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~
“We do not act upon the world. We are the world in its unspeakable tensions, contradictions, experimentations, creativities, and messy alchemies.”
– Bayo Akomola
Yesterday, I took a bunch of stuff and donated it to a charity. I also filled several recycling bins and two garbage bins. I hauled stuff from my crawlspace and my furnace room. I unsubscribed to a million junk emails. Millions. I did a big electronic purge, too. Folders and files that were not serving me, that were cluttering my in-box and my desktop, and really–my brain. The whole process is an eff-load amount of work, but the chronic mental clutter is more than I wanted to deal with.
Good-bye. Delete. Unsubscribe. Good riddance.
It’s liberating.
Why am I doing this? Other than the above?
Because I need to make space for creativity. We creative types…the wheels never stop. We think of new ideas every moment of every day. We have a surplus, while simultaneously, we’re nurturing a time deficit.
Time is integral to this new writing project.
Actually, it’s not new at all. I’ve been happily creating, cogitating, and incubating this manuscript for a year now. A year! That’s huge. And it’s about my great-grandmother, a woman who was too old and too demented for me to have had much of a relationship with, but I do have a memory of visiting her in the nursing home long, long ago.
Cora Belle was a tough, independent woman. A single mother to six (!) during The Great Depression. She lived in a tiny home with dirt floors. My late grandmother told me she swept those floors. She did the wash on metal washboards. She took in ironing to make ends meet. Cora Belle had no time for creativity, not the kind we think of. But she was creative with her pennies. She was creative with the way she set up her home (she slept in the dining room, giving her three girls one bed to share in the one bedroom, her boys slept in the living room). She was creative in that she canned food from her garden and decorated with wildflowers in Mason jars.
I’m writing her story. I’m integrating my own.
I’m in awe.
I think Cora Belle would be appalled to know how much I have accumulated in my lifetime. In adulthood alone. It’s an embarrassment of riches, a luxury she did not have. So I am letting things go to new homes. So I can re-create her world, give her breath.
I’m letting myself breathe through her.
This is the good part!
What Brought you here?
Let’s talk about that. Where to you hope to go and share and be?
Find me on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and let’s chat!
xx,
~Leslie : )
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 Cynthia Swanson on grief, intuition, music, and so much more. I have a new author conversation in Fugue Reviews, 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. I also have a piece in the BECOMING REAL anthology, edited by Laraine Herring (Oct 1 2024) Regal House/Pact Press), which benefits Girls Write Now, a mentorship for young women who want to write.
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.
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:
- How does it feel to finally become a published author after years of ‘covering’ books? Check out this piece, On the Anxiety of Finally Publishing, by Maris Kreizman.
- Getting to the Truth: A Craft & Practice. I’m always up for a good craft book…even if we are disciplined writers, sometimes we need a refresher, right? Check out this book from Hippocampus.
- Sheila Heti on writing advice for the people who give it, from LitHub
New! Featured Author|Insights
john compton
my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store: Poetry
“john compton’s my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store is a wonderful permutation of pain, paradise and pleasure. They write, “i engrave poems/into flesh on his back,//clean the wounds with alcohol/so scars heal legibly.” This feral collection is continually like that. Imagistic, bewildering, surprise surprise surprise. A book of fractals fused by love, both jagged and bewitching.
—Luke Johnson, 2024 California Book Award Finalist, author of Quiver (Texas Review Press) and Distributary (forthcoming)
Leslie Lindsay:
Without responding in complete sentences, what would you say MY HUSBAND HOLDS MY HAND is about?
john compton:
As Subhaga Crystal Bacon, captured in their blurb, i think this encapsulates the book perfectly: “a clear-eyed examination of the body, its hungers, desires, shames, and pains. It’s a book of desires fulfilled, thwarted, and manipulated. The poems explore “my body,” “his body,” “your body,” and “her stone body.” Bodies that are “mercy,” “burning,” “rakish,” and “dampened.””
Leslie Lindsay:
Where did you write MY HUSBAND HOLDS MY HAND? Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? Do they change with each project, or remain constant over time?
john compton:
i wrote this book everywhere. i have no specific writing routines. i don’t have a writing desk. i write whenever i am inspired. i love writing in the chaos of the world or at 2 a.m. when everything is silent & a majority of the outside is sleeping.
Leslie Lindsay:
If you weren’t writing, you would be…
john compton:
dead. honesty, i will never see myself doing anything else. i have an obsession. i have dedicated my whole life to poetry. it is the only thing i do from the time i wake until i sleep.
Leslie Lindsay:
What was the last non-poetry art you engaged with?
john compton:
i love art. painting and drawing. i get lose in it most the time. it is something i wish i could do, so therefore i give it my attention. the visual beauty of how someone can transform lines into something that makes you stop and pause and relish and lose yourself. how they turn a simple stroke of a brush or drawing utensil into something magnificent.
John Compton:
For more information, to purchase a copy of or to connect with the author via social media, please visit his website. Find him (and me) on IG.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
john compton (b. 1987) is gay poet who lives in Kentucky with his husband josh and their dogs and cats. his latest full length book is “my husband holds my hand because i may drift away & be lost forever in the vortex of a crowded store” published with Flowersong Press (dec 2024); his latest chapbook is “melancholy arcadia” published with Harbor Editions (april 2024).
Browse my Bookshop.org for more books featured on Musings & Meanderings, and see what I’m reading in 2024…and more!
Three Readerly Things:
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.
- This is more about how writers/authors nurture and care for their readers…’how to take care of your reader,’ but I would wager that we need to nourish and support the readers in our lives, too. They may be yourself, your children, your niece or nephew. If they need to read, let them. It’s soothing. And it helps us learn/be better humans. But also, as writers, there’s a sort of unspoken contract between us and readers. This explains more.
- I lied a little bit. I don’t have three readerly things.
- Just read. Be good. Find books that inspire. Maybe they make you want to write. Maybe the make you want to read more on a subject. Maybe they make you want to reach out to the author and thank them. Do it. Maybe what you read transforms you. Let it.
Recently Published Interviews, Prose, Etc.:
- BECOMING REAL: An Anthology (Regal House/Pact Press, Oct 1 2024). My work is featured in this glorious anthology about the speculative, edited by Laraine Herring. I am proud to share that purchase of this book benefits Girls Write Now organization.
- What if you went to a writer’s retreat/workshop and the unspeakable happened? What if you were berated and torn to shreds and then worse…you went missing? Were presumed dead? That’s what happens in this novel by Andromeda Romano-Lax, THE DEEPEST LAKE, whom I interviewed for Fugue Review. Seriously, you don’t want to miss this one. It’s also about writing craft and the workshopping experience.
- I spoke with Barrie Miskin about her mysterious mental health struggles during pregnancy, the broken mental health system, and maternal mental health in Hippocampus Magazine. Check out her raw and moving memoir, HELL GATE BRIDGE (Woodhall Press, June 2024) and eavesdrop on our conversation, too.
- Suzanne Scanlon appears as if she has it all together in a literary sense–and she does–but there’s a darker history under the surface. She was once hospitalized in one of the nation’s most well-known psychiatric institutions. I loved COMMITTED: On Meaning and Madwomen. Check out our conversation in Hippocampus Magazine.
- Susannah Kennedy, author of READING JANE: A DAUGHTER’S MEMOIR (Sibylline Press, September 2023) and I chat about the archives we’ve read, carried, and made sense of after our mothers died by suicide, but we also discuss so many others in this February 2024 interview in Hippocampus Magazine.
- Identity and closed adoptions, plus a thirty-year journey to publication, Susan Kiyo Ito and I discuss her award-winning memoir, I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE (Mad Creek Press, 2023) in the January issue of Hippocampus Magazine.
- 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 2023 issue of Hippocampus Magazine.
Click HERE for more of my published writing.
There’s more to this newsletter. Keep scrolling.
What’s Obsessing Me:
- Shopping local. This year, I’m approaching gift-giving like this: simple, local. If I can walk to get it, better. If I purchase a gift at a place I typically spend time and money (the coffee shop I frequent, the yoga studio I attend, the bookstore I shop, the antique store downtown), that’s how it’s going to go. If I can make it, even better.
- Simplifying my time and my life. Streamlining. Not streaming. Reading more. Scrolling less.
- Beauty. Finding pockets of it where I can. Capturing it in my mind’s eye, basking in it. The woods are unchanged. The sunrise is miraculous. The moon is, too.
Drop me a line!
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.
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 debut author interviews. I’m also on twitter and instagram. I try to answer comments as best I can. Feel free to find my book suggestions on bookshop.org, and also check out the authors I’ve hosted in in-depth interviews HERE.
In the meantime, catch me on:
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:
As I sift through this new project, which combines genealogy, legacy, and untold stories, I’ve found the Photo Detective Podcast (Maureen Taylor) quite helpful and inspiring. Each episode offers little tidbits of research hints, photo tips, organization ideas, and more. I get mine through Spotify.
Get the book HERE
Let’s walk this bookish path together.
THANK YOU!!
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.
More than 2,800 folks read Musings & Meanderings.
Created by Leslie Lindsay. I’m a proud book nerd. Connect with me on Instagram, and Twitter. See what I’m reading on Bookshop.org. Find my reviews on GoodReads. I’m also a Zibby Books Ambassador.
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Wishing you all the best this fall
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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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