In 2018, I wrote a lot about winter.
Before I moved to rural Pennsylvania, my conception of it was more fiction than fact, more archetypal than actual; winter the symbol, not the season. In my late 20s, I learned how to scrape ice off my windshield, how to buy (and properly wear) a good winter coat, how to drive safely on snowy back-roads — hard lessons for someone who grew up in Dallas, a city that shuts down when it snows.
But in the winter of 2017, I’d been in a car accident — the first one in over a decade of driving; I’d lost control on a icy curve and skidded into a tree.
Physically, I was lucky; my injuries were not serious. But the aftershocks of anxiety worked their way into everything I wrote for months afterwards, fiction and non.
It was not the closest I had ever come to death, but it was the most dramatic; unable to commit to therapy, I began to keep a journal in earnest for the first time in years, writing my way through the thicket of unfamiliar emotions and the not-insignificant existential crisis that followed.
When the car began to spin, I felt unmoored from both my body and reality; adrenaline and panic distilled, in my memory, to a single moment that I relived across page after page of my dollar-store spiral notebook, circling ever back to the probability of repeating the mistake (but perhaps fatally, next time).
Once the early anxieties subsided, the theme that emerged starkly between those pages was guilt; a preoccupation with all the projects I’d left unfinished, a hyper-focus on the breadcrumb-trail of paper-scraps (digital and analog) that — had I succumbed to my injuries — would lead those who had survived me to my dragon’s-hoard of drafts and works-in-progress. “You worried yourself into a manic ache over this idea, once upon a time,” I wrote of a shittily-first-drafted novel that had been drying on the rack for the past three years. “What happened?” I underlined the question until the paper beneath it shredded.
By 2019, I had relocated back to North Texas. That year, winter and death were not immediately relevant, but I wrote a lot about money and lost time. I’ve never been great at long-term plans, but two cross-country moves within five years had set me even further adrift.
Stuck in a temporary but discouraging living situation, I passed the time in the sort of aimless haze that so commonly goes hand-in-hand with transition and upheaval, and once again, my journal became a steady platform in an otherwise shaky world.
“There’s a thread you follow,” writes William Stafford. “It goes among / things that change. But it doesn’t change.”
Like all writers, I became aware of this concept via hours of workshopping; all writing is rewriting came the familiar assurance each time a story didn’t quite strike the way I intended.
The themes and insights that emerge in a given piece are not often something you arrive at by intention, we’re taught, but something you unearth via the process of drafting. It had become second nature to me: excavating and locating this thread between the scribbled lines of shitty first drafts.
But when I think of thread, I think of fate, too. Not as predestination, but as the process by which we arrive anywhere as opposed to elsewhere.
My partner and I have discussed buying a house twice in our relationship.
The first time was desultory; we were in our 20s, in college and living paycheck to paycheck, playing a game of what-if? to alleviate stress in a routine that felt unsustainable on a daily basis. Daydreaming became an effective coping mechanism.
Several years later, after spending most of 2020 crammed into a sudden and necessary mutual work-from-home arrangement that had us desperate for personal space, we dusted the conversation off and had it for real.
Sometimes the line between need and want is hard to see until misfortune ups the contrast and something tangible is suddenly on the line. In our case, sanity seemed to be the resource most at-risk; our apartment met our needs pre-COVID, but it was too small to accommodate two working adults who each required a desk and an office (and, luxuriously, an hour or two of real, actual silence).
We agreed that sanity is a need and not a want, but the distinction didn’t make the conversation much easier; we are a frugal pair without children who have, historically, made the most of small spaces. Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs a room of her own, but I earned one and a half degrees at the dining room table, and had grown somewhat accustomed to being productive in a communal setting.
A house is a significant investment. The past several years have been an exercise in risk — management, mitigation, the psychological effects of. What fresh hell will the news bring us tomorrow? We asked ourselves this again and again, from 2016 onward.
Also: where? Urban or rural? Here or elsewhere?
This question is the most annoying one to answer, especially right now. On the cusp of the past year, neither of us has the emotional energy to move cross-country again, but here is a place fraught with political drama; I have never felt kinship with this place, with these cities — not the way that often emerges when writers talk about home, about place.
In a list of pros and cons, I come up with a few half-hearted positives about staying in Texas. The long growing season (but I’m not a gardener); the fact that every performing artist on tour comes to either Dallas or Austin (but I hate concerts); it hardly ever snows (but when it does, it’s apocalyptic; people skid across highways and die).
As a systems engineer, my partner’s list of pros is longer and more specific. Tech hubs. Interesting career opportunities. Important things that apply to us but not to me. He talks about the widespead availability of Google Fiber, and I think back to the summer in Pennsylvania when a family of deer — seven, at least — walked right up to the window while I was writing. Our internet was terrible, but we lived at the edge of the woods, far from the city and its noise and its unspoken demand to consume, indiscriminately, in every possible direction.
