Tending the Details
Finding home in the small & slow.
Before the jump: I’ve announced spring 2024 classes on my website. They include Notions: A Sewing & Writing Class, another section of Short Story Multiverse, and a new offering called Chimeric Writing. Start dates range from January through March, and some sliding scale options are available.
To protect its soft larval body, the caddisfly in its nymph stage builds a shell out of whatever it can find in the stream bed it calls home. Using a durable and waterproof spit glue, it might slap together pebbles, grains of sand, glass, bits of leaves and twigs, plastic, or other materials.
Can you imagine using what’s to hand to build your home?
After catastrophic flooding, swarms of insects may make webbed nests of trees, sewing up home by the thousands and concentrating the biomass of acres into singular organisms.
Can you imagine finding the last bit of dry land left and making your home there with strangers?
Cliff swallows combine mud with saliva to build gourd-shaped nests on the undersides of bridges. Bush tits sew a sleeping bag out of grass, moss, lichen, and feathers to house their offspring and their neighbors’ offspring. Hummingbirds add spider silk so their nests expand with the growing bodies of their young.
Can you imagine clinging to infrastructure for support? Can you imagine raising young with a community, no care for who is biologically related? Can you imagine building home so that it responds and changes with your needs?
The paper wasp chews gray weathered wood to collect its pulp and lay down delicate strips of its eponymous material, not for words but for warmth, for architecture.
Can you imagine building a home out of paper and cardboard? Out of the worn down bits of hard things, pulped and recombined to protect you?
Difflugia, a tiny ameboid puddle-dweller, ingests grains of sand in its travels. These then migrate through its protoplasm to the outside of its body until it’s constructed its own homemade exoskeleton. Coral polyps, diatoms, concentrate minerals from seawater—lime, silica—until they build cities around their bodies.
Can you imagine feeling so at home that your shelter is a byproduct of your body simply living?
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A few weeks ago I went to listen to Nicola Griffith read from and speak about her new book Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to her instant classic Hild. Hild, if you’re unfamiliar, is Griffith’s lush & queer imagining of the life and times of Hild of Whitby, a sixth century historical figure about whom almost nothing is known. Published in 2013, I read Hild four or five years ago now, and was astonished at the level of detail and careful observation Griffith packs into the lush fantasy novel. For even though it’s a book about a real person who lived, powered by years of meticulous research by Griffith into the family lines and battles and textiles and on and on, the hallucinatory level of detail makes it feel like a fantasy. Listening to her read from Menewood a particular passage in which Hild observes an ant for many sentences of interior description, it’s clear the sequel follows suit in this style.
I asked Griffith during the Q&A portion of the reading how she approaches the writing of these passages of natural detail. Were they from direct observation? Written in the moment? Or was she engaging in a sort of channeling at her desk, perhaps closing her eyes and conjuring visions like her protagonist? It’s Hild’s ability to carefully observe her surroundings, after all, which makes her a valuable seer to the kings and rulers of her time. I wanted to know if Griffith was somehow living like her character, and if so, how?
I’ll need to paraphrase her answer here, but it’s stayed with me as an important component of disability and its relationship to writing and literature that I don’t hear spoken about very often (at least not in my nature-y circles, where it seems extremely relevant) and I want to share it with you. Griffith, who uses a wheelchair to get around, was a very active child and young adult, she told me, enjoying climbing trees and being rambunctious outdoors. But since her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis and the progression of her disease, her mobility has taken a hit. Now, she said, her time outside is spent largely still in her wheelchair, observing the details of the world around her that are within reach. It’s this stillness and the powerful attention it allows her to concentrate that yields these descriptions, she said.
We throw around the phrase “attention to detail.” But I don’t think it’s ever come into focus for me as clearly as Griffith’s answer did in elucidating the relationship between creativity and stillness and disability as a means of channeling a different sort of observation, in fiction and of the natural world.
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It’s been a wild end of the year. I won’t attempt to sum it up here, but as this is likely my last newsletter of 2023, the greatest hits real quick:
smoke and mold published its ninth issue, including the poem “Last show at the Sderot Cinema, or How to IDa lynch mob” by Palestinian-American poet Rasha Abdulhadi. As I said in the intro to the issue, there’s a readiness to the work in issue 9, and when the writers are getting ready for a fight, you should be paying attention.
I had a story published in Michigan Quarterly’s special issue Transversions: Archives, Testimony & Reimagination, edited by the wonderful Alex Marzano-Lesnevich. An excerpt of “The Chlorophyll Library” can be found on the site, but to read the whole thing you’ll need to get your hands on the print version, baybee.
I took half an edible and went to listen to prophet-poet Alice Notley when she came to Portland to read from her new book The Speak Angel Series, published by none other than our local Fonograf Editions. (Highly recommend this experience.)
I’m sending this edition of Sex Weather Climate Death from my little cabin on Cascade Head on the Oregon coast, historic unceded territory of the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla peoples, and the current day Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of the Siletz Indians. It is also home to the Sitka Center for Art & Ecology, where I’m in residence for the next several weeks. So far it’s been quiet, beautiful, and unseasonably sunny. I’m grateful to have this time here.
Finally, I’ve turned on the option to receive paid subscriptions for this publication. It’s still free for everyone regardless of if you pay $0 or $100, and will never be paywalled, but you know, the times we live in and all that. I hear some people out there have forgotten inflation exists and pretend to go on as normal. Outrageous!
Anyhow, thank you for reading another year of Sex Weather Climate Death. Hang in there, say hello, support if you can but no worries if you can’t. I’m very very glad you’re here.
In solidarity,
CJ