An August Buffet

This newsletter is a little long, read in app online and scroll until you find the orange!

Summer, the fastest season and yet the one that lingers. Like your first sunburn of the year. I’ve disappeared a bit like I said I would. Working and trying to finish what I said I would finish in the time I said I’d finish it. I’m not sure if I’ll be able, but I’m hopeful still because the last time we spoke feels like ages ago and the days are long even if I’m already noticing how dark it is when I get out of work.

I knew when I decided to have a brief pause in creating that the August newsletter would be an opening of the fridge even, a look around at what’s been feeding me and a taking of whatever it is you want. That is to say, I’m spending my days in another document, one you haven’t seen yet, and I can’t say I have many ideas left to share. But it doesn’t mean I have nothing, it’s just still a little different. But you knew that already didn’t you.

Let me be frank! I have no idea how to start this newsletter. I’d wanted to call this a collage of chaos, but I don’t think it’s chaotic, it’s really more a buffet. There’s a lot going on, a lot of things I’ve prepared. I’ve paid close attention these past weeks. I wanted to be sure that what I included was all the good stuff and, indeed, I like what’s waiting for you below. It’s a gluttonous version of the newsletter you’ve come to love, just perhaps without so much a story. But if you really need it, there’s some book stuff waiting down below.

And before we begin I thought I’d let you know what I’ve been doing this summer vacation.

1. I’m constructing a cottage in my brain. I’m making a place I want to go to where the ocean always is and where I can swim in it even when it’s cold out and in the morning it is spring but by night it is fall. You see I’ve been, for a few years, flexing my imagination in hopes of returning to the strength I used to have in childhood which saw first the real world and then also what that real world might be. So now the floors are made of water and the windows have flowers on the glass and everything is really vine but there, reach, it’s stone. The grass is neck high and people are hiding and the fire in the fireplace warms the whole house and you are here and I am here so it means we are together, even if that is not true. Even if I wish it were true.

2. Working: outside, in a basement, and also on my couch. Feeding children lunch and sword fighting, packing boxes and lifting them over my head, writing my story down and drinking a coke.

3. Getting covid. (Okay yeah I got it once but it felt like summer was over forever.)

   

   Covid Chloe July 19th, 2024

4. I’ve begun to plan a trip to Washington DC. A little over four years ago I heard Max Richter’s Recomposition of Vivaldi — Spring 1. Most of my book was written listening to that song. It filled me, upon my first listen, and still to this day, with an enormous feeling that I don’t know how to describe. A sense of hindsight and foreshadowing, a feeling of love and gratitude, some momentous understanding of my life as it stands in that moment. It is, to me, a premonition that my life is going to be good, that I’m going to do what I said I would do and those bad times have passed and they’re not coming back. Not, at least, in the same way—which is a good thing. So there is more to learn, but there is also more to feel, more to write, more to be glad about once it has passed and that song comes on again and I remember that indeed this is what it is all for. Joy and hope and the belief despite everything you know to be true that its going to be good, whatever it is you call this thing we’re doing. And I wrote a chapter, my first chapter on female friendship, listening to this song. It seems completely correct that I should be visiting my dear friend Maddie when I see him live for the first time.

5. I’ve been welcoming longer periods of want. I’ve accepted that I’m past the point of preferring to be alone and actually, I would really like it now if someone were here. Not always, not even most of the time, but certainly in a way that I have not in many years wanted. Which is good. Which is how it is supposed to go.

6. Trying to visit the Old Friends Photobooth (managed to snag it one time out of four visits.)

   

7. Doing a really long probably inappropriate bit with Mason and Sydney at work

8. Showing off my copy of Intermezzo. Yeah, I’m a big bragger!

9. Practicing my curiosity. I work now in the stockroom of a store and I mostly get to put my headphones in and listen to whatever audiobook I’ve decided. I’m using the lack of service, the tedious long tasks, and the feeling at work that you might as well push through whatever it is you’re listening to, to finish books I might’ve sooner given up on or not tried at all. It’s a good kind of force, a way of getting out of my comfort zone because there’s nowhere else to go. And I like what I’ve found. So if you have any recommendations I’ll be glad to hear em.

