It’s mind-blowing to me that in the 3+ short months I‘ve been writing this blog, more than 4700 people have visited it, and I’m deeply thankful to you. However, my workload (fortunately) and my chosen platform (unfortunately) are both making it sort of impossible to do this in the way I had intended, so I’m in the awkward position of having to rethink it. I have some ideas for how to make it both meatier and more manageable, and will let you know when I’ve sorted that out!
Meanwhile, any April or recurring contributions have been refunded/canceled — and I thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart.
Please be well. I’ll be in touch! And you can find me on Instagram @karentempler in the meantime …
I’m in the midst of an online lecture series organized by American Short Fiction, comprising three fiction writers teaching two classes each. Sandwiched between two writers I am familiar with and admire — Lauren Groff and Luis Alberto Urrea — is one I confess I hadn’t heard of, Carmen Maria Machado. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock for a few years, why do you ask?) As it happened, Machado’s talks were the pair that interested me most and persuaded me to sign up. They were jointly titled Every story is a haunted house story, and — breaking news — I’m (allegedly) attempting to write fiction these days, and one of the things I’m working on seems to have a ghost-story aspect to it. Regardless, I was particularly intrigued with the simple implication right there in the class’s title, and couldn’t wait to hear her elaborate on it.
Machado is a prize-winning short-fiction writer, essayist and memoirist — author of the story collection Her Body and Other Parties, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and In the Dream House: A Memoir, among other things — and a lecture she gave during the first of her sessions was so utterly moving and inspiring and mesmerizing that you could sense the entire unseen Zoom room swooning. We weren’t given a copy of the text, and although I cherish an ephemeral experience I’m not-so-secretly hoping it’s because it’s due to be published in some form. (If I ever see that, I will let you know!) But her imagination, vulnerability and storytelling capacity were on full display even in lecture form, and it made me eager to read her work. I started with a short story that was mentioned in class, and it’s so good I wanted to share it with you. It’s called Eight Bites (it also appears in her story collection linked above) and I hope you’ll find it as gripping and moving as I did.
If you’ve already read her, let me know what you think!
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[ IMAGE: Carmen Maria Machado publicity photo by Art Streiber/August ]
My first foray into gardening was when I was in my mid-thirties (c. the mid-aughts) and renting a little house in the town of Napa where the backyard — a tiny patch of grass bordered all around by beds — had obviously once been gardened but had long since “gone to seed,” as they say. The landlord was fine with me doing whatever I wanted and I had no idea what I was doing, but I was having a blast. I was at the local nurseries and chain stores first thing every Saturday morning, impulse-buying whatever plants wowed me, or that I had seen and fallen for in the gardening magazines I was hoarding at the time — trying things out, moving them around a lot (a LOT), going for a certain kooky, California desert-tropical look, which I felt pretty good about! One morning a year or two into this, our next-door neighbor, observing me over the fence from her second-story deck, said very politely, “Have you thought about using any native plants?”
I had no clue what that meant. And so began my research of and increasing dedication to the act of planting plants that belong where they’re planted; that are acclimated to the local soil and weather and thus need little to no human intervention in the form of water, fertilizer, pesticides, or soil amendments; and that are actively needed by the local birds, bees and butterflies — who literally give us life — among other creatures. In these last two decades, the native gardening movement has grown enormously (as the bee population has plummeted) — people organizing and teaching and campaigning about the harm we have collectively done with decades of poison-soaked lawns and raked-up leaves and landscape lighting, and how to bring back biodiversity, one pot or bed or yard at a time.
The little Hudson Valley house we moved to last year sits on a small, flat, treeless plot, carpeted with the thickest, greenest grass you’ve ever laid eyes on — seriously, everyone comments on it — due to the previous owner’s long, torrid love affair with lawn chemicals. For now, all we’re doing is not poisoning or watering it (it gets plenty from the sky). And we are planting trees! Two little flowering trees, so far. But I can’t wait to begin gradually giving every square inch back to nature.
In case you’re not already on board with a more natural approach to lawn care and gardening, as we head into peak season, I’ve rounded up some resources for you—
• Let Your Garden Grow Wild is a new TED Talk (just 12 mins!) by horticulturist Rebecca McMackin that is a really great introduction/primer/overview of the why of native gardening — and she does a great job of making the case that even if the only gardening you can do is a potted plant on your stoop, you can help the cause!
• This might seem odd when I’m talking about zeroing in on where you live, but I read a book a few years ago when I was making a garden in Florida called A Step-By-Step Guide to a Florida Native Yard that I would recommend to anyone anywhere. It’s not a very big book yet it addresses the hows and whys of every aspect of evolving a sterilized lawn back into a functioning ecosystem in a helpful framework. To the extent that specific plants are recommended here and there, which I don’t recall there even being much of, you’d simply adapt the principles to your location.
• Do a Google search for the Native Plant Society in your area, or check this list for state-by-state orgs in the US and home in from there. They’ll have native plant sales or swaps and learning opportunities of all kinds, as well as an online plant database you can consult for what’s native, recommended, and commercially available where you live. (What’s native to Oregon and Arizona is not the same! And not all native species are ideal garden plants.) Your state or area might also have an equivalent of Florida’s Florida-Friendly Plants list, which includes both natives and non-natives that are naturally suited to the soil and climate, and not invasive.
• The New York Times’ Margaret Roach writes routinely about native gardens and gardening in her In the Garden column, which I encourage you to poke around in. For instance, this article about replacements for turf grass (Gift Link) is full of inspiration and info.
• And of course look for plant nurseries in your area that specialize in native plants, or at least have an assortment grouped somewhere under that heading. Sign up for their mailing list and it’s sure to be a regular source of localized intel.
As you dig in, you’ll find everyone referencing, pointing to or conversing with others in the field, so it’s a perpetual joyful rabbit hole.
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[ IMAGE: Butterfly photo by Ju00c9SHOOTS on Pexels.com ]
“My parents didn’t let us watch much television. Dad has us cover our eyes when the commercials came on. He didn’t want us to nurse any unnecessary desires and succumb to capitalism. Shakespeare’s history plays and ‘The Three Stooges’ were major influences.”
“I can barely speak to a four-year-old in Ojibwe, let alone write in it. But I own the curse and glory of English, a language that has eaten up so many other cultures and become a conglomerate of gorgeous, seedy, supernal, rich, evocative words.”
—Louise Erdrich
When I put those Louise Erdrich interview links at the foot of Monday’s post, I knew they would surely be good reads for anyone who needed one (uh, two). But I’ve since read them and they are FAR TOO GOOD to have been eclipsed like that. So I’m claiming a do-over and giving them today’s full attention! If you’re not familiar with the novelist and her work, there’s a great overview/intro at the top of this first link—
• Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208 (2010, by Lisa Halliday) In this 2010 interview — which is outside the Paris Review paywall for the week — Erdrich talks about everything from her dad’s letter-writing skills to the difficulties of learning the Ojibwe language, to why she changed her name, tied herself to a chair, voted for Richard Nixon, rewrites her work even after it’s published, and so many other things. It is long and wide-ranging! But more than that, every answer is a total wow of a different sort from the one before it.
• A Conversation with Louise Erdrich (2024, by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain) With HolyWhiteMountain, Erdrich talks much more about her bookstore, her influences (Native and non), and the collective fight for Native sovereignty, “joke by joke, book by book, political win by political win.” (I believe this one lives outside the paywall.)
The first Erdrich book I read was Tracks, in a continuing ed class I took with my sister and a friend right after I graduated from college. (I don’t remember what the class was called but I remember we read The Bluest Eye and The House on Mango Street and In the Time of Butterflies … it was a great class.) Now I wish I could read her rewrite. The most recent Erdrich I read was Future Home of the Living God, which I liked many things about, but I didn’t quite love the whole of it. (Now I’m curious if this was the book she was talking about in the 2010 interview — “I suppose I could go back to my eternal science fiction novel …”) Somehow I think I’ve never read Love Medicine, so I’ll rectify that, but these interviews most made me want to read The Night Watchman. And you?
Speaking ofcollective experiences, I’ll be in a car today headed toward one, whether barreling or crawling, with my fingers crossed. We live a couple hours east of the Path of Totality for today’s eclipse and decided to attempt it as a daytrip — quite possibly along with tens of thousands of others in the area. Which means maybe we’ll get to our chosen viewing destination in time, maybe we’ll make it to the Path and simply pull over on the side of the road wherever we are at that moment, or maybe stand-still traffic will leave us short of the Path, for the second time in seven years.
In 2017, when the Path encompassed Nashville — where we lived at the time and could have simply stood in our own backyard or hung out with friends — we didn’t realize what a big deal it was, and inadvertently made plans to visit family in Pennsylvania that weekend. We did our best to make it back that morning, but wound up pulling over somewhere in Kentucky to watch an ordinary partial eclipse, so uneventful we might not have even noticed had we not known to look up. The next day in Nashville, everyone we knew responded as if we’d just told them a loved one had died when they heard that we missed the total eclipse, with its midday nightfall, 360-degree sunset, and magical hush. (Every single one of them used the phrase ‘life-changing.’) So this year, we’re giving it another shot! Wish us luck.
