Sorry about, uh, completely and utterly missing the last newsletter with no forewarning. It's been a busy few weeks! The first and foremost reason for this: We moved to Asheville!
Everything has gone remarkably well, overall, thanks to a lot of help from friends and family and kind strangers. But still—and it's crazy that I forget this every time—moving is hard. Exhausting, too. And settling into a new place takes way more time than it has any right to.
So, for those reasons, I missed the last newsletter. Thank you for your patience, and endless appreciation to those who reached out over the past weeks. I almost missed this edition too, but wanted to avoid y'all sending out digital search parties for me.
With all of that said, I have (predictably) not been in my most productive writing mode, and ergo have relatively little to share—so I'll actually keep it short today. Next time I'll be back to my usual verbosity, and should have positive updates to share about my projects, too.
In the meantime, I'm sending lots of love and wishing you well. Talk soon.
☕ Project Curses
As I alluded to in the introduction, I haven't been making the progress on Curses that I'd hoped—though, at this point, any and all progress is meaningful (yes I did get déjà vu typing that, thanks very much).
Right now I'm working my way through an updated outline that incorporates all of my notes and changes, which should be the last thing I can procrastinate with before delving into the revision proper. I kid! I'm not procrastinating—not really. I just don't know what I'm doing (like, at all), so I'm over-doing everything. Hopefully, next time around, this will mean that I'll be able to refine my drafting and revision processes, knowing what's actually helpful and necessary and what is, ultimately, definitely just procrastinating.
♟️ Project Rift
In contrast to the revision effort, work on the new project is going well! It's still in the early stages, but I think the voice of the story is near pinned down now, and I'm liking it more than I'd even dared to hope. I know I've been a little (or a lot) vague about this one. Once I have a few more chapters under my belt and the story gets moving, I'll share some more details and give you a better idea of what to expect. Stay tuned!
📚 Reading
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood | This novel (which is truly novel in that it blends autofiction, prose poetry, comedy writing, and satire, amongst other genres) won a bunch of awards back in 2021—which makes sense, after reading it. It's fascinating and unexpected, charting the experience of a woman rising to prominence for her social media presence through brief, evocative vignettes reminiscent of the very platforms they're probing. But there's so much more to the story—passages that made me laugh, and cry, and groan, and stop to stare at the wall and think. The format takes a moment to get used to, but once you're in, you're in.
Dorothy's Harp by Dorothy Ashby | As my interest in and appreciation for jazz has grown, I've been finding an (unsurprising) wealth of fantastic music for all moods. This album, for instance, has JAZZ HARP. *Ahem*. Apologies. "Jazz harp" has become a constant refrain in my head ever since listening to this album, and it seems to be slipping into my writing. As I was saying, this 1969 album from the harpist Dorothy Ashby features JAZZ HARP. Oh bother—what I'm trying to say is JAZZ HARP JAZZ HARP JAZZ HARP. Terribly sorry. I think maybe you should just give it a JAZZHARPJAZZHARPJAZZHARPJAZZHARP.
In the frame: This little trail is a two minute walk from our new apartment. Yay trees!
For today's show and tell, I'd like to share—with childlike glee—that my initials spell a word.
I can see your blank look. You don't understand how cool this is. Let me explain:
As a kid, I was always fascinated by the idea of names and initials holding some hidden meaning—some secret that helps to explain who a person is. My first name is good for this—Corbett means "little raven" or "crow" and has gifted me a pleasant affinity both with the birds and melancholic Romantic poetry. My middle name—Wade—is decent, but only lightly evocative on its own. My last name? Not so much (at least without a stretch). And my initials? CWM? Absolutely not. They're nonsense letters.
Or so I thought.
In Robert Macfarlane's excellent Underland, I stumbled across a passage that referred to a cwm in the mountains; I thought my brain was breaking. I stared blankly at the page, reading the sentence over and over. Finally—with trepidation and trembling hands—I searched for cwm on the internet:
cwm
/ko͝om/
noun
(especially in Wales) a steep-sided hollow at the head of a valley or on a mountainside formed by glacial erosion.
Gasp. Good old Welsh, mashing consonants together and giving my life meaning.
Now, this geological feature is more commonly referred to as a cirque and in English is more typically written as "combe"—but who cares. My initials are a word! And a good one at that—it lets the moody, Poe-inspired poem of my name practically write itself:
Raven soars on darken'd wing
Whilst I wade in pools retained
In the hollow of a mountainside
Needs work, but you get the idea. It's so cool!
Stop giving me that look!
Enjoying Coffee Chats?
Visit the links below to support the newsletter and discover more of my writing 👇
💌 Share the newsletter with a friend → Hit forward!
📬 Send me your questions, ideas, and suggestions → Email me
Hello! I've been thinking a lot, lately, about the many iterations of the Taoist aphorism that "a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step": How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time; Rome wasn't built in a day; Little by little; Day by day; That Shel Silverstein poem about Melinda Mae eating a whale. (A quick digression—does anyone else have a bunch of these illustrations permanently stuck in their head? Silverstein's illustrations weren't as haunting as Stephen Gammell's...
Hi there! I hope you’re doing well, and that, wherever you are, crisp, cool fall air is kissing your skin, and the scent of leaves and sun are filling your nose, and that you’re finding some peace in a not always peaceful world. Autumn is intermittent for me, right now (peace, too, though that’s a topic for another time). Back home, in Asheville (home? Can I call a place I’ve lived so briefly “home”? It’s the place where my things and my cat are, at least), the mornings have been misty and...
Hello! So, as you (hopefully) already know, it's Monday, and Monday is, obviously, not Sunday. This is coming late, is what I'm saying—but I have a good excuse! This weekend was full of family and fun and good food and hiking and all of the other things requisite for good mental health. It was a sorely needed reprieve during this period of continued uncertainty. Which brings us to today's reflection on uncertainty and sureness. I'll say up front that I don't have any particularly great...
