The slanted sun of autumn turns the day golden

And the days shift in the dizzying nostalgia of fall

Dust motes drift through the air, caught in columns of hazy light

The fiery brilliance of leaves – yellow, orange, red, plum

Their smell of dirt, the earth, something deeper

Sun-dappled drives in the two-seater

wind-whipped hair tucked into a baseball cap

The dogs scurrying around the yard, sniffing, transfixed by new smells and increasing squirrel activity

Making soup on Sunday

Making sauce on Sunday

Scary movie night with the family, piled onto the couch with dogs and blankets

Going dancing with my best friends

My dog whining at my feet when I’m trying to work, knowing I’ll pet her

An acknowledgement that choice is the only thing we have

A tired body and a grateful heart

A refusal to give up

Taking care – of myself, of one other

Open to this season as a teacher

every season as a teacher

each time, something new.

I’ve been obsessed with this passage from an Elisa Gabbert essay since I read it in early September:

“I think essays, like buildings, need structure and mood. The first paragraph should serve as a foyer or an antechamber, bringing you into the mood. Alexander writes that a building should have a ‘graceful transition between the street and the inside.’ ‘If the transition is too abrupt there is no feeling of arrival.’ He cites a study that showed people judge houses with greater degrees of transition between inside and outside to be more ‘houselike,’ to exhibit more ‘houseness.’ The transitional space makes room for a change of mood, for ‘ambiguous territories’ and ‘intimacy gradients.’ The same could be said of essays. (‘Stanza’ means ‘room’ – from Italian, for ‘standing place’ – but paragraphs are more like rooms than stanzas are.) I like to think of a piece of writing as an environment for thinking, a semicontained space with some wandering-around room – a clearing in the woods, plus a little of the woods, or a house museum… A site where interesting thoughts can happen, a site with open doors and multiple paths out.”

— From “Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,” in “Any Person is the Only Self,” by Elisa Gabbert

Thinking about it in that way gave me a sense of control I don’t always get as a writer. I tend to be a “let it happen” kind of writer — one who begins on the page tentatively, wandering with exploration in mind. But it’s been nice to juxtapose that mode with a different one, one inspired by Gabbert’s essay — one where I’m actively thinking about how I might tell the story to and for a reader. Thinking about what I might want them to think about. As I think about that, I’m reminded how writing is a vulnerable act, how there can be immediate intimacy between writer and reader, especially when I consider how to adjust my approach to elicit a certain response or create a specific impact on my reader. It is, in its simplest terms, an act of power.

I suppose all art is, in some way. An attempt at self-expression, the urge to tell a story, a desire to impact others, to show them a different facet of the world.

For more than a year now, I’ve been working on a longer piece of writing about the idea of ghosts and what it means to be haunted. I’ve sort of let the idea of it sprawl and sprawl, taking notes along the way as different thoughts pop into my head. This is my go-to method: I get obsessed with an idea or a question and I chew on it for a really long time (sometimes years) until my notes coalesce, until they gather enough critical mass to become an essay.

I like thinking about the idea of writing an essay as an energetic process, one akin to something scientific. It makes me think about the opposite of what happens in a mass spectrometer, a machine meant to determine the makeup of molecules by ionizing and breaking apart some of them. (Glad that molecular architecture class I took in college gave me something beyond the inferiority complex I developed while trying to do scientific math.) The essay is spinning a bunch of different ideas and threads around until they pull together, forming something cohesive.

I combed through the last year’s worth of journals, putting sticky notes anywhere I wrote about ghosts or being haunted. At last count, I had 58 pink sticky notes bulging from the pages. (XL Moleskine notebooks, black, 7.5” x 9.5”is my preference.) I’ll revisit those notes, transcribe them into my Scrivener software, and identify areas where I can go broader or deeper. It also shows me the natural patterns that my brain creates — specifically, which ideas and words become refrains, what I circle, what I return to.

Almost once a month, I look up the etymological description of the word “haunt.” The simplest definition is that haunt is from the Middle English “to frequent a place,” which in turn is from the Old French hanter, or in English, home. To trace a word’s lineage is a twisty endeavor. Language has gained and lost so much through the centuries, and as always, it depends on who is telling its story. (Who is telling its story is, I hope you know, those with the most privilege and power.)

What is not explicitly stated in this definition is that to frequent a place, one must return again and again. A haunting is a returning, a circling.

Each season is a teacher. The cycle is at once simple and complicated, a complete miracle – planting, growth, harvest, rest. And it reminds me that I’m of this world, not just in it. I am affected by the same patterns and timing as the plants and the birds and the trees. My urge is to resist nature at times – capitalistic socializing makes me want to be a consistent human, one optimized to get enough sleep, eat the right things, exercise to keep my brain working and my body moving, one that has the same high level of output at all times. But the consistent human often clashes against my nature as a human of this natural world, as something beholden to the same rules as everything else. I wonder about people who understand that, and about people who don’t, and what that means for all of them.

I am responsible for my own joy. Those are the words that have echoed in my head the last month and a half. It’s what I mean when I say we are equipped with choice. We choose our response. I’ve chosen things that bring me joy. This is not just sniffing the flower before clipping it and adding it to a vase in the kitchen. It is saying no to things that actively kill my joy. It is the understanding that joy can be boundaries, too.

Right now, I have several cosmos, zinnias and leaves drying in my flower press. I’ve been crafting with dried flowers, arranging them in layouts on heavy cardstock and glass. These floral collages are another example of things coalescing, coming together to create something more beautiful, more than the sum of its parts. An essay in visual form. A way to preserve my joy, to alchemize it into something that lasts longer than a season.

Stuff I read and loved: I’m going to do more of this kind of sharing, since I read voraciously and am always excited to make recommendations (just ask my friends — I love to fill their bookcases).

• News: This NYT piece (free gift link) about the Clark family is powerful stuff. If you have a heart, it’ll make you cry, so be warned. My news team has been following the immigration in Springfield, OH, including its challenges and opportunities, for the last year and a half — long before it became an unfortunate flashpoint in the current election. This story is about the family, the pain they have endured, and about Aiden Clark’s life and legacy. It’s worth the read.

• Essays and nonfiction: I mentioned Elisa Gabbert’s “Any Person Is the Only Self” as a great essay collection for people who love books, reading, writing, and how to think about those things. I just started reading Samantha Hunt’s very weird, very awesome genre-defying book “The Unwritten Book: An Investigation,” which eludes easy categorization. If you like books and experimental writing and really good thinking on the page, this is a good one. There is mention of ghosts and the history of books and literature.

• Novels, fiction, & short stories: This has been the year of the novel for me — I cannot get enough. Some of my recent favorites are “All Fours,” by Miranda July; “Liars,” by Sarah Manguso; “Madwoman,” by Chelsea Bieker; and “We Were the Universe,” by Kimberly King Parsons. I jokingly call the first three “the divorce trilogy” because they present a fascinating look at domesticated life and a woman’s perspective of a system that, frankly, was not built to serve them. I love the subversive interpretations of marriage and domesticity in present day, and beyond that, they’re just well-written stories by some of the best writers of our time. Parsons’ novel is about family and grief due to the loss of a sibling, and the journey of how one becomes unstuck. I loved the short stories in “A Manual for Cleaning Women: Selected Stories,” by short form master Lucia Berlin — they have a Carver-esque vibe to them, though told from a woman’s perspective. Berlin never really got her due — she died in 2004, and this book was published in 2015 to much acclaim, skyrocketing her to posthumous fame. The stories are funny, sad, very working-class.

As always, thanks for reading (or listening). If you like the book recs, let me know!