12 months of writing

zoe on thursdays is a monthly newsletter sharing zoe’s most recent fiction & non-fiction writing, a reading recommendation & a writing prompt.

Dear reader,

This year, I started writing again after almost four years without it. For four years, I wrote nothing but long birthday cards for friends and wine soaked poems in my notes app.

When I went home to my childhood room for Thanksgiving, I organized the journals I’ve kept since second grade. Filling two full rows of bookshelves was an archive of almost every moment of growing up.

I’ve known I wanted to be a writer since sixth grade. In English class, we were tasked to rewrite a story from the perspective of a character other than the original narrator. I chose to rewrite the story from the perspective of the mother’s character. I felt like the male author didn’t pay enough attention to her. She was in the corner busying about her routines while everything happened to her. It was a thrill to get inside her head and blow up the story from her perspective. When I was done, she felt more like the mothers I had witnessed from the short head of a 12 year old. She was filled with an intense energy and capability that being a mother seemed to require.

When I read it out loud at the fall parent breakfast, I noticed that mothers put down their powdered donuts and coffee cups and looked up to absorb my words with their full faces. After, as I tried to balance three donuts between my two small palms, a mom came up and asked how I knew to write about motherhood like that. I discovered a new rush of writing words that people could feel.

In college, I was lucky enough to study with great writers like Jonathan Lethem and Sesshu Foster but something wretched had happened on my way to 18. With puberty came self-consciousness and a desire to be considered good by any means necessary. I thought that to be a good writer, I needed to write stories like the ones I was told were good - stiff stories about serious male characters with endless internal monologue. My senior year of college, I seriously wrote my capstone short story on a drone pilot living in Arizona. It lacked feeling or any pulse of my true self.

I stopped writing for almost four years after college and came back to it in January in a few different ways. One, was taking writing classes that felt like a celebration. Through these classes, I began to see that it’s a beautiful thing to write anything for any reason. (If you have any interest in getting back into writing or writing for the first time, I’ll share those writing classes in the recommendation section at the end!).

This is the first year in a long time where I’ve written consistently every month. To celebrate that, I’m sharing a paragraph written in each month of both fiction & non-fiction writing:

12 months of writing

1. January

I try to write a poem called balms for self harm. I think it’ll be in list form with at least ten helpful sentiments. I can only come up with one: I’d rather be me, I’d rather suffer as myself than be anyone else.

2. February

(excerpt from a love letter to salt lake)

I was 22 when I drove into Salt Lake and decided to stay. I was on my way to LA from Boston. My wide, white 1994 Toyota avalon was filled with the shockingly little I had for a cross country move. At 22, I hadn’t yet begun the accumulations of adulthood; a bed frame or a rug I really liked.

3. March

(excerpt from my short story, “V on her wedding day”)

The show finally stopped one clear, winter morning when Ivy and I took our equally energetic dogs on a hike. We both got our ankles wet as we postholed through slushy ice in some places and walked atop three-day-old snow in others. I looked up to see her pale face sweating as she recounted a recent and ruinous trip with her mother. She paused at some points because she didn’t have all the words yet to describe this specific pain. In the stillness of the morning, I could feel the hollow part behind the large moth tattoo on her sternum that was seething with a dry kind of pain. She wasn’t talking about a theory of healing and repair, she was just telling me what happened in words that felt fresh and illicit. We walked together alongside that sad circle of hers and maybe healed it a bit by just letting it exist out in the open. This act alone gave me hope for the years of friendship and solitude where the jargon will change but the meaning will stay the same.

4. April

(excerpt my short story “Braces off Our Bullet Girl”)

She didn’t remember when she got her braces off and boys at her school commented on the picture she posted saying, look who’s hot now. That was one of the proudest moments of her short life, this god given gift of people telling her she was attractive. She didn’t remember the summer she turned 12 when her mother decided it was past time for her to join the feminine coven of weight loss. Almonds counted slowly and bananas sliced thinly. She didn’t remember that part in puberty when she first noticed her uncle looking at her chest or the converse and jean shorts of 7th grade dances. The tiny erections pressed into backsides as the girls competed for how many boys they could dance with. 

5. May 

(on queer generations)

My mother's friends were either out as lesbian at 14 or are leaving their husbands in their 50's for the first passionate love they've ever had. There is no in between. I saw a pink and orange Instagram graphic recently that said every queer millennial is a late bloomer. It’s beautiful to all be a little bit late together. There's nothing I love more than hearing someone change their pronouns for the first time at 32 or a friend who's married to a man calling herself bi for the first time at 28.

6. June

(excerpt from my short non-fiction piece “still bi in the desert”)

It’s the first day of pride and I’m in the shower thinking that I should post something on Instagram. Maybe something I would’ve liked to see when I was younger, panic drinking too much on the side of the dance floor of an outdoor pride event while my tall boyfriend and his friends take up too much space. Panic drinking and looking at people I think might be girls kissing and wanting I’m not sure what.

7. July

   Being in new york makes you believe in anything. How do all the pipes even work?

8. August

(Reasons to Stay, after Emily Long)

A forest fire is contained and there are birthday cards with true to your core compliments. Everyone you texted shows up at the public pool midsummer. The child sitting on the side of the pool says daddy daddy daddy and his daddy comes to grab him and swing him in the air. There’s movie theater popcorn and fountain diet coke. She stops walking abruptly on a summer night and says, do you smell that? Everything smells like flowers. A new therapist holds you in her kind gaze. On the way home, you buy a new book that smells crisp and infinite. There are dog paws that smell like Fritos and a cuddle so good that you don't move even after you're numb. Bright red nails and a flight confirmation email. You send each other the same meme at the same time. Your favorite song comes on at the queer bar.

9. September

(excerpt from my short story “Love is a shallow pond”)

I’m scared that if I love you in this way that’s more than I’ve loved anything before, it’ll give me a new fear of mortality like when I held my newborn nephew for the first time. His neck wanted to snap back and break and his belly was too small to even see if he was breathing under his clothes. I held him tacitly and prayed that he wouldn't break but the possibility that he might break so easily was what made him the most wonderful creature I’d ever witnessed. This fantastic will to live against all odds shone out of each part of him like his eyes and soft arms and fingernails that I couldn't believe grew in my sister’s womb. 

10. October

(my Notes app in October)

October is a month I experience with an urgency I feel for almost nothing else. Most months, I go to bed at 11 or, on a night out, maybe 2 or 3. In October, I stay up until 6 am. I’ll end the night with a group of roommates I've never met before. I’ll teach them a hand game I remember from summer camp. It’s called Crock-A-Dilly-O-My but I forget all the rules. They clap along enthusiastically anyway. Or, I’ll stay up all night kissing, hoping that if we wrap our tongues around each other’s until we're a haze of wet upper lips and moist inner thighs maybe we'll stay right here forever. 5 am in October, jewelry strewn everywhere. I just put the blue flannel sheets on the bed but 55 degrees through an open window still feels cold on our summer bodies. 

11. November

(excerpt from my short story “Black Linen Funeral”)

The night before she got the call from Mary, Alicia had googled, “How are break ups different from death?” The google search was still up on one of her Safari tabs. She had scrolled through some poems and an article about the science of breakups. The article asserted that the emotional self grieves like a death. Now that she was grieving an actual death, she’d have to disagree. In the four days when they were broken up, but he was alive, she could still feel his love for her and hers for him. It had a real mass around her body like something thicker than smoke. There was still the possibility that she could run into him, maybe walking in or out of a coffee shop that had once been theirs and the tension they both felt would be their love for each other. It would be propped between them as they expressed niceties with sad eyes. Now, there was no tension. There was just her love for him and nothing on the other side of it. Just her love for him sitting alone on her lower back, making her sag and slouch.

12. December

(excerpt from my poem Lavender Hatchets, written with Kate Bulger)

I’m not afraid of dying
in a fire and nothing
makes me cry. Except I know,
someday, I'm gonna see her
and I’ll have to say, I’m happy
for you, and then
cry myself to sleep.

something to read & something to write

something to read:

I think I’ve read this poem 75 times in the past month, looking for the feeling I got on the first read. (source: instagram @kafkasbf)

something to write:

Choose a line from a song that you love. Write it down on a piece of paper and keep writing until your 15 minute timer is up.

writing class recs:

Classes like the ones below helped me to write again as a celebration:

• Haley Jakobson’s Writing with Confidence class - subscribe to her newsletter here to sign up

• Grubstreet’s Jumpstart Your Writing classes are the perfect mix of community & encouragement. Browse their list of classes here.

Thank you so much for reading :) See you on the first Thursday of January!

Love,

Zoe