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“I used to think that the saddest thing about these days was that one day we’d look back and remember nothing but the sadness. The saddest thing, as it turns out, is that we may not remember these days at all once they’ve gone their way, leaving each of us with a conscience full of names and nothing to name, not a single image left.” Dionisio Martinez

I read Dionisio Martinez’ stunning poetry collection History as a Second Language in the early days of COVID, in May of 2020, and this quote has stuck with me over the years. I think a lot about time and memory, and how trauma messes with both, not only while the trauma is happening but in how we relate to the world after.

I let this blog go dormant in late 2021 – although I’d been inconsistent for a while before that – as part of a bigger malaise, partly having to do with COVID but more with the weight of my own sadness and stagnation. I was working, slowly and steadily, toward goals that I knew would improve my life in major ways – I’d finished grad school and gotten a professional job and was making inroads on financial goals, I had started househunting in early 2020. But I hit setbacks that forced me to shelve that ambition for a while. The job was great, but demanding, and I had set goals that I found I could not achieve in my art practice, in the SCA, in picking back up my long-term educational goals. For a long time, it felt like every time I thought I was close to a big, meaningful change, it would get pushed a little further out, and I found myself in a very hopeless place.

And a big part of being in a hopeless place, and not being able to get out of it, was detachment. I slogged through many gray days, one like the other, and sometimes came up for air to find that seasons had passed without my really noticing. The dark times dragged on and on I just felt more bleak and lost and struggled to hold on to hope, and blog posts became fewer and far between, less substantial, and finally fell off altogether. I stopped posting on social media. I stopped even trying to connect with friends. I hibernated, alone in my blanket of sadness, for a really, really long time.

So many people experienced time distortions during COVID; I was already experiencing that, and it got worse. I was lost in my own head. I have very little memory of that time; it seemed to pass so slowly, but it’s compressed in hindsight, a handful of snapshots interspersed amongst a grey fog of what could have been months or forever.

But I kept afloat for a long time on sheer gritty stubbornness. I was still hanging on, still doing the work, and when the good things did start to happen, I didn’t trust enough to talk about it,

A little over a year ago I finally bought a house. I knew that would change everything, and it did. But not right away.

I thought, “I’ll blog about the house! I’ll document the renovations and the work on the property! I’ll tell the story of how I turned this grubby little former rental into my dream cottage and art space and there will be interesting things happening all the time and that will give me focus to write and I’ll write my way back to myself and it will be wonderful.”

But – surprise! Renovations are exhausting. The job is still demanding. I’m a woman in my mid-fifties going it alone on a limited budget, and everything takes forever, and while I can see where I’m headed, pictures – more often than not – don’t do it justice. I keep thinking, “I’ll start blogging again soon, but not quite yet.” And somehow a year passed, and the moment to say I’m going to use the house as a springboard to start writing again passed too. And I realize there never going to be a right time; there is only the time I choose.

I’m much, much happier than I was a couple of years ago, I’m healthier, I’m slowly (slowwwwly) working my way back to being connected to my community again, but I’m still struggling with that detachment and time haze. I don’t lose seasons anymore, but I often lose days and weeks. I need to work on being present, I need to work on capturing and remembering the moments of my life and staying grounded, and so I need to write.

Some things that have kept me going the last few years: hikes and walks, art, a few precious trips to look forward to (Florida, Spain, Hawaii), and the sweet, beautiful creature who shares my life now.

The obsessive planner, essentially, is demanding certain reassurances from the future – but the future isn’t the sort of thing that can ever provide the reassurance he craves. – Oliver Burkeman

It’s become a bit of a joke at work how out-of-control my backlist is, but it’s ha-ha-only-serious actually quite a source of stress and diminishment of the joy of reading; there are just so many books that I really want to read, that I don’t want to let go of, and a sort of vanishing hopelessness of ever actually getting closer to reading the new stuff that I find and add. At one point the combined lists in several places topped out at nearly 900 TBRs; between increasingly ruthless passes of culling the lists, chipping away steadily at the back end, and becoming aggressively discerning about what books I add, I’ve brought it down to about 650. With a backlist like that, book discovery is…. not fun anymore. I’m thoroughly enjoying just about everything I read, but choosing what to read next is a mechanistic process of picking from the list what feels most urgent, and browsing is fraught with weird feelings of guilt, shame, and impatience.

