Ten Things You Know About Me

Or you will after reading this (very long) newsletter

New headshot to go with my new post-chemo hair. According to a friend this one best captures my “personal brand.” I’ll leave it to you to figure out what on earth that is. Photo by the multitalented Kristi Alyssa.

It’s that time of year. The time of year when writers share the fruits of the year’s labor, reminding their readers what they wrote, what was published, and where. If they’re really ambitious they’ll also do a gift guide!

Me, I have not written much outside this newsletter this year, and I still struggle with a Gen X-coded shame around ambition and self-promotion. I wrote about this two years ago, for Sari Botton’s wonderful Oldster magazine (see what I did there) — but I really should have it figured out by now.

So, in the spirit of the season, and as a way of (re)introducing myself to all of you delightful people who have subscribed of late, here is a 2023 Bell, Whistle — or at least a Martha Bayne — FAQ, shame-free, full of too many links, and with a couple of gift suggestions snuck in for good measure.

1. Who are you? I am a writer and editor based in Chicago. I was a journalist for a long time, but now I work in book publishing. For a while I was a bartender, and I run a community soup project at the bar I used to work at. I’m also an amateur aerialist, a dancer, a theater-maker, a rower, and a somewhat terrible potter (unlike my friend Tim, whose one-of-a-kind works of art make gorgeous gifts). Relevant to this newsletter, I’m in recovery from breast cancer treatment. I grew up in Seattle, and I still think of it as home, though I’ve been in the Midwest for almost 30 years.

2. What pays the bills? Currently, I’m the acquisitions editor for regional trade books at the University of Illinois Press. The imprint I manage, 3 Fields Books, is dedicated to general interest titles about the history, arts, culture, and people of Illinois and the Midwest. (They make good gifts! Use the code HOLIDAY50 to take 50% off through December 31.) I also handle popular and scholarly titles in architecture, food, natural history, and Chicago politics. If you are an author who’d like to know more about what I’m looking for, this podcast (from January of this year) is a great place to start. Or just get in touch (scroll down).

3. What else do you do? I am a part-time editor with Chicago’s South Side Weekly newspaper, which is dedicated to developing emerging journalists and to creating media by, for, and about the South Side of this large, complicated, still-segregated city. I also teach advanced editing at Columbia College Chicago — or I did until October 30, when we went on strike. With our contract up for renewal and the school in fiscal trouble, the administration announced this fall that many courses taught by adjuncts would be taken over by full-time faculty. As the vast majority of Columbia faculty are adjuncts, this did not go over with the union, and after negotiations broke down we went on strike halfway through the semester. This strike — which has just this week reached a tentative agreement — is now the longest-running adjunct strike in U.S. history. I am lucky that I only teach (taught?) one class; I’m not dependent on the school to make rent. But it has still been deeply frustrating: I was counting on the extra money, and I feel terrible for my students, many of whom are graduating seniors just about to launch. Here’s a good story about the latest developments co-written by one of them. And if you’d like to give a gift to a striking teacher worse off than I, may I suggest our strike fund?

4. Have you written any books? I have edited three anthologies of writing about Chicago and the Midwest, all published by Belt Publishing, the small press I worked with before coming over to UIP. By edited, I mean that I selected all the essays, short stories, and poems therein, and my name is on the cover — which is not to be confused with the kind of editing that an acquisitions editor does, or a copy editor. I love all three of these books, which showcase a diverse range of emerging and established writers from here in Chicago and elsewhere around the region. Other people have loved them too. The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook (2019) was named one of the ten best 21st-century nonfiction books about Chicago by Chicago Magazine. Chris Borrelli, of the Chicago Tribune, praised Rust Belt Chicago (2017) as a “who’s who of contemporary Chicago writers.” These Chicago collections, along with the regional Red State Blues, also make excellent gifts — as do all Belt titles, which include everything from memoir to maps.

   About 12 years ago I also wrote a narrative cookbook, Soup & Bread: Building Community One Pot at a Time, which was wonderfully received at the time. The first edition is out of print, but after the rights reverted to me, I self-published it with a new preface. That edition is available via Bookshop, here — and for the person on your list who has everything, who doesn’t love soup, or a soup cookbook?

5. Have you written anything this year? I wrote exactly one published thing this year, an essay on Chicago’s mayoral election for the Baffler. But it got picked up by Jamelle Bouie for his New York Times newsletter, so I must be doing something right. I have also written a year’s worth of weekly essays here on Substack.

6. What’s this newsletter all about? I launched this project in July of 2022, shortly after I began chemotherapy for triple-positive breast cancer. I was diagnosed just ten days before my wedding — my first, at the age of 54 — and writing through treatment was a way to make sense of the absurd tension between the happiest and the hardest moments of my life to date. (This post is a good place to start.) The terrible name is a relic of the early days of the pandemic, when I started a tiny art project in which I sent little bells and whistles to friends as a way to encourage them to pay attention to what might seem frivolous in such dark times. To cultivate the bells and whistles of life along with the essentials, as it were. Over the past 18 months the newsletter has become less cancer-y and more a space for memoir and other investigations. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about dance, and the ways women are conditioned to make themselves small and how they learn to take up space. You can expect more in that vein in the year to come.

