Supreme Court fireworks and Caroline Siegrist

Dear Writers,

Happy July 🎆 How are you? Our heads are spinning in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decisions to overturn Roe v. Wade, curtail the EPA’s authority to limit greenhouse emissions and weaken the separation between church and state. With our federal constitutional right to abortion gone, we’re taking our pleasures where we can and were thrilled to walk down Fifth Avenue on Sunday, June 26 and watch Pride being celebrated 🏳️‍🌈.

What else can we do? Since we can’t bring back Ruth Bader Ginsburg, let’s support pro-choice candidates in key states where abortion is on the line 🫡✊🏼✊🏽✊🏾. If you’re interested, go to actblue.com and donate to these candidates in these states: Arizona: Eva Burch; Georgia: Jasmine Clark, Dr. Michelle Au; Michigan: Darrin Camilleri, Carol Glanville, Sam Singh; North Carolina: Sydney Batch; Pennsylvania: Dr. Arvind Venkat, Melissa Cerrato, Dan Williams. If you’d like to volunteer for organizations providing access to abortion, you can do so here.

We know that reading and writing about politics can be devastating and distracting. Let’s spend this summer getting our creative work done, in spite of, and because of, it all. As Jean Rhys wrote in Wide Sargasso Sea: “Have spunk and do battle for yourself.”

In other words, write your way out of this.

Last month, we read and listened to Kathryn Schulz’s memoir, Lost & Found. Schulz lost her beloved father soon after meeting her future wife, the writer, Casey Kep, author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud and the Last Trial of Harper Lee. Schulz’s memoir weaves the two love stories together, while braiding in explorations of the history of love according to Dante and Plato, among other people, and the history of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where Kep is from. Schulz’s love for her father, her wife and the natural landscape is so beautifully described that she lulls you into a soothing trance. You emerge from the book feeling cheerful and full of hope.

We’ve also been talking with Caroline Siegrist, a Nashville-based writer who wrote the fabulous piece, Sinners List, and was a guest speaker in one of our June workshops. See our Q&A with Siegrist below and read what she has to say about being a “save the cat” writer versus a “pantser,” the “compound interest” idea of writing and where and when she writes.

Mohsin Hamid published a sharp short story, The Face in the Mirror, excerpted from his forthcoming novel, The Last White Man. In a Q&A, he said: We are living in a time of intensifying tribalism and nationalism. Change is accelerating, which makes us anxious, and the competition for our attention in the attention economy is defaulting to a mode of fueling those anxieties. The question is: What other responses can there be? And among those responses, surely, are alternative storytelling responses. As fear of the other grows, stories can venture into that fear, acknowledge it, and seek to allow us to experience the losses that changes bring with less anger and more sadness—but sadness made bearable by hope.

In other words: Write your way out of this.

Our week-long Moroccan writing retreat in October is sold out so thank you to everyone who signed up. We’ll return to teaching weekly workshops via Zoom in September and are running a one-day hybrid writing retreat in NYC in November, so we hope you’ll join us, live or via Zoom, in the fall.

Clients Getting Published:

Melissa Mizel, Just Too Bad (Medium)

Holly Shaw, Big Lessons from Montclair Little League (Montclair Local)

Juicy Reads:

Rachel Cusk: Making House: Notes on Domesticity (NYT Magazine)

Hua Hsu, Ocean Vuong is Still Learning (The New Yorker)

Honor Jones, How I Demolished My Life (The Atlantic)

Caroline Siegrist, Sinners List ( Chapter 16), Code Grey (Hippocampus)

Kathryn Schulz, How I Proposed to My Girlfriend: The Two Lives of a Wedding Ring