We circle back to needs versus wants; the relative brevity of my lists seems disproportionate to my level of anxiety about the question being asked.
In December 2019, I made a resolution to start taking my work seriously again.
This was less a change in faith than a renewal; I have been writing for as long as I can remember, with a devotion that is almost dogmatic. But several years prior, the soul-crushing process of evaluating every story-idea for commercial viability in a graduate-level writing course had left me feeling creatively gutted. I wrote things that year, but I wasn’t proud of them; I published things, but I didn’t love them. I had workshopped and workshopped, written and rewritten, refined my weak areas at the expense of creative authenticity, and afterwards, when I was alone with myself at the mercy of a blank page, the trade-off didn’t seem worth it.
The tyranny of the writing workshop left me in a half-hearted state of disinterest; I stopped writing.
At the end of 2019, life stabilized; I had taken a year off, read a lot of books, nursed a handful of other pursuits, and I felt ready to confront writing again.
But my resolve was only one of many casualties in the year that followed; to say that no one got anything done is an understatement. It was, at the time, a miniscule problem in the world’s grand scheme of things, a thing that was relevant only personally, and yet: when I’m not writing, life takes on a monochromatic cast; like Bruno Schulz wrote in a letter to Romana Halpern, “my nervous system has a delicacy and fastidiousness that are not up to the demands of a life not sanctioned by art.” I become categorically unwell.
Later in the year, I’d met someone in a genre workshop; we liked each other’s stories, and she was starting an online critique group. I was overzealous; it sounded like what I needed, and I was tired of waiting for problems to solve themselves.
A few weeks into our second month, nobody had posted anything. The critique channel stayed empty, the conversations stayed off-topic.
And then someone posted an Instagram-filtered style photo of their laptop and their aesthetically-appealing snack arrangement. “When you’re supposed to be working, but you write instead. Oops.”
I stared at the oops, tacked onto the end of that post like a wink, an accident staged like a model home; I stared at it, feeling a rise of emotions I couldn’t name. This is what writing looks like the image implies, invoking both ritual and performance.
This neatly-packaged, perfect thing; this make-believe accident in the midst of a real and present and semi-dystopian reality had all the disingenousness of a social media post. The way someone on Twitter posts a question like they actually want to know the answer, but they never respond to the replies, and this becomes shorthand for community, for engagement. They want you to look at them, but they don’t actually care to see you looking.
I felt struck by a feeling so profoundly discomforting I would rather not name it, and I left the group.
In an effort to solidify a position, I decide that the question is vaguely ethical.
When I met my partner’s family for the first time, native Ohioans, his mother exclaimed, “I love Texas!”
Texas is a state with a definite aesthetic; when pressed, the things she claimed to love about it were more aesthetic than not, more mythos than fact. The allure of the Southwest, the ferocity of independence, the romanticized bigness of everything (egos included) — all of which are highly dependent on where you live. The weather in Texas is described by outsiders as both humid and dry; the summers are beautiful, they say, but the important question is whether you’ve ever seriously burned yourself on your seatbelt somewhere in the middle of a 100-day consecutive streak of 100-degree days, when getting into your car feels like climbing into an oven (and for a moment, yes, you do kind of want to die).
His family reluctantly reversed their stance on gay marriage when two out of three children came out, but they still defended Trump until 2020, when his efforts to contain the pandemic were unsatisfactory for my immunocompromised mother-in-law, for whom the failure of conservative policy was finally personal. (This sort of self-centered opinion-reversal is something almost definitive of political conservatives. That her grandchildren were inheriting a world buckling under the weight of greenhouse emissions and plastic trash was not convincing enough to trigger it.)
Texas has had a Republican governer for my entire life. After the 2021 winter storm, Texas was on everyone’s mind as $10,000 electric bills scaffolded by Republican policies sent shockwaves through the rest of the country. I have been subjected to the political ideologies of oppressive conservatives. My queerness publicly disrespected, first by my family — Sicilian immigrants who, nonetheless, wore the mantle of the deep south well enough to pass — who told me that it was a sin to be in love with the girl from Georgia that I’d met online when I was 15, and then later, by the absence of state-wide legislation granting LGBTQ protection.
The governer of this state makes headlines for doing things that I find incomprehensible, and the rest of the country watches in horror as Texas becomes a parable.
My asthma gets worse, and so does my insomnia, and if setting is a character in life as it is in fiction, am I really okay with inviting this one to the family gathering?
The year we moved back to DFW, an EF-3 tornado carved a path of destruction less than five miles from where we lived.
Tornadoes are never personal in North Texas, but this one was; the National Weather Service had ranked our risk only slight, so we were watching TV on the couch that Sunday at 9pm when the #CMAS#EXTREME alert came screeching from our phones. “It’s coming right for us,” I remember saying; I was wearing Adventure Time pajamas and mismatched socks and staring, disbelieving, at a radar image that gave us less than ten minutes to get to safety.
A few days later, my partner and I drove past downed trees and boarded up windows on our way to the coffee shop — back when casually going places was a thing — and we debated which was worse: tornado-season or bad winters. (We grew up on opposite sides of the country, and our answers are different.) The tornado had destroyed my favorite branch of the library. I thought about all the books that had been ruined, waterlogged or ripped to shreds, and considered changing my answer, but remembered sliding on the ice, the steering wheel spinning through my hands, and stood my ground.
In my well-worn copy of MFA in a Box by John Rember, someone has scribbled angry disagreements into the margins of every essay. This is the joy of buying books used; an ephemera that is more exciting than the markless, noteless digital copies of the same books; an alternative perspective on the text encountered without having to solicit it or go looking. A used book, like setting, is a character of its own. In “Writing Place”, he asks, “In the face of extinction, why get up in the mornings? Why choose between right and wrong, or assume there’s any basis for the choice? Why write?”
“Because it probably won’t happen,” the previous owner scrawled afterwards, tiny in the margin.
This annotation is like a meteor. The use of the word probably, precarious. Is this climate change denial, or is it a fragile act of resistance – belief, in defiance of certainty? Could they be talking about writing? Because it probably won’t happen, I think, and I consider all possible meanings. Mass extinction; a career in a field as uncertain as writing; getting out of bed in the morning in the midst of a global pandemic.
The which-is-worse? conversation came up again lately, only our concerns were slanted more towards the future than the present. The summers are getting hotter and hotter; this trend is expected to continue. We’re young enough that it makes sense to worry about the prospect of baking to death in a decade, in two decades, but it feels like a level of scrutiny more on par with science fiction than with reality. Our parents didn’t consider climate change when deciding where to put down roots, but scientists, the people who know better than anyone what we’re up against, are breaking down in tears when they talk about the future, so we talk about contingencies. Escape plans. Solar panels and water filters and what-ifs, until the language of survival becomes more fluent than the language of home.
It probably won’t happen; somebody, somewhere, is parading maskless through a grocery store, typing a similar sentiment onto Facebook.
What are the chances that your house will be destroyed by a tornado? It’s an impossible question to answer, but the thing is: nobody ever thinks it’ll happen to them. Watch the news — sometimes it does.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the subtle intricacies of language, so I find it significant when I realize that my partner describes this process as home-buying.
“Home” implies a level of certainty that discomforts me; because it probably won’t happen, they write; probably denotes uncertainty, so why do they sound so sure?
I think of the homes I’ve lived in. Of the years I spent in early adulthood deciding whether to put something on the bare white walls of my tiny apartment or feed myself for the week. The way everywhere seemed unfinished; apartments where I wasn’t allowed to paint the walls. Kitchens that are never big enough to contain all the small appliances you need to make home-cooked meals. Small. Inadequate counter-space. Outdated appliances that don’t match and don’t work. Plain, aesthetically unappealing cabinets.
The places I’ve lived have always felt liminal and transitional; one stop among many in a lifetime, casual and impermanent and deliberately half-finished. Those of us who can’t live up to the mythic ideal of home — because we can’t afford it; because we can’t commit to it; because we can’t relate to it — are forced to develop broader, more poetic conceptions.
Rember speaks fondly of where he lives, but he reminds us, too, that the intersection of writing and place is something subjective, something hand-made. “Over time,” he writes, “your writing will become the place you live.”
Sometimes, when I’m up writing past midnight, I glance out the window. Darkness swallows everything; I could be anywhere in the world. I am, in fact, usually somewhere else: a speculative fiction writer, I spend most of my time in a world I’ve painstakingly crafted from the happenstance of a single thought; a chance firing of neurons that became a place I wanted to put down my anchor.
In my first-ever creative writing class — a freshman-level course at community college; the first of many ventures to validate myself and my art — the instructor asked if creative writing was whatever we wanted it to be. Practical considerations aside, I wonder the same thing about home. Place or mindset? Noun or verb?
House-hunting, home-buying, feels a lot like the process by which an emerging writer learns that the final draft isn’t a fixed point on a map, a predictable place at which you can arrive if you follow the named roads.
I’ve survived my rounds in the ring of artistic self-doubt in the age of COVID-19 certain of one thing and one thing only: there are no named roads; not around here. These plots unfold in real-time; a collaboration with chance.
“Tragedies happen,” Stafford writes, “people get hurt / or die; and you suffer and get old.”
These days, I’m hanging onto that thread for dear life.