Anu Recommends #41

Happy Winter Solstice: a chat with Nina MacLaughlin

Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!

Today’s a special issue of the newsletter, in celebration of the winter solstice. Do you celebrate or commemorate it in any way?

To help us do that, I have a very special guest here with me. She’s no stranger to this community; I spoke to her for the interview-only version of the Storyteller which you can read below—

Then there was also this year’s newsletter issue commemorating the Summer Solstice—

Winter Solstice, which I’ll post separately about in the new year, is a companion to Nina’s Summer Solstice, and I was privileged to read it before it was released last month.

Publisher’s blurb

A celebration and meditation on the season for drinking hot chocolate, spotting a wreath on a neighbor’s door, experiencing the change in light of shorter days. All aspects of Winter, from the meteorological to the mythological, are captured in this masterful essay, told in wise and luminous prose that pushes back the dark.

Winter begins with the shortest day of the year before nightfall. As in her companion volume, Summer Solstice , the author meditates on both the dark and the light and what this season means in our lives.

“Winter tells us,” Nina MacLaughlin says, “more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked. The angels sing on the doorknobs and others sing from the abyss. The sun has been in retreat since June, and the heat inside glows brighter in proportion to its absence. We make up for the lost light in the spark that burns inside us.”

If Winter is a time you love for its memories and traditions, if you love writing that takes your breath away with lyrical leaps across time and space, Winter Solstice is an unforgettable book you’ll cherish.

For new readers, or those who missed out on reading the above issues, here’s Nina’s bio:

Nina MacLaughlin is the author of Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung (FSG/FSG Originals), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as Winter Solstice (Black Sparrow) and Summer Solstice (Black Sparrow). Her first book was the acclaimed memoir Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter (W.W. Norton), a finalist for the New England Book Award. Formerly an editor at the Boston Phoenix, she worked for nine years as a carpenter, and is now a books columnist for the Boston Globe. Her work has appeared on or in The Paris Review Daily, The Virginia Quarterly Review, n+1, The Believer, The New York Times Book Review, Agni, American Short Fiction, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Meatpaper, and elsewhere. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Anu: Welcome back to the Storyteller, Nina! I was re-reading our interview from 2020, when we spoke on the phone in Boston, it feels like a lifetime away, yet, in some strange ways, very recent.

Nina: Thanks for having me! And yeah, it's amazing the way the time has sort of dilated and compressed over the last few years. Like, you're, I agree, that feels like both in some ways yesterday and in some ways like a lifetime ago.

Anu: Exactly! So I wanted to know, when did you start writing Winter Solstice? Was it like a simultaneous thing with Summer Solstice, or how did it work?

Nina: No, it was about a year and a half later, it was the first winter of the pandemic. So I wrote this in 2020 in that late fall/early winter period, in a time of global grief and fear. And I was really relieved to have the chance to go back and sort of rework the essays for this book, over the last year or so. Because my brain was definitely not at its best in that moment, for me sustaining any thought was difficult. So having a chance to go back and revise and sort of deepen some of the places in these essays was, I was really grateful to be able to do it. But yeah, I definitely wrote them in a very different mind state than when I was writing Summer Solstice.

Anu: And did you find it different editing them because you were already in a different mental space by then?

Nina: You know, I think editing always feels different. I think it's, I don't know, it can be a deep pleasure and challenge. Part of the challenge was dropping back into the mind state was in when I was writing it, but at the same time, kind of moving outside of it, you know? So I could keep the smouldering part, which I write about in the book, very much there. And there’s also the question of where are the opportunities here to improve and elevate these places? I don’t know if it’s just me but the editing always takes more out of me than I think it's going to. And I think for this one, it was especially true. I think that a lot of it had to do with returning to that time in my mind.

Anu: I can confirm that, as a reader, I felt that intensity while reading the book! My next question, going somewhat off of what we’ve been talking about, is whether you’re a seasonal writer.

Nina: Wow. Definitely. Great question. I love that. So, as we were speaking before, my brain really gets quite dumb in summer. I have a hard time thinking, I am not as productive, and I used to be really hard on myself about that. Why couldn't I get anything done? It would be very uncomfortable, and it wasn't only that “oh, I'm not doing a good job writing”, but “wow, you need to be doing a better job writing”. Finally, I realised that fallow periods are essential, and, God, it sounds so lame, but like listening to your body and saying that right, this, this is not the season for me to be producing, this is a season for me to be taking in. So it’s been about finally learning and accepting that I’m not going to be churning out pages in the summer. And this has been such a great, not exactly relief, but a feeling that “this is how the year is going to be working for me”.

Anu: I feel like those fallow periods, which I have too and am slowly learning to embrace and accept, are also about trusting that the work and the writing is going to happen, just not yet.

Nina: Exactly! Totally. Learning to trust that this doesn’t mean I'm never going to write again. Things are still happening. They're just happening in a different way. Of course, it’s an uncomfortable space to be in, you know, and it's a frustrating space. I also believe that there's stuff working at the back of your brain all the time that you're not aware of.

Anu: Absolutely. Okay, so, in these sort of fallow periods, what do you find yourself doing?

Nina: I’ve learned that it’s not about productivity, per se, but about keeping things moving forward. One of the things I do when I’m not going to be working on a bigger project is that I’ll pick a topic and write a thousand words a day on it. It's just kind of sitting down and blasting, so it doesn't matter what I’m writing, as long as it’s in a sort of associative way related to the topic. And a thousand words a day becomes a lot of material; even if this absolute pile of words was useless in totality, there would be strands and fragments and ideas that I could do stuff with, many of which ended up being essay series for the Paris Review Daily. So it’s about keeping the muscles working, not just in the putting together of words, but also in the paying attention, you know, in the being alert and attuned. And I do find that that's a practice and a discipline that makes for a really rich and rewarding way to be not working, but sort of inhabiting writing still, if that makes sense.

Anu: It absolutely does!

Nina: And, as you know, I worked as a carpenter for almost 10 years and the work was most intense in the summer, coinciding with my fallow periods. And doing that work also helped because I was really working with my body, as opposed to sitting at a computer.

Anu: Speaking about that, are you still carving spoons?

Nina: I am! I had taken a while off, but I just started a new one out of this beautiful piece of applewood.

Anu: One of the lines that I loved most about the interview we did back in 2020 was about “putting your brain in your hands”. I love that because it's another way of creating and working and keeping it all connected.

Nina: Completely.. When I’m sitting there with a knife in my hand and a piece of wood, I'm not actively thinking about the writing, but that's still happening. It’s about giving that “word brain” a rest by focusing on something very tactile, so that you allow the word brain to do kind of work different kinds of magic.

Anu: Yes, and you’re letting it do its own thing without peering over its shoulder all the time.

Nina: Exactly. And it doesn't have to be carving a spoon. It can be cooking, sewing, knitting, or anything else that you’re doing with your hands that’s away from a computer screen.

Anu: I agree. So, to what extent do you plan out your essays? Do you write you structures, especially in a series?

Nina: When I did the Summer Solstice series, I had done a few different series for the Paris Review Daily, but it was the first one where I knew there were going to be four essays. It was the first one I thought of as a whole broken up into four essays, so I was thinking of the whole arc, the whole set of four as one long piece, and I think that it benefited from that. I tried to do the same with this book. And one of the things that I did for both books, it’s not a secret, in terms of my own organising principles, is that each individual essay within the book is tied to an element—earth, fire, air, so on—which was more for my own self than the reader. And if you pick up on it as a reader, that's cool. But it was mostly for me. How do I take all of this material and think about it in a way that can feel more manageable? So that's how I did it for these two projects. Whereas for something like the Moon series, which was 12 essays based on the full moon, I had to find the character of each month and different aspects of lunar magic. That felt less like it had a total arc. So it varies. When I start an essay, it’s usually like, right, what are the elements to include here? And just kind of a list. That's how I always start, and then it’s the shaping—what leads to what leads to what? So it’s not a formal outline but more of a “here’s the shape, here’s the movement”. With longer projects, I don't know, I feel a little far away. For example, this painter in Los Angeles approached me a little while ago. She had read Wake, Siren and wanted to know if I’d be interested in writing a book about her work. And her work is amazing. I spent some time with her in LA and at her studio, and for the last eight months or so I’ve been working on this very strange, amazing project which felt very different than anything that I've done. It felt like the job was to inhabit these paintings and write from inside them, which for me was this very cool new challenge. The longest part was sitting there. I'd spent time in front of her paintings, but later had printouts, images, photographs of them just spread out on my living room floor thinking how do I shape this? Like we were saying before, yeah, how is this going to come together? And then, finally, things started to fall into place, but that thinking was the hardest part, and that’s slow for me. That is a slow process.

Anu: One of the (many) lines that caught my eye in Winter Solstice was “what’s death in a world of stories?” Could you elaborate on that?

Nina: Sure. The line that leads up to it is by the poet Octavio Paz—in a world of facts, death is really just one more fact. I love Paz, he's a real sort of a touchstone for me. And I think that in some ways the writing that I do is always trying to make more sense for myself that all of this is going to end, you know; like trying to write myself into some sort of comfort or understanding? Yeah, and so the idea of what's death in a world of stories. I have a friend who's a scientist and he was saying that if anyone tries to tell you that they know what happens after you die, walk away. It’s a mystery. And this is coming from not like a poet, but someone who’s helped with mapping the genome. And so there’s this, this infinite possibility of unknowing. And again, it's uncomfortable. But it can also be really beautiful to press against the limits of imagination, of what’s possible. We live in a world of both stories and facts.

Anu: What is your favorite part of the creative process and has that changed over the years?

Nina: I was thinking about this yesterday, actually. I run a lot and there's a feeling, it doesn't happen often. I don't know if it's runners high or what, but it’s that kind of feeling where you can go forever, where you have huge lungs, your legs are strong, and there's that fleeting sense of ‘oh, I'm flying’, you know, like you've almost dissolved into the atmosphere. And I feel like there's a kindred experience that I have with writing, so rarely, where is that kind of feeling of absolute dissolution, where I have exited my body and something else is coming through me. That to me is one of the great pleasures of my life. It’s like something bigger than you takes over, and I think that that magic and that, whatever that is, is unparalleled in my own existence. And you can’t force it. I think the only way to have it happen is to just keep grinding away.

Anu: The quote that you have towards the end of Winter Solstice, the “look at it all, it is all end full”. You saw it graffitied on a bridge, right? What made you link it to this or bring it into the writing?

Nina: Yeah, gosh, it was so funny. I mean, I saw that little bit of graffiti, let's see, like 20 years ago at this point. It was a long time ago. Partly I noticed it because it was in such small neat handwriting, it wasn't like big tag-style graffiti, it was just one inch high letters. I love this idea of being end full, you know, I think that this is, in some ways, what it is to live, it is end full. And it's easy to think of these ends as emptying, you know, that there's an emptiness, you lose someone, or something, someplace, and that void that is created. But the idea that it's “look at it all, take it all in”—I don't know, I guess I would find that echoing in my mind across all these years. I mean, like I said before, I wrote these essays in a tense moment for the globe in the beginning of the pandemic. And I think that right now is another really tense and terrifying moment in the world. This end full is not a stance of ignoring the horror and ignoring the terrible things, but it's about accessing the strength there is in noticing the things that bring you joy. I feel like that can sustain us through these periods of actual legitimate horror, you know. And, again, it isn't saying turn away from the horror, in fact, the opposite, but being able to kind of look at this stuff, look at just the smallest thing, the steam rising out of your coffee or whatever, like, wow, gosh, this moment of such beauty, you know, stillness. I don't know, that feels like a kind of all-over-the-place answer. But I feel like, no, it's the correct one.

Anu: It made sense to me! I have one final question for you before we wrap up today. How do you celebrate the winter solstice? Do you have like a tradition or does it change every year?

Nina: You know, it's funny. I feel like when I was working on Summer Solstice, even though I love winter more, and I feel sort of more myself in winter, it definitely opened me up to the charms of summer in a different way. And they're both such powerful days, but, in some ways, I prefer the summer solstice because it's like that tilt back into darkness. There is that, here we go back into the shortening days, I'm back into the half of the year when I come alive. Even though it’s the start of the summer; whereas winter, it's got that crescendo of darkness, but it’s already ticking back to the light. I don't have anything elaborate as tradition; it’s simpler. I will light a candle in the morning, like in the dark of the morning. And then again, as soon as it starts to get dark, so like three o'clock in the afternoon. It just has to do with like the glow of the can. Maybe I should figure out some some more rich, but the instinct is certainly to have a little candle flame going.

Anu: I love that image—a little candle, a little flame in the darkness.

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Thank you so much, Nina, for this beautiful chat to commemorate the winter solstice!

You can read more about her work or keep in touch at website | instagram | twitter - all of which have buy links for her books.

As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue 😊 Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.

Take care and see you for a final 2023 issue on the 31st!

Anu

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