Where are you today, and will you see total eclipse? If you’re in the Path, or have been before, I’d love to hear about your experience! Hell, tell me about any life-changing experience you’ve had! I’ll be in the car all day …
There was a period of time when I absolutely loved Monday mornings — my favorite part of the week. Why? Mad Men aired on Sunday night, and Monday morning was all about reading critics’ assessments and talking to friends, comparing notes, everyone abuzz with observations and theories, easter eggs they’d spotted and sub references they’d caught that cast new light onto what we had watched, right down to whatever song had played over the closing credits. Even then, those sorts of shared-timing cultural experiences were becoming diminishingly rare. But on top of the simple joy of “appointment viewing” and the water-cooler camaraderie the next day, there was the draw of a written thing that rewarded close reading, and the collaborative experience of mining it. I’ve been reminded of that this week by the whole world listening to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (available wherever you get your music) and the utter, delightful flurry of people unpacking all that it contains. (I mean, wow, just look at that scope of that Wikipedia page already.) In addition to enjoying the hell out of things like the recasting Dolly Parton’s Jolene from “begging” to “warning,” I have truly learned something new from the album and the ensuing conversation every day since it dropped, from Linda Martell and the Chitlin’ Circuit, to the fact that Paul McCartney wrote ‘Blackbird’ with black women in mind, and so much more.
Hands down the most moving thing I’ve watched lately is the documentary American Symphony, about musician Jon Batiste and his partner (now wife), writer Suleika Jaouad. And what I mean is I felt like my heart was in a vise the entire time.
I came at it knowing only what pretty much anyone would know about him — extremely talented and charismatic musician, Stephen Colbert’s bandleader, all those Grammy noms — and all I knew about her was that their Brooklyn townhouse had been featured in Architectural Digest in November, and that she had collaborated with Hudson Valley designer Hallie Goodman on it, which is why I knew that. I had seen the photos on Instagram via Hallie (who I follow) and simply thought wow, gorgeous people, gorgeous home, what a nice life. 🙌
The photos were so good that I bought that issue of AD, which is a rarity for me. As much as I love a shelter magazine — and loved what I had seen of Batiste and Jaouad’s highly personal, idiosyncratic, antiques-filled home — I’m not generally interested in the sort of high-end designer houses that AD is full of. So even after I bought the issue, it sat unread for a while.
A couple of months ago, I turned on the documentary, American Symphony, being forever interested in creativity and creative people. A few minutes into it, I knew my husband would also want to see it, and by the 30-minute mark, there was that aforementioned vise around my heart, and I turned it off so we could watch it together another time, which we finally did.
In short, it is, conceptually, a behind-the-scenes look at a year in Batiste’s life, during which he is composing a symphony (also called American Symphony), to be performed at Carnegie Hall, while working on the Colbert show, touring, and being on the receiving end of the most Grammy nominations of the year — but also, as it happened, while Jaouad was being treated for leukemia after a decade in remission. As powerful as the film is, I knew there was even more to the story, because I had read the AD piece in the meantime, which turned out to be her first-person account of the renovation that was happening during that same period. The documentary shows us them getting quickly married in a bare living room without mentioning it was the living room of the house they had just bought — to be their first home together — and had only begun renovating when they got her diagnosis. It shows us her taking up painting in the hospital, when she couldn’t write, but not that she was also collaborating on the design of the house from that hospital bed, an act not just of creativity-as-a-lifeline but of profound optimism.
You’ve heard the expression about having compassion for everyone you meet because you never know what battles they may be fighting, and we associate it (or at least I do) with people who are rude or withdrawn or something, but it was all I could think about as Batiste goes necessarily about the job of being a performer, entertaining crowd after crowd while bearing the load of that treacherous time in their private life offstage. Talk about ‘living in the world of collapse and delight.’ After his performance at the Oscars last month, the camera panned to Jaouad in the audience, beaming with pride and joy. Had I not known what I did then, I would have thought oh that’s his lovely wife who made that beautiful home. But seeing her there, dressed up and enjoying herself, took on so much more dimension at that point, even before I had watched the rest of the documentary.
This is kind of a long post for a quick recommendation, yet dreadfully short of an actual review. Without saying too much about it, I’m saying it’s a powerful story, powerfully told, and I highly recommend both the movie and the AD article. And for more of Jaouad, her book is Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted, and her current project is The Isolation Journals over on Substack.
