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~

THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE

Ah…August. It used to be the time for languid days at the cabin or beach and then the school year started creeping into the middle of the month (what the heck?!). I don’t know about you, but I miss that traditional June-July-August summer schedule.

I’m starting a new project and I need your help! As we wrap up summer, I am continually obsessed about vintage postcards, you know the ones…

Greetings from…

I recently unearthed some from the early 1940s from ancestors I never met. They are such a hoot to read and I love them so much I decided to start my own postcard project, which runs adjacent to my my new WIP (that’s work-in-progress).

Here’s how it works:

We all hold a special place–home, town, country, room–in our hearts. Your grandparent’s farm, your first married home, that cozy cottage, your college dorm, an abandoned property that haunts, your host family’s Greek apartment from 1995, that ramshackle rental from grad school. I’d love to hear about it!

Write About:

A PLACE THAT RESIDES INSIDE

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Have a THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE postcard project card? Great! Flip it over, write your story in the space on the back and DM me a photo @leslielindsay1 on Instagram. [Look for full details in my ‘Postcard Project Highlights Reel’…those little circles below my IG bio]
2. Have any old post card? Perfect. See step #1 above and step #2a below:
   • 2a: Bonus if your post card is thrifted or vintage and contains a house/map/early town/farm scene or billboard style.
3. Want to send it to me IRL? I’d love that. I’ve been obsessed with sending and receiving mail since forever. As part of this writing project (a blended memoir of historical fiction), I’ll share yours in a social media reel. Just your first name and city and some highlights from your PLACE THAT RESIDES. Your post card may even end up in a collage or essay or the book-in-progress. (Don’t worry, I’ll ask first). Be sure you’re following along on Instagram because that’s where I’ll be posting the reels (see my ‘stories’ section. Stories only last 24 hours; I don’t you to miss anything).

Mail yours here:

Leslie Lindsay c/o JJL

2221-B Halsted Court

Aurora, IL 60503

4. Super-Bonus: Send to a friend! So much of our living happens with others. Maybe you want to send this to your old roommate, a writing partner or someone you met at a residency? Thinking of a childhood friend? Maybe just someone who needs a hello. Share (send?) this card and let them fill out the prompt themselves, or write a little note of your own. Did someone’s name just pop into your head? I bet they’d love to hear from you!

Questions?

DM me at @leslielindsay1 on IG

Thank you for your contribution!

Use one of the THIS IS WHERE WE LIVE post card project cards (ask!) or make/thrift your own. The idea is to connect people near and far.

Are you in?!

Be a part of the story.

You’re are a valued contribution to art.

This is the good part!

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Action Item:

Participate in my postcard project!

Respond here in a comment, or find me on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.

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 Reeves about her novel, THE LAST WHALER. I have a new author conversation 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.

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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.

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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:

• I had the pleasure of meeting Beth Unzis Johnson at the Writer’s Festival through Story Studio Chicago last fall and immediately connected with her compelling urge and desire to tell a story. This story. It’s an actual book now. But getting it to that point wasn’t easy. Far from it. Read her journey of concept to agent to agent break-up, to small press, to shelf HERE in the OCWW About Write Column.
• Quick! Sign up now for this Cleaver Magazine Craft Class at the end of the month with Megan Stielstra, Get Out of Your Head. I think you’ll love her no-nonsense style and practical tips.
• Want to write in Mexico in January when it’s cold nearly everywhere else…AND the holidays are over…AND you’re ready to tackle that New Year’s Resolution…finally, once and for all? Applications for the Chestnut Review‘s Winter Writing Retreat is open now through September 30. DETAILS HERE.

New! Featured Author|Insights

Cynthia Reeves

THE LAST WHALER: A Novel

Longyearbyen Literature Festival, September 1-6, 2024

Talk and Reading: Of Ice Floes, Whale Bones, and Abandoned Mines: Inspirations for The Last Whaler 

Svalbard. Midsummer’s Eve, 1937. Astrid’s body cupped in mine, I clasp my arms around her waist. Our pulses coursing together through our skin, I enter her from behind. This was the beginning of our undoing.

