Musings & Meanderings: Jami Nakamura Lin prefers longhand horizontal writing in large unlined notebooks (same!), plus checking-in on your writing goals, wrapping up 2023, book recs, honing your craft, more
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By Leslie Lindsay
A curated newsletter on the literary life, featuring ‘4 questions,’ reading & listening recommendations, where to submit, more
Leslie Lindsay|Always with a Book
~MUSINGS & MEANDERINGS~
December…a flurry of activity
Checking in…how’s your work/creativity/writing going?
Let’s pretend for a moment we’re checking in on each other. Here’s what I would ask you:
How’s your work going? How many words do you have right now? (Go check. Any number of words is good.) What do you want to accomplish by the end of the year? And when do you want to be done with this project? Do you have a timeline? No?! Why not? Let’s get all the boring stuff out of the way. (Seriously, the boring stuff is what needs to get hammered out because without that, it won’t get done).
Now how do you feel about what you’re writing? Do you love it, are you excited about it? Are you passionate about it? Good. Remember that feeling because I guarantee you will need tap into that feeling sometime in the future.
If you’re struggling with your work, it’s my hope you can find a way back to the pleasurable side of it. Writing should be fun! Think back to how excited you were to start this project. You couldn’t stop thinking and talking about it, right? You had about your topic, even ‘what if’ ones? Can you light that fire again? Your voice is important. Your story is worthwhile.
This time of year can muddy boundaries. It’s the end of the year. It’s the holidays. We get to feeling frenzied and nostalgic all at the same time. Plus, you know, the busy-ness of it all. We’re racing to the finish line in all the things by the end of the year. Do you need to reconfigure your schedule a bit if you’ve let some boundaries around your writing schedule slide? There’s still time left. There’s still a few weeks to write. You can totally do it!
Keep going!
Question:
Do you write in December? Do you cut back? Same as always? Maybe you turn it off and focus on holidays, family, planning for the new year…
This issue of Musings & Meanderings is jam-packed with some really great stuff to get your [writing and reading] off on the right foot. Coaching, book recommendations, journals to submit to, reading recommendations, author interviews, recently published prose, and a quick 4 questions insights interview with Jami Nakumura Lin on her recently-released speculative memoir,THE NIGHT PARADE (Mariner, November 7 2023). I interviewed the award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger on her recently-released memoir, WHILE YOU WERE OUT: An Intimate Portrait of One Family During an Era of Silence (Celadon Books, September 2023) in Hippocampus Magazine, plus poetry in Ballast, Neologism Poetry Journal, Empyrean, photography in Western Michigan Review, and a photo-essay featuring miniatures in On the Seawall.
This will be the last Musings & Meanderings this year. Instead of the usual two issues this month, we’re just going with one. Be sure to come back in January when I will feature debut author Kate Brody and her domestic thriller, RABBIT HOLE.
There’s more to this newsletter. Keep Scrolling.
By the way, I do not get any ‘kick-backs’ or other kind of payment (in-kind, or otherwise) for mentioning these classes/workshops/books/individuals. Sharing because if helps me, maybe it’ll speak to you, too.
Three Writerly Things:
Words + Art?! It’s a thing, and I love it! Kelcey Ervick shows you how in thisBrevitypiece.
Iowa is synonymous with good writing, so why not check out their 2024 online course offerings and kill those New Year’s aspirations? Fee-based.
Poets–are you interested in learning how to read your poetry to a live audience? Want to brush up your skills? Check out this one-time offering from the Chestnut Review. Fee-based.
Ooops! I lied. Four things. Here’s a bonus.
Writing a memoir? Check out this StoryStudio Chicago offering with Suzanne Scanlon, who has her own memoir coming out this spring. Fee-based.
A Most Anticipated Book by Poets & Writers– The Boston Globe – San Francisco Chronicle – The Millions – Library Journal– Book Riot – Debutiful– and many more!
In the groundbreaking tradition of In the Dream House and The Collected Schizophrenias, a gorgeously illustrated speculative memoir that draws upon the Japanese myth of the Hyakki Yagyo–the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons–to shift the cultural narrative around mental illness, grief, and remembrance.