10. Writing fanfiction

That’s basically it. Sometimes I get the feeling that this summer isn’t really happening and I get a little sad. There’s a lot to be done, fine things, things I’ve been waiting for really. So I can live with the fact that maybe this year I didn’t get to have summer. But I’m spending a lot of time in my own life, looking back, living it again and again. Maybe it’s a good thing too, a needed thing, to have somewhere else to go for a while. So, the cottage awaits. You can keep on reading, I’ll be waiting for you. You can knock but the door is open.

See you soon

Library snags aka the elevator music that’s been circulating my mind these past warm weeks. All the words that sit inside my head in repetition, beating like a heart.

And you, you go carry on with your living. Know only this, mon cher, you're the only being I trust and whom I love, above and beyond myself. All my love belongs to you. You are its keeper. A veil will now forever separate our union. But it is a thin veil and I am always on the other side, face pressed up against your longing. Interview with the Vampire season 2 episode 2

I remember thinking that I’d spend my whole life bucking up against the truth of living while loving someone this much. The two seem mostly incompatible, the shape of devotion rarely contained in something Earthly or understandable. I cannot fit the totality of my love for you in this world, and so I make the world larger. The Love I Know By

eliza mclamb

The Doubling of Self: An Interview with Richard Siken

Mortal, your life will say, / As if tasting something delicious, as if in envy. / Your immortal life will say this, as it is leaving. When Your Life Looks Back by Jane Hirshfield

“All my life,” she said, “I have been told ‘go’ and ‘come.’ I am told how I will live, and I am told how I must die. I must be a man’s servant and a mare for his pleasure, or I must hide myself behind walls and surrender my flesh to a cold, silent god. I would walk into the jaws of hell itself, if it were a path of my own choosing. I would rather die tomorrow in the forest than live a hundred years of the life appointed me. The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden

How To Be A Writer: The Map Is the Territory

Summer Reading

1. Fruit of the Dead by Rachel Lyon

2. The Storm of Echos by Christelle Dabos

3. Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

4. The Bear And The Nightingale By Katherine Arden

5. A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid

6. The Unmaking of June Farrow by Adrienne Young

7. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney*

8. Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart*

Summer Not Reading (books I meant to start/read this summer but failed to)

1. A Divine Language by Alec Wilkinson

2. Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan

3. Cowboys are my Weakness by Pam Houston

4. The City of the Living by Nicola Lagioia

If you have read these and have any quotes or motivation to offer for me to finish these books feel free to share! I will finish/start them eventually I am simply never any good at sticking to my planned TBRs

*currently reading still

Things I’ve been thinking about: 

1. Poems that are not sestians but function that way. A sestina being a type of poem with six stanzas each six lines. The form is tricky, though, because to write one, the last words of each line must be ordered in a particular way. And it happens that some numbers can’t reproduce this form while others can. And the numbers that can happen to be Germain primes.

2. The primary role writing plays in my life wherein all things follow behind it. How I will stop conversations to write things down or, in trying to finish my book, abandoned certain activities like knitting, journaling, and even found a decline in my reading. All of which happened seamlessly and with synchronicity without much thought. As if, like sneezing, writing is an involuntary action. Because I admit sometimes I feel like an unwilling participant. I don’t know where some of these words come from but they are there. 

3. The way invisible things are made visible. How riptides pull the water a certain way or when the wind makes the grass bow and what we think of as a breeze sweeping and singular is made more round like waves or flocks of birds moving in synchronicity. Or the fact that the sunset reveals numerous pinholes in the silky sky. Or even the way it happens when someone smiles. Is it accidental, or do we know only what is wanting, at any given time, to be known? Because when things who don’t wish to be seen inevitably reveal themselves that feels like a gift, a miracle, an unfathomably beautiful thing to me that I would like to fathom. Why do I know what you look like? 