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[ IMAGES: Photo of the magazine by me + the official movie poster for American Symphony, directed by Matthew Heineman, streaming on Netflix ]
It’s that time again, where I turn the month’s posts upside down, shake out all the links, and organize them into neat piles for you by type. Each item’s original post is linked by its post number so you can see what the context was, and what was said! I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog, and if you were to buy a book or leave a buck in the tip jar, I sure would appreciate it! Thanks for being here, and happy weekend—
*NYT Gift Links expire 30 days from their creation date, so may have reverted to subscriber-only **All book links are Bookshop.org affiliate links except these. Buying through the Bookshop links helps make this blog possible, thank you!
After I had finished and scheduled the two parts below, IG fed me a post by a silver-haired 53-y-o model and anti-ageism advocate that just said (under side-by-side photos of herself with her previously dyed hair and her real hair), “In case you need a reminder today: It’s ok to look older.” The message, of course, being that “older” isn’t inherently worse than “younger,” especially with regard to looks (ffs), although we’ve all been trained to think so. But it got me musing on that age-old irony: that when we’re kids, all we want is to seem and look (and indeed, be) older, and then at some point the script flips, and suddenly simply appearing older is a fate worse than death. What popped into my head was a day last spring when I was out wandering with my sister (K) and my then 15-y-o niece (N) in Winter Park FL —
We were in a store my sister had wanted to shop in, full of what I would describe as generic, age-neutral sportswear — like a Gap sort of thing, but locally owned. K said bemusedly, “N thinks this is a store for old people who want to look young.” I said, “What’s old?” and N shrugged and replied, “I dunno. 30?” K and I giggled and shook our heads. Then we went off down the street to the store N had wanted to check out. As we approached the storefront, I took one look at the slinky, revealing dresses in the window — the kind that teenagers think makes them look all grown up — and said to her, “Ah. This is a store for young people who want to look older.” To which she replied (I love her so much), “Touché.”
It’s not uncommon for the fashion industry to periodically try to show their (momentary) commitment to diversity in various ways, only to quickly fall back into the habit of only featuring very young, very thin, and mostly white models. Hopefully this isn’t just another such anomaly, but ‘More old(er) models walked on the runways this season, marking a step in the right direction for age representation.’ (NYT Gift Link) At least as far as the images included in the article go, they are still all thin and mostly white (like scientists conducting a lab experiment, they apparently can only change one variable at a time), but how great to see these women showing how it’s done.
Years after having dramatically downsized my library (which I’ll talk more about some other time), I’m finding myself frequently looking at what remains of it and feeling puzzled by past choices. One of the most puzzling is my lost collection of books by and about Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, which I don’t recall consciously deciding to give up. And yet all that remains on my shelves are two of Woolf’s novels — To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway (that rare case of my having fallen in love with a book I was assigned in high school), both in stuffy, unread, navy-blue clothbound editions, you know the ones — and a well-thumbed, sun-faded paperback of A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary (out of print), which according to the post-it bookmark still adhered to page 169, I left off at the entry for 15 October 1923. Probably fifteen or more years ago.
Gone are Virginia’s other novels, the biography, Leonard Woolf’s multi-volume autobiography, various other books of their circle — books I had acquired and been given. Did I ever own the rest of VW’s diary (i.e., the complete five-volume set), or at least Leonard’s edit, A Writer’s Diary? And the letters? I no longer know. But while countless other books have gone unmissed, the Woolfs feel a bit like a phantom limb. A phantom shelf, you might say.
Wandering through Instagram one day last week I saw a mention of a book that’s about to be published in the UK called Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker. In Baker’s feed there is mention of a piece she had written for the Paris Review last summer called Virginia Woolf’s Forgotten Diary, about the ‘Asheham Diary,’ which I knew nothing about — it’s neither included nor mentioned in the Shorter Diary. Baker’s essay is gorgeous, but also it’s how I learned that Granta has reissued the entire diary in five shiny new hardcover volumes, which contain the full Asheham Diary for the first time. Resisting the urge to eat mac and cheese for the next month and order the full set, I bought Volume 1.
Here’s how Asheham fits in:
The 1915 Diary On 1 January 1915, living at 17 The Green, Richmond (outside London), with her husband Leonard, Virginia started a diary that she kept until 15 February. Each day she wrote a paragraph or two about their day — who they saw or wrote to, or ate with, where they went, what they were working on. In his introduction to the original set, her nephew (and biographer) Quentin Bell sets the stage, like a Masterpiece Theater host:
“Virginia was living in a kind of vacuum and was still barely recovered from her [second] bout of insanity. Since she did appear to be getting well again and was able to work and to enjoy Leonard’s company [they married in 1912] she may be considered happy. But in other ways her state was not enviable; she had reached middle life without any great achievement to her credit [she was 32!], and all around her were younger people rapidly advancing towards fame. She was poorer than she had ever been. She almost certainly knew that her mental health was precarious. She had hardly begun to find the fictional form that suited her, the great literary adventure of her life still lay unseen in the future, and she awaited with dreadful anxiety the publication of her first novel.”