That’s a problem. Besides the obvious personal issue of sucking the joy out of something I love, it’s a problem professionally. Burnout in book discovery for my own reading is one short step away from burnout in readers’ advisory, which is a huge (and much-loved) part of my job. If browsing the new books shelf feels like self-flagellation, then I’m not picking things up and reading back blurbs and adding them to my repertoire, I’m not participating in conversations with colleagues about reading, I’m not paying attention to new authors.

I knew this was an issue, but I didn’t realize how unhappy I was about it until I was in front of a stall on the Calle de Claudio de Moyano, the open-air booksellers’ market on the southern edge of Madrid’s Parque de Retiro, thinking more about the weight of my suitcase than the length of my reading list, and choosing with care the handful of books that I would bring home and add to my tiny but growing collection of Spanish literature. It was pure, quiet joy; it took me back to my college days and afternoons at The Country Bookshop in Plainfield, Vermont, to pilgrimages with John to Black & Read in Denver hoping to find the rare paperback covers of sci-fi classics to fill gaps in his collection. I’d forgotten; I’d had an ache in my soul where that joy used to be for so long that I’d gotten used to and numbed out the ache.

That is true of many things, I’m finding, and that needs to change.

My new year’s resolution this year is to let go things that are getting in the way of the things I want more of in my life.

So this year I’m trying a new approach.

First, I’m not putting new releases on my to-read list anymore. If I’m not excited enough about it to put it on hold on the spot, then that ship has sailed, sorry. Maybe in a couple of years it’ll pop back up on my radar? Maybe at some point in the future I’ll have bandwidth to be able to say, “I know I want to read that but not right now” again. But I’m not counting on it.

Second – last year I picked back up my grad-school practice of post-it noting books as I read them and then revisiting the notes at the end, copying down quotes to keep on 3×5 cards and chasing down references. I’ve mostly been doing this for heavy nonfiction, to capture key information, and I’ve done less and less noting over the course of this year, and there have been some really great books I’ve read without post-its handy, and I have no notes for them, and that makes me sad. I want to reverse that trend, really ramp it up and pick up more inspirational and thought-provoking material too, and spend a little more time sitting with each book I finish before moving on to the next.

Third, I’m going to continue to be really, really conservative about adding new stuff. Part of the spiraling out of control was the self-perpetuating rabbithole of “read one book, add three references to the TBR list”; a certain amount of that is inevitable but dammit, I’ve got to just be better and more realistic about picking and choosing.

But part of it was a sort of promise to myself that there would be life after grad school, there would be time to read for fun again, and there is, of course, but not as much as I thought there would be, there never is. As Burkeman says, when you demand reassurance from the future, you’re – unavoidably, inherently – neglecting the present. This is life after grad school, this is what the kept promise looks like, and I cannot just continue to demand and demand from the future; I have to live in the present too.

Maybe I’ll read less this year, but I’ll read slower, I’ll read in a more balanced and healthy way, and I’ll take more away from what I read. Maybe that will feed into my relationship with writing too.

There’s a lot to love about Basque cuisine, but what I think I love most about it that I’m averaging – averaging – twenty minutes from door to table. It’s been ninety degrees this week, and coming home, throwing a few perfectly fresh and seasonal vegetables in a skillet and a fish in the fryer and being off my feet with a glass of wine in my hand ten minutes later is fabulous.

I’ve been cooking mostly out of The Basque Book and the four dishes below are all from it. I’ve just gone ahead and bought it. I like Basque Country, but the recipes I’m most interested in are a little fussier, so I’m going to save those for weekends. And I’m still working my way through the José Pizarro book.

Huevos rotas (“broken” or “messy” eggs) is a favorite all over Spain (I learned to make them from one of the Madrid episodes of Made in Spain, and I cook it at least once a week), and each region has its own quirks, but the core of the dish is eggs fried sunny-side up in a pool of hot olive oil deep enough that they basically poach in oil, over skillet potatoes and chorizo. I added fresh sliced tomatoes and poblanos to the version shown below.

