It Makes a Lovely Light

Some schedule thinkings and poetry

Dear Readers,

Two weeks in a row! I’m back. (Ha.) (And I’m leaving all posts free for this first month.)

There’s likely not any “optimizing posting” guide in the world that would recommend settling into a Saturday schedule, but part of the reason I want to focus on this newsletter (and Patreon, for those who prefer) is the desperate longing to get back to a more idiosyncratic internet. This is also the reason I can’t define what this is going to be about more than What Is On My Mind that week, which, again, probably not what the Internet Lords say hits today. And not that there aren’t some extremely focused newsletters I read religiously (shoutout The Dopamine Dispatch, Today in Tabs, Agents & Books).

Increasingly, there’s so much chatter about publishers relying on authors to have big online platforms, but… Almost none of the big hits in fiction come about because of that. The platform grows with success, of course, but what are we even doing pretending everything we do should be about selling books? (Publishers, you’re supposed to be the ones who know how to do that! Help us help you!) Anyway, ahem, it’s about writing the books and connecting with other people, both through our books and through our actual lives, part of which includes interacting with friends and strangers online, sure, but let’s shoot for something meaningful.

I want my online life to feel less frazzling, more dazzling. Also, it just hit me, of course I’m not going to focus up, the ADHD of it all means you have to follow your interests and whims whenever possible OR DIE OF BOREDOM.

So alghorhims algorhithms algorithms be damned! (I can never spell that word correctly on first try.) Saturday mornings seem like a generally good time to take stock of the week. No one wants much from me during this time. I can linger in my robe with my coffee and write to you all.

As I mentioned last week, there has been much holiday merrying.

This has been such a busy holiday season, more than I can remember, so much so not everything has been doable. It is a great feeling to skip things, sometimes, to sit and read or watch five episodes of Jeopardy in a row. But the thing is? I adore all these people. So it’s also been truly great to see some people more than I usually do and other people I see often but never enough and to see everyone’s holiday decor and make each other laugh and tell stories and drink and eat too much cheese and sweets, et cetera, ad infinitum. (That bread pudding last night! To! Die! Josh’s ginger cookies! Give me!)

And it also makes the slow evenings, cooking and binging Season Two of Fargo, our current watch, feel decadent in the dark times of winter.

I have a point to all this, I swear. Last weekend, I woke up with one of my favorite poems in my head between a friend’s party and the LWR Member Substack Potluck extravaganza at our beautiful new space.

(Dress was $30 from ebay!)

The poem was Recuerdo.

Recuerdo
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. 
It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table, 
We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon; 
And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon. 

We were very tired, we were very merry—
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry; 
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear, 
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere; 
And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold, 
And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold. 

We were very tired, we were very merry, 
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. 
We hailed “Good morrow, mother!” to a shawl-covered head, 
And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read; 
And she wept, “God bless you!” for the apples and pears, 
And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

It captured the feeling I had waking up perfectly. I sent Josh the recording of her reading it, which is one of my favorite bits of old audio—her creaky voice! Treat yourselves.

Isn’t it fabulous?

This morning, I woke up with the lines of another of her poems in my head.

First Fig
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

It gives a lovely light!

Which means I’m officially declaring Edna St. Vincent Millay the poet laureate of holiday merriment hangovers (not necessarily the physical variety!).

And, to connect her to our present moment, she was a radical in spirit and got arrested in 1927 while picketing in Boston over the Sacco & Vanzetti trial, and later wrote poetry that apparently wasn’t good but did encourage America to fight Nazis.

Did I just go down a rabbit hole? You bet I did. What a grand, messy life. From a review of her diaries:

Despite her depression, Millay continued to feel thrilled by the most everyday things, just as she did as a teenager. “Apple sauce for dinner tonight,” she wrote when she first moved to Austerlitz, “I never get used to this—it is much more wonderful than the telephone—well, I don’t know—the telephone is wonderful too—.” Roses, swallows, toilets, faucets, rainstorms, dresses with trains, the year’s first sounds of tree toads: No surprise was too small, no pleasure too simple. Millay and her husband soaked sweet peas, intending to plant them on Easter Sunday because, she wrote, “we believe in resurrection.” She caught butterflies, fed chickadees in her bed, celebrated every jar of raspberries turned into preserves.

Toward the end of her life, Millay’s diary becomes slightly unsettling. She writes herself notes and reminders to not “become sloppy” and “never let the other person see you using the hypodermic,” as well as an hourly account of her substance intake (a morphine injection, two cigarettes, a glass of beer, and a gin cocktail before 10 in the morning). Read this way, the entries depict a dramatic descent, but this is not a particularly useful way of reading them.

The poet laureate of merriment, I’m calling it.

Some fun bits at the end:

• I discovered Madge Maril by happy accident at the Kentucky Book Fair, where I picked up her first romance, Slipstream. I DEVOURED IT. And I recently begged her to send me the manuscript of her next one, The Paddock Club, which I just finished and is also fabulous! She writes a heroine to die for. I don’t even know anything about F1, and you don’t have to either! Read these if you’re looking for a swoony treat.

• Now I’m alternating The Fire Concerto by Sarah Landenwich (LOVING) (Bookshop) and Frankenstein by, you know, Mary Shelley. The Frankenstein is for the first installment of this! The new book/movie club of mine and Josh Boldt’s dreams, kicking off next weekend at the Writer’s Room. If you’re in Lexington, join us for Read & Reel!

And I think I’ve bent your ears and eyes enough for one week, so I’ll leave you with my ever-evolving Christmas playlist for your holiday driving or doings. If I’m missing a song you love, comment!

Sending light from each end of the candle,

Gwenda