On Saturday I spent much of the day walking—a little over 13 miles. It has been, as they say, unseasonably warm here in southern Maine, and this weekend the weather felt more like my December holidays growing up in San Francisco than what I’ve come to expect from the east coast. Due to a combination of some personal stuff and staggering global events I, like many, haven’t been feeling great recently. Writing has felt difficult and sometimes pointless. After a period of not much wanting to get out of bed, I was grateful for a reason to be out in world. While walking I was on the phone with one of my old, dear friends for a marathon three hours; it’s too warm where she is, too, in the Hudson Valley, and before we hung up we talked about the cognitive dissonance between knowing that the the warmth is, basically, the human-instigated slide toward climate apocalypse, but also how we were enjoying the sun, the break from the cold.
Later, as I crossed a bridge with a view of Portland’s working waterfront, out of what felt like nowhere the melody of the song “You Are The New Day” floated into my head. It felt like nowhere, but I assume it showed up because of the San Francisco-y Christmastime feel of the low winter sun as it hit the ocean—aside from the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, The King’s Singer’s Christmas album was likely the most-played holiday CD in my household. Still, “you are the new day” is the only lyric I could quote from any of its songs.
It turns out that there are two versions of the song recorded by the King’s Singers. The one I probably had in my head is actually a Christmas-modified update to the original. But it’s the more popular, secular, first-recorded version that I’ve listened to maybe ten or fifteen times since Saturday.
Listen, I know that an all-male British a capella vocal ensemble isn’t for everyone. But:
Send the sun in time for dawn
Let the birds all hail the morning
Love of life will urge me say
You are the new day
The lyrics are very simple, like a prayer. I have always found that art has a way of finding me when I need it—I don’t consult astrological predictions or have my tarot read, but I give great weight to opening a book at random and having my eyes fall on a sentence that seems, however obliquely, to address my current mood or concern. And so it didn’t surprise me much at all when I did some light digging into the song’s origins and learned that it was written in the 1970s by the songwriter John David for his band Airwaves, who apparently said,1 of writing it:
The inspiration for New Day was quite simple; I had just had a major blow in my personal life, and was sitting alone late at night on the settee feeling very low, and watching an ominous story on the news about the very real possibility of nuclear war.
I started singing to the (hopefully) soon-to arrive New Day like it was an entity, that would rescue me from the depths. If the sun came up and the birds started singing as usual then I could believe that it really was the new day in which life would go on, and in which hope would survive.
What a thing, for hope to survive.
It’s been awhile since I last wrote one of these. I was burned out after publishing my novel over the summer and I got out of practice. I am also prone to overthinking—it’s strange to both feel as though nothing I say about anything could be of use or interest to anyone, but also to feel an urgent and constant desire to connect with others through language. Even writing this has taken so much longer than previous newsletters tended to; it feels harder to pin down thoughts right now. Maybe it’s natural to have waves of input and output, and right now I’m in an input phase: I’ve been reading a lot, and listening to people talking about writing. On my long walk this weekend I listened to a conversation between David Naimon and Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger (which VF excerpted), and then one between Naimon and Isabella Hammad about her novel Enter Ghost. And then when I got home I read this conversation between Hammad and Sally Rooney, about how they have been thinking and feeling about writing and otherwise.
Last year I did a roundup of quotes from my VF interviews over the past twelve months and I found it to be a lovely reminder of how glad I am to have a job that allows me to hear from so many interesting people. So, some 2023 highlights:
Margaret Atwood said: “My favorite question from the audience about The Handmaid’s Tale was this man who said, ‘So The Handmaid’s Tale is autobiographical.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not.’ He said, ‘Yes, it is.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s set in the future.’ He said, ‘That’s no excuse.’
Frieda Hughes—poet, painter, daughter of Sylvia Plath—told me, “We only borrow people…. I'm the only one left in my little family. Somebody has to live life like it matters. My attitude is very much that I need, for my sake and for theirs, to make my life matter.”
Jhumpa Lahiri, who published Roman Stories this year, said: “I think AI is the last thing that is pertinent to the translation of literature. It’s one thing to translate like, how do I use my new MacBook, or whatever. But translation is a calling and it’s a human attitude that is based on curiosity, and empathy, and reading, and choosing, and deliberating—dwelling for days, if not weeks, over a single word.”
Emma Cline, author of The Guest, called the omnipresent distraction of the smartphone “a struggle,” but gave an antidote: “I am just always struck by any time I’m reading a book, how it’s the most satisfying thing to be doing.”
Geena Rocero, the model and activist, said of conservative proponents of anti-trans measures: “They know how powerful we are. The bigger questions that they can’t answer about their own rigidity of understanding about a gender binary, which is causing them suffering—we have that answer. We live it.”
Susanna Kaysen, who wrote Girl Interrupted, said, of writing: “You either think, ‘Oh, it’s the work of genius,’ or you think, ‘Terrible, terrible.’”
Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans, said: “I had to convince myself that this story mattered. I would look at the darkest, least generous way to read the project, and I’d be filled with all this doubt.” But then, “I realized that I wrote this book because these questions felt urgent to me, and I feel like if I feel that way, other people feel that way.”
David Grann, who wrote Killers of The Flower Moon and The Wager, said: “More and more, I’m acutely aware of parts of the story that have been scrubbed or whitewashed, and sometimes really tragically can’t be accessed anymore. Sometimes what haunts me when I do a story, it’s not the things I know, even when it’s a horrible crime, but actually the things I don’t know.”
C Pam Zhang, who wrote Land of Milk and Honey, told me: “I think that part of the project of this book, and of all good writing, is to try to strip away the question of what is moral and what you should be doing, because that dead-ends a creative thing.”
I think that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. And to everyone who picked up a copy of my novel this year, thank you, thank you, thank you.
Actually, a last thought from Atwood, on writing:
Why do I do it? Why do I do it? Because that’s what I do. In a way, it’s really a question without content. Human beings are creative. They’re all creative, every single one, in some way or another. Some of their creativity takes the form of mathematics. Some of it takes the form of scientific thinking. Some of it takes the form of knitting. Some of it takes the form of dad’s woodworking shed. And some of it takes the form of storytelling.
In fact, a lot of it takes the form of storytelling. Anybody you will ever meet is a storyteller of one kind or another. They don’t necessarily write them down. In fact, they usually don’t, but they tell them. Those stories are of many different kinds. They are what happened to Old Joe down the road, or the time I had a dead squirrel drop on me out of a tree, or in the beginning, the world was without form and void and God said, “Let there be light.” That’s a different kind of story, but they’re all stories.
Good to have you back in the saddle. Thanks!
So much of this resonated with me. Thanks for sharing your writing even when it feels hard and/or pointless!