Oh, to be sure of your own good fortune
But first, a writing exercise.
I’m going to start this newsletter a little differently than I usually do. I’m going to guide you through a writing exercise. This is the one I used to settle us into the inaugural Thursday Evening Craft Club this last week, which was such a delight. It is an exercise I’ve adapted from a prompt by the writer Lucy Ives, but everything is born of something, so thank you Lucy for the inspiration. I use this exercise as a way to shake out the often tightly wound muscles of all of us in class— muscles that are clenched tight in expectation or nervousness and could use a little loosening up.
To begin you will need a piece of paper and a writing utensil. This is not something that can be done digitally, trust me. I’ll wait for you to go find something.
Got your paper? Great. Let’s begin.
I’m going to give you several prompts, actually they are just topics to dwell on and write about. Write anything on this topic you want. Read them one at a time. Write for several seconds or minutes and then read the next. Each time you switch topics, turn your page 90 degrees clockwise writing in a spiral. Write towards the center, and then stop.
Let’s begin by writing about Autumn.
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Water.
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Art.
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Friends.
When you come to the place where there is no more space to write, you are finished. How did that feel? How does your paper look? If you are brave, I’d love for you to share the photo with me on Instagram by posting it and tagging me @Eidlehands.
If you enjoyed that exercise, you should join us for the next Thursday Evening Craft Club (TECC) which will be October 17th at 7PM EST. Mark your calendars. Week two will be focused on everyone’s favorite, the Unreliable Narrator. I will be sending out one short story ahead of time to get us in the mood and get the conversation rolling. It’s a story I love and one I’ve always wanted to discuss in class. We will also do some free writing. Bring your thoughts, questions, and recommendations. It’s $35 to join and all you need to do to reserve your spot is throw your email address in the comments below, or if you are reading this in your inbox, send me a reply.
Now back to our regularly programmed newsletter.
Thursday kicked off our first TECC which was so energizing. I always learn something new in class. One person shared that they write down all of the titles of the books they own but haven’t read on slips of paper and put it in a jar and pull out a slip when they need something new. Someone else shared a tip for working through a piece of writing— give what you’ve written to a child to read out loud to you. Someone else shared that writing in an unlined notebook turned landscape has unlocked their creative energy.
I really needed to hear all of this.
I feel like I keep repeating myself but self-employment is weird. The weeks since leaving my job have felt very fuzzy. I’m a person who loves routine and I’m trying to exist without one and have no visibility into what the future may hold. My tendency is to pack every day with projects from 7AM until I can’t move any longer (usually 9pm) which is easy to do with never ending farm tasks plus I have to answer emails and feed myself and answer texts from friends lest they forget I exist and that doesn’t include movement and reading and and and. I am fighting this tendency to be busy to move myself closer to stillness.
This weekend was one of gentleness and stillness. I went to a fiber festival and wandered around for two hours touching squishy skeins of yarn and ended up buying two skeins from a woman who had dyed the wool herself. I was drawn to the different shades of blues. I loved how scratchy it was and how it was spun as a single strand. What sold me was when the woman told me she had no idea what she was doing and that she wasn’t sure what it looked like knitted up. I saw myself in her in that moment. If you have an idea of what I should do with this yarn, I’m open to it. When I was winding it into a ball, the loosely spun single strand kept breaking. Something is telling me to weave with it which was affirmed by my friend Jane.
I was supposed to spend the rest of the day with a friend but she was not feeling well (feel better Emma), so I spent much of the rest of Saturday laying in bed trying to nap but not able to because I drank a second cup of coffee that morning. I continued the task of moving boxes of stuff from our bedroom to our living room since a friend is coming to paint our bedroom this week. This is not a big task, moving things from one room to the next, especially considering that our house consists of three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, and a small bathroom. That’s right. No kitchen. For that we walk next-door to my in laws. That’s a conversation for another time.
This moving of things is a small project but after having moved houses ten times between 2013-2020, something in my body shuts down when I begin the task of filling a box. So, I was gentle. I did it slowly. I moved some things then I laid down. I moved some things and then I read a few pages of The Shipping News. I moved more things and ate a bowl of soup. Moved some things and listened to Julia Jacklin.
I’ve been reading The Shipping News slowly. Each chapter takes me close to an hour because I’ve been underlining and annotating far more than other books I’ve read lately. The marginalia is funny out of context: “perhaps this is a sign right now” and “will I underline this whole book? maybe” and “to be a friend is to bring food”. So much of what I’ve underlined is about food. When I think about Annie Proulx I think about place-prose. I think about setting. So, I did not expect so many rich food details. What a treat.
“Partridge’s yard smelled of burnt cornmeal, grass clippings, bread steam.”
“There was olive oil on his interview suit, a tomato seed on his diamond-pattered tie.”
“The next evening Quoyle was there, gripping paper bags. The front of Partridge’s house, the empty street drenched in amber light. A gilded hour. In the bags a packet of imported Swedish crackers, bottles of red, pink, and white wine, foil-wrapped triangles of foreign cheeses.”
“In August, snipping dill into a Russian beef stew with pickles, Partridge said, ‘Punch wants you back.’”
The food details are rich and delightfully 90s.
Not food related but this line really struck with me: “He was sure of his own good fortune. He could blow perfect smoke rings. Cedar waxwings always stopped in his yard on their migration flights.” This is an incantation I want to repeat to myself like a prayer. I want to write this on my wall. I want to title a newsletter after it.
Sunday two friends came with boxes of craft supplies and tangy potato chips and we made watercolors and ate snacks. After they left, Jared and I laid on the floor of my in-law’s office and watched his uncle perform in the house band for the 2024 Americana Awards. We got set up in his childhood bedroom, which is in the attic and only accessible through a tiny doorway you have to crawl through. This will be our home for the week until our room is painted and dry.
I’m writing this outside. The leaves are falling from the giant sycamore. I can hear friends upstairs in our room laughing while they prep for painting. My friend Beth just left with a case of beets to turn into juice for her clients. Today we will work on the barn siding and work on dried bean prep. It may even rain which would be a blessing. The dry earth is calling out for the rain.
Repeat after me: I am so sure of my own good fortune.
Until next time,
CM
One thing to tide you over until we meet again
It’s that time of year where everyone is getting sick. While I still have my health for now, I made a soup that is perfect for when I feel a cold coming on. I don’t usually follow recipes and this time I didn’t even start from a soup recipe but instead turned a recipe I’ve made a lot for cabbage rolls into a soup. Here’s what I did if you want to make it— make mini meatballs (I used 1lb pork, an egg, ginger, scallions, salt, pepper, a splash of soy sauce) and brown them in a pan. Take them out and pour out a little fat, then add into the pan a whole cabbage sliced thin and a thinly sliced red onion. Brown it. To that add the meatballs back in with stock of your choosing (I used chicken stock because it’s what I had in my freezer) and a splash of soy sauce. Bring it to a simmer and cook a few mins until the meatballs are cooked through. Then make a dumpling dipping sauce (look up a recipe if you’d like—I used soy sauce, sugar, hot water, rice wine vinegar, sesame sauce, chili flakes, and garlic). Serve your bowls with a big drizzle of this sauce and chopped scallions. If you’d like, make rice noodles and put that in each bowl too. Yum. If you freeze this I’d do it without the rice noodles.
Some images as parting gifts
