Musings & Meanderings: Quarter-Year Check-In, Writing Advice, Julia Malye’s new historical fiction PELICAN GIRLS, about Baleine Brides & survival, how she would be a visual artist if not a writer; do’s & don’ts of writerly self-promotion, how to write for Modern Love, more
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~
Is it spring yet?!
You know, you really should…
Welp, here we are, a quarter of the way into 2024, or at least we will be at the end of the month. I know how January can be, everything is shiny and new and you have GOALS, you’re pumped, and ready to GO and then that March thing happens. Your momentum sways. You think maybe you’re a big bozo for thinking you can do this writing thing. Yep. Been there. Might be there now. It’s part of the creative curse.
Here’s some pep talks to keep you going, from some of the best.
“Try as hard as you can not to compare yourself with other writers and their success. We are all on our own journeys, and I believe in supporting one another. Any distraction is time away from writing and focusing on your goals. The longer I’m in this writing world, the more the same lessons come back to slap me in the face. Your words and your writing are unique to you. The world will always have room for you.” -Hillary Leftwich, teaching A Ritual in Writing Resilience
“Louis L’Amour said, ‘Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.’ This is so true! It’s really hard to get into that chair and get started, but nothing will happen until you do. I often set a timer for an hour and promise myself I can stop after that if the writing is not coming, and that gets me into the chair. And once I am there, it starts to flow.” -Kathy MacMillan, Mentoring Picture Book Writers
“When I was a student at the Iowa Writers Workshop, Frank Conroy, author of the groundbreaking memoir Stop-Time, used to always tell us not to be afraid of writing badly, because it’s the bad writing that leads to the good writing. I try to remember this every time I sit down at the desk: bad writing is the seed of good writing. All writing leads us forward.” -Robert Anthony Siegel, leading The Storytelling Lab
“In a workshop once, the poet Matthew Dickman told the class that art should involve wrestling with an idea or experience. If you’re feeling like you can’t make progress with something you’re working on, ask yourself if you still have something to learn from it. If you’ve learned what you need to learn, it might be time to move on to something new. I think this has stuck with me because it has helped me put my writing life into perspective. Not everything we write is for somebody else. Sometimes the work we’re doing is simply to take us from one place to the next.” -Sarah Carson, teaching Write 30 Poems in 30 Days
“Just do a little. This is a fundamental truth of the writing craft. It’s very easy to get daunted for a variety of reasons, and often, the best way to keep going is just to agree to work on something for ten minutes–motivation follows action, and once you start, suddenly you find you’ve been at it for half an hour, an hour, two hours.” -Emma Brodie, teaching The Art of the Query
“You could be writing when you go for a walk, talk to a neighbor, or do the dishes. This taught me to pay attention and to take in the rich world ceaselessly unfolding around me.” -Pingmei Lan, teaching Writing the Magical, Cultural and Mythical
“Maggie Nelson, a mentor of mine, said to follow your obsessions. I’ve never forgotten that advice.” -Amanda Montei, teaching Beyond Memoir
Keep going!
Action Item:
As a side note, if you’re looking for a craft-ish book on writing, a peptalk in a your pocket, look no further than Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Creative, Focused, and Productive All Year Long (Simon & Schuster, 2024), and which just released in January, and is based on her #1000words movement and popular Substack, CraftTalk. You’ll find all kinds of advice, tips, practical tools for keeping the saw sharp.
I recently cleared out my office. I uncovered 14 craft books. My plan: re-read one a month for the next year. I can math…there are only 12 months in a year, so maybe two don’t get read. But being the overachiever that I am, I’ll read all of them in 12 months.
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 Julia Malye on her historical fiction, PELICAN GIRLS (Soho Press, February 2 2024). 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.
Musings & Meanderings is a labor of love. Lately, it’s been more labor than love. I’m going to try just one per month in order to focus on my own work. Find me on IG and Twitter, where you’ll find recently-published interviews, essays, photography, and poetry.
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.
Are you writing about health/illness/wellness? The Missouri Review is looking for these narratives–poetry, CNF, fiction–for their annual Perkoff Prize, now through March 15. The website offers this description: “The Perkoff Prize is a tri-genre contest that awards $1000 and publication each to writers of the best story, set of poems, and essay that engage in evocative ways with health and medicine as judged by the editors.”
Do you want to write for Modern Love/NYT?! It would be a stellar byline…but how does one do that?! Often these essays start ‘in scene’ and are swiftly-moving, concise pieces that inspire and end with some reconciliation. Plus, submissions are open now. Check out these tips and guidelines , from Writing Workshops.
A sweeping epic in the vein of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and inspired by a true story, this stunning US literary debut captures the never-before-told journey of the Baleine Brides: a ship full of young women plucked from a Paris asylum and sent to marry settlers in North America’s rough Louisiana Territory.
At once a gorgeously written work of startling depth and emotion and a gripping drama marrying high-seas adventure with pioneer grit, Pelican Girls is a powerful, thought-provoking novel about female friendship and desire and the daunting compromises women are forced to make to survive.
Leslie Lindsay:
Without responding in complete sentences, what would you say PELICAN GIRLS is about?
Julia Malye:
Survival, female friendship, love, desire, discovery, alterity, courage; adapting to a new environment; women finding bubbles of independence, freedom and agency in a world that denies it all to them.
Leslie Lindsay:
Where did you write PELICAN GIRLS? Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? Do they change with each project, or remain constant over time?
Julia Malye:
PELICAN GIRLS is a transatlantic story, and my writing process mirrors that aspect of the book: I wrote parts of this novel in France and parts of it in the USA. I drafted the first chapter in Oregon as I was about to graduate from my master’s program in creative writing and eight years later, I finished the final draft in Paris, where I was born and raised.
PELICAN GIRLS invited me to see my creative process anew: I wrote this novel both in English and in French, which was a first for me. Self-translation is very challenging—almost impossible, if you ask me—and so I found myself rewriting, using translation as a tool toward revision. Each language taught me something new about the characters, and the story grew tremendously as I went back and forth between the two manuscripts. It was fascinating to see each of these bilingual twins change depending on the feedback I received from my French editors and my American and British editors.
Leslie Lindsay:
If you weren’t writing, you would be…
Julia Malye:
Probably a visual artist. I was always drawing (and writing) when I was a child, and I almost enrolled in a junior high school specialized in art at age 11. Around that time, when a fellow student told me that I wrote well, I first thought and hoped she was complimenting my handwriting. When it turned out she referred to storytelling and word choice, I was disappointed she wasn’t talking about my calligraphy. Be reassured, I would not have the same reaction today.
My mother is a painter, and oil painting has always been therapeutic to me. I also adore collaging and I make a collage calendar every year—my autumnal quiet activity, one that reconciles my love for literature and art.
Leslie Lindsay:
What terrifies you about having your book in the world?
Julia Malye:
The fact that it is no longer quite mine, and that I won’t be able to continue working on it to try and turn it into an even better version. But one could be working on one’s book indefinitely, and the story would keep on changing, mirroring the writer’s growth, the author’s changing experiences. Maybe a published book is only one of the many lives a story could have.
‘Pelican Girls is a feat of sublime imagination, every page a wonder. Malye has written an unforgettably rich and sensual novel—a triumph.’
— Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen and The Dog of the North
Image designed & photographed byL.LindsayPhoto retrieved here
For more information, to purchase a copy ofPELICAN GIRLS or to connect with the author via social media, please visit her website.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
JULIA MALYE is the author of three novels published in France and works as a translator for Les Belles Lettres publisher. At the age of twenty-one, she moved to the United States to study fiction writing and graduated from Oregon State University’s MFA program in 2017. Since 2015, she’s taught creative writing to hundreds of students at Oregon State University, and at La Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Sciences Po Paris.
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. I recently read DAYSWORK, co-authored by a husband-wife team about the life of Herman Melville, but intersecting with Nathaniel Hawthorne, others, and many cameos of contemporary authors. A 2023 NPR bookpick.
What is creative non-fiction, anyway? Lee Gutkind sort of defined the genre. Check out this book about this often misunderstood (criticized?) topic. P.S. It’s now a very popular genre. From Yale Books.
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.
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.
Oh my gosh! This is so unique and stimulating. Smells are closely related to emotion and memory and this artist created a scratch-and-sniff wall, bringing forth the scents of Hong Kong, by We Designs. Check it out.
Postpartum depression has long captured my attention. I’m not convinced I suffered from it when my two kids were born, but it is very common. It seems the reasons might be part of the body’s immune system. Check out this piece from the Washington Post.
Image designed and photographed by L.Lindsay. Follow me on Instagram for more like this.
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.
“I try now to be more mindful of what I can’t stop thinking about. To honor my obsessions. To ignore the editor on one shoulder and the internal naysayer on the other. Those two voices who are always convinced that ever word is the wrong one, that the while idea is bad, that the end will never be in sight.”
–Laura Spence-Ash in Poets & Writers, Jan-Feb 2024
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: April! I’ll feature this environmental novel set in 1973 Turkey, mined from the author’s real life, NO MORE EMPTY SPACES.
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.
Reviewing books and talking about them with others on-line and in-person is one small way to engage with & support the literary community.
Thank you for letting me guide you on your bookish journey.
What I’m Listening to:
I just finished listening to a podcast about the longest-running U.S, study on happiness (Harvard Study of Adult Development) in the United States, which began during The Great Depression, ironically. You might be surprised at the findings.
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.
I support writing organizations, authors, publishers, and more. Occasionally, you’ll get a peak behind-the-scenes, too.
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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| Writer & Creative 