Leslie Lindsay:
Without responding in complete sentences, what would you say THE NIGHT PARADE is about?
Jami Nakamura Lin:
Grief. Loss (both personal and intergenerational). Joy. Bipolar disorder. Movement. The archive. Telling a story and holding a story. Monsters and monstrosity. Japanese, Taiwanese, and Okinawan legends. Diaspora. Homing and unhoming. The uncanny.
Leslie Lindsay:
Where did you write THE NIGHT PARADE? Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? Do they change with each project, or remain constant over time?
Jami Nakamura Lin:
I wrote it primarily in my bed (I have this whole set-up that allows me to write horizontally without hurting my back too much) because I have such low energy! I usually write first drafts longhand, in a really huge notebook. Thick, smooth, unlined paper always. When my notebooks are smaller, my ideas get cramped as well. I use a lot of Post-it notes. I also was lucky enough to attend two writing residencies during the years I spent on theNight Parade. I won a fellowship that was for writing about mental health at the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow in summer 2021. I was midway through writing the full draft then, and having that time helped me get down tons of words and sketch out the rest. Later, I went to Yaddo at the end of 2022, and during those two weeks I finished up the last line edits for my editor. One day I spent 11 hours and the next day I spent 8 hours just completing those last edits. Having dedicated time helps me so much.
Leslie Lindsay: If you weren’t writing, you would be…
Jami Nakamura Lin:
Working in a library or in an indie bookstore!
Leslie Lindsay: What advice would you give to your younger writing self?
Jami Nakamura Lin:
The advice I would give to my younger writing self is to stop listening to the writing advice of people who you don’t trust. I listened to all these people who told me I should change X and Y about my writing, that Z was wrong with it. I didn’t know how to filter out feedback. After my MFA it took years for me to finally find my way back to writing the kind of weirdo stuff I loved.
“A gorgeous invocation of the magic-haunted spaces between lived experience and folkloric traditions, between the living and the dead, between memory and story. I loved THE NIGHT PARADE.” -Kelly Link, bestselling author of Get in Trouble“
Image designed & photographed byL.LindsayPhoto credit: Alexa Bradenberg
What books or essays you’ve read and enjoyed or felt energized by lately? Is there a book you’ve been consistently recommending? If nothing comes to mind, can you make a plan to pop by your local bookstore for a second? I promise, you will find something. You can respond in the comments or shoot me an email or connect on IG.
Photo by Leslie Lindsay. Keep your eyes peeled for my interview with Susan Kiyo Ito in the January issue of Hipppocampus.
I can’t get enough of local bookstores. They’re cute and charming and full of inspiration and life, so here’s one I’m definitely checking out, Yellow Bird Books. Remember, you can almost always order books from local bookstores and have them shipped to you. It helps keep small businesses going and a vibrant community. P.S. Books make great gifts. Did you catch myIG post about the 2023 titles that might appeal for your gift-giving needs?
Are we hanging together on IG? I hope so! I post much more frequently there, and don’t want you to miss out. I’ll be sharing tips, ‘best of lists,’ interview round-ups, and more throughout the month of December. Pop over. I’m @leslielindsay1|Booknerd
Recently Published Interviews, Prose, Etc.:
Such an important and affirming interview with the lovely award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger about her recently-released memoir, WHILE YOU WERE OUT (September 2023, Celadon Books), about a large family with mentally unstable parents, a family plagued by suicide, plus a plea to improve housing for mentally ill. In the November issue of Hippocampus Magazine.
This piece, MODEL HOME: A Study Under Compression, in On the Seawall, is something I am so proud of. It was conceived in a craft store when I wandered down the model train aisle. At home, I already had the moss and tiny house and vials. I wanted to depict something with words and photography that would spotlight my family falling into disarray…my mother’s mental illness, the ‘perfect’ home, the family divided. This was my answer. It’s my first text + image publication. Here’s a sampling:
I am bowled over by the reception my poem, CREVASSE, received by Luke Johnson in the Spring 2023 issue of Ballast. Check out our dialogue about one another’s work HERE. Also, that landing page! Swooning.
You can find some of my other poetry atEmpyrean Literary Journal. This piece was conceived in a workshop at StoryStudio Chicago in which the prompt was to combine two totally different things with one’s childhood street. I chose my grandfather’s profession as stained-glass artist and the year 1989. The resulting piece is COLLAPSE.
This interview with poet Pattiann Rogers in LitHub was such a dream. Pattiann is 82-years-old and still writing and publishing poetry. This piece is about nature, curiosity, and the flickering that happens in all creatures.
Super-excited about this illustrated review inDIAGRAM, which has sorta been like a dream place of mine to get work published. It’s a beautiful melding of all things that bring me joy: fonts, words, ideas, art, books, and the human body. I mean…the only obsessions missing for me is architecture, travel, nature, and basset hounds. Check it out and the book, YOUR HEARTS, YOUR SCARS: Essays by the late Adina Talve-Goodman (Bellevue Literary Press, Jan 24 2023), which happens to be a Powell’s pick for January.
My illustrated review of YOUR HEARTS YOUR SCARS (Bellevue Literary Press, Jan 24 2023) as it appears in DIAGRAM 22.6
Kathryn Gahl in conversation with me about her poetic memoir,THE YELLOW TOOTHBRUSH(Two Shrews Press, September 2022), about her incarcerated daughter, perinatal mood disorder, more in MER, November 28, 2022.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery’sHALFWAY FROM HOME(Split/Lip Press, Nov 8) in Hippocampus Magazine, about her working-class unconventional childhood in California, moving across the country to pursue writing, home, displacement, and so much more November 13, 2022.
Prose in SEPIA Journal Oct/Nov 2022 issue. Interiors is about an Appalachian family, black bottom pie, trains, and ear aches. It was inspired by my own family lore, and also: this journal is STUNNING!
An essay about an experience at a workshop/retreat, featuring design/architecture, and how we are all works-in-progress, in The Smart Set.
Someone alerted me that my ‘obsessions’ were blank. I assure you, they are not!!! So MUCH goodness going on in my life right now, I plum-near forgot. Here goes:
Friends. WHY they are so amazing. HOW they are so amazing. WHAT the heck I did to deserve so many bright souls in my life.
Dorthea Lange’s photography, but also her life. Did you know she developed polio as a child and that her father left the family when she was 12? She dropped his name and took her mother’s maiden name.
Art as an expression but also a social construct, expressing oneself in this manner is probably, maybe the backbone of all other art. In that sense, I am going to say…architecture and design still really fuels me (I’m thinking of becoming a volunteer with a Chicago architect organization and supporting young people who want to go into the profession).
Much of writing is made up of obsessions. We might use our obsession as catalyst, something that gets us writing and, if lucky, keeps us writing.
Sometimes we write about our obsession directly, hoping (perhaps futilely) to be purged free of it, once and for all.
Susan Sontag, while talking about writing and the writer’s life, said it simply:
“You have to be obsessed. It’s not something you’d want to be—it’s rather something you couldn’t help but be.”
What subjects do you keep returning to—from harmless infatuations to downright obsessions? Is it a piece of art of music? Why are you (okay, me) so obsessed with houses and homes? Old photographs? Paper and erasers and pencils? Basset hounds? Postcards? Old letters? Miniatures? I mean, really….the list could go on and on.
Until next time, happy writing& reading.
Sneak Peek: In January, you’ll find a 4Qs Insight Interview with Kate Brody, author of the wildly-anticipated debut domestic thriller/mystery, RABBIT HOLE (Soho Crime, January 2 2022)
You are reading Musings & Meanderings, a consistently inconsistent weekly newsletter about the literary life from Leslie Lindsay, and home of an archive of bestselling and debutauthor interviews. I’m also on twitterandinstagram. I try to answer comments as best I can. Feel free to find my book suggestions onbookshop.org, and also check out the authors I’ve hosted in in-depth interviews HERE.
Some of you have been reading my reviews, interviews, and meanderings for more than a decade now. That’s huge and I am so humbled. Thanks for being here.
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One last thing: I love Between the Covers podcast with David Naimon. Not listening yet? If you’re a serious reader and writer, I don’t think you’ll regret it.
Leslie A. Lindsay 
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