September Writing Goals

Before I get started, I want to thank you all for being here. There are now more than 700 people who subscribe to this newsletter, which I can hardly believe. Share it with a friend, cousin, lover, or frenemy, and maybe we can make it an even thousand by the end of the year?

Intentions: Summer is coming to a close, a gust of wind, a wrinkled cardigan. The dog is lying next to me in the study and I have been writing, for the first time in a little while, on the memoir that I have in mind as my next book.

Have I said that here? I’m writing a memoir about meeting my grandmother for the first time, about adoption and reconnecting with Cherokee people. About how I became Cherokee. It’s hard. Really hard.

I’ve written about adoption before in other places, more academic, though always also personal. But I have wanted to write something coherent, something substantial, that brings together my thinking on the ruptures of adoption and the possibilities of repairing those ruptures.

Some of that I address in Speculative Relations, which will be coming out next year. But that book isn’t really ‘about’ adoption and return to community so much as uses my own personal story to ground what I’m writing about other things. I tell my story there, yes, but it isn’t really ‘about’ me. Although, one of the reviewers of that book suggested the whole thing should be about adoption, which I really bristled at. I had already started writing the memoir, and I knew I was going to be focusing on it after the next book, and I didn’t want it to overwhelm what I had to say about speculation and relations.

Anyway.

I have a note on the Notes app open on my screen, a note that I have also written by hand on a piece of paper next to my computer. It reads: Feel the calm. Focus on writing. Give yourself this gift.

I have it there to remind me how to approach this space. Today, at least, I have done a good job of it. I woke up at 7, even though I think I have a cold—sniffling and congested and my ears are popping—and wrote until 9. And then I took a break and came back and sat down, and thought I would send a short note here. A note about writing. Intention setting. About the calm and the gift of writing. About what I want to bring to this month.

There is so much going on. So much death. So much absolute devastation. The lies and fuckery know no limits. But for a couple hours each morning this month, I want to make sure I have some calm and focus. I want to keep writing this memoir because eventually I want to share this story, too. I want it to be a gift. I want it to be honest.

I want to keep this focus going. I am always trying to find the consistency. I am not always good at it. But today feels fresh. Clear.

I wanted to share this thought: The love of writing requires giving yourself the gift of patience. The gift of calm. I wanted to share that I struggle with this. I am a perfectionist. I am proud. I want my work to matter. And it does, sometimes. And I let myself find the flow, sometimes.

I wanted to share that I have about 30,000 words written on this memoir. It has a few decent chapters, and a few wonky ones. I wrote 652 words yesterday and 384 today, and edited some of those from yesterday.

I wrote about the first tattoo I got with my brother, which was of the Cherokee word for rock, nv ya. Rock, which was my grandmother’s last name, which is, in a way, a name I could have had, an aspiration. A loss.

Here is the file we sent to the tattoo artist, my brother and I, in December 2016, before we went in to have this inked on us together.

A tattoo on our right bicep in the script that Sequoyah invented 200 years before. Is that ancestral memory? Is that love? Perhaps it is the gift of presence. Perhaps it is faith.

I’m in my heart today. Hope yours is warm.