Telling Ourselves Stories
My autumn wrapped up on a strange note. Midway through November, I got hit with a series of unfortunate events that culminated with my second COVID infection, after my initial one in the early winter of 2020 which had resulted in a year and a half of long COVID. This second infection came despite masks, vaccines, and boosters—all because a coworker of my husband’s, who tested positive but then came to work anyway unmasked, coughed over everyone. My husband wears an N95, but after eight hours in the presence of someone coughing on you, it’s really hard to avoid contamination.
My website and illustration deadlines got pushed by the illness, my novel writing for December got scrapped, and most of the last month and half was spent sick, recovering from being sick, and then catching up on work and holiday prep. I managed to get all my work wrapped the Monday before the holidays and spent the week leading up to Christmas dodging snow storms, ice storms, windstorms, and making up for a month of Christmas prep where I was laid up. I also celebrated my birthday last Thursday mainly by prepping for an ice storm, so I owe myself a special day later this week to make up for it.
By the time Christmas rolled around this last weekend, I was exhausted but so grateful. This holiday wasn’t perfect by any means. I’m still at half-capacity and I didn’t get my novel finished by my birthday like I’d planned. But so many people whom I love were under one roof for Christmas this week. My sister was out from New York for the holiday, and we celebrated the fact that my Dad is still with us after his heart attack and triple bypass this June. After COVID, and nearly 3/4 of my family being hospitalized for different reasons this year, we had no reason to expect that would be the case. And I know there are Christmases to come where it won’t be, so this weekend I held tight to just being in the same room with these people and telling them that I love them. That was my one and only perfection this holiday, and I’m grateful for it.
This means that all the content I teased in my last newsletter, I still owe you all. Recipes, mutual aid and activists to support, craft talks, and more. But for now, I just wanted to send something out before the end of the year to get back in touch, and let you know why this Substack had gone temporarily quiet.
What am I reading this week?
I unwrapped Stephen King’s Fairytale Sunday morning under the tree, and I’m just cracking it open this evening. In craft books, I’m reading The Writer's Notebook II: Craft Essays from Tin House after it had been recommended in several editions of Matt Bell’s
(one of my favorite newsletters for writers). I’m also finishing up a revisit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion and reading Saeed Jones’ poetry book, Alive at the End of the World (his Substack is another favorite: ).And while it’s not a current read, I gave Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land, one of my favorite books this year, to one of my best friends and brother Todd for Christmas. Seeing him open it today when his wife and kids came over for Boxing Day reminded me of how much I loved it, and it’s theme on the power of stories that help us endure throughout all the apocalypses we’ve been through in our past and have yet to go through in our future.
What am I watching?
As of today, season 11 of Letterkenny has dropped on Hulu and this series of Canadian hick Shakespeare never fails to delight. The puns, verbal gymnastics, soundtrack, and the jokes that have set-ups in previous episodes (or seasons) that build on each other with every subsequent storyline is next level. You doubt? Read this write up from 2019 in The New Yorker. Ask other writers and filmmakers. We’re all in awe of Jared Keeso’s tongue-twisting, tough trash-talking, cast of cranky characters and every Boxing Day it’s a joy to go back to Letterkenny and its population of 5000 people and their problems.
In other TV, there is the second season of Sort Of, which was just as much a triumph as season one. I am loving Willow on Disney Plus. We haven’t gotten into Witcher: Blood Origin yet, but that’s on deck for later this week.
In film, we rewatched Glass Onion on Christmas with the members of the family who didn’t see it with us in November. It was just as good the second time. We also rewatched RRR for the fourth or fifth time, and it’s tied with Everything Everywhere All at Once for my favorite movie of 2022.
What’s inspiring?
Every year in late autumn and early winter, I am reminded that humans everywhere have ceremonies at this time of year celebrating some form of storytelling and light emerging in the darkness. Around the world, we are disposed as a species to find reasons to gather together, light extra candles, remember the ones who have passed, and tell ourselves stories that remind us of who we are to each other, what we value, and what we want out of the next year.
The stories can be grand and spiritual, or they can just be the thousandth time someone in your family told a story about something that happened years ago. A story that’s gotten a lot of traction in my family this year is remembering when my sister Mary, who had been eleven at the time, treated me, her eighteen year old big sister, out to dinner and a movie after I graduated from high school. She emptied out her piggy bank to do so, and we paid for the whole thing (Burger King and a matinee) in quarters. I cried as she produced the baggie of loose coins, because she was the only one at the time to celebrate me graduating. I was a week away from being kicked out of my house and a month away from living in my car. I remember that being the one day that year when I felt loved and worthy of love. She remembers that as the day I gave her her first driving lesson in the empty movie theater parking lot. It is, as much as anything from a holy text, a reminder about how small gestures and even smaller resources can stretch into something more expansive and transformative.
After having COVID and feeling like there was no way I could do all I normally do for the holiday, thinking about that story and others like it kept me from stressing out about expectations and focused on what mattered: spending time with friends and family and just letting people know how much they are loved and worthy of love.
What am I working on?
I did not get much writing done during COVID or the week I had to prep for the holidays, but I had some work return to me in a variety of ways. I started December well: I sold a story to Kaleidotrope! My Ibsen-esque fairytale about memory and monsters, “In a Clearing on the Darkest Day” will debut in late 2024. This acceptance buttressed me when I got a rejection from another magazine after they had held my story on the editor-in-chief’s desk since March of this year. They gave me a glowing rejection note, and invited me to resubmit, but it was still a heartbreaking “no” because it concerns the prequel novelette to the fantasy novel I’m in-progress on, the one I was supposed to have finished by now had COVID not waylaid me.
But I ended the year on a high: on December 19th, I had an essay published by Identity Theory. My second essay to be published this year, “A Winter Vigil” is speculative nonfiction about my grandmother’s passing, her influence on who I am as a storyteller, and the ways that we say goodbye to the people who we love. You can read it here.
My Grandmother passed nine years ago on December 20th, so having this piece out in time to remember her on that day meant so much to me and members of my family, and underscored all those feelings I’ve written about several times in this letter: every holiday season, the ones that go smoothly and the ones we barely slide face-first into, is potentially our last chance to tell people that we love them.
Aarik Danielson wrote about the essay in his Friday Five, “In these bleak, early-winter days, Salcedo’s latest proves a strangely consoling read. A gorgeous rendering of her grandmother’s last hours, and of the way our souls linger in the world, the essay quietly implores us to consider that life, death and the tenses we use to describe them aren’t fixed categories.”
There’s so much to share with you all in my next letter, like I said: I still owe recipes, mutual aid and activists to support, craft talks, and more. There is also film news and publishing news, but I’ll save that for the next few letters.
For now I’m going to sign off on this update with the wish and hope that your holidays have reminded you that you’re loved and worthy of love, and if they haven’t, I hope you know it now.
You are loved and worthy of love. Believe it, even when it’s hardest to internalize. So much changes when we believe we’re worthy of love. One of the only compasses I had when I was 18 was my sister’s baggie of loose change. But it’s one of the things that led me home after I was kicked out of it, and it’s one of many stories I think about on these holidays when I’m surrounded by a family that’s been through so much.
Tell yourself a story going into this new year about your worth and keep telling yourself that story until you see it abound throughout in your life, echoed in all the things you do, the people you choose to have in your life, and the efforts you where you choose to put your energy. You are worthy of love, and as we come up on the end of the year this weekend, I hope you think about how that is a candle in the darkness for you at the start of 2023. What will that light bring into view for you as something to pursue? What will it expose as an object in your way that you may have been about to trip over?
Until the next letter, friends. Happy holidays.
❤️❤️❤️