May Lists

a bittersweet celebration of sorts

I am going to start with a list. The things on the list come in no particular order, just words that are orbiting in my brain and together constitute a sort of minor cataclysm, like rainfall in May, something that primes the pavement for the singing summer heat. It goes like this:

• park

• spicy margs

• read, only for fun (impossible obvs, but humbling to see it like that on the page)

• look to the stars (yes, like tarot, astrology n shit that divests responsibility)

• massage

• massage with aromatic oils

• yoga, but actually for relaxation not pass ag competition of who can hold the gnarliest pose

• cycle, not in the park and only with hill assistance

• watch Severance

• watch Couples’ Therapy

• throw phone in the bin

• meet friends

• dance, dance, dance

• ferry

• get new shades, to replace the ones I lost

• a ritual for burning bad blood

• a church of poetry (or am I just thinking of that place on St Marks??)

• journal alone at the bar like in that first year in NYC where I knew no-one

• finish drafting that vampire short story

• be less irritated by my dentist who keeps trying to remove my molars (it’s an American thing, I’m told)

• frame photopolymer prints

• Gertrude Abercrombie retrospective in Maine

• read over notes from workshops this semester

• quit drinking coffee again before picking it back up in July in a state of emergency

• start writing book review of that next book that’s coming in the post (this one has photographs in it!)

• make Substack post about the things I’ve done this year—

So I’ve started from the bottom of the list when I should have started with self-care. But it’s Friday afternoon still. Come Saturday, I’ll be working through the list top-down: park, spicy margs, read, astrological star-gazing and dance and dance and dance.

---

Of course, this is all a deflection from the fact that I haven’t written on here for a while. Because. There are times to share things with the world and there are times to sit your ass down and lock in. Last year, starting in August, I locked in, hard. I moved states. I started a Creative Writing MFA, at UMass Amherst. Girl, how much education do you need? I asked myself when I arrived. The answer came to me immediately: the most valuable thing a writer (or anybody) can have is time.

What was that a wise man once said?

You only live once, that’s the motto, n***a, YOLO

And what have I done with a full-ride scholarship and a bunch of time on my hands? I’m going to write another list.

1. Now that I spend most of my time sitting down and writing, I channeled my restless, hands-on arts side into painting and decorating a magic barn on the edge of Belchertown where I currently live. I am blessed with the chillest, most vibrant landlady.

   

2. I had a very short stint teaching at the RCA, but was hooked instantly and have missed it dreadfully ever since leaving the UK. This year, I started teaching freshmen to unlearn high-school writing habits and put their unique “I” back in, which has been a thoroughly humbling process, considering I’m like I? What’s my I, who am I? I was learning alongside with them. They seemed to have enjoyed the process enough to sneakily nominate me for the Distinguished Teaching Award. Whoever your are (plural?), thank you.
   

3. I had a blissfully unhinged conversation with Peter Gizzi recently (many cigarettes involved), who said that writing book reviews is a way to “show up”. And he’s right. Writing a book takes a long, long time, and it sometimes feels like you are working constantly toward that enormous goal, ever-moving and in the distance, but in the meantime have little to show for. So here is how I’ve showed up:
   

   1. Reviewed Aysegül Savaş’s delightful novel full of everyday magic The Anthropologists, for The Massachusetts Review. A few months later, I also had the spooky luck to talk further about the book to the author when she called into class.

   2. Reviewed Bruna Dantas Lobato’s debut novel Blue Light Hours, for the Spring 2025 issue of Rain Taxi. This one has a slightly confessional, nostalgic angle to it. You can only find it in print. I urge you to support Rain Taxi—they are a wonderfully vital literary project.
      
      Asa Drake, thank you for being there from the beginning.
      

   3. Another way to show up more locally (for me, for my community), was to start hosting informal *salon-like* craft talks. Why live in a barn if you won’t offer it up to poets and prose writers to chew each other’s ears off about craft—those idiosyncratic channels of expertise each and every writer has to pave in order to *find their voice*? I called it Barn Craft Nights. #2 has just happened, the perfect book-end to the first 10 months in Western Mass. Wow, there are so many brilliant people around me. There will be a publication documenting this, perhaps.
      

4. Put finishing touches to Vermin, a short story I started writing 1.5 years ago. Yes, I’m a dreadfully slow short story writer with bipolar energy spurts and commitment issues I don’t get in the same when when working on a longer project.
   

5. Wrote, re-wrote and re-wrote again the first four chapters of my novel. It’s a migrant’s ghost story in an English Gothic wrapper. Grey Hall is the working title and I don’t like it.
   

6. Erm, I got a Travel Grant to go to West Country England and research the novel in question. My iffy plan involves a visit to St Bueno’s church for lepers in Culbone, a pauper lunatic asylum with an unmarked graveyard and pitching up at a “haunted” Elizabethan manor for three days. Aiming for possession, wish me luck, goodbye forever.
   
   UMass English dpt, Bryony and Amy, I’m so grateful to you for putting faith me!

   

7. I read a LOT. For me, at least. I can send you the list if you like.
   

8. I started collecting books. Ok, I didn’t just start, but you know there is starting and there is STARTING. More about that later.
   

9. By way of life-writing, I haven’t had much to say in the last two years since I’ve decided to put a pause on the book-length essay I pitched to Fitzcaraldo (it was full of bleak stuff around ethnic cleansing and Nagorno-Karabakh) and focus on fiction. But recently, my non-fiction voice is getting louder in my head again. Maybe I’m energised by teaching essay writing? (I loved introducing students to Melissa Febos’s legendary essay In Praise of Navel Gazing, as a way of inducting them into the idea of hierarchies of subjects that can be considered as intellectual inquiry e.g. the Russian Revolution is not a more worthy subject than, say, spanking men for money.) I can feel an essay brewing, that draws heavily on life experience and the lyric of Sade and Tia Blake. It’s about love, longing, grief, attachment, heartbreak, getting married young and divorce. Fundamentally, it’s about a 10 year relationship ending—a bookend to my 20s.
   
   The impetus for a project like this might turn out to be a transient, quixotic desire that begins and ends with this list. But as it stands in this moment, without mentioning it, the list would not feel complete.

—M