How we spend our attention is how we spend our lives
Summer means visiting my beloved CSA––Astarte Farm in Hadley, MA–– to gather my share of chard, beets and zucchini. Today, U-Pick is berries, so while Tom is plucking fat blueberries from the netted rows of bushes, I crouch in a raspberry patch.
There’s a reason raspberries are expensive. Not only are they surrounded by thorns, they are the most delicate of the berries, and one must pick carefully in order not to injure them.* But anyone who’s bitten into a sun-warmed raspberry knows it’s worth the time and care.
At the age of fourteen, I met myself in a raspberry patch. I was with my family on a small Maine isle, which had neither electricity nor running water. It was one of the happiest weekends of my life. We played guitar in our friend Kariska’s cabin, learned how powdered lime worked to mask odors in an outhouse, cooked a delicious meal of the vegetables grown in the garden. One afternoon, I stole away to a raspberry patch, spent hours picking berries, eating berries, and as I did so, I became acquainted with the person I was becoming. I felt wholly myself, content with being exactly the creature I was. This calm gatherer, so different from the Nerissa who’d recently been ensconced in the dramas of eighth grade, was free. When I lose that Nerissa, as I often do, I return to the slow work of picking berries––or its equivalent.
I am a poor gardener, the kind of person who loves plants, hates weeds, but doesn’t like to take time to pull them. I see the poppies in early June, the morning glories in September, and I make a mental note to plant some next spring. But next spring comes, and I forget. My beautiful yard, lovingly cultivated for decades by Suzanne Chambers, the previous owner, is too big for me to care for as well as she did, given the music and the writing and the general impatience.
But this morning as Tom and I finally planted the fern and the Budleia we’d bought earlier in the week, I looked around the adjacent garden and saw the weeds I’d learned to identify with my handy Picture This app. I spent a lovely twenty minutes or so de-weeding, and as I did so, I also thinned out the Baptisia which had taken over, threatening to strangle the hydrangea. As I staked the milkweeds for the butterflies, making tidy at least one corner of our half-acre lot, I was reminded of the similarity between this kind of work and tackling the editing I have to do on my novel-in-progress. When I wake up in the morning, it can seem daunting—how do I cut 10K words and also add a new ending??? But if I simply slow down, say a quick prayer to the Muse, and read just one page, I become immersed again, and the work is easy. It takes time, it takes patience, but it’s all there. I’m learning, slowly, how to identify the weeds, how to thin, how to imagine what might fill the newly emptied space.
Weekly Workshops for Autumn 2023!
I’m pleased to announce open enrollment in my Fall Season of weekly workshops. We will begin our 10-week trimester the week of September 19 and run groups until the end of November.
Generative groups begin with a prompt, and then we write for an hour. The second hour, we take turns sharing what we’ve just written. Responses are focused on the merits of the new work we’ve just heard. No negative or prescriptive critique will be given. All generative workshops are either on Zoom or in Little Blue with a hybrid option.
Weeding & Pruning is manuscript based, and we meet on Zoom. These groups require a commitment to submit a set number of pages, as well as critiquing your classmates’ pieces in writing. For more information, email me: nerissand@gmail.com.
All times below are Eastern Time.
Tuesday Weeding & Pruning: 12:30-2:30pm starting September 19, 2023 (led by Nerissa Nields, by application only. To apply, go here.)
Tuesday Evening: 6-8pm starting September 19, 2023 (Songwriting, Poetry, Prose)
Wednesday afternoons: 12:30-2:30pm starting September 20, 2023 (all genres)
Wednesday evenings: 7-9pm starting September 20, 2023 (Songwriting, Poetry, Prose) (FULL)
Thursday Fiction: 12:30-2:30pm starting September 21, 2023 (Fiction or Fiction-adjacent)
Friday Weeding & Pruning:12:30-2:30pm starting September 22, 2023 (led by Elaine Apthrop, by application only. To apply, go here.)
Morning Seeding & Tending
Morning Seeding & Tending is a low-stress, no-share writing and accountability group. We meet Monday-Friday, 10-11am Eastern Time. We begin each morning with a quick greeting, teeny prompt (quotation/poem fragment which I then email to all members), then set our intentions in the chat. We write with sound muted, and usually people turn their cameras off. If you arrive late, no problem. At 11, we’ll say a quick goodbye. You can choose to leave early. Or you can keep writing long after the group officially ends. Some people come daily, some weekly, some whenever they can.
After signing up, you’ll get a welcome email and thereafter a Zoom link which changes every month. Pay by the month, via subscription, or a month at a time via my website. The longer you commit to write with us, the cheaper it is. The month begins whenever you start payments.
By website, it's $25 per month. This is a great way to try it out.
By Ko-Fi subscription, it's $20 per month, with automatic payment (like Patreon).
By paid subscription to my Substack newsletter, it's $20 per month, with automatic payment.
OR the very cheapest is to subscribe via Substack newsletter for an entire year, which is $200 upfront--but that makes the cost between $16-17 per month.
Best of all? You can start right now!
Recommendations & Reading List
The Bear, Season 2! And did you know that Ebon Moss-Bachrach, AKA Richie, is a local kiddo from Springfield MA?
Zadie Smith’s excellent essay “On Killing Charles Dickens” for writers of historical fiction.
Podcast: The Hidden Brain, especially the two episodes on addiction and dopamine called The Paradox of Pleasure and its follow-up, The Path to Enough.
Movie: Barbie. I wrote about this in the last newsletter. I want to go see it again. And no, I haven’t yet seen Oppenheimer, but I’m sure I’ll do so by the next newsletter.
This great interview in the Guardian with Allison Bechdel.
What I Read This Summer:
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver (AMAZING! Worthy of the Pulitzer for sure, and my favorite book of the year. I also recommend her interview with Ezra Klein).
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (FINALLY! And the movie by John Ford.)
Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell (beautiful, beautiful).
Arsonists’ City, Hala Alyan (I actually started reading from the beginning as soon as I read the final sentence. Thanks to Laura and Tariq for recommending!)
The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry, Gabrielle Ziven (she wrote Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, too. This short read was a book lover’s dream.)
Dear Edward, Ann Napolitano (and the Netflix show! which is very different, but both are great. AN also wrote Hello Beautiful, maybe my second favorite book of the year so far.)
Body Work, Melissa Febos (must-read for any writer!)
French Braid, Ann Tyler (not my fave of hers)
The Sun is Also a Star, Nicola Yoon (great YA)
Ready Player One, Ernest Cline (also not my fave)
To read next:
Exit West, Mohsin Hamid (reading this now!)
We All Want Impossible Things, Catherine Newman
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett
*Fun fact: if you want to keep your raspberries free of mold, make a solution of one part white vinegar to three parts water and rinse your berries with this, then rinse again with plain water, because…vinegar. Then lay them out on a cookie sheet lined with paper towel to absorb all the moisture. For raspberries, moisture=mold.