Nuts raining down

I needed to get out into the woods, but between sciatica and recovering from the sprained ankle, it’s been hard to plan, or for that matter to pick a trail that hits my sweet spot between genuinely peaceful and not-too-rugged. Yesterday my spouse remembered Reservoir Hollow. It’s an obscure out-and-back trail a 15-minute drive away, heading from the edge of a small town into the state forest, climbing a low mountain but gently–and what a perfect morning to walk it, cool and clear, with the blue of the sky deepening as it does in September and just a hint of gold touching the leaves. It crosses streams seven or eight times in the first mile or so, more than I can handle in spring, but the long dry spell made stepping from stone to stone easy. Acorns in shades of yellow, green, and brown pelted around us, but none clocked us on the head, and there were lots of fascinating mushrooms to pore over. It lifted my spirits so much. In the late afternoon I went to a lovely poetry reading (plus guitar) in another part of the county, and we ate a good dinner outdoors. I kept catching my breath in awe at the day’s beauty.

There was a moment, though, when we parked the old Prius with its lefty bumperstickers on that residential-getting-rural edge of a conservative town and I thought: hmm. Am I being stupid? My agitation-machine-of-a-cellphone had been reporting fresh horrors (not to mention the horror of how mainstream media covers them, or doesn’t). The aforementioned spouse has published a raft of editorials in state newspapers lately, about which he gets some thank you notes and some hate mail (here’s his recent blog post about a right-wing alumni group that has called for his dismissal by our employer). He works with a local political organization that got a new death threat yesterday. We’re white, cisgender, safer than most, privileged to not worry much about this sort of expedition, but no one’s safe, really, and politically this beautiful Virginia county feels like a bad place to be. We only saw one other group of hikers in the two hours we were out there, four teens in Jesus tees, and we hadn’t told anyone where we were going. We were fine, although we forgot to lock the car. How long will this surreal bubble around us last?

I haven’t posted in a few weeks but this is how I’ve been: lucky and worried, taking consolation in nature and all kinds of art. I’ve had my head down revising my novel like crazy, and I think I have a literary agent now–more when the paperwork goes through. The work is exciting but it also sends my anxiety levels through the roof. What do these characters really want, Lesley? (It’s self-therapy to contemplate this, because each main character contains some aspect of me.) How does this experience feel in their bodies? (Notice, author, the fearful tightening around your heart.) Why does the plot sometimes just seem to happen to them? How would they actively step up to crisis? Why aren’t you addressing the gun thing? (Yikes and yikes and yikes.) Processing literary critique as, in other spaces, I’ve been processing a lifelong feeling of wrongness…not easy. At the same time, I know in my bones that it’s an extraordinary gift for anyone to think deeply about your work and give useful advice. I have no answer for how to balance it, except to keep walking.

Hope you’re okay. Here’s some of the good stuff. I drive down to Asheville next weekend for the Punch Bucket Literary Festival, where I’ll give a reading from Mycocosmic and speak on a publishing panel. Last weekend I donated a workshop to the Botanical Garden of the Piedmont (Charlottesville VA) called “Listening for Poetry.” I had an open, curious group and it was really fun. I’ve received a couple of other nice invitations lately, more details TBA, among the usual rejections, which is just part of the biz.

Below are a few snaps from the NYC trip in late August, reading in Bryant Park and visiting the Hilma af Klint exhibit at MOMA of botanical drawings she created as a daily meditation. The images provided that quiet feeling we all need direly.