7. How’s your health? Good! I mean, I broke my foot in November, which sucks. But otherwise I am doing well. I finished active cancer treatment — chemo, surgery, radiation, lymphedema treatment, immunotherapy — in May of this year and so far I remain NED, or “no evidence of disease.”

8. Read any good books lately? I am working on a memoir project, so I have, in turn, been reading a whole lot of memoir. Here are just a few that would make good (if last minute) gifts. For the relievedly divorced: Kelly McMasters’s The Leaving Season, a bittersweet memoir in essays that has a wonderfully deft touch with detail. For the Midwest GenXer: Sonya Huber’s Love and Industry — another graceful essay collection that connects the dots that make up an idiosyncratic, flannel-clad life. For the forager: chef Iliana Regan’s Fieldwork, which is a blazing followup to her first book, the National Book Award-nominated Burn the Place. For the fan of literary Chicago history: Bette Howland’s W-3, published in 1974 and about which I spoke at Howland’s induction into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame this summer. For the recovering or wistful dancer: Alice Robb’s Don’t Think, Dear, an excavation of the author’s life as a young ballet student and the cultural weight of ballet more broadly. I wrote about it here. I could go on … but this newsletter is too long already. Maybe I’ll save the recs for a separate post.

9. Go back to that soup thing — what was that about? In 2009 I started a project called Soup & Bread at Chicago’s Hideout bar and music venue, where I worked for eight years as a bartender after leaving my job at the Chicago Reader. People brought soup, people ate soup, and we collected pay-what-you-can donations to donate to local food pantries. Over the past 14 years, the project has grown and shrunk and shifted-shape and location, but like a good stock, the basics remain the same. It relaunches for the winter on January 3 at the Hideout, and on January 27 we are starting a spinoff project called “Soup & Thread,” which this year takes the form of a series of monthly sewing bees, but will iterate into other public programming in 2025. You can read much more about this on the Soup & Bread website. And this is a good time as ever to remind you that the very best gift you can give to the food bank or pantry of your choice is cold hard cash.

10. What else are you looking forward to in 2024? So many things. Walking, for one (I go back to the orthopedist today). But I’m also excited for the January launch of three books that I acquired for Illinois (this one, this one, and this one). Publishing is a long game and it’s so fun and gratifying to see work I began two years ago start to bear fruit. In February, I’ll be performing with my class at Aloft Circus Arts, where I’ve been studying for more than ten years. (Our group act is built around the theme of the seven deadly sins, and I am Sloth. Even if I can’t quite get around by then, I can still hang languidly from a lyra.) In March I am traveling with my Theater Oobleck co-conspirators to present Mickle Maher’s The Hunchback Variations at Antioch College. We have been lying low since even before the pandemic and it is exciting to get back to work with some of the smartest, most talented people I know. I’m looking forward to the return of water rowing season in April and to the opportunity to stage manage my coach Kristi’s debut circus show, Way Home, in July. And I am looking forward to continuing to write to you here.

    In the coming year I will have longer term projects that need care and attention, so I’m changing up this newsletter some. I value the chance to write in this space — it’s been so generative for me — and want to keep it up, but I’ll be posting essays just once a month, with probably some shorter chatty stuff in between. I’ve also turned paid subscriptions back on, with a new bargain yearly price of just $40. Everything here will remain un-paywalled, but if you become a paying subscriber I’m happy to share whatever expertise I can with you in return. Want feedback on your book proposal? Curious about running away with the circus? Need a good soup recipe? Hit me up! I am looking forward to hearing from you, and hitting the ground running — on two unbroken feet.

Bonus extra question: How do you feel about Substack? In general, I am a fan. I subscribe to a boatload of newsletters and while I’m not terribly engaged in what I guess is now the Substack social media community (via its Notes feature) I do appreciate being plugged into this network, which I try to support as much as it supports me. Here are a few of my favorites; a gift subscription to any of them is an excellent way to support individual writers: For insight into the maze of modern publishing: my friend and former colleague Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press, Christine Sneed’s Bookish, and Kathleen Schmidt’s Publishing Confidential. For inspiration from writers franker and braver: Millicent Souris’s Attitude Adjustment Facility, Lauren Hough’s Badreads, Jacqui Shine’s Well, Actually (with bonus gift ideas of things-that-look-like-other-things). For inspiration, cancer-adjacent and sometimes woo: my writing group partner Cameron Steele’s Interruptions, Raechel Anne Jolie’s Radical Love Letters, Suleika Jaouad’s The Isolation Journals. Newsletters that have exploded beyond than the talent that drives them: Alicia Kennedy’s From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy, Sari Botton’s Oldster, Lyz Lenz’s Men Yell at Me. Just for being her brilliant self: Neko Case’s Entering the Lung. Just for being my brilliant friend: Eiren Caffall’s Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth. Yes these are all women and nonbinary writers. I follow some men too, from time to time. I do wish the people (men) who run this place would provide a reasonable response to this reasonable request to stop platforming Nazis.