4. Particularly the wind. I am thinking so much about the wind lately and how it sounds, what those sounds mean, what they make me think. A breeze, a gust, and a gale, all have different sounds. The wind that whistles vs the wind that howls. Wind that is wet vs wind that is dry and wind with sleet or wind with snow. All very different, all with a particular signature upon the world. 

5. That I use religious vocabulary though I did not grow up that way. The relationship I have with putting God in other people, asking them to grant me access somewhere I feel I cannot go on my own. This desire to be given personhood by someone who is not myself. The ritual of love. The banal worships.

6. Walking with my hands behind my back like an old man. When did I start doing this? Why doesn’t everyone walk this way!

7. It’s strange also the way power dynamics form in our average lives. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because of Rooney. How, in very casual moments, before we even know what we want from someone, we can put into place a dynamic of power which we cannot for some reason go back on. How does this happen and why are both partners always so willing at first and reluctant later, once desire reveals itself? 

8. The Paul Muldoon quote: “Poetic form is a straitjacket in the way that a straitjacket was a straitjacket for Houdini.”

9. These two things together

   

   

10. The amputation of impact and meaning from the term “sacrificial lamb” in my mind. The historic value of sheep is so great that, genuinely, losing any number of lambs would truly have an effect on someone’s life in a way I have never considered because I am so separate from the wild world and the labor of living.

11. This reminds me how in H is for Hawk Helen Mcdonald wrote that animals are starting to mean less. Like when a species becomes endangered it no longer evokes the feelings in us of something wild, but instead feelings of disparity or loss.

12. Blond and Blonde being gendered words in the English language.

13. How Big and Carrie would’ve been a far better romance if it ended with her and him in front of the plaza saying “I don’t get it” and “You never did.” But it was gonna be him no matter what so what can you do!

14. The belief I have that some questions shouldn’t have question marks. Or, simply, I do not want to put them because in memory or in my imagination they were not spoken quite like a question even if someone was asking. They are rhetorical only insofar as you have any choice of answering. Some questions are merely statements of need. I must know this about you. And some people deliver questions as casual absolute things, tossing them to the air like a frisbee, and it feels insincere to add the uplift of a question mark. I will know you they are saying. There is no question there.

15. And of course, the sea in works of art and life

    

    Rolling Waves by Constantin Westchiloff

    

    

    Summer Night By the Beach by Edvard Munch

I haven’t had much of a purgatory. With the book just about every last possible idea I have is getting edited and used, so I figured I’d share with you that which was in purgatory but is currently being worked in somewhere. Only a few. I gotta leave some secrets for the release!

1. I felt my body beyond my body, haloed in a buzz of tremors that were only sated when I pressed my cheek to the cool tile. It was hot. It was already hot and morning had barely begun.

2. This was a power I’d given him a long time ago. I don’t know precisely when, maybe that first time we met when I did not know what to do and he had to do everything. Life, so full of innocuous moments in which you put in motion things you cannot go back on.

3. Salty, cold, a gust passed up the rocks and into me. I stumbled back, shoving my hands in my pockets, and tucking my mouth into the collar of my jacket. No one was out. A few fishermen maybe, pulling rope, tying it in a language I did not understand. A kind of cursive, the dialect of things.

The foundation of my cottage has been set and you can enter here. Welcome! I’ve spent all summer waiting for you.

That’s all this month! If you enjoyed the little conversation we had let me know! Save, share, and tag @chloeinletters

Here is My Twitter and my Instagram is @chloeinletters  where the DMs are checked, cared, and loved for.

My Goodreads where I sometimes write reviews but keep updated is right here where more of my library is contained as far as books go. 

My website is where you can check out my portfolio and contact me 

My email, if you want to cut to the chase, is letterstochloew@gmail.com where you can let me know what you think or ask me a question about what you saw here! 

Here’s to coffee Fridays, summer, sacrificial lambs, and books being written

Love always,

Chloé