Where I've Been, Where I'm Going, and the World in Which We Hope to Live

Plus a creative writing prompt at the end

Where Have I Been?

If you noticed that I missed last month’s newsletter, I’m sorry! I should’ve warned you—warned myself!—that July would be nuts. All the book-tour craziness came to a sudden halt as I focused 100% of my energy on The Writers Circle’s teen Summer Creative Writing Intensives. This was our 12th season, so I know by now that everything else in my life stops during these hectic weeks of creative madness. Below is a small glimpse of me teaching, at the mic, working with students in class and one-on-one, and even dusting off my actor’s cap to play Lady Macbeth (with my co-director Michelle Cameron who played the Nurse from Romeo and Juliet for a Whodunit writing activity.) and “Mason, the Evil Jar” in our really nutty Dungeons & Dragons event. No, I’m not kidding!

Starting on The Way

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.—Rumi

How I long to start on The Way again. The Way—capitalized because, for me, writing is more than a profession or a craft. It is how I understand myself and this life’s journey.

This reminds me of a wonderful little film called The Way starring Martin Sheen as a grieving father who takes a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in Spain. For him and others who walk that particular path, it is a deeply spiritual and transformative peregrination. For me, writing is that, too. More than an act of creativity or entertainment, writing is a work of discipline and faith that brings me closer to myself and whatever force drives us all to live and breathe.

It’s been a long time since I have allowed my mind to drift deep into the creative haze. While I have been writing over these last few months, almost all of it has related, one way or another, to promoting AKMARAL. And while I’m going back on the road for the fall book festival season (I’ll be in Saratoga Springs, Brooklyn, Vermont, and Miami. Here’s my schedule with more to come.), it won’t be the full-time focus that it’s been since the spring.

There’s always more to do when it comes to promotion (My Book Marketing Boot Camp this fall will reveal exactly what I mean. See? I’m still promoting!), but at some point, I want to accept that I have done enough. While I enjoy tapping into my extroverted self to talk with new people about my book and take center stage, I have also felt a visceral ache for silence, solitude, and the solace of my own thoughts. Right now, I’m clearing up my office and checking off my final summer program to-do’s. Then I will set off in search of The Way.

Childless Cat Ladies and Climate Responsibility

There’s been a lot of talk lately about birthrate collapse, the reluctance of younger generations to have children, and the value or lack thereof of childless cat ladies (I’m a cat lady, for sure, but I also have two lovely grown sons.) which all brings to mind a book I read earlier this summer, THE QUICKENING by Elizabeth Rush. Among the many complicated questions her book poses is the challenge of responsibility. Is it right to add to the burden of our over-stressed planet by bringing a new child into the world?

She frames her conundrum within the context of an extraordinary adventure—a trip to Antarctica to observe and report on the melting of the massive Thwaites Glacier. If you have no idea what that is, you can learn about it and some bold efforts to save it—and us—in A Wild Plan to Avert Catastrophic Sea-Level Rise by Ross Andersen, published in The Atlantic in June.

Some of the plans outlined in the article make it pretty clear how absurdly incapable we humans are of undoing the climate mess we’ve made. One plan involves moving equipment and manpower to Antarctica equal to the population of Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, then drilling at hundreds of sites, installing pumps that gush water that will “likely” flow and “with luck” cause a cooling feedback loop to freeze the “nation-size glacier” in place. All those qualifiers (not the mention the cost) just emphasize my point, especially when you consider that Thwaites is situated in the most treacherous and remote location on planet Earth.

Unlike some who discuss declining birthrates in the news, Elizabeth Rush isn’t talking about economic, social, or political outcomes in THE QUICKENING. She is weighing far bigger concerns, those of sheer survival and quality of life for us all. What is a child’s fate—what is every child’s fate—if we fail to protect and repair the planet that we have so thoughtlessly abused?

I ascribe to the belief that there is no Planet B. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has suggests, we have it all backward. We keep worrying about saving the Earth, but the Earth will be fine. We should be focusing on saving ourselves.

Creative Writing Prompt: Remove One Thing

In my workshops, I often share an exercise that involves taking away one single sense—sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch—from one of your characters. The prompt forces us to embrace a character who interacts with their world in a completely different way.

But what if that character as the Earth itself?

Try imagining living in a world without one essential element—clean air, fresh water, fertile earth, the warmth of fire or of the Sun itself. What becomes of our world and the living creatures on it if we remove or destroy one essential element that makes our existence possible? If those huge elements are too much to consider, try removing a more specific planetary essential, like melting the polar ice caps (as above), or killing all the bees, or stilling the gravitational pull of the Moon on the oceans, or shifting the flowing warmth of the Gulf Stream.

Since all of these are actually quite possible, if not already in the works, this prompt may seem like a direct path to dystopian fiction. But this kind of writing can also open us up to new possibilities and ideas. In my Eco-Fiction workshop this summer, I talked to my teen writers about how eco-fiction (or “Cli-fi”) isn’t all about doom and gloom. Like science fiction, which has imagined some of our greatest and most terrifying technological advancements, eco-fiction opens us to thinking about the possibilities of what we want for our future on Earth.

Imagining something is a necessary first step in the process of creativity that leads to making that something real.—Matthew Salesses

Thank you, everyone, for your support. And to my paid subscribers, you are ANGELS!

AKMARAL: a nomad woman warrior of the ancient Central Asian steppes must make peace with making war

“A crackling novel”—Publishers Weekly

“A gripping saga”— #1 bestselling author Christina Baker Kline

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AKMARAL - Available wherever books are sold.

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