Jump Day!
In which Day 1 as a footloose writer finally arrives.
Hallo, subscribers! Welcome to the second note and the first proper newsletter in Notes from an Everything Historian. If you’re trying to remember what this is all about, an outline is here.
Re-learning to write: Day 1
Today (December 1, 2022) marks my first day as a full-time freelance writer, speaker, and historian (and maybe somewhen a historical and monster consultant?! Feel free to send your TV and movie contacts my way….). Yesterday was an epically long final payrolled day, one of multiple reimbursement claim uploads interspersed with the start of the Renaissance Society of America Virtual Conference (you can register here, and watch session recordings up until 31 Jan 2023). Consequently, the morning started late for this early riser.
Once the obligatory coffee coursed through the veins, the day began to feel like the ideal birthday or holiday morning: running excitedly between presents, playing and snacking at will like a locust on a pub crawl (or on a field swoop?). First there was googling for book podcasts, which took me to a telling and humorous interview with Greta Thunberg on her The Climate Book; emails to friends; re-reading bits of Stephen King’s On Writing, which I first read in spring 2020, and which (ironically) helped me to avoid both apocalyptic terror and (less ironically) total writing funk that year; another chapter of Isabel Cañas’s thrilling The Hacienda (more later) - and this newsletter.
Pouring my way through the cafetière, I asked: what is the right call - the honest, confident call - for the day, with a calendar mostly my own and independence from neoliberal institutional expectations about what a working day looks like regardless of energy or headspace? With another late-afternoon-to-beyond-bedtime virtual conference on today’s menu (not that I plan to eat it all), what was the radical best choice for the sunlit part of the day?
The answer: whatever the heck I felt like, as and when the spirit moved: a long sunny winter walk; ignoring errands that are not on fire; and letting the brain ooze where it needed to flow. Making cool things with words will go a lot better when I’m well rested.
Takes and recs
If you’ve never been to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, put it on your Low Countries bucket-list now. On the fast train line between Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport, Antwerp, and Brussels, Rotterdam’s museums host terrific exhibitions on contemporary art and culture as well as on old stuff. Exhibitions now showing at the Kunsthal include Into the Black Fantastic, in collaboration with the Hayward Gallery, London. This vibrant show comprises multiple rooms of paintings, sculptural installations, and video by eleven contemporary artists from the African diaspora, including Ellen Gallagher, Hew Locke, Chris Ofili, and Kara Walker. A selection of Nick Cave’s Soundsuits - sculptures of costumes that obscure race, class, and gender, as a sort of camouflage armour - open the show (pictured above).
On the literary front, check out Rachael Herron’s joyful and inspiring interview with Isabel Cañas, who wrote a PhD dissertation on medieval Islamic literature and just published her debut novel, The Hacienda, a gothic thriller set in nineteenth-century Mexico. I’m now a few chapters into The Hacienda, and it is riveting. Just don’t read it after the sun goes down.
Good luck Surekha! All the best to you, and I look forward to reading your future work!
Great start! Looking forward to reading what you come up with.