That novel, The Voyage Out, is alluded to only once, in passing, in the diary of the year it was published. As noted, this diary only lasted until mid-February — before the end of that month she had another mental breakdown.
The Asheham Diary (1917-18) Recuperating at her rural Sussex rental, Asheham House, and finding a semblance of normalcy again, she made notes in a pocket-sized notebook from 3 August to 4 October 1917, at which point the Woolfs resumed life in Richmond. That much was always included in the “complete” set of the diaries, but she wrote in it on future visits to Asheham, later in the year and into the next. Those remaining entries are what’s newly included — as Appendix 3 — in the first volume of the Granta reissue.
The entries she made in this smaller diary are generally much shorter and more note-like (pictured above). The war is even more felt, and the notes are often about the price of eggs — literally, she keeps track of how much she paid to whom — as well as the things they can’t get due to rations or scarcity. They walk, bicycle or take the train wherever they go, and frequently forage for mushrooms and blackberries, often coming up empty. She remarks that she couldn’t go to social events if she wanted to because her clothes are all too shabby. She isn’t writing this diary, she (for the most part) is simply recording facts and visitors, weather and expenses, what’s blooming or hatching or molting (and even a laundry list, not published), but it is no less a compelling picture of the time and her state. And as Baker notes, there are anecdotes and imagery that reappear in her later novels.
The Main Diary (1917-1941) Upon their return to Richmond, on 8 October 1917, she opened a new notebook and wrote: “This attempt at a diary is begun on the impulse given by a discovery in a wooden box in my cupboard of an old volume, kept in 1915, & still able to make us laugh at Walter Lamb. This therefore will follow that plan — written after tea, written indiscreetly, & by the way I note here that L. has promised to add his page when he has something to say. His modesty is to be overcome. We planned today to get him an autumn outfit in clothes, & to stock me with paper & pens. This is the happiest day that exists for me.” And then she describes the rest of their day in the remainder of the one paragraph: it rains; they go for an errand-walk around London, with observations about a fellow shopper; they visit Dr. Johnson’s house (by then a museum); and while dropping off a review she’d written for the Times Literary Supplement, they also trade some gossip. She would keep up this diary — which altogether spanned 30 notebooks — until her suicide in 1941.
It is indiscreet and gossipy and occasionally outright horrifying, the things she says. It’s also a remarkable window on a fiercely intelligent couple and their friends and family, many of whom were highly influential, boundary-breaking figures at a key time in European history. It is constantly both ordinary and extraordinary in that way. I think what I had decided all those years ago was that the Shorter Diary would be enough for me and I could always read the longer one if I felt unsatisfied at the end of that, which, as noted, I never got to. Reading them side-by-side now, I’m happy to have both the yearly introductions in the shorter and the extensive footnotes in the longer.
In her preface to the original 1977-84 five-volume set, Anne Olivier Bell (Quentin’s wife, known as Olivier) — whose editing and annotating of the diaries is itself a masterwork that took her ten years — wrote “Virginia Woolf’s interests and observations range over so wide a field — art, literature, politics, people, and her surroundings — that some supporting explanation seems necessary. In deciding how much annotation is appropriate, I have to take into account the probability that — for reasons of cost and copyright — there is not likely to be another edition of these diaries for perhaps half a century.” At that point Leonard had already published his edit (in 1953), and Olivier’s “Shorter” edit would publish in 1989. But she was almost exactly right that it would be 50 years before another complete set would be produced. And here we are. Hopefully there will be a US edition. I could only find the new Granta hardcovers in the US at Amazon, and I hope I can justify buying the next and the next by finishing them one at a time before they go out of print. Meanwhile, perhaps someone will also publish updated hardcovers of the two edited versions. But I’ll be hanging onto my worn copy of A Moment’s Liberty regardless.
As I’m writing this, on Sunday March 24th, I turned to the final page of the shorter diary — and confirmed online that it is indeed the final entry — to see what Virginia’s last sentence was. (You can see it in her handwriting here.) It was four days before she drowned herself in the Ouse. The last sentence: “L. is doing the rhododendrons …” The date: March 24th.
Collapse and Delight 