Hello everyone:
First of all, if you’re getting this newsletter you may notice that it’s coming from a new space. I’ve migrated my old TinyLetter over to Substack in the interest of functionality. At some point down the road, as I find my way forward, I may add on a paid membership tier, but for now don’t fret, it’s all the same free, erratic content you’ve come to expect from the editorial team here at Toe Hang, Inc.
Second: as you have no doubt not even noticed, it’s been a while! Life keeps on lifing, and over the last year personal writing has been relegated to what my sisters and I used to call the back-back of the station wagon. But lots else has been happening.
So far this year, I’ve edited and promoted a lot of books, and got to see one of them, Selina Mahmood’s “A Pandemic in Residence,” net a review in the New York Times Book Review, the first one of those our scrappy Belt Publishing has ever scored. I also edited a whole mess of newspaper stories, taught an undergraduate class in magazine feature writing, led a team of Medill grad students in a group reporting project, and, with the South Side Weekly team, won a Lisagor award from the Chicago Headline Club for our 2020 coverage of the George Floyd protests in Chicago. I helped swap out IRL Soup & Bread for a more COVID-friendly wintertime Zoom show (still a fundraiser for local food pantries) and relaunched our Veggie Bingo fundraiser for local community gardens for a short outdoor summer season at the freshly reopened Hideout.
And then, in September, I left most of that behind to take a new, full-time job as an acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press. If you know me, you know that I’m a compulsive multitasker, so my project right now is to figure out how to have One Job. Luckily, it’s a great one: as the regional trade editor, I’m in charge of developing general-interest book projects for the Press, and building up our new 3 Fields Books imprint. You can read more about what I’m looking for here and here.
I had complicated feelings about making this to-me extreme life change. I was not dissatisfied with my work! Everything I have been doing these past ten years or so has fed me in different ways creatively, intellectually, and literally. I remain a co-owner of Belt and a senior contributing editor with the Weekly, and the future of Soup & Bread in the (post?) pandemic era is an open question. But this position is so well crafted for my own peculiar set of skills and interests that when I saw the job posting I dropped everything to apply. I’m so grateful to be there now, and excited to see what happens next.
One other fun thing I did this past year was develop and perform a solo lyra act (first time ever), for an aerial circus showcase organized by my wonderful coach Kristi Taff. I’ve been studying for seven years now and still can’t do a damn toe hang, but I’m keeping the name of this newsletter in homage to the original spirit of the TinyLetter, "to function as a space in which I can try to do something else I don't do so well, which is be honest. About bodies and aging and fear and hope and effort and the pleasures of pursuits with no possibility of proficiency.”
It’s an aspirational title—who knows, I may nail this trick by the time I’m 60—and one I hope can serve as a rubric under which to explore the experience of doing hard things, whether the stakes are as high as leaping into a radical life change or as low as the plain mastery of a physically preposterous circus trick. Down the road I may add a paid subscription tier, as I try to regain the creative headspace that the pandemic effectively obliterated.
I’m on vacation right now, in an undisclosed location with my sisters and my mom, and I just read this wonderful essay by Timothy Schuler about weeds, and the ecological value of letting the land lie fallow. It reminded me some of this piece I wrote in 2014, but better. To wit:
The notion of lying fallow reminds us that our personal resources are limited. In arid areas, fallowing preserves the moisture in the soil for the season when crops are planted. We need to start acknowledging that our own energies—our mental, emotional, and spiritual resources—are finite too.
I’m no book designer, and neither am I a poet, but it’s my hope that in the coming year I can continue to build a life that looks, to mangle Tim’s words elsewhere in the piece, more like a poem, with plenty of white space to doodle in the margins.