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THE LAST WHALER is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive under extreme conditions. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to rendezvous with the ship meant to carry them back to their home in southern Norway. Beyond enduring the Arctic winter’s twenty-four-hour night, the couple must cope with the dangers of polar bears, violent storms, and bitter cold as well as Astrid’s unexpected pregnancy. THE LAST WHALER concerns the impact of humans on pristine environments, the isolation of mental illness, the sustenance of religious faith, and the solace of storytelling.

Leslie Lindsay:  

Without responding in complete sentences, what would you say THE LAST WHALER is about? 

Cynthia Reeves: 

The cyclical nature of regret and grief 

The unintentional damage we do to each other and the environment 

The inscrutability of human motivation 

The consolations of family and faith 

Leslie Lindsay: 

Where did you write THE LAST WHALER? Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? Do they change with each project, or remain constant over time? 

Cynthia Reeves: 

Writing THE LAST WHALER took place during the time my father was dying and then during the Covid lockdown. I think the novel’s elegiac and meditative quality comes from living through that period of my life.  

The opening scene came rather easily during a residency at Vermont Studio Center in the fall of 2017, not long after my 2017 Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition. During that voyage, we landed on a beach covered with piles of beluga bones. Our guides knew only that it was the site of a beluga whaling station in the 1930s, and that the bones represented the remains of 500-700 whales. In all my research, I found only a brief paragraph in a Svalbard guide about the history of the site. The absence of a story intrigued me. 

Unfortunately, I knew almost nothing about whaling, Arctic flora, Svalbard’s unusual landscape, Norwegian customs and its history in the era surrounding World War II—in short, I knew little of what I needed to know to write the book. Thus, after the rather easy time I had with those first pages, I spent two years immersing myself in research—from libraries on Svalbard, to the Scott Polar Institute in Cambridge, to my own ever-expanding home library. During this time, I made little progress drafting the novel, though I learned a great deal about obscure facts such as how to tan an animal hide and how to lure a polar bear into a rifle-rigged trap. My most precious discovery was a rare copy of the pioneering Norwegian botanist Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen’s Svalbards flora, long out of print, in the small library at the Galleri Svalbard. I painstakingly transcribed the guide from Norwegian using Google translate and a little imagination. 

This history of THE LAST WHALER’s creation gives you an idea of my process—I have none. My only constants are research and travel as springboards for my work. I write whenever and wherever I can, and let the work grow organically. I’m not one of those writers who sets aside time every day or certain months every year to write. I admire those who have such routines; I’d probably be more prolific if I did too. And finally, I never use outlines. I write pieces, begin to fit those pieces together, then fill in the holes. I think of my books more as mosaics than traditionally plotted works.     

Leslie Lindsay:  

If you weren’t writing, you would be… 

Cynthia Reeves:  

If I weren’t writing, I would be a full-time volunteer. My academic background and my early career involved urban planning and redevelopment. My first job was as a grant writer working to secure funding for urban redevelopment projects. I found that work gratifying.  

Over the years, I’ve done a variety of volunteer work: working with homeless women at a Philadelphia day shelter; serving meals in a soup kitchen in Kensington; raising funds for a public library; teaching English to refugees and to students in Poland; caring for impoverished children at a children’s home in Peru; and refurbishing a cemetery in Costa Rica.  

I live not far from schools that teach woodcraft. I’d love to take formal classes that would give me the skills to build homes with organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the (international) Fuller Center for Housing. 

Leslie Lindsay: 

What do you wish people would ask about that no one ever does?  

Cynthia Reeves: 

How do you feel about publishing your most significant work later in life?  

I don’t think I could have written what I’m writing now when I was younger. That may sound cliché, but aging does have a way of altering one’s view of the world and one’s place in it. Caretaking the dying, suffering the deaths of loved ones, living through our rapidly shifting, chaotic political and social climate, and confronting my own mortality—all of these experiences have had a significant impact on my work. Above all, especially since my parents died, I feel the pressure of DO IT NOW.  

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“This is a hell of a book! Every moment is an urgent conversation between the past and the present, a meditation on the dance between what is ephemeral and what cannot be changed. The landscapes of The Last Whaler are at once metaphysical, emotional, unknowable, and all too real. Questions asked of the silent dead mingle with a couple’s daily struggles to survive in a frozen world in which darkness reigns. A masterful storyteller, Reeves replicates grief’s unique power to demolish clear distinctions between time and place, between love that heals and love that destroys, and in so doing she has written a memorable, necessary tour de force.”

—Robin Black, author of Life Drawing and Mrs. Dalloway: Bookmarked

For more information, to purchase a copy of THE LAST WHALER or to connect with the author via social media, please visit her website.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

A writer, teacher, and poet, Cynthia Reeves is the award-winning author of three books of fiction: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, September 2024); the novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (2024), winner of Gold Wake Press’s 2023 Fiction Award; and the novella Badlands (2008), winner of Miami University Press’s Novella Prize. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared widely. Most recently, her short story “The Last Glacier”—whose narrator is the glacier Austfonna—was included in If the Storm Clears (Blue Cactus Press, 2024), an anthology of speculative literature that concerns the sublime in the natural world. 

A Hawthornden Fellow, Cynthia has also been awarded residencies to Vermont Studio Center and Galleri Svalbard. She taught creative writing at Bryn Mawr College and Rosemont College, and earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson’s low-residency program. She lives with her husband in Camden, Maine. 

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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.

• I’m super-intrigued about this book, maybe because of the title, WISDOM BUILDS HER HOUSE (Brandylane, August 2024), by Carole Duff, but also because it has to do with reading journals of someone who has passed away, someone the person doing the reading has never met, revealing truths about someone still living. Would you read them? How much might you read affect how you see someone or something?

• I love a good, visceral poem that crackles and snaps with emotion and authenticity. Check out this one in Bellevue Literary Review.
• Summer always brings the dilemma of ‘what books to take on vacation?’ As a book nerd, this is a real problem. Where are you going? The beach? On a road trip? Overseas? For how long? Do you want to take your favorite books? Easy, light books? Paperback? Hardcover? Poetry? I mean…really. A lot of variables. I like this list from indie bookstore, Content, in Northfield, Minnesota. See the full list HERE.

Recently Published Interviews, Prose, Etc.:

• 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:

• Old photographs, photo mysteries, and this concept of Geolocation Estimation, an AI-generated thing that analyzes your photos (architecture, scenery, colors, etc.) and provides an estimate of where your photo was captured. It’s pretty accurate, but has a few flaws. For example, I uploaded a photo captured in rural Kentucky, and it was analyzed to be Nebraska.
• Sticking with that old photo obsession, you may have some vintage Real Photo postcards in your family heirlooms. Curious when they were captured? This website, Playle.com takes a look at the stamp box design, providing a range of dates. No photos? No problem. Antique stores have plenty and often aren’t very expensive. Grab a few and date them.

Also?! Participate in my Postcard Project!

Details on IG

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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:

“Your art makes art. It can hit people. You don’t know when or where or who or how. But if you don’t ever put it out there no one can be hit. And no one can create something out of it.”

–Billie Eilish

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 September, I’ll be featuring Evan Friss’s THE BOOKSHOP: A History of The American Bookstore (Viking, August 6 2024), just in time for all the back-to-school feels.

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:

• Instagram
• Twitter
• GoodReads
• Bookshop.org

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:

This 49-minute podcast from Granta features Andrew O’Hagan on journalism + fiction.

‘The world comes down on your head if you don’t tell people what they already believe to be true.’

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.

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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.

Learn more HERE.

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That’s where you’ll catch bookreels, cover reveals, & bookmail : )

Wishing you all the best this late summer

Find me on Instagram for this exclusive content: @leslielindsay1| #booknerd

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.