Our Endless and Proper Updates
The new book's been out just over three weeks now. Here's what's been happening.
I’ve long told readers of this newsletter, and I’ve done my best to remind myself, that you can’t build up too many expectations for what will happen to your book once it’s out in the world; you just have to concentrate on writing the best book you’re capable of writing, do what you can to get other people to notice, trust that your publishers are doing everything they can to get other people to notice, and cross your fingers.
So I was delighted to learn that Poets & Writers had added Our Endless and Proper Work to its “Best Books for Writers” list, joining a roster that includes works by Annie Dillard, Audre Lorde, Carl Phillips, and others. “This inspiring volume helps readers not only to develop an ongoing writing practice but also to consider that practice as a worthy goal rather than a means to publication,” the magazine’s editors observe; it was also great to see that they gave a shout out to the illustrations Emm Roy did for the book, which do such a wonderful job of underlining some of the key themes.
Meanwhile, I took a train into New Jersey on a recent Saturday and reunited with Girl Roth, the host of The Virtual Memories Show. We’d first met in 2015, and then did a digital “check-in” call in the summer of 2020, when Gil was following up with many of his guests to see how they were faring while sheltering in place. This time around, a good chunk of our conversation focused on the spiritual aspects of the book’s message, which I consciously downplayed somewhat as I was pulling the essays together but which are also still fairly obvious. What isn’t so obvious, though, because I had quite forgotten it myself, was that the book’s origins—that is to say this newsletter’s origins—are grounded in a transformative spiritual experience I had a little over three years ago. You can read about that experience if you’re interested; I’m not asking you to reach the same (tentative) conclusions I’ve reached about it, but to some extent I’ve become less interested in talking around what happened to me, and more interested in talking about how my life has changed because of the decisions I’ve made following that event.
Finally, I made a guest appearance at Subtle Maneuvers, a newsletter by Mason Currey, the author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Once a month, Mason fields a question from one of his readers, and he invited me to respond to “Adriana in Prague,” who was worried that her desire for “success” was a distraction from her art:
“Realizing that I actually want to be famous and well-known in my area of work and art practice has been shocking to me and made me feel pretty dirty inside. I really want that status. I have a tendency to objectify my art and to worry about the final product and its marketability before even sitting down to do the work. It can be paralyzing.”
As I told Adriana, “[the] desire for success… is nothing to feel dirty or ashamed or embarrassed about. We all want our work to succeed. We want people to see it, to recognize its significance—and, inevitably, to recognize us as the only people who could deliver just this work of art in just this way.”
Yet, I added, this is the very thing that is beyond our control. It’s like I said at the top of this newsletter: All we can do is do our best to share what we have to share, and hope that, to steal a metaphor from the gospels, some of the seeds we scatter will land on good soil and take root.