On early hours and late letters, handwriting and words on a screen, and carrying heat out of the flame
August 1, 2019
Dear Eva,
Hello from a small hotel room in Palo Alto in the wee hours of the morning! As you know, I traveled here yesterday for a one-day workshop today. I woke up strangely early (even accounting for the time difference), so it seemed it was a sign that I should fire up the laptop and get writing before I get going for the day’s festivities.
I have several things on my mind this week, but first I wanted to say that I was amazed and impressed hearing about the glass-making and woodworking you have been doing. Yet another of the many wonders of Eva! It struck me how foreign a craft so physical and serious sounds to me — lose your focus and you might be charred?? I think I can safely say that I have never in my life done something like that, and now I’m curious to know what the experience would be like, though given my daydreaming tendencies, it might have a sad ending.
Speaking of daydreaming, I will admit that there is a small part of me that looked forward to and enjoyed the weird, timeless limbo of air travel yesterday. When I travel alone, and without any sense of urgency to get where I am going, flights can be a nice little excuse to just be, whatever that might mean for me on a given day. For this 26-hour work trip, I brought four, yes four, books with me. Of course I didn’t have any illusions that I might read them all, but I wanted choices. What if I only brought a new academic-seeming nonfiction I bought about visual intelligence, and then it turned out that I was in the mood for an impassioned set of essays about race, identity, and feminism? Or vice versa. Hence, my bag was full of books for this short trip. And thank goodness it was! The fourth and final book I had placed in my handbag when I packed was the aforementioned essay collection. It’s called Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom, and it was what I ended up being in the mood to read on the first leg of my journey. I read the first essay, and then put the book down to let it marinate. It was one of those incredible times where I could feel myself changing, like things were shifting inside me as I read the words.
I feel the same way about these letters actually, like the changes within me are palpable. Of course, these letters are just a tangible representation of our friendship, so it’s our friendship that is changing me. I have been thinking about how our letter exchange seems to place our friendship on some alternate, higher plane. We have been talking lately about all of the invisible ways that face to face interactions create more textured interactions between people. But on the flipside, there is something about letter writing that - although one dimensional (we exchange only words on a screen) - gets at things that don’t often come out in person. Or maybe they would if you were with someone else enough, in meandering conversations on long walks or car rides. But our letters get there quicker, and they do it each week. It means our exchange has deepened our conversation quickly in the span of our relatively short friendship. It means you have changed me. It means I have changed by writing to you. I can feel it happening.
This brings me back to our discussion recently about what to do in year two of our collaboration together. I now think we should just continue writing our letters. Why change a good thing? And if we can both feel and see the changes in ourselves in just one year, just think what year two might bