crisis? Are Rockridge residents once again David, or have they become Goliath?

This was an interesting (and challenging) story to report. I came out of every conversation convinced that that particular source wanted to make their shared community more accessible and welcoming, despite having very different visions for how to get there.

One big takeaway from reporting this: Part of aging is coming to terms with how your identity and role changes. That’s extremely hard. Many older residents in Rockridge see themselves as lefty activists, and they’ve organized their lives around liberal values: they chose professions that helped those in need, they sent their kids to public school, they marched against the Vietnam draft and the invasion of Iraq and police brutality. And now they’re being cast as NIMBYs, as the rich homeowning establishment trying to close the door behind them.

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I don’t believe these homeowners are against affordable housing in their community. I believe it’s a question of priorities and urgency. Sure, it would be ideal to build beautiful four- and five-story affordable housing buildings in the same architectural style as Rockridge’s Craftsman homes. But that isn’t going to happen. It’s too expensive. And because of decades of not building housing, neighborhoods like Rockridge need way more housing than a couple four-story buildings would create. That impasse—and decades of neighbors blocking dense development—has led to state legislation making it easier for developers to bypass community concerns.

I don’t think anyone in Rockridge believes that the best way to create more affordable housing is by building 26 stories of market-rate (expensive) senior living apartments. It creates more affordable housing only in a secondhand way: When older people move out of their three- or four-bedroom houses, they open them up for others, who in turn open their homes up for those at a lower price point. But housing advocates would say that these proposals do something to alleviate the housing crisis, and something is better than nothing. The choice isn’t between expensive housing in a tall tower and affordable housing that fits into the neighborhood. It’s between expensive housing in a tall tower and doing nothing at all.

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The third alternative—local homeowners actively working to develop affordable housing within their communities, proposing sites to developers and working to support a feasible plan together—sounds amazing. I haven’t found any examples of that, which is telling. (If you know of communities that have done this, please tell me!) As one of my sources admitted in the article, it’s easy to take action when you feel threatened. It’s hard to do the slow work of proactive advocacy when the problem is abstract.

Reporting this story made me think about how hard it is to change how you see yourself, and how easy it is to become defensive when faced with change. I’m grateful to my dad (a Rockridge homeowner) for talking to me about this in the piece: As a proud public defender and liberal, when my dad sees wealthy homeowners prioritizing neighborhood aesthetics on one side and people who can’t afford to buy a home on the other, it’s easy for him to slide into his role as an advocate, calling out hypocrisy in defense of those in need. But it’s much harder to see himself as an older person who may, someday soon, need senior housing himself.

Of course, it’s possible to be both a lefty activist and a wealthy older homeowner. But it’s hard and ungainly to reconcile two competing versions of yourself.

If you’re willing to share: What’s a time when you’ve had to reconcile two versions of yourself? Or, what’s a time when you had to reconcile yourself to how you’ve changed?

yours,

Charley

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

I’ve been working on a few longer reported pieces, but in the meantime, here’s a very fun literary map to Portland that I got to write. Portland has an incredible (and welcoming) literary community. It’s a big part of why I love living here. It was a pleasure to read so many books about Portland and talk to authors who have both shaped and been shaped by this place. Many of whom (including Cheryl Strayed, Omar el Akkad, Joe Sacco and Susan Orlean) have shaped how I think about writing and place.

If you’re local, pick up a (free) copy at the Literary Arts bookstore! An expanded online version is in the works.

Are you a writer? Are you looking to improve your writing in community? Then apply for Sanjena Sathian’s upcoming Banyan Writers’ Workshop. I’ve taken Sanjena’s classes before—they’re generative and supportive and fun. You’ll become a better writer (and editor) and gain more confidence in both. I can’t recommend her teaching highly enough. Application deadline is extended to August 21.

What I’m wondering

The Literary Arts map project gave me an excuse to compile and read a lot of books set in versions of Portland, with a kaleidoscopic vision of the city: Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona Quimby books, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, Lean on Pete by Willy Vlautin, a city guide by Chuck Palahniuk, Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, Trevino Brings Plenty’s poetry, Susan Orlean’s memoir of her years writing at Willamette Week, The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson, Colin Meloy’s fantastical YA vision of Forest Park in Wildwood… I love to see a place through the art made there.

Which made me curious: What are books you love that are extremely of-a-place? How about songs that are very much of a particular place for you?

What I’m reading

Some of my favorite writing about my forever place, California:

Maggie Shipstead on Los Angeles, Great Circle:

It’s wind chimes and helicopters, I said. And it’s muscle cars and leaf blowers and trash trucks picking up everyone’s bins and tossing them back like tequila shots. It’s coyotes yipping like delinquents who’ve just left lit firecrackers in a mailbox, and it’s mourning doves sitting on power lines practicing the same sad four-note riff. It’s the thrum of hummingbird wings and the silent gliding gyres of vultures and the long-legged stepping of white egrets through shallow green water in the concrete channel that’s the river. It’s dance music pounding in a dark room full of people pedaling bicycles going nowhere. It’s gongs and oms and whale songs soothing in the dim inner sancta of spas. It’s a Norteño song bouncing out of a passing El Camino and schoolkids singing “o beautiful for spacious skies” in a classroom with the windows open and the rasp of a beat from somebody’s earbuds you pass on the sidewalk. It’s pit bulls barking through chain-link and Chihuahuas yapping behind screen doors and poodles sneezing on terra-cotta tiles. It’s blenders and grinders and juicers and hissing steel espresso machines the size of submarines and waiters who talk too much — Any special plans for the weekend? — and water, so precious, splashing into fountains and pools and hot tubs and tall glasses on shaded patios, burbling from hoses and geysering from broken pipes. And underneath, there’s the hum of traffic, always there, like the ocean that lives in seashells, like the cosmic whoosh of the expanding universe.

At least that’s what I tried to tell him. I don’t know what I actually said.

Jesse Nathan, from Eggtooth:

There’s a moment — barely — when you see both
ocean and bay from the 280 as it mills north
near Millbrae, the waters flash what they know
of daylight, and you register being a sort of gliding porch
before dunking back under cypress
and their bob and sway, and the press
of eucalyptus and acacia in full dress.

John Steinbeck, of course, from Travels with Charley:

The years crawled back in their holes. It was the Monterey where they used to put a wild bull and a grizzly bear in the ring together, a place of sweet and sentimental violence, and a wise innocence as yet unknown and therefore undirtied by undiapered minds. I printed it once more on my eyes, south, west, and north, and then we hurried away from the permanent and changeless past where my mother is always shooting a wildcat and my father is always burning his name with his love.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

Aging sometimes makes life feel smaller, particularly for people with immutable constraints. For The New York Times, I spent some time with people in senior living communities, many constrained by finances or limited mobility, to write about how they’re traveling and creating new experiences together in VR.

What I’m wondering

I was talking with a friend recently about what we do when the world feels hard, to reset our nervous systems/try to get out from under our own rainclouds. (Anyone else?) Her solutions are physical: go for a walk, take a nap.

A good trick that I come back to is to always be reading a novel. Then, when the day feels heavy, I can get out of my own brain to be in a different plotline for part of the time. If I’m in a conversation that feels strained, or in a moment of vague dread, I can blur the focus and look over at a fictional world for a minute.

This is also the idea behind my intermittent practice of slowly memorizing a poem first thing in the morning, which I wrote about here. Right now, I’m working on memorizing “Just Once” by Anne Sexton. (Thank you Alec for the recommendation.)

So: What do you do to break out of your own doldrums?

What I’m reading

I took a seminar for the first time since college, and reader, I loved it. The class was all about novelist Muriel Spark, taught by Emily Adrian at Great Place Books. (I highly recommend Emily’s Substack to anyone, especially to friends interested in the experience of being a mother.) The class met online for four weeks to discuss a different short Spark novel each time.

I loved this kind of reading: talking through how a book works, in a way that I haven’t done since college; and reading many books by one author in quick succession. Which author have you, or would you, read like that? For me, I think the books have to be sharp and short — which Spark’s writing definitely is. Some favorite lines:

when you realize your boyfriend is lame due to his disinterest in your fabulous older friend:

He was very much absorbed by numerous private anxieties which he was too self-centred to overcome now, when I was presenting him with this splendid apparition, Edwina, an ancient, wrinkled, painted spirit wrapped in luxurious furs… I was suddenly disenchanted with Leslie. It was a feeling that came over me ever more frequently, leading to quarrels in the end. Leslie just sat there and let himself be interviewed, unable to forget himself and his own concerns, with his young face and good health contrasting with Edwina’s dotty shrewdness, her scarlet nails, her bright avid eyes.

seeing the world as a writer:

For a moment I felt like a grey figment, the “I” of a novel whose physical description the author had decided not to set forth.

great way to describe a sanctimonious person:

But in any case I was weary of the sound of Sir Quentin’s name and all the twanging of harps round his throne.

bemoaning the economic extinction of the upper-crust snob:

We are not the same people as we were a quarter of a century ago. We are necessarily different in our ideas. In my view it is an economic phenomenon. We cannot afford to be snobs. Since Lucan’s day, snobs have been greatly emarginated.

Did I mention Spark converted to Catholicism?

As Hildegard knew from her own experience as a stigmatic fraud, blood, once let loose, gets all over the place. It sticks, it flows, it garishly advertises itself or accumulates in dark thick puddles. Once it gets going, there is no stopping blood.

perfect cutting and concise British class description:

We come now to Nicholas Farringdon in his thirty-third year. He was said to be an anarchist. No one at the May of Teck Club took this seriously as he looked quite normal; that is to say, he looked slightly dissipated, like the disappointing son of a good English family that he was. That each of his brothers — two accountants and one dentist — said of him from the time he left Cambridge in the mid 1930s, ‘Nicholas is a bit of a misfit, I’m afraid.’ would not have surprised anyone.

a lesson I could have used in college:

This was a mistake she continued to make in her relations with men, inferring from her own preference for men of books and literature their preference for women of the same business. And it never really occurred to her that literary men, if they like women at all, do not want literary women but girls.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

I talked with dozens of people who have retired about their advice for a Bloomberg Businessweek story:

As ever, I loved these conversations about how people live and how they make sense of their lives. That’s especially true for people who don’t think of themselves as having a story worth sharing. I mostly interview people who have never been interviewed before, which I prefer, in part because the interview often involves a beautiful unfolding of their expertise. Often, after I introduce myself and explain how the interview will work, a subject will tell me, “I’m happy to talk to you, but I don’t really have anything to say. I’m no expert.” And then, over the course of the next half hour or so, they open up and share insightful, self-aware, broadly relatable advice and perspective.1

It’s a pleasure to hear how in a short conversation, someone gains confidence that their experiences matter. We’re all experts on our own lives, and hearing a curious stranger really listen to you, paying attention and asking follow-up questions, can be an immensely validating experience. Same goes for seeing your experience carefully rendered on the written page. Both of those are parts of the point of my job, I think, and are parts of journalism that overlap with therapy and with writing fiction. I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to have that kind of conversation for the rest of my working life, even if someday it’s no longer is possible to make a living through reporting.

However, for now it is possible to make a living as a journalist—and personally, I think freelancing is the most stable way to do it. This winter, my friend and colleague Megan Greenwell and I taught a six-part online class on how to build a freelance career, one that’s intellectually rewarding, that provides more freedom and more financial security than a staff job. We talked through questions like: How do you go from cold-pitching to an ongoing relationship with an editor? How do you budget? How do you find lucrative non-journalism gigs?

The class went so well that we’re offering it again, starting April 15. There are two spots left, so if you’re interested, please join us. (And tell a friend!)

What I’m wondering

I just returned from a wonderful monthlong honeymoon across Southeast Asia. I hadn’t traveled for more than a couple weeks in a decade, and that kind of travel opens you up differently. With enough time in each place, I find it’s possible to step outside of the sightseeing checklist and wander: return to places you liked, sit on a stoop and people-watch, observe daily life without a camera in your hand.

For example: We spent the first week or so in Luang Prabang, the religious capital of Laos. The old city, where we stayed, is dotted with temples and encircled by the Mekong River. Most Lao men are monks at some point in their lives, largely to study (the Lao word for a man who has not served as a monk translates to “unripe”).

Every sunrise, Luang Prabang locals gather for sai bat, or morning alms: They line up along the main temple street and hand rice to the monks as they file past, as a way of earning merit. It’s a striking scene.

But, of course, I was far from the only tourist there. Every day, a few minutes before the sunrise ceremony, busloads of tourists arrive from the big hotels outside of town to join in. Lao handlers set them up with plastic stools and instruct them on how to participate, and vendors sell bags of rice. When the monks process, there’s a parallel line of tourists taking photos, leaning over the rope supposed to keep them back.

The first morning, I was irritated by all the tourists. Can’t you get out of the monks’ faces? Put down your camera and be respectful? It reminded me of a grouchy John Steinbeck line from Travels with Charley: “It might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.” But, of course, I’m one of those tourists, regardless of where I’m standing.

The next morning, I woke up earlier. In the darkness, I sat on the curb and watched as locals prepared for the tourist arrival, sharing thermoses of tea and chatting. I walked around, watching the construction of the artifice, appreciating my fellow tourists as part of the show.

That’s the kind of second-turn that’s possible when you’re traveling for a longer period, I think. If you see the artifice as a production worthy of appreciation itself, then you see it as part of the experience—and artifice is always part of the travel experience, because we’re there. I romanticize a version of travel where you’re a fly on the wall, but observing never just goes one way. Maybe that’s true now more than ever: I grew up thinking of the pinnacle of travel as seeing how people live, unaffected by how I live, but that’s not really possible anymore (if it ever was). Part of the experience is witnessing how we see each other.

There’s a distastefulness to the authenticity trap: to wanting to see teenaged monks collecting alms as their counterparts did 100 years ago, rather than as they are now (taking selfies of each other, buying Cheetos at the corner store, leaning close to watch a soap opera on a phone screen). If you’re seeing people live as their ancestors did a century ago, there’s likely some reenactment for tourists going on. It takes a beat to stop looking for that and remember that there’s so much to notice about how people live right now, regardless of globalized culture.

We also did travel somewhere that was very far afield: the Pam Islands, in Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago, which is four flights and two long boat rides away from Portland. There’s no cell service or wifi, and very limited electricity. We stayed with a family and mostly ate fish that their teenage sons caught. But mostly, we snorkeled, among coral and fish more diverse and vibrant that I knew still existed. (This reef was forty feet from our room.)

It was spectacular. I want to go back.

What I’m reading

On romance:

Norman Rush, Mating (highly recommend this book):

Causing active ongoing pleasure in your mate is something people tend to restrict to the sexual realm or getting attractive food on the table on time, but keeping permanent intimate comedy going is more important than any other one thing.

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, one of the most romantic novels:

How soft her voice is. That there should be such a voice in the whole world, and that I should be the one to hear it, seemed to me then and seems to me now an unfathomable grace.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?:

Maybe I should go shopping — a married person’s version of dating.

From a profile of Maggie Nelson, after publication of The Argonauts:

“He” turns out to be the right word, though for Nelson the one that sounds best is “you.”

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss:

In the end what Sai and Gyan had excelled at was the first touch, so gentle, so infinitely so; they had touched each other as if they might break, and Sai couldn’t forget that.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers (bad title, great book):

Dana is talking about her date the night before and how the guy put a clove in her mouth before kissing her. “What am I, a ham?” she says as we slide past.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m wondering

I try to stay optimistic about the future of journalism and literacy because the alternatives are too depressing. But the decimation of The Washington Post hits really hard. There are so few outlets reporting the news today and it gets harder and harder to imagine what substantive, reported journalism will look like in 20 or 50 years. That, of course, has a direct impact on how we think, how we conceive of the world, and how we relate to people who are different from us. I believe that journalism shapes our imaginative capacity. Less journalism—both the serious stuff, like investigative reporting and international news and obituaries, and the lighter stuff, like book reviews and the styles section—means we live smaller, more isolated lives, both in terms of our self-conception and how we help and relate to others. It’s dire.

I don’t feel very comfortable on a soapbox, but if this also matters to you: Pay for the news you consume. If there’s an outlet that you like, pay for a subscription. Think about what you pay for Spotify or Amazon Prime or Netflix and give yourself the same monthly budget for buying books and magazines that you like.

If nothing else, subscribe to your local NPR station, which has been entirely defunded by the Trump administration and plays a vital role in communities across the country. Or find some journalists writing meaningful local news coverage where you live! Coyote Media is fun in the Bay Area; here’s a list of some others. If you’re looking for interesting local publications, let me know and I will find some where you live.

The New York Times Magazine has launched a new series called “What Were They Thinking?” For each article, the photo editors choose an evocative image from a particular historical moment, and a writer (in this case, me) interviews the people depicted about what was actually going through their minds. For one of the first installments, I interviewed Oksana Baiul, Lu Chen, and Nancy Kerrigan about the 1994 Olympics figure-skating medal ceremony. Kerrigan, who had been attacked by associates of teammate Tonya Harding weeks earlier, was a fan favorite to win; in a controversial ruling, sixteen-year-old Baiul beat her, becoming the first Ukrainian to win a gold medal after the fall of the Soviet Union. Chen, who had been physically disciplined by her coach, had decided to quit after that Olympics. After the scoring, Baiul’s team captain realized they didn’t have the Ukrainian national anthem; she had to speed back to the Olympic village, accompanied by police sirens, to find the CD. But Chen and Kerrigan were told that the delay was because Baiul had cried her makeup off and insisted on reapplying it, which led an impatient Kerrigan to complain on a hot mic, sullying her reputation as America’s sweetheart.

Most of the details didn’t make it into the short “What Were They Thinking?” piece, but it was so fun to talk to the Olympians about that surreal, specific moment in their lives.

It made me curious: What’s a particular photo that you’d want to hear about in this way, from all parties involved? (Could be a personal photo or a famous one!)

What (else) I’m writing

Somehow, my other two stories to share this month are also about athletes who are also teen/preteen girls.

For Esses Magazine, a beautiful publication about Formula 1 and motorsports, I wrote a profile of Alba Larsen, a teenager from Denmark who is maintaining an unreal balance: driving race cars at 150 mph in competitions across the world, while trying to find time to make up tenth grade and learn to drive her family’s station wagon so she can get her driver’s license. It was so fun to go hang out with Larsen in Las Vegas before the Grand Prix, to work alongside photographer Cassidy Ariaza, and to write for Joey Bien-Kahn, who I came up with at WIRED a decade ago. (Work with your friends! And subscribe to magazines in print!)

To continue my youth sports beat, I spent some time with preteens who are really, really into basketball for The New York Times. Turns out, youth sports looks very different from the days of twice-a-week afterschool soccer practice. (During which I would silently protest by sitting down and making daisy chains. Sometimes, you don’t learn to like exercise until you’re old.)

What I’m reading

Every so often, I read a book so good that I immediately try to recommend it to everyone. That’s how I felt after finishing The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. I think it’s the most precisely written fiction I’ve ever read: every line is polished to be exactly what it should be. And it’s plotty, a propulsive story too. So much to say about it. Shirley! Here are some particularly great lines:

Such a great character study, just a perfect send-up of when an older person bemoans and delights in how the world has gone to shit:

Despite angina, the father had fast, definite gestures—taking up his water glass with a sort of efficiency and setting it down with a hard little snap. Pressing a napkin quickly to his sculpted mouth, not to waste time. Snap snap, snap snap snap. He might have been at a desk rather than a dining-table. He talked with abrupt velocity, also, and had already reached the end of the world.

“Your generation will be the one to feel it. Some form of social structure existed until now. Say what you like about it. Now we’re at the end of all that. You’ll be the ones to bear the brunt.”

With rapid satisfaction he pointed out, to Ted and the girls, their almost culpable bad luck. In the same way, arrivals at a rainy resort will be told, “We’ve had fine weather until today.”

Some delightful lines:

A little curled chrysanthemum of a dog was in heaven at her approach.

The two girls walked home hand-in-hand, not so much lovers as like an elderly couple, grave with information and responsibility.

The dove-colored guide had laid her rod on a table and was showing with her hands, like an artist.

More wonderful character studies:

Major Ingot was thickly built, though in no martial way, having a citified paunch and large pinkish jowl. Within the restaurant doorway he cut the oval sweep of a watermelon.

Along the back of the front seat his heavy, extended arm was energized yet not quite human, like a turgid fire-house. His name was Captain Girling.

On big feelings:

She said “Yes?” as if accosted by a stranger. But trembled in the raincoat with her whole body so that she felt the separate stuffs of her clothes, and her anatomy delicately beating within.

It was now well into the afternoon. Caro was taking the Underground. Ted went to the ticket booth with her. “Good-bye.” They kissed. He watched her red coat pass the barrier, move with the Down escalator, gliding, diminishing, descending: a rush-hour Eurydice. At the last moment she looked back, knowing he would be there.

(A “rush-hour Eurydice”! Like one of the best teases of the 20th century, delivered by my first crush: “You have wished yourself a Scarsdale Galahad / the breakfast-eating, Brooks-brothers type.”)

Great example of how to set a scene to match the plot (trigger warning of waiting on a swampy NYC subway platform in August):

Following the storm, a sickly warmth; a humid sun pearling a film of gasoline on the steaming street. Rain-water swirling in sluggish gutters, redepositing rubbish.

On end-of-life:

Like a ball lobbed to a great height, he made his last few diminishing bounces.

Just a wonderful big gestural opening, pinpointing a certain time and certain class:

Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed, or in sheer nylon to which an old cardigan had been added for warmth, girls were pushing back bedclothes and groping for slippers. They were tying the cords of dressing-gowns and pulling pins from their hair, they were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. Those who shared were nudging each other out of the way and saying, “And it’s only Tuesday.” Those who lived alone were moaning and switching on radio or television. Some said prayers; one sang.

It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present, or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun. The weekends washing hair and underwear, and going in despondent pairs to the pictures. For some, who could not have done otherwise, it was their fate, decreed by Mum, Dad, and a lack of funds or gumption. Others had come from the ends of the earth to do it—had arrived from Auckland or Karachi or Jo’burg, having saved for years to do just this, having wrung or cajoled the wherewithal out of tear-stained parents. Not all were very young, but all, or nearly all, wished for a new dress, a boyfriend, and eventual domesticity. No two, however, were identical: which was the victory of nature over conditioning, advertising, and the behavioural sciences—no triumph, but an achievement against the odds.

Among the awakening women, that New Year, was Caroline Bell.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

A quick note

I’m teaching a workshop on how to build a freelance career with my friend (and colleague) Megan Greenwell. For years, Megan and I have talked about all the things we wish we knew when we were starting our freelance careers. Several months ago, we started talking about whether we could help others with the same questions. The result is FLYING SOLO, a six-week intensive for experienced journalists looking to build or strengthen their freelance careers. We’ll talk about how to make working for yourself a very good job: how to pitch effectively, find colleagues, be a good boss to yourself, and balance making money with what you want to write. We’ll have editors and other freelancers as guest speakers, and even our accountant. (Shoutout to Dave.) It’ll be fun and help you have the career you want. Journalists, please join us!

What I’m writing

For The New York Times Magazine’s last issue of the year, I got to write about some of the larger-than-life people who passed away in 2025 through objects that defined them: the recliner where Brian Wilson quieted his anxiety; the cross that Ozzy Osbourne’s dad, a welder working the night shift, made for him; how Kitty Dukakis defied convention through her wedding dress and her marriage. It was a privilege to talk to their loved ones and get to know them.

I talked to teens a couple times for WIRED: about how Australian teen influencers are planning to deal with the national social media ban and about how teenagers in the U.S. think about working in tech.

I also wrote for a small magazine I love—Mildew Magazine, which is all about secondhand fashion—about Onerva Luoma, a Finnish artist who created lending libraries for beautiful hand-painted clothes at library branches across Helsinki.

What I’m wondering

Writing about who someone was through an object they loved and used was such an interesting reporting exercise. For each subject, I talked to their loved ones to get a sense of who they were, beyond their famous persona, and then we talked about which beloved objects would be a way to communicate that story.

For example, Jerry Weiss, a longtime friend of Brian Wilson, told me about the piano in Brian’s house and his prominently placed platinum albums and awards. But after we talked for a while about how he pictured Brian and why he admired him, Jerry mentioned Brian’s recliner. We talked about how Brian urgently wanted to share his music and be part of a collective experience, but also needed to feel like he was at a secure remove. The recliner provided that for him, both when he was performing to sold-out crowds across the world and when his young kids and dogs were running around his home in L.A. For one of our great geniuses, the recliner was a way to feel the radical power of how his music moved people without losing control of his sense of reality.

That kind of conversation is why I love my job: talking to people about what matters to them, taking their perspectives seriously, and finding a narrative within what they’re saying that resonates with some broader thought about what it means to experience being alive.

So: What object do you think could explain you in this way? What would get at some truth about how you live or who you are?

What I’m reading

Some of my favorite descriptive writing on kids:

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse:

James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy.

Shirley Hazzard, The Evening of the Holiday:

Outside, at the table next to theirs, a young couple sat with their little boy, who was eating an ice cream cone aloud.

Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?:1

In some ways my childhood consisted of a kind of wasting away, a wandering dreamily through woods and illegally in the concrete sewer pipes, crawling, or pleasantly alone in the house (everyone gone for an hour!) chewing the salt out of paper bits, or hiding under quilts in the afternoon to form a new place that wasn’t here, a new space that had never existed before on the bed, like a rehearsal for love.

Kate Riley, Ruth:

Ruth knew no greater joy than discovering a present at her place at the breakfast table. Like all good and mysterious things, presents grew in the dark and appeared in the morning, evidence that the world conspired toward delight.

On her sixth birthday she woke before dawn and stood in the door of the living room, paralyzed with happiness at the silhouette of the items on the table. She got back in bed and prayed to God: If she went to Heaven, might she be six years old forever?

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

I haven’t published anything since my last newsletter. But I realized: today marks my five-year anniversary of freelancing. (Yes, I have a recurring calendar event of when I got laid off.) Other journalists and aspiring journalists often reach out to me with questions, so I thought I’d write about it here. This is probably most interesting if you’re also a journalist, but I hope some of it is more broadly applicable, too.

First, freelancing is the best job I’ve ever had. (I’ve now had this job longer than any of my previous jobs.) I think this is largely because you can bet on yourself. (That’s a lesson from the Elise Craig School of Journalism.) In my previous jobs, I ran into a wall of what people thought that I could do. For example, I really wanted to write a feature. I had edited features, and I had written shorter articles. But I couldn’t get editors at the publications where I worked to greenlight a feature by me, because I hadn’t yet demonstrated that I could do it. They saw me for what I had already done, not what I was confident I could do.

As a freelancer, I am my own boss, which means that I can just… decide that I’m a person who is allowed to write a feature! I started describing myself that way to editors. And it worked.

I still like editing and producing too, which leads me to another aspect of what I like about freelancing: I get to do a wide variety of types of work. Some of the stories/projects I’ve made this year: a how-to guide for kids who want to learn how to mime, an obituary for an eccentric British socialite who raised wild animals, a feature about teenagers and happiness, an essay about going skydiving with octogenarians, a live storytelling event featuring designers at Stanford, an article about clothing lending libraries for a zine, a report on psychedelic research, analysis about how Trump’s administration is hurting older Americans, an interactive piece about sports gambling, a personal essay about memorizing poems, a workshop for high school students about how to interview… This is a weird and varied list! I would never be able to do this range of assignments at a staff job.

Before I started freelancing, I always imagined it as a blank expanse: that every morning, I’d wake up and think, how can I make money writing today? In my experience, freelancing doesn’t have to be like that. Early on in freelancing, I had one half-time gig (reporting for the podcast “70 Over 70”) and one very steady gig (reporting for The New York Times for Kids). That meant something like 75 percent of my work was planned out far in advance. As I continued freelancing, and got more confident in my ability to pitch stories, I shifted that balance towards more high-risk, high-reward big swings.

Much of that big-swing pitching is made possible by non-journalistic work. Every freelancer I know does some of this work, whether that’s teaching, writing case studies, ghostwriting, editing blog posts for a company, writing sponsored content for brands… I really wish it was possible to make a good living while just writing journalism, but I don’t think that exists right now.

Sometimes thinking about that makes me bitter and discouraged. (If you like reading or listening to journalism, you should pay to subscribe to it.) But I also remember how any job contains some work that you love to do (if you’re lucky) and some work that’s just part of the job description. As my own boss, the balance is clearer.

Sometimes, it helps to think of each assignment as landing at a different point on a scattergraph. The well-paying work that doesn’t light me up subsidizes the long-term projects I love that don’t pay very well.

People often ask if freelancing is lonely. Sometimes, yeah. There are parts of working in an office that I really miss! But over the past five years, I’ve built my own community of colleagues: fellow writers (mostly freelancers), many of whom I talk to every week. They’re friends whose work I admire, and they’re invaluable both for figuring out what to do when an editor ghosts me and for shooting the shit. Having coworkers is really important. It’s cool when you can make sure they’re people you really like.

A community is also enormously important when it comes to finding work. Which can be hard, as a freelancer! I’ve certainly had dry spells, when I start to panic because I don’t have much work lined up. That’s when I turn to my coworker friends and to a broader community of people I’ve worked with before. My coworkers and I will often recommend each other for assignments—when something isn’t right for me but seems interesting, when my plate is too full. Because I worked in newsrooms for years before I started freelancing, and because I maintain relationships with editors that I like, I can also reach out to them when work is slow. I can’t really imagine freelancing before I had some on-staff experience, both because it introduced me to people and because learning how an editor’s job works means that I can make their job easier, which makes them more likely to assign me more work.

I don’t think I’ll always freelance. If a perfect staff job appears, I’ll apply! (Feel free to send them my way.) But right now, freelancing feels more stable than a staff job, where I’d be very vulnerable to the vicissitudes of a particular publication and the whims of its owner/leadership. (Right now, when one publication shuts down, I lose a portion of my income, but I never lose my job.) I feel more in control when I’m in charge of my own work.

