Hello!

It’s been a while. I’m sorry. I missed you.

Since I quit practicing law three years ago, my work life has been a patchwork. I edit, I coach, I do too many things for low or no pay. On days when I get several uninterrupted hours to write, I feel great about my life choices. On other days, I wonder why I gave up health insurance to not write.

Six months ago, I took on a temporary gig as a Session Editor for the Texas House Research Organization. From January through mid-March I had almost nothing to do. It was nice leaving the house. I enjoyed having colleagues and a space to write besides the three-bedroom house that I share with my husband, two teenagers, a dog and a cat. After the Texas Legislature hit its mid-session bill filing deadline on March 14, my job kicked into high gear. There were late nights, early mornings, and long working weekends. It was like shoveling coal: every couple of days a pile of 50-100 bills needed to be analyzed and edited, and the humans assigned to do this task did one at a time until they were all done.

With a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old in the house, this spring was also bat mitzvah season and driver’s license season and Maycember. I haven’t seen some of my best friends in months. I’m just now reentering social life. Everyone I’ve seen in the last week comments on how long my hair has grown.

On one of the nights that I escaped the office this spring, I saw the new Mission Impossible movie. Ever since Sine Die, which is a Latin phrase for the last day of session that I recently learned my husband pronounces “Sign and Die,” I keep thinking about that incredibly long scene of Tom Cruise underwater. I’ve been in a submarine at the bottom of an ocean of bills for three months. I think I might have the bends. Where are Haley Atwell’s clingy tank top boobs to nurse me back to health?

Another reason you haven’t heard from me lately is less about time and more about capacity. I started my job on January 6. My time in Texas government coincided with the first six months of Trump II. It’s not that I haven’t kept reading and writing and thinking about everything that I read in a way that I’m dying to share. But every day, when I read the morning headlines and look out at [*Gestures Broadly at Everything], I feel a clinching in my throat, like a voice being silenced. I have wondered, what good are my pithy thoughts about books and writers in this moment? As Jason Stanford wrote this week in The Experiment, “I felt unequal to the task.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. said that even if he knew the world was ending he would plant a tree. Ursula K. Le Guin said she would “write novels and worry.”

Masha Gessen, who fled a country where military parades are common, wrote in May that people have resigned themselves to Trump’s takeover of democracy, which is a dangerous stage. “After the initial shock, few people keep track of the shifting front line.”

Readers and writers can and should be among those few people.

One thing I liked about my job with the Texas House was that I had a short pedestrian commute. Walking from the state parking garage on San Jacinto to the John H. Reagan building at 15^th and Congress, I could almost pretend that I was in a city like Oakland or New York, like where I used to work. On some mornings, when I made this walk and thought about all the things I wanted to write, I thought about the word “recommit.” It reminded me of the Modeh Ani, a Jewish blessing that can be said when you wake up in the morning, to give thanks for your soul returning to your body so that you can live another day in this broken world. It seemed to me like that was all I could do: give thanks and recommit to this work that I have chosen. So that is what I’m doing here. Thank you for sticking with me.

Here are five ways that I kept reading during this busy season:

1. Reading long books a little bit at a time.

Every morning I write three pages by hand and drink a cup of coffee. On some days, there is a sliver of time after I have finished writing, before my mug is empty. I used to pick up my phone during this time. Last year I started reading a few pages of a book instead. In this manner I finished a lengthy biography of Larry McMurtry and Jill Lepore’s sweeping history of the United States, These Truths.

While working at the Texas Capitol, I’ve begun reading the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon B. Johnson. The pace is slow; I’ve been reading for months and LBJ is barely in college. But I’ve already read so much more than I would have if I had waited for the mythical “time to read a big book” that never comes. It’s a pleasure to read Caro’s long, old-fashioned sentences before I check my email.

2. Audiobooks.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t know what I would do without the Libby app on my phone. I listen to audiobooks from the library while I am driving to and from work, stuck in traffic, walking the dog, folding laundry, etc. etc. This season I got so obsessed with Dolly Alderton’s novel, Ghosts, that I listened to it all the way from my car to the elevator of my building, where I had to turn it off because my children have stolen all the ear buds and I didn’t want the state troopers in the lobby to hear the steamy parts.

3. Poetry newsletters.

Even when you feel too busy to read a book, you can take a few minutes out of your day to read a poem. I subscribe to a few different daily poetry newsletters, and I consider them an antidote to the news that fills my inbox every morning. My current favorite is Swimm, and I also really like Rattle Poetry. The Paris Review newsletter is also good and features poetry in translation.

4. Quitting.

I have a great appreciation of the art of quitting, and this philosophy extends to reading books. Life is short. If a book isn’t capturing my attention after I’ve genuinely tried to read it, I put it aside.

This comes with a caveat: as a serious reader, I also reject the idea that I should be able to sink into a story on the first page. Sometimes you have to push past some initial boredom or discomfort. But when that’s not enough, I move on! Books are like food: sometimes I’m not in the mood for pasta, and a few days later it’s all I want.

5. Reading even when I’m not reading.

My son and I watched the second season of Andor and now we are slowly rewatching the first season. (This is my third or fourth time watching the first season.) While we watch, we talk about plot structure, character arc, and the meaning of “Kafkaesque.” My daughter and I are watching The Pitt: an opportunity to discuss melodrama and time. My children don’t read as much as I wish they did. I take every opportunity to share my love of stories.

Other interesting things

• These five poems by Bobby Elliott are good for Father’s Day.

• This newsletter is helping me understand the world right now. It also helps me talk to my Gen Z kids! I want more people my age to subscribe to it so that we can discuss. Please join me.

• This video of my husband talking about restaurant employees detained by ICE has been viewed thousands of times. So has this video of my son and his friends lifting a gas station canopy that collapsed during a severe weather event that I would have called a “freak storm” five years ago, before the three worst storms in Austin’s history.

• This cake provided my family with a disproportionate amount of joy relative to the amount of work it took me to make.

Next time I’ll write more about books, I promise.

Plant your tree. Write your novel. Do good work.

Bye for now!

Love, S.