How Three Writers Are Coping With the World Right Now

The days are growing shorter. The seasonal affective disorder is inching nearer. I’m pulling my favorite large mug from the back of the cupboard and gripping it like a talisman. 

We at Scratch are doing our best to enter autumn with curiosity and open hearts. That said, our hearts are probably doing about as well as your own at the moment. Today we’ve rounded up some of the things that are helping.

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— Rahawa, Maggie, and Latria

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Maggie

I pinched a nerve in my neck sometime this summer, because my posture is terrible and I spent too much time in the car on family road trips, and at my desk, which is an antique rolltop and not at all ergonomically sound. Stress also doesn’t help bad posture, it turns out. 

According to my PT, I wasn’t allowed to read in bed, because that put my head in exactly the position that got me into this mess. So instead of flipping a few pages each night before passing out, as is my usual pattern, I was prescribed the couch in my living room after kid bedtime (with an icepack on my neck), reading on my recliner like a retiree. And get this — I was actually able to tear through some books in their actual paper versions. A few highlights:

In The Rhododendrons: A Memoir With Appearances by Virginia Woolf by Heather Christle

Confession time: I have had the Virginia Woolf biography by Hermione Lee on my bedside table for several years, and while I have read it in bits and pieces, the heft of the thing has kept me from truly diving in. But Heather Christle’s memoir (author of The Crying Book), cited the Lee biography heavily, and gave me enough touchstones to Woolf’s life to move it up my TBR pile. This is my favorite kind of memoir — a quiet, investigative kind of reflection, in the hands of a deft and serious writer who plays with language and context and memory and imagery all the way through. 

The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson)

I had a big plan to read the Emily Wilson translation before I went to see the Christopher Nolan film — which I anticipated hating — and to then read the Wilson takedown of the Nolan version. I finished step one of this plan. Maybe someday I will have time to see movies in theaters again and complete the rest of it.

Euphoria by Lily King

I started this book on a Friday evening and finished it by Sunday afternoon. It’s been a while since I inhaled a book like that; the last one was probably one of King’s other novels. Heart the Lover, which I read and cried and cried and cried. Someone heard my response to that one and said this one was a must. It was. I finished and immediately recommended it to at least three friends.

Rahawa

Apparently, I’ve been coping with the world by throwing myself into work (a classic for a reason). Between the end of July and the end of August, I published five articles and edited another seven, split between Scratch and COYOTE. This is putting aside book work, and part-time bakery work, and secret third co-op work. Perhaps you recall I also moved at around this time? It has all been too much. I won’t deny it. 

I am easing into autumn with the trepidation of a first kiss. This weekend, some friends and I drove two hours north of Oakland to celebrate Manjula’s birthday on a beach along the rugged coast of central California. It was beautiful in the way stark places are. Whale spouts appeared in the distance between high hovering gulls. A kindly Scratch reader introduced herself and said nice words about our little publication, which honestly made my week. The big sky did big sky things. I am trying to remind myself it is good to be in the world and not staring at a screen and fretting, or drafting, or texting, or bookmarking, or screenshotting, or drinking. 

Here are some art projects and articles nudging me forward:

— The latest issue of The Drift magazine contains a section dedicated to anonymous Dispatches on AI. I particularly enjoyed an unnamed literary agent’s exasperated contribution that Aaron Wistar highlighted online.

— The designer and programmer Jesse Kriss has an interesting new photography project called secret.systems. The about page is worth a read, but the gist is that the means of sharing art feels increasingly tethered to media environments that further entrench feelings of isolation in users (which, yes): 

Secret Systems is my new way to share and sell my favorite photos. There's no online storefront, no catalog, no Instagram feed, and no email list.

Just sign up for text messages by texting JOIN to 888-505-1703. You'll hear when there's a new item available, and it's easy to unsubscribe if you're no longer interested.

The plan is to have a handful of drops per year, at most one per month. For each one, I'll have two options: one framed or mounted medium to large print, and a smaller photo print. They'll be available for a limited time—buy it or not! You'll get a high quality, hold-it-in-your-hand, physical print instead of pixels on a screen and a post to like and share.

So that's the backstory. I hope the approach offers something different from your everyday experience of being sold stuff online.

— Megan Giddings published her new short story collection, Black Arts; you can read an excerpt at Lit Hub. On Bluesky, Giddings described her story as being “in stylistic conversation with Lorrie Moore's "How to Become a Writer" and Kiese Laymon's "You Are the Second Person." (Which again, yes.)

— Joel Pinckney reported a great piece for Defector, in which he asked booksellers from around the country what they made of The Atlantic's August cover story, entitled "The End of Reading Is Here." Short answer: not much, but with many thoughts on the matter.

— Sci-fi author and journalist Annalee Newitz has a new short story up at Flaming Hydra “about a graduate student whose clitoris disappears after the Second Comstock Laws go into effect.” Given the state of reproductive rights in the US, I'd call the timing apt. Their new book, A Wall Is Also a Road, drops on October 6th.

— The sun still exists, and I got to rewatch Widow’s Bay with my friend Robert. A sentence that would have brought me immense joy as a teen (i.e., watching horror with a good friend), which, consequently, is compounding my joy today.

Latria

The end of August got so heavy that, if I’m being honest, it was suffocating. The end of the year is quickly approaching and I’m trying to tie up some loose threads, as well as put a bow on the final version of my book; apparently being *done* and being DONE DONE are two different things.

As certain things end, others begin: The new school year came with more rules, and regulations (being a creative writing teacher in a red state is… an adventure), and even higher expectations. Over the summer, and in the early days of the academic calendar, I got wind of Black academics being accused of things like plagiarism. Add in the persecution of people like Jason Arday and Kerri Greenidge, and things grew toxic quick. I love what I do, but right now much of it feels so…fraught.

I have come to realize, seeing these kinds of career assassinations play out up close, that it doesn’t matter if the professor is guilty of what they are accused of —  the accusation is the point. The articulation of doubt, whether or not it is true, is enough to dismantle an entire career. As a Black professor writing about hard, often unpopular topics, it’s honestly a lot.

Hambidge

So when I got an email from Hambidge, my favorite writer’s residency in the South, saying that an artist cancelled and there was an open cabin, I snapped it up. I needed a little time to think.

Hambidge is an artist community up in north Georgia that was founded back in 1934. There are cabins dotted around the 600-acre property, and they don’t have Wi-Fi or cell service. To use the internet you have to go down to the main house in the heart of the property. This helps my brain decompress a little. (No doomscrolling in isolation where no one can see me.) The light in the private cabin studios is always *chef's kiss* no matter where I stay, and the wood-paneled pine walls smell like my Grandma Mary’s house. Below are some photos:

Nail Art

Musician, farmer, writer. I’ve always worked with my hands, but I never took great care of them.

Getting my nails done is one of the few things I do for myself now that feels a little whimsical, and I love it. Some days I spend 12+ hours at a computer (I know, I know), but I get a little thrill from looking down and seeing something sparkly. Tina, my nail artist, is incredible and the artwork on my hands are a small expression of who I am. Here are some of our latest collabs:

I also keep a nail appointment on the calendar because it’s an hour or two where I can’t hold my phone and I have to slow down. Frustrating? Yes. Would I do it without the appointment on the calendar? Probably not.

The Anxiety Oracle Deck

As you’ve probably guessed, anxiety is whipping my ass. It’s such an issue that when I saw that this was a thing, I immediately purchased it. Therapy is great, but sometimes I need a more immediate way of addressing some of the crappy thoughts running through my head.

This post was edited by Rahawa Haile.

Post-Credits Scene From the Garden

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