I didn’t choose to freelance. I’m generally cautious and I wouldn’t have taken this risk of my own volition. But I’m so glad it happened.

If you read this far, thank you! And if this is interesting to you, let me know—I’ve been thinking about creating more resources for those who are interested in going freelance.

What I’m wondering

How do you think about risk in your own life? When did a risk pay off for you (or turn out to be a mistake)?

Also, do you like the format of this newsletter? Links to writing, questions, quotes? Specifically, do you like the questions?

What I’m reading

On inheritance:

Rachel Kushner, Creation Lake:

Watching Lucien work the flippers, hold the machine on either side of its narrow end in order to guide the ball and control the game, it seemed to me that this posture, of man and machine, recalled some ancient form: a man behind the box that he steers—a plow, perhaps, or cart. Boys playing pinball in pantomime of an old world where men drove plows over fields, steered carts that were filled with hay or manure.

Tracy K. Smith, To Free the Captives:

We repeat. Our voices, our features, our names. The turn of a foot. The way the heel of a hand cradles a piece of bread. My uncle gives me my father, just as my father carried his mother forward to me. She softened something in his throat, made his voice theirs, something they shared.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities:

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says—such as “wolf,” “sister,” “hidden treasure,” “battle,” “scabies,” “lovers”—the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

For WIRED’s back-to-school issue, I talked to teenagers about how they actually use AI and what they think of it.

In December, it will become illegal for anyone under 16 years old to have a social media account in Australia. Also for WIRED, I talked to teenagers about what they make of the law and whether they think it’ll work.

Lady Sarah Aspinall had a genuinely thrilling life: Born into British aristocracy, she married a race car driver and traveled around the world observing the very dangerous, often fatal early days of F1. After her husband died when his car exploded on the track, she raised two sons by modeling through the Swinging Sixties (she shared an apartment with Twiggy at one point), and then was courted by her second husband, a gambler who used his winnings to buy lions, tigers, and bears from the pet’s department at Harrod’s. They raised the exotic animals in their London townhouse until neighbors started to complain about the screaming of baby tigers and domesticated bears alarming their dogs; then they moved to a country estate and expanded their family (antelope, rhinos, elephants, snow leopards…) At one point, she sold her family jewels so that they could continue buying kumquats and starfruit for the gorillas.

I got to write an obit for Lady Sarah for The Wall Street Journal, which was such a fun assignment.

What I’m wondering

Learning and writing about Lady Sarah Aspinall made me curious: What makes for a big life? What lives do you consider to be “big”? Would you want that kind of life? (Do you have it?)

What I’m reading

On aging:

Susan Burton’s profile of Terry Gross in The New York Times Magazine:

Terry Gross was serene. “I don’t know if it’s a function of age or temperament,” she said, “but I’m no longer seeking those major exclamatory notes of pleasure. I want a life that has pleasure contained within it.”

Christine Smallwood, The Life of the Mind:

The point, she thought, was that Rachel was her mother’s pet, and allowed her mother an existential recursion. Everyone had their way of denying linearity. Men left their wives for younger women; women acquired mentees. If you wanted to fool yourself that something wasn’t ending, you just had to go out and start something that was pretty much the same.

“Litany,” by Helen Dunmore (hard to excerpt, read the full poem):

for the length of time it takes a wound to heal,
for the strange pity you feel
when told off by the blank sure faces
of the young who own and know everything

“Tell Us a Story, Grandma,” by Natalie Wise:

I wonder which ones I will remember:
That I loved my boyfriend’s best friend?
That I rode the lonely train to Boston?
That I could never hold myself together?
Maybe I should just tell them
Milk was $2.89 a gallon and bread was $3.29
And an iPhone was $200
In 2010, when I was 22.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

As humans, we’re constantly generating patterns: in the sequence of our genes, the beating of our hearts, the mannerisms we use to express ourselves. AI’s superpower is to recognize and interpret patterns, which means it’s able to perceive us in ways that are startling and somewhat unbelievable. I talked to scientists, inventors, and artists about how AI sees us, for The New York Times Magazine.

I got to talk to some other pros for The New York Times for Kids: people ages 6-15 who are absolutely experts about the most fun local things to do in the summer.

One more: Yoshi’s is a Bay Area institution, for live jazz and for community. It was a privilege to get to write an obituary about Kaz Kajimura, a tireless force behind the club, for The Wall Street Journal.

What I’m wondering

Portland is so lush and beautiful right now: the pale yellow of wild roses, the deep red-brown of shaded redwoods, the purple-black of marionberries. I just visited friends in Vermont, which is just as vibrant with its own summer colors. So: What are the summer colors where you are?

What I’m reading

The brilliant Diana Saverin, one of my favorite writers and friends, started a newsletter, where she’s writing about wilderness and motherhood and identity. Her first missive is from a backpacking trip through Alaskan tundra and snowfields with her 15-month-old toddler, while pregnant. She’s incredible and you should read it.

Alaskatarian

Toddlers in the Backcountry, Essays, Rhubarb

Hi, readers…

Read more

a year ago · 15 likes · 5 comments · Diana Saverin

On travel:

Elif Batuman with one of the great depictions of a funny girl prohibitively stuck in her own brain, one of the best genres (The Idiot):

Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters come up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them for a time, even though you might never see them again for the whole rest of the book. I would rather have talked to Ivan, the love interest, but somehow I didn’t get to decide. At the same time, I also felt that these superabundant personages weren’t irrelevant at all, but somehow the opposite, and that when Ivan had told me to make friends with the other kids, he had been telling me something important about the world, about how the fateful character in your life wasn’t the one who buried you in a rock, but the one who led you out to more people.

Lorrie Moore, master of description (Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?)

It is hard, galumphing along a sea of French women who have exquisite shoes and haircuts, overbites unruined by orthodontia, faces unbedecked by optometry, a great, nearsighted, chomping faith in their own beauty that makes them perhaps seem prettier than they are. It is hard to find a place for yourself in a city like this.

An astute, if grumpy, observation from this newsletter’s namesake, Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck:

It might have been the American tendency in travel. One goes, not so much to see but to tell afterward.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

For The Atlantic, I wrote about how the Trump administration is making life worse for aging Americans—and why it’s bad news for everyone who’s getting older, including seniors with financial security and those of us who aren’t seniors yet.

I’ve read the reports from experts about how teenagers today are experiencing dating, romance, intimacy, and connection way less. As always, I was curious about what teenagers themselves thought and experienced. So I asked them (for Vox).

Are you in Portland? Are you looking to feel righteous anger? Do you like books? Want to hear more funny stories about teaching journalism to teenagers in New Jersey dorms?

If yes, come to Powell’s on June 30 as I interview Megan Greenwell, my friend, colleague, and summer camp roommate, about her brilliant new book Bad Company. The book is so well-done: enraging, compelling, and diligent. I generally don’t read nonfiction and I could only put it down to text Megan an ongoing series of exclamation points.

What I’m wondering

I recently spent a week in Berlin, exploring the city with a close friend. I was struck by how much the history of the 20th century feels present and constant there: in the stolpersteine stones before hotels and restaurants, in the concrete windowless bunkers repurposed to house techno clubs and art collections, in the crawling greenery that reclaims vast GDR apartment blocks. It’s present in conversations there, too: I talked to my German counterparts about how they grew up with a vivid sense of history, of lessons learned from what their country perpetuated in the last century.

It made me consider how I understood history—and my role in it—as a kid, and how I think about it now. I’d be curious to hear how you think about that for yourself.

What I’m reading

on our other selves and choice:

Lucy Grealy, in a letter to Ann Patchett (Truth & Beauty):

Sometimes I feel real calm and wise and accepting and other times I’m totally on edge. When I wear the guise of alienated poet I do okay; everything seems if not actually good, at least placable. When I try and wear the guise of a woman, it’s a disaster.

Justin Taylor, from Reboot:

I was going to do it—for the money, sure, but more than that, because I was lonely and bored and adrift in inclement middle age, and I wanted to spend time with my hot famous friends who had known me and pretended on TV to be my family back when I was hot and famous, too.

Marilyn Monroe, in her last interview:

When you’re famous, you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does. You’re always running into people’s unconscious.

Sheila Heti in an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

When I was younger, I was obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t live every life—it seemed so unfair to be born only to be forced to live one narrow life. It seemed like such a stupid waste of existence, to only exist as a single person. My fears about not experiencing motherhood—and therefore not being able to write from that position—were as much about feeling that I needed to experience a kaleidoscope of human realities to know what life is, and therefore to write about it.

But the older I get, the more I feel like it’s interesting and significant that we only get to be this one person. Life seems more tragic, and poignant, and sad, and exhilarating, and odd this way. I now feel like the limitation of life is the essence of a human life. It’s not a bug in the program that we’re stuck being ourselves.

Lawrence Wright, from God Save Texas:

I drove back to Austin, under a Turneresque sunset with a gibbous moon rising from a bank of pink clouds. A herd of Black Angus cattle moved like shadows in the places where the buffalo once grazed. I thought about how unintentional most of life is. Part of me had always wanted to leave Texas, but I had never actually gone. Sometimes we are summoned by work or romance to move to another existence, and for me those moments where there is no reasonable alternative to departure have always been joyful, full of a sense of adventure and reinvention. Staying is also a decision, but it feels more like inertia or insecurity. Most of the time I live in a state of vague discontent, tempted by the vision of another life but unwilling to let go of the friends and daily habits that fill my time. When I am in other states or countries, I’m always aware of being in exile from my own culture, with all its outsized liabilities. I wish I lived in the mountains of Montana or on the Spanish Mediterranean. I wish I had a condo in a high-rise overlooking Central Park, with a piano by the window. These thoughts have been at play in my imagination for decades. Now here I was, on a darkening highway in Texas, with so much more road behind me than what lay before.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines from my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

Last month, I wrote about how teenagers are finding hope and happiness. The related story publishes online today: recommendations from teenagers across the U.S. about how to find happiness. (Also, in print tomorrow!)

It was a genuine delight to talk to and learn from teenagers for this story (including many that didn’t make it into the final version! I wish I got to include them all!). The conversations reminded me of ways that we cultivate happiness in spite of so much heaviness around us. It also reminded me of how intense it feels to be a teenager. Do you remember the potency of those emotions? I remember feeling with such absolute certainty: disappointment felt like despair, excitement felt like elation.

What I’m wondering

Which leads me to ask: When in your life have you felt most intensely? What has made you feel that way? I know adolescence is a big one, and I’m curious about that. I’m also curious about the other experiences and settings that have made you feel exceptionally strongly. (For example, Emily Adrian is writing beautifully right now about the intensity of the first weeks after her daughter’s birth.)

What I’m reading

on one of the most intense feelings, longing:

White Girls, by Hilton Als:

I looked at physical love like an anorexic looking at food: I did not understand how to consume it while I wanted nothing more than to consume it. Like everyone else, I required love’s nutrients—its touch—but didn’t that spoil love? To put one’s body in it? To not claim it—to not grab it by the short of the hair, or by its wit—was, to this Simone Weil of the ghetto at least, the greater good: why could we not rise up out of the world of bodies? Rise up and be holy, holy, holy, in the oneness of love.

More Curious, by Sean Wilsey:

I’ve always wanted to be good and free; a statement so true it makes me cringe (sort of the embarrassing bumper sticker on the car of my soul).

The History of Love, Nicole Krauss:

After all, who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness?

Martyr!, by Kaveh Akbar:

We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves of miracles.

From “The Boy’s School, or the News from Spain,” by Joan Wickersham:

There are children who are too old to be children. It stops being a problem when they get older—they grow into themselves—but before that happens it’s perpetually awkward. For you it was a mix of judgment and wistfulness. You thought all this stuff was stupid, but you also had no idea how to get it, and you wanted it.

Durga Chew-Bose on “Call Me By Your Name”:

I am reminded of a missive Vita Sackville-West sent Virginia Woolf in 1926, anticipating their reunion. “How pleased I shall be,” wrote Sackville-West, “to sit on your floor again.” To sit on your floor again. The plainest, most anticipant expression of longing. A wish that requires so little; insisting on nearness without design.

Also, All of “Nostos” by Louise Glück.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

For National Geographic’s special issue about 33 “global changemakers,” I wrote about someone I really admire: Jennifer Uchendu, a Nigerian climate activist who made it to big conferences like COP only to realize that world leaders didn’t really want to be challenged by the experiences of young Africans, who are disproportionately affected by climate catastrophe. So Uchendu made the space she needed: a network of young Africans taking action and processing their grief and anger.

The world feels overwhelmingly catastrophic right now, and feeling helpless makes it worse. Uchendu realized that those in power weren’t interested in the challenging reality she was experiencing, but instead of throwing up her hands, she rolled up her sleeves and did something. Her organization, which supports young activists across West Africa, brings their voices together so that they’re impossible for global leaders to ignore. More importantly, it validates their experiences and helps them figure out how to build meaningful lives in a deeply challenging time.

Uchendu is my age, but the energy that she fosters among young people is a big part of why I like interviewing and writing about teenagers. They are stepping into an undeniably dark, challenging world, and it can feel overwhelming to figure out how to imagine their futures. Yesterday, I talked to an American high school senior who was born into the 2008 financial crisis, didn’t attend much of middle school in-person because of the pandemic, and is now trying to figure out whether government loans will exist for her to attend college. I spent much of last fall talking to teenagers like sixteen-year-old Ayesha, whose skin burns and whose hair falls out because of the pollution in Dhaka, Bangladesh; she feels that she has no option but to leave her home country and grapples with how to imagine that future.

Most writing that I read about Ayesha’s generation underlines the hopelessness of their situations. And yes, they feel overwhelmed and disillusioned and scared, with good reason! But they are also indefatigably teenagers. In conversation, the joy and wonder and excitement and weirdness of adolescence comes through. They love coordinating outfits together and talking on the phone with their friends for hours until one of them falls asleep. They want to tell me what they’re learning about immortal jellyfish, about light rail, about how to make good crepes. They strategize about how to run for class president and organize protests at school and advise their friends on how to act nonchalant but interested in a crush. They see what’s going on in the big picture, just like we do, but they’re mostly focused on improving the life and the world that they’re in. The teens I’m talking to may be open-eyed about the bleak world they’re stepping into, but they’re optimistic about themselves.

All this to say, maybe the kids are all right. And maybe all of us should put on a live jellyfish cam1, call our senators2, and share something funny in the group chat3. Don’t be daunted into retreat. Do something about it and remember that it’s good to be here.

I often talk to journalists interested in freelancing about what it’s like and how I make it work for me. It feels like a good practice to have these conversations, in large part because I’ve mostly figured out how to freelance (and have my current career) by talking with people a few steps ahead of me.

Olivia Rockeman reached out to me last year as she considered leaving her job at Bloomberg Businessweek to start freelancing. I was glad to get to talk to her again a few weeks ago about what freelancing actually looks like for me, and why I think it can work well.

If you’re interested, the link is below. (I also have a FAQ about freelancing on my website.) And if you’re someone who is considering freelancing, or would want to hear more about this, what would you be curious to learn? I’ve been thinking about putting together some more resources.

Also, if you’re a Yale student and want to know about freelancing, I’m giving a lunchtime talk on April 4. Free food and advice! RSVP here.

Hustle Culture

Writing Practice #1: Charley Locke

Hello and welcome to the first installment of Writing Practice, an interview series about the interplay between embracing creativity and earning a living…

Read more

2 years ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Olivia Rockeman

Very much not my work, but something I’m proud of: Kwaneta Harris is an incarcerated journalist who just published an excellent essay on “This American Life.” She works with Empowerment Avenue, an organization that I volunteer with, which pairs incarcerated writers with editors/journalists who can help them publish their work and get paid for it. I’m proud to volunteer at an organization that helps talented journalists like her share their stories to a wide audience.

What I’m wondering

For a broader project I’m working on: What’s a small thing that makes you happy? (Buttered popcorn at the movies? Scratching a dog’s belly? Successfully executing a somersault in the pool?)

What I’m reading

I have found myself reading both Anna Karenina and Ulysses in book clubs with friends, which is both great and consuming. But as our world is increasingly run and ruined by those with terrible wealth, here are some commonplace book lines that felt salient:

From a Joel Lovell profile of George Saunders:

“I saw the particular way America creeps up on you if you don’t have anything,” he told me. “It’s never rude. It’s just, Yes, you do have to work 14 hours. And yes, you do have to ride the bus home. You’re now the father of two and you will work in that cubicle or you will be dishonored. Suddenly the universe was laden with moral import, and I could intensely feel the limits of my own power. We didn’t have the money, and I could see that in order for me to get this much money, I would have to work for this many more years. It was all laid out in front of me, and suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort—and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was an erosion of grace.”

I can’t recommend Mating by Norman Rush highly enough:

She definitely looked rich, which made me not sisterly towards her. I have a vulgar marxist reaction to the rich, which is part of me. Not that I’m a marxist of any kind. I would have made a wonderful marxist if I’d been born into it, probably, which is the only way it could have stuck. Too bad for marxism. I feel towards marxists the way you feel toward Greek Orthodox people when New Year’s Eve comes and they get to go to this fantasy mass with basso priests droning, candles flaring, gold leaf all over. If only you could believe it.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers:

It’s impossible not to feel that I could write better with just a little more space and light. I wish my own room of my own wasn’t so claustrophobic.

Hernan Diaz (author of In the Distance, which I loved, and Trust, which I liked and which won the Pulitzer), talking about how wealth as a prerequisite in American fiction:

In American fiction, money has already been made. It’s a past-participle, not a gerund.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send this newsletter every month or two, covering what I’m writing, what I’m reading (including lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. The questions are genuine; write back if you’d like.

What I’m writing

This month, I wrote a Letter of Recommendation for The New York Times Magazine about my one cool trick to break free of my phone: memorizing poems first-thing in the morning.

I started memorizing poems early in the pandemic, out of desperation, because I couldn’t focus on anything. I’d wake up to a monotonous dread; when I tried to read a novel or watch a movie, I’d be drawn back to my phone’s pinging litany instead. Repeating lines from poems to myself let me borrow perspectives that seemed brighter and sharper: the tender silliness of Paige Lewis, a playful confidence from Naomi Shihab Nye, an ambling grace from Jesse Nathan, the unshakable conviction of Adrienne Rich. For a moment, I could step into the version of myself who saw the world that way.

In the five years since, slowly memorizing poems has changed how I think. It changes the background noise in my mind, where my thoughts go when I’m between work calls or washing my hands or waiting at a stoplight. When I look at my phone first-thing in the morning, for the rest of the day, my mind defaults to a scroll of notifications: What demands my attention? What’s next? When I groggily write out lines of a poem, then instead of defaulting to stress, my idle mind moves towards a precise, generous beauty.

Which makes me wonder: What’s your one cool trick? (A way to preserve your sanity right now, or the best way to preserve avocados? The trick for jet lag, or the right way to fold a fitted sheet?)

Last fall, Wildsam sent me to the coastal California redwoods for their latest guidebook. The books are really beautiful, and I love these assignments: a chance to get to know gorgeous places through the locals that call them home.

For The New York Times for Kids, I talked to kids all over about their dreams.

And in the most off-brand assignment possible, I wrote about why (and how) so many Americans gamble on sports, for Bloomberg Businessweek. I was also interviewed by an incredulous host on Bloomberg Adria TV about why American men gamble on the NFL, but I’m pretty sure that only aired in Croatia. (an unbelievable Mad Libs of a sentence)

What I’m reading

As I wrote about in that Letter of Recommendation, when the world feels dystopian and uncertain—like in the early days of the pandemic; like now, with American democracy teetering on the edge—I find it really hard to focus enough to read novels. My attention drifts too fast. That’s how I started memorizing poems, so I figured I’d send some lines from poems I’ve loved/memorized at some point.

“When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows,” Paige Lewis:

We bring the shadow game home
and (this is my favorite part) when we
stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled
my husband grips his own wrist

“The City Limits,” A.R. Ammons:

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

“Proof,” Tiana Clark:

I think it’s important to implicate
the self. The knife shouldn’t exit the cake clean.
There is still some residue, some proof of puncture,
some scars you graze to remember the risk.

“Art,” Erika Jo Brown:

Not many passions take your pants off—
painting with oils, reading in the afternoon,
other people’s bodies. I want to really
say something here. I want to be clear.

“From the Beginning,” Jesse Nathan:

Of all the forms of freedom
I have and have not felt, this—
this tripping through the cords
of someone else’s beauty—
is a gift as old as earth,
whirled in sunlight.

“The Art of Disappearing,” Naomi Shihab Nye (thanks to Sanjena, who introduced me to this poem by reciting it to me on a nighttime walk along the seawall in Mumbai):

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

Are there any lines from a poem that stay in your mind? Lines that are helping you make sense of the world right now, or your role in it?

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m writing, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), and what I’m wondering. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine.

Where I’m living

Portland in December: very dark, very gray! I’m making it through the weeks of little light largely by reading, going to the sauna, and escaping to the sunshine (see above and below). Glad to be on the other side of the solstice.

What I’m writing

I jumped out of an airplane with some risk-loving skydivers in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. As someone who hates rollercoasters and heights, I still can’t believe I did this. Read more about the septuagenarians who jump out of planes together thousands of times in NYT Well. They’re wonderful and worth emulating, no matter your risk tolerance.

I also wrote a first-person account of the reporting experience for NYT Insider, which you can read here.

Speaking of airplanes, I got to work on a very fun, very magazine-y package that Bloomberg Businessweek did on the state of air travel in 2024. I talked to the experts (disgruntled TSA employees, longtime flight attendants, kids who fly constantly).

What I’m reading

On reading—

Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small:

Beautiful things do violence to us, their viewers, by assaulting our strident sense of centrality.

Lily King, Writers & Lovers:

If I could write something as good as right there, right where that belt cinches her pinafore. It’s hard to pull my eyes from it. I don’t know why it’s so moving to me, and I could never explain. There’s a madness to beauty when you stumble on it like that.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina:

Anna read attentively but there was no pleasure in reading, no pleasure in entering into other people’s lives and adventures. She was too eager to live herself.

Adrienne Rich in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics:

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to work one choice and one choice only?

Tracy K. Smith on reading Lucille Clifton’s poetry manuscripts, from To Free to Captives: A Plea for the American Soul:

The life force rising like breath off paper pages. The dark smudge of oil where a thumb once lingered. The moisture droplets—water? tea? tears?—smudging a column of words so that the ink is burbled, blurred. Pages of text written in such haste that there was no time to lift up the pen, no attempt to distinguish one word from another. It is intimate. Enrapturing. An encounter in which you are allowed almost to brush knees under the table with the work’s maker. It makes you feel large, as if you, too, are held in a reciprocal regard. And also small, a mite upon the massive page of time.

And a Lucille Clifton classic to usher us into the new year:

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twenty-six and thirty-six
even thirty-six but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)

What I’m wondering

When do you feel nervous? Why? What do you do to dispel the nerves?

And as always, what should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What questions do you think should be reported out?

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

What did you care about when you were a teenager? What felt really urgent?

When you’re a teen, everything can feel like a crisis. (Seriously. Do you remember how exhausting and exhilarating that time was? I have never again since felt the particular, crushing intensity of learning that I was the only one not invited to [redacted]’s sleepover birthday party or of waiting for [redacted] to text me back. Not to mention the fraught experience of getting bangs.)

But many young people today are actually living through climate emergency. Across the world, the climate crisis won’t take place in a hazy, theoretical future; it’s happening now, at the same time, for teens, as nerve-racking first crushes and door-slamming fights with parents and life-defining college admissions exams. It frames all the other wonderful, terrible moments of growing up. When wildfires destroy your home, or heat waves make groceries unaffordable, or air pollution makes your skin burn when you step outside, climate change becomes a constant, the lens through which you see the world. 

Yet growing up is ungainly and all-consuming, even in the midst of climate disaster. Climate catastrophe disrupts adolescence in a million small, devastating ways: It prevents young people from hanging out with their friends, from gaining independence, from defining themselves as individuals with their own interests and ideas. And it forces them to grapple with how climate change will reshape and restrict their futures.

For The New York Times Magazine, I talked to teenagers in affected regions across the globe about trying to figure out who they want to be while reckoning with the world they’ll inherit. They’re young enough to remember a more hospitable world, but are clear-eyed enough to suspect that they’re too late to preserve it. 

Read it online today and a longer version in print on Sunday.

My conversations with these teenagers have made me think differently about the climate crisis. They don’t have the luxury of turning away from it when they get overwhelmed, like most Americans do. Climate change casts a shadow over everything: Both their present, as they go through the pains and triumphs of growing up, and their future, as they plan with the knowledge of how much worse climate will get in their lifetimes.

A few of the teens I talked to (including some details that didn’t make it into the story, because what else is my newsletter for than my cut darlings):

“I feel like I was born in the wrong generation,” Ayesha Ali, a bubbly sixteen-year-old in Dhaka, Bangladesh, told me. “If I had been born before, like even in the early 2000s, then I would have a chance to enjoy my country, but now I feel like my country is the worst.” Ayesha’s long hair has started to fall out, which she believes is due to air pollution; because of the blazing sun and dense particulates in Dhaka, she gets painful acne when she goes outside, which makes her feel really self-conscious. When she gets together with her friends, they mostly talk about their climate-caused aches and pains, including debilitating headaches and insomnia. She wishes they could talk about gossip and fantasy novels instead.

Sara Saumanaia, 14, is from Tuvalu; she and her family live in east Christchurch, New Zealand, in a predominantly working-class neighborhood of Māori and other Pacific Islander immigrants. She grieves for a homeland where she will likely never get to live, since the low-lying atolls of Tuvalu will probably be largely underwater in her lifetime. Sara told me about how she finds it easier to connect with other kids of Pacific Islander heritage, because they too reckon with grief and guilt. Her two closest friends are Samoan and Tongan. “We’re all brought up the same way, with our strict parents implanting our cultures in us,” she says. “They especially feel for me, because they know my country will probably be one of the first countries to be gone because of climate change.”

Daniela Bazán, 16, talked to me about a strange kind of nostalgia: a longing for a version of home that she never got to experience. She lives in Huaraz, in the Peruvian Andes, where she can see glaciers from her house. For her, losing the glaciers is both a spiritual and a practical crisis: She and her family make offerings to Pachamama, the Earth goddess, and the Apus, the mountain gods; combined with drought, the shrinking glaciers mean there isn’t enough water to grow the corn that they sell for income. Bazán feels like she’s coming of age during an awful in-between: Too late to save the physical landscapes she loves, but just on time to watch their destruction. “I feel nostalgia for the glacier, and sadness, because little by little, it's disappearing,” Bazán says. “It won't be here forever.” She hears from her parents about a time when the rivers were full of fish and the land was lush; she doesn’t want to have to tell her children what it was like before the glaciers disappeared, which will likely happen in her lifetime. “I don’t want the generations to come to be left without seeing the landscapes, or only to have seen a photo and hear that it existed,” she says. “Then one is left with nothing.”

Feels obvious, but because I’m sending this hours before election day: These teenagers are a big part of why I vote, and call my senators, and talk to friends and family about uncomfortable political issues. They have less power than we do, and are far more affected by climate change (and so much else) than we are. We owe it to these young people to agitate for a better world and not to turn away from what’s hard. After all, they don’t have that luxury.

From my commonplace book

On the high-stakes feelings of childhood and adolescence—

From Marilynne Robinson’s The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought:

Metamorphosis is an unsentimental business, and I was a long time in the thick of it, knees scraped, clothes awry, nerves strained and wearied.

From Mary Karr’s interview in The Paris Review:

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate.

From “Miss Lora,” by Junot Díaz:

You were at the age where you could fall in love with a girl over an expression, a gesture. That’s what happened with your girlfriend Paloma—she stooped to pick up her purse, and your heart flew out of you.

From “Goodbye to All That,” by Eula Biss:

I hardly even knew the story back then—I had only a vague sense that the heroine was young and that the moral had something to do with being in the right place at the right time. I was ready for anything.

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine.

Where I’m living

I recently spent a few days camping in the northern California redwoods (a dream reporting assignment). Those groves are awesome, in both senses of the word. They always remind me of a passage from Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, the grumpily yet beautifully written namesake of this newsletter:

The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It's not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. They have the mystery of ferns that disappeared a million years ago into the coal of the carboniferous era. They carry their own light and shade. The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that's the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns… One holds back speech for fear of disturbing something—what? From my earliest childhood I've felt that something was going on in the groves, something of which I was not a part. And if I had forgotten the feeling, I soon got it back.

Not that I consider myself a contender for the most slap-happy and irreverent of men, but something to work towards.

What I’m reading

I’m going to try something a bit different here and share some lines from my commonplace books on a theme. Let me know how/if this lands with you. (And if you have additional quotes on-theme, by all means, please share them.)

On that twenty-something period of choice paralysis, waiting for Real Life to begin, feeling like your life could be anything, but making a choice necessarily means it can’t become everything—

From The Anthropologists, by Ayşegül Savaş:

All this time, we were waiting. For the news of some momentous change; that we were being summoned to serve in real life; that the time for playing games was over. We lived with the abstract shape of the news, informing us that it had arrived. We lived with the imaginary shock. Maybe, I thought, it would also be a relief: Here it was, finally. Here was life itself.

I scanned abstractly through the list of things awaiting us, like probing an aching tooth, but I couldn’t bear to think specifically about any of it.

From Sean Wilsey’s More Curious, with an apt description of what it’s like to be 24:

But what I really wished it would have been is those three-in-the-mornings in a booth with a bunch of people that I really liked talking about whatever and being engaged and some beautiful woman across the room that you thought you might have something with—that’s all I really wanted from my life.

From a Sheila Heti interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books, about Motherhood:

When I was younger, I was obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t live every life—it seemed so unfair to be born only to be forced to live one narrow life. It seemed like such a stupid waste of existence, to only exist as a single person. My fears about not experiencing motherhood—and therefore not being able to write from that position—were as much about feeling that I needed to experience a kaleidoscope of human realities to know what life is, and therefore to write about it.

But the older I get, the more I feel like it’s interesting and significant that we only get to be this one person. Life seems more tragic, and poignant, and sad, and exhilarating, and odd this way. I now feel like the limitation of life is the essence of a human life. It’s not a bug in the program that we’re stuck being ourselves.

And Kenneth Koch’s classic on how you can’t have it all, actually (“You Want a Social Life, with Friends,” published in The New Yorker in 1998):

You want a social life, with friends.
A passionate love life and as well
To work hard every day. What’s true
Is of these three you may have two
And two can pay you dividends
But never may have three.

There isn’t time enough, my friends–
Though dawn begins, yet midnight ends–
To find the time to have love, work, and friends.
Michelangelo had feeling
For Vittoria and the Ceiling
But did he go to parties at day’s end?

Homer nightly went to banquets
Wrote all day but had no lockets
Bright with pictures of his Girl.
I know one who loves and parties
And has done so since his thirties
But writes hardly anything at all.

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)

What I’m wondering

What’s something you’re really an expert on? Narrow expertises welcome (drawing a horse, correctly identifying shitty beers by taste, underwater somersaults…)

What should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What kinds of stories do you want to read? What questions do you think should be reported out?

What I’m writing

For The Atlantic, I wrote about why people don’t wear hearing aids, and how important it is to get over vanity and just wear them. Share it with a dad you love.

Also for The Atlantic, I wrote about how the Notes app acts as a kind of digital scratch paper, revealing what we actually think about. I talked about this on The Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public Radio, where I learned that the host also took Daily Themes, the class that introduced me to commonplace books. He hated it. (I just searched for Daily Themes and learned that Calvin Trillin shared my more positive take on the class.)

Newcomer students—those who are learning English and moved to the U.S. in the past three years—are a growing and often overlooked group, one that will reshape how we educate the next generation of Americans. For Alta Magazine, I spent some time in the classroom of Efraín Tovar in California’s Central Valley, home to refugees from across the world.

For ACLU Magazine, I wrote about students’ rights in and out of classrooms, and how they can protect themselves while speaking up.

And a very fun one: For a recent issue of The New York Times for Kids, I got to work with my genius editor Amanda on a game about making it through a school day at wacky middle schools across the country.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

I haven’t sent a newsletter in a couple months. That’s in part because I didn’t have published work to share and in part because I was spending the time away from my computer, swimming and reading and people-watching and, you know, generally smelling the summer roses, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. 

I’ve also been traveling, mostly to see and celebrate friends: by dancing under the redwoods at a friend’s wedding in Oakland, with a birthday ocean dip in coastal New England, on my way to a reporting trip in the blinding sun and verdant plum fields outside of Fresno, through the intoxication of sweaty July nights in Brooklyn. It’s been a really good summer.

I just got home from my traditional two muggy weeks in central New Jersey, teaching earnest high school students through the Princeton Summer Journalism Program. They’re 8am to 10pm days, filled with big revelations—about what a college dining hall is like, about the scary exhilaration of interviewing a stranger, about all the different people you can grow up into. It’s a privilege to watch these bright teenagers realize how big their lives can be. (And sobering to realize how very old I am: If the dorm-issue twin-extra-long induced back pain doesn’t do it, try looking around a lecture about live coverage on 9/11 and realizing no one else in the room, neither the high school students nor their college-age counselors, were alive for 9/11.)

What I’m reading

Mating, by Norman Rush, is such a sharp delight. I know I’m late to it (both the 1991 publication and its resurgence of a couple of years ago), but that won’t stop me from foisting it upon all my reading friends (aka you):

It became the kind of scene that makes you want to be a writer so you can capture a transient unique form of social agony being undergone by people who have it made in every way, the observer excepted… Everything was adding to the mad hatter tenor of events. In every collation of at least two hundred Brits there will be several people with hysterical surnames. I think this is the result of coming from a culture which has yet to wake up to the fact that it’s a thinkable thing to do to go down to the name-changing bureau and rid you and your offspring of these embarrassments. Or possibly they don’t do it just because Americans do, when they notice that people start falling about laughing when they introduce themselves. Anyway, they were all there: Mr. Hailstones, Mr. Swinerod, I. Denzil Quorme, Mr. Leatherhead, and a plump couple, the Tittings. Anyway, there we were with all the Brits with ludic names in one enclosure. The feeling of being under guard was enhanced by the presence of lots of actual guards, Waygards in specially cleaned maroon uniforms, spaced like caryatids around the edges of the incipient riot we were becoming. I had to get myself under control. I kept thinking, This is the world created for us by grown men, n’est-ce pas? This was the human comedy.

Demon Copperhead felt so wonderfully American. I think something about the unapologetic vast scope and regionality of the voice. Makes me want to read other Barbara Kingsolver:

“Hang on tight,” I said, and flopped on the ground beside him, panting like a dog. He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it.

A lovely movement through anxiety, from “Loom” by Bradley Trumpfheller (“breeze-fretted!”):

My mother says when she is anxious she finds a seam,
finds stitches on her clothes, on furniture she’s near, always
a verge has that feel, birch joints, wrinkles. It’s a relief
to think with the hands. Not with what years do,
not with rings or someone else’s sadness. With the repair
in a sheet her sister tore, breeze-fretted in the yard.

I’m already a fan of Becca Rothfeld’s book reviews for The Washington Post, which read like your smartest friend spouting off about a movie as you walk out of the theater together. Her collection of essays, All Things Are Too Small, is a paean to excess in its many forms, and it has so many ideas I want to work through aloud. (If you’ve read it and want to talk about it, text me.) Here’s one of many good lines:

compliance is the preserve of the inanimate: pique and resistance are the best proofs of life

Also worth noting the list of words I’ve written in the endpapers of Mating and All Things Are Too Small, which I may work up the courage to pepper into conversation: beguine, carking, vitiate, effulgence, salable, sanguinity, salvific, lustration, bete noire, labile, ersatz, empyrean

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.)

What I’m wondering

What stories do you come back to? Movies you re-watch, books you re-read, albums you listen to again and again?

What should I be writing about, in this newsletter and elsewhere? What kinds of stories do you want to read? What questions do you think should be reported out?

What I’m writing

Some professional news: I’m now officially a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. I’m thrilled about it.

For Vox, I wrote about how being an only child is, contrary to popular belief, totally fine. If you’re also an only child who gets accosted by worried parents-of-one at weddings, please feel free to deploy this article and its statistics at will.

What’s it like to step away from work later in life, when your career has thoroughly defined who you are? I talked to some lovely octogenarians (not Joe Biden) about their experiences for The Atlantic. 

I wrote about how we should think about what we do afterschool (and after work), for both kids and adults, in Vox.

I’ve also been interviewed about my stories in the past few months: for The New York Times, The Sunday Long Read, The Brian Lehrer Show, KQED’s Forum, and WFAE’s Charlotte Talks. I will never voluntarily listen to a recording of my voice, but my parents say the interviews sound great.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

The Pacific Northwest in late springtime is magical: the clouds part and everything blooms. I’ve never seen such a lush place! Tulips and lilacs and magnolias bursting out from front gardens, dogwood blossoms carpeting the sidewalks… It’s glorious. Find me catcalling blooms throughout Southeast. (“Oh, damn, just look at that tulip!” I say to myself on my lunchtime walk, stopping to take my one thousandth flower close-up of the day.)

-

It’s hard to know how to talk about the genocide in Gaza, except to continue to say that every death is a tragedy and the murder of so many innocent people, especially so many children, is unimaginable, and that it’s unconscionable that our elected leaders and institutions have enabled the Israeli military as its soldiers murder kids. I hope you’re continuing to reckon with it, to tell our representatives to do better, and to support the students showing us that throwing up our hands isn’t good enough. Also, when changing the minds of politicians feels hopeless, remember that we can concretely help individual people survive by donating to individual campaigns. (Here’s one link for that.) When I order takeout because I’m feeling tired, or buy new shorts or an expensive plane ticket, I’m trying to think about giving to those who need money because of what my elected leaders have enabled. I’m trying to donate enough so that I really notice.

What I’m reading

I can’t remember the last time a book made me laugh as much and as loudly as Reboot by Justin Taylor. It’s so funny, so smart, so layered. It reads like it’s narrated by a cross between the lit mag editor from your philosophy section who corners you at a party to talk about their blog and the tired super-senior smoking a cigarette on the stoop outside, which, no spoilers, it kind of is. Anyway, read it:

Precisely what she saw in me, then or now, was obscure to me, but that’s because I mostly hate myself. Therapy had taught me to say that plainly, but I was still working out what to do about it. You are worthy of love, I thought to myself, as the recessed panel reestablished itself and Grace stepped out of her jeans.

“Yeah, duh,” Grace said. “But thanks for clarifying.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I said the quiet part loud. And I didn’t mean you. But I mean of course you are, too. We all are.”

“I know you’ve had a hard time,” she said. “I’ve had a hard time, too. And I know this is random and weird. But can we just, for the next little while, focus on the subject at hand?”

“Yes,” I said. The roof of my mouth was atingle—GMO healing? I hoped so. It didn’t seem like I was going to bleed when we kissed at least. Maybe the burn hadn’t been that bad after all. I pulled off my shirt, hopefully sexily. We met each other in the middle of the room, fumbled and tumbled, familiarly, rebooting. I focused. The subject was at hand.

An especially vital book to read right now from Kaveh Akbar — I hope it will change how you think about statistics and the loss of a human life, as it has for me. Also, poets write such beautiful novels, there are so many sentences you can tumble through, like this one (Martyr!):

We held the song’s preemptive nostalgia between us like a candle, swaying as its flame smocked the wick, our faces illuminated and flickering in it, that flame, yearning, idiot yearning, yearning so strong it bends you, buckles you, like waves of miracles.

I didn’t know a book about motherhood could be so bleak and funny1, but I should’ve known that if anyone can walk that high-wire, it’s Rachel Cusk (A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother):

I have observed several times an expression of polite, horrified surprise on the faces of new mothers, as if they had just opened an inappropriate Christmas present: clearly they were unprepared.

And a classic description from one of my all-time favorites, Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time):

He was bald and his face had the naked, political sensuality seen on the busts of Roman generals.

If you’re interested in more of what I’m reading, or a book recommendation, check out my storefront on Bookshop. (Buying through there sends me 10 percent of the sale, which I’ll add to my donations to help kids in Gaza get medical care.) As always, I’m also glad to give (and receive!) book recs.

What I’m wondering

What’s your favorite writing about a place? In particular, what’s your favorite writing about where you’re from?2 This is obviously a question dear to me as a lifelong proud, loud Northern California kid who named her newsletter Travels with Charley (RIP to my college idea of retracing the steps of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, lmk if you would be interested in sponsoring/publishing that book). It’s also a way I’ve understood the way land shapes identity in places I’ve lived and visited: Terry Tempest Williams on Utah, Claire Vaye Watkins on Nevada, N. Scott Momaday on New Mexico, Mary Oliver on Cape Cod, Jesse Nathan on Kansas, Mary Karr on East Texas and Christian Wallace on West Texas, Zadie Smith on north London, Kiran Desai on Delhi, Michael Crummey on Newfoundland, Maggie Shipstead on LA and José Vadi on southern California, Fernando Pessoa on Lisbon, Elena Poniatowska on Mexico City, Lorrie Moore on upstate New York… I’ll stop but please add to my canon. (Also, I’ve added those books to a “writing on place” list on my Bookshop profile.)

What I’m writing

If I talked to you in the past two months, I probably asked if you knew anyone who was about to retire. Out today in print for The New York Times Magazine, my story on what it means to retire in America, photographed by the brilliant Victor Llorente, told through the final workdays of seven people: Francis, who played the church organ for daily Mass from age 10 to age 83 (yes that is 73 years!); DJ Tony, Cincinnati’s King of Salsa; Roz, who has woken up at 1:30am to deliver morning traffic news to Chicagoans every weekday since 1989; Dave, a firefighter and union president who requested a bagpipe player herald the end of his last 24-hour shift; Sheila, who met her now-husband when he asked his cute mail carrier out on a date to the casino; Juliane, a former surgeon now in her eat-pray-love era; and Arthur, a fabric store owner passionate about custom draperies, vanilla frosting, and Robert Frost. It was an honor to learn about their lives (and a downer to learn about the gulf between how we imagine retirement and what the end of work usually looks like in the U.S., but that’s another story).

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

I just spent a month in Buenos Aires, where I had enough time to get into rhythms of observing: kids walking to the bus stop in the morning, crusty-eyed with backpacks askew; primly coiffed older ladies wheeling their shopping home; one teenager scooting closer to another in the park; gray-hairs in flat caps sharing a newspaper; families with babies improbably out to dinner in the 11pm heat.

Wonderful, too, to spend so much time in international art museums where the contextual frame isn’t Europe — where an exhibit on 20th century art is grounded in the South American history of dictatorial regimes and political instability, not the World Wars. A nudge to remember that I’m always seeing through a lens.

What I’m reading

“Poacher,” from Niall Campbell’s beautiful collection on becoming a father to a boy, which is full of poems that land the ending and reminds me of my favorite-ever book on fathers and sons (this is from Campbell’s Noctuary, thank you Jesse for the astute recommendation; my favorite-ever is, of course, Danny, the Champion of the World):

It’s not the pelts and meat I love,
the rabbit furs — their tails’ soft fires —
and I don’t think I’m drawn to violence
seen here as a knife and a gun barrel;

though yes, there is a second violence
that maybe does appeal to me:
beneath the mud and the night marching,
there’s the ownership of things

and someone standing where they shouldn’t,
filling a bag that shouldn’t be filled;
hand in the sky, hand in the stream,
I hope they take everything they can.

Karen Russell with a laugh-out-loud precise description that reminds me of All My Puny Sorrows, a very big compliment (Swamplandia!):

Cubby Wallach was complected like a bowl of oatmeal and yet carried himself as if he were wearing a top hat and spats. He had the bellicose dignity of a kid who refuses to excuse or even to acknowledge his own extreme ugliness. I admired this trait. It reminded me of the Seths, with their scarred, alien faces and their beautiful oblivion.

I often admire Wesley Morris’ criticism, but as a sucker for sentences, I’m also always distracted and delighted by his precision and rhythm—here, describing Larry David’s physical comedy (“Larry David’s Rule Book for How (Not) to Live in Society”):

Eyebrows as up-yanked drawbridge, forehead creases as lasagna of vexation. That rawboned voice of his soars, if not in octaves, then certainly with tickly, prickly dynamism. He can shout anyone down. For insinuation and seduction — for seductive insinuation — he can drop it low. David has imbued Larry with so much guilt, exceptionalism, cluelessness, terror, cowardice, innocence, avoidance, vindictive zeal, genuine curiosity and joie de vivre that the performance becomes what Larry loves: a buffet.

Gladly adding this description from Melissa Febos to my canon of Thinky Girls With Roiling Inner Worlds* (Girlhood, also excerpted in this essay):

Before I learned about beauty, I delighted in my body. I sensed a deep well at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives. Its channel was not always open, and what opened it was not always predictable: often songs and poems, a shaft of late afternoon light, an unexpected pool of memory, the coo of doves at dusk whose knell ached my own throat and seemed the cry of loneliness itself. It was often possible to open the channel by will, an option that I found both terrifying and irresistible. I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state—not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the raw matter from which each was made—then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much.

*Please reply to add to this canon.

What I’m wondering

What’s art that has changed your mind — your perspective or your mindset? (Is there music that has pushed how you think? An author who consistently changes your mood?)

Also, for a story: Do you know anyone retiring from an interesting job in April?

What I’m writing

The New York Times sent me to Alta, Utah to shred the slopes with skiers in their 80s and 90s. Despite my fears, I managed to keep up with them. Here’s the story. I also got to write an NYT Insider (A2) story about being a later-in-life skier and what it was like to interview elders from a chairlift, always fun to get to do some more first-person writing. Read that story here.

Brian Lehrer interviewed me about the story I wrote on regret (feat. Sjanna and Peter, with the sweetest romance I know).

Not my writing, but Tony Cobb, an incarcerated writer that I work with through Empowerment Avenue (if you’re a writer, check them out/ask me about volunteering), wrote a moving piece about the impact of the felony murder rule in Florida.

yours,

Charley

Hi readers,

Thanks for subscribing to Travels with Charley. I send these dispatches every month or two, writing on four different fronts: where I’m living, what I’m reading (lines I’m adding to my commonplace book), what I’m wondering, and what I’m writing. If you feel moved to write back, the questions are genuine! I’d love to hear from you.

Where I’m living

I spent much of the past month in Salt Lake City, skiing as many mornings as possible. It’s beautiful to be outside and moving in snowy sunshine so much — skiing has made me actually appreciate and look forward to winter weather. It’s still/always surprising to me that I discovered a sport I like for the first time in my thirties. I guess it’s never too late to become athletic? It’s been fun to be transient again, but mostly, I was glad to realize that I really miss my budding life in Portland. A good thing to have a home that I’m eager to return to.

I’ve also been acutely aware of how many people don’t have a home to go back to right now, and especially how many children are trying to survive amid unconscionable violence in Palestine. Every time I interview a kid, about ice-skating or annoying siblings or their most embarrassing moment, I think of their contemporaries whose childhoods are being torn apart. It’s easy to cover my eyes or turn away from the news, but I’m trying to do what’s right — to continue to advocate for them with my voice, my money, and my vote. I hope you are too.

What I’m reading

The extraordinary inner remove that Ayşegül Savaş builds in this story (“Notions of the Sacred”):

As I walked down the street wearing the hat, I saw people glancing at me, and I beamed at them full of my own mystery, like a benevolence. I thought of the face of the Virgin Mother in scenes of the Annunciation, and had a new understanding of her inward gaze, at once present and far away.

I’m reading Tessa Hadley short stories for the first time, and every ending is a precise, quiet shock, like this one (“An Abduction,” from Bad Dreams and Other Stories):

It isn’t only that the drink and the drugs made him forget. He’s had too much happiness in his life since, too much experience; he’s lost that fine-tuning that could hold on to the smell of the ham in the off-licence, the wetness of the swimming costume, the girl’s cold skin and her naivety, her extraordinary offer of herself without reserve, the curtains sweeping the floor in the morning light. It’s all just gone.

Lydia Davis with a good kind of “New Year’s Resolution”:

I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around.

One other recommendation: One of my favorite things in the world is when someone I admire walks me through something they adore and how it works. (Helpful attitude when I regularly ask experts questions like, “So, how do hiccups work?” for the kids section.) If you like this too, listen to “Just Add Music.” It’s a podcast started by my brilliant friend and former colleague Minna Choi, a composer and musician. (If you ever saw a Pop-Up Magazine show, the music and so much of the magic was Minna and her orchestra, Magik*Magik.) In “Just Add Music,” Minna lets you into her relationship with music, delighting in and explaining what lights her up about the songs she first loved. Listening to it feels like if, after dinner with an expert composer, you asked them, “Why do you love music?” and they wandered over to your piano and started to explain. A lesson in enthusiasm, curiosity, and paying attention to what you hear.

What I’m wondering

A few weeks ago, a friend played me some songs by Elisapie, a Canadian Inuk musician. In her most recent album, she translated songs you’ll immediately recognize (“Heart of Glass,” “Wild Horses,” “Going to California”) into Inuktitut.

The covers are so striking, and made me think about the covers I love the most. (Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs performing “Fast Car” together at the Grammy’s did, too.) What are your favorite covers of songs? Why?

Also, here are some favorites from me and from friends — send me your additions!

What I’m writing

Back in November, I asked you about your relationship with regret. Thank you if you wrote back. Regrets are still taboo to admit, to others and ourselves, but there’s a value to owning up to them, to dropping the facade that we get it all right and learning from the difference between who we are and who we want to be. I wrote about this for Vox, including the story of two people whose regrets have shaped their happiness today. (I won’t spoil Sjanna and Peter’s story for you.) I’m very grateful to them for their openness with me, and for showing the rest of us how living with our regrets can make us kinder, including to ourselves.

yours,

Charley