Huevo mollet con patatas is a lighter, more summery riff on the same theme. These potatoes are boiled, with green beans thrown into the pot to blanch just before tdraining, dressed with a loose, sharply mustardy fresh mayonnaise. The recipe called for soft-boiled eggs but I poached them here. I’ve made this dish twice in the last two weeks and fully expect to make it again this week.

Coliflor con refrito de pimenton is exactly what it sounds like – cauliflower blanched and then panfried, dressed with a fast sauce of white balsamic vinegar, paprika, salt, and olive oil. I’ve cooked it once with a piece of pan-fried cod, and once with a whole deep–fried sea trout; I like having the protein but I really could happily just eat the bowl of spicy, acid-bright cauliflower by itself.

The last photo, which was my dinner just tonight, is menestra de verduras. Most of the recipes I’m coming across are richer and heartier, featuring later-summer vegetables – carrots, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, green beans, fresh white beans – but basically, the whole point of menestra de verduras is seasonality and freshness, and the recipe based on the one in The Basque Book is an early-summer version with peas, lima beans, leeks, asparagus and artichokes. Vegetables, sautéed garlic, jamón, a light roux. That’s it. Simple, elegant, and delicious.

I’ve also made two different tuna-and-tomato dishes that I didn’t catch photos of – a salad of salt-and-vinegar-dressed tomatoes, jarred guindilla chiles, and big fat chunks of seared sashimi tuna (that one is from Basque Country), and a charred vegetable salad of eggplant, tomato, peppers and garlic, cooked down to goo and smashed onto bread with the fancy tinned tuna.

Later, in high summer and into the early autumn, I’ll be turning my explorations to Andalusia, but I’m going to linger here a little while longer. I am enjoying this.

My first step in diving into a new cuisine is to track down a couple of well-reviewed cookbooks and read them cover-to-cover, making two lists: specific recipes I want to try and ingredients that I want to have on hand, either because they’re pervasive across the cuisine or because they’re specialized, iconic, and not really substitutable. The Denver Metro area has a pretty good ethnic food scene and most things I find I can source or substitute fairly easily, but there’s always one thing. For Basque cuisine, it’s becoming clear to me that that thing is going to be cheese.

There just aren’t that many Basque cookbooks out there, and even fewer that go beyond the narrow and specific category of pinxtos/tapas. I got the two shown above from the library and bought José Pizarro’s new release (still on its way). I got so much out of Pizarro’s Seasonal Spanish Food when I was working my way through Asturia and Galicia last winter, and I’m thrilled that he has a new book out just in time to be relevant to what I’m doing here. I got through these the other night and I’ve started sourcing what I’ve put on my list.

Alexandra Raij takes no shortcuts and pulls no punches. Basque cooking, she reiterates, is all about the ingredients, and there are some things that just can’t be substituted. Jamón and bacalao. Those little pippara peppers, and choriceros. Idiazabal and Roncal and Ossau-Iraty cheese and bleus – Bleu des Basques and Cabrales – and about a million little hyperlocal varieties that are all just called ardi gasna (sheep’s-milk cheese). Seafood, and lots of it, fresh and quality, in great variety.

Marti Buckley’s Basque Country is just as much all about the balance of seasonal fresh foods and iconic preserved foods, but it’s a little more accessible. I can get all the seafood I need at the Korean supermart in Aurora; we’re coming into the right season for most the fresh veg I’ll need on a regular basis (which is why I chose spring/summer for this project in the first place) and I found a reliable, if slightly spendy, source for frozen artichokes.

When I started on the north coast tour last winter, my big investment was making twenty pounds of air-cured chorizo; but I hesitated at the price of real Spanish jamón, muddling through with a mixture of American ham, prosciutto and salted pork belly (many of the recipes called for jamón or pork belly). But with Basque recipes it’s just unavoidable. So I’ve got a half-pound kit of sliced Fermin serrano on the way. The remaining ingredient that’s really giving me fits is Idiazabal. It’s easy to find but runs $40+ per pound online, so I’m just going to have to make the rounds of the specialty stores in town. Dangerous… what else will I not be able to resist coming home with?

When people are involved in their work, they experience, and produce as experience, a dissolution of the reified object, and for that matter, the reified subject. Involvement in the world is a negation process, a dissolving. There is no such “thing” as the environment, since, being involved in it already, we are not separate from it. – Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature

Perhaps I shouldn’t have picked up on a whim, on the strength of an appealing cover, what turned out to be a very mediocre hiking memoir by a very average dude directly on the heels of a meaty and nuanced aesthetics work on the problems in environmental writing. But I did, and I got some unexpected things out of it, more from my own reactions than from the book itself.

I am reminded, first of all, that so many of the brightest lights in ecological, nature, and place-based American literature – and especially of the American West – came to writing from work that involved slow and careful observation of the natural world. Dude describes exploring Capitol Reef with a copy of Ed Abbey in his pack, without seeming to take any significance from the fact that at the time Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire, he was a working park ranger. Abbey was a fire lookout too. So were Norman Maclean, Doug Peacock, Philip Connors. Aldo Leopold was a forester of course, and it’s less known that John Muir was a geologist, and the line between art and science blurs in the work of the many, many naturalists and ecologists who are better known as writers.

That kind of observation, that kind of immersion, takes time. And when my life shifted away from that immersion, feared becoming the kind of dilettante nature writer and artist I hate, dipping in and out of places, skimming beauty and poignancy off the surface without the give-and-take of deeper relationships.

I’ve been living with my heart somewhere else. In the past, with John, with my small children, with a the aspirations of a younger and more naïve version of myself. In the future, with my books and art in a home of my own making, with friends in and out and good food and wine and music and meaningful work. One a beach or mountainside, a hiking trail or riffling river or the built-up layers of history along street in a city where the language is not my own, anywhere but here, in the textureless grey mundanity of a square-box apartment too far from anything that I feel drawn or attached to. Marking time, treading water, waiting. Just waiting.

Recently I’ve become afraid that I’m so out of practice at being in the world that I don’t even know how anymore. And so I started practicing, and what I found intriguing was that sensation of lostness itself – the experience in my body of living through a liminal time and space, the ebb and flow of my mood and energy, what I resist and what I desire, what sustains and what dismays me.

I was taking stock, earlier in the week, of what I’ve accomplished during this plague year. And I’m surprised to find it’s actually quite a lot. Since March 15, 2020:

I’ve read 151 books, including about 50 that have been languishing neglected on my to-be-read lists for as much as five years.

I’ve visited the Denver Botanic Gardens nine times and taken many, many pictures.

I’ve cut 11 new linocuts and have a twelfth in-progress that I will probably finish this weekend.

I’ve started a series of printing blocks based on the 13th-14th century Fustat finds (one done, one in progress, one ready to go, about twenty images selected, so I can more or less have one in-progress at any given time for the forseeable future)

I’ve finished half of the Hagembach Toledo initial alphabet woodcuts.

I’ve made two art quilt pieces, and am about halfway through a third.

I’ve done a deep workshopping of Cathedral with a crit group and made some fantastic friends, and started a new pass of editing on Refuge.

I’ve put many, many hours – maybe a couple of hundred hours – into a blackworked partlet, a blackworked mantilla, and a goldworked ropa.

I’ve built and launched this blog.

I’ve made two art quilt pieces, and am about halfway through a third.

I’ve gotten about 20% of the way through Motino and am getting ready to start recipe testing.

I’ve started a deep dive into modern-traditional and contemporary Spanish cooking, have spent the last three months cooking Galician and Asturian food several nights a week and really getting a feel for the cuisine, and am getting ready to switch gears and go full Catalan.

And honestly, most of this has happened in the last few months. The lockdown itself was a pretty foggy, grim place; I was working a lot, but I was also doing a lot of sleeping, doomscrolling, and generally staring at the ceiling, and I got a little bit of a bounce in late summer before falling back into it again and I probably really hit bottom in early December. There were times that I went weeks without touching the woodcut on my desk or the book on my nightstand.

But somewhere along the line I got bored, or angry, or impatient enough to push back on the foggy feeling, and started being more methodical about doing stuff even if I wasn’t feeling it.

Writing is still very hard. I want to get back to it, I do. I want to get the Darzins’ Mill stories out in the world, I have other fiction stories beating their drums in the back of my head, I have life stories of my own I want to get down on paper, I want to go back to environmental and ecosocial writing. The difficulty with it is more than just post-grad-school burn out; I have some deep work to do. I’m trying to get my art practice and other parts of my life on even enough ground that I can put my mental and emotional energy and my time into digging in and powering through that struggle. And blogging regularly (more regularly, at least) is certainly part of it.

Happy New Year!

I only managed two of these this week (as well as finishing The Man Who Spoke Snakish, which was every bit as heartbreaking as I expected it to be but left me feeling bittersweet rather than bleak).

Class and Librarianship, although a slim little book, took me a bit to get through and made me think a lot, which of course was both the intent of the authors in writing these essays and my intent in picking it up. Some of it dealt directly with practicalities of service in public libraries to financially struggling and class-marginalized populations. More of it had to do with the profession itself, the idea of “the profession” and the power dynamics between the front lines, administration, and the librarians in the middle. How personal ambition and professionalization in LIS education pushes us toward alliances with administration, leadership, and stakeholders, which puts us in a challenging position with the paras and clerks and volunteers who are our allies of circumstance on the floor, and how to leverage class consciousness to navigate those tensions. It’s a lot to chew on, and casts into sharp relief some hard decisions I want to make about the direction I want to go in my career.

Browsings, on the other hand, was lighter than I expected it to be. I was expecting a more deep-delving memoir; in fact it’s a year’s collection of Michael Dirda’s mostly lighthearted weekly columns in The American Scholar, ostensibly about being a book collector and reviewer but tangenting off into topics ranging from growing up in working-class Ohio to hiking Rocky Mountain National Park to current events (his essay on the Aurora theatre shooting is harrowing) but always coming back to rambles in used bookstores, to friendships formed around books and the book community, and the obscure science fiction and adventure genre fiction that he loves so much (there’s one essay dedicated entirely to the highly specialist small presses that republish and revive the popular fiction of the 1880-1920 period). Dirda is funny and humble and thoughtful, and Browsings was just an unexpectedly delightful way to unwind for a few evenings and the end of a long, difficult year.

Re-reading of Encounters With the Archdruid will have to be bumped for a little while because I had a mass of library holds come in, and several of those are new releases with hold lists. (Isn’t that how it always is? I have a house full of books I’d love to find the time to read but the library books come first.) I started The Book in Society this morning, and it and Writing the Other are at the top of this week’s pile.

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Some people keep commonplace books. When I was in college I wrote longhand notes when I wanted to remember things, and I haven’t done that in a long time but I want to retain more of what I read and reflect and re-engage with it. So sometime last year I started writing quotes that I wanted to hold onto on 3×5 cards. Some of the treasures;

There’s this concept of suffering central to so many of us as whatever, activsts, organizers, anyone trying to change the world… so much of how we get pulled into community and kept in community is a solidarity around our suffering, and that is not liberatory. – “The Legacy of [Audre Lorde’s] Uses of the Erotic,” in Pleasure Activism, adrienne maree brown and Cara Page.

Dealing with wicked problems is not just about showing up and building houses, giving things away, or delivering any direct service – even if you’re in the community for the long haul. You have a moral imperative to build capacity, to enable the community to solve its own problems, lift itself up. If you’re not helping the community build its ability to improve either its skills or its support network, you’re not making a difference. – Ryan Hubbard, in Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving, Jon Kolko.

Space does something to the vision. It makes the country itself, for lack of human settlements and other enhancements to the illusion of human importance, into something formidable, alluring, and threatening, and it tends to make human beings as migratory as antelope. Literature reflects this necessity… Look at any book that is western in its feel… and you will find that it is a book not about place but about motion, not about fulfillment but about desire. There is always a seeking, generally unsatisfied. – “Coming of age: the end of the beginning,” in Where the Bluebird Sings to Lemonade Springs, Wallace Stegner.

Maybe wayfinding is an activity that confronts us with the marvelous fact of of being in the world, requiring us to look up and take notice, to cognitively and emotionally interact with out surroundings whether we are in the wilderness or in a city, even calling us to renew our species’ love affair with freedom, exploration, and place. – Wayfinding, M. R. O’Connor

To see things is to enhance your sense of wonder both for the singular pattern of your own experience, and for the meta-patterns that shape all experience. All this suggests a useful working approach to making art: notice the objects you notice. (e.g. read that sentence again.) Or put another way: make objects that talk – and then listen to them. – Art and Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland

The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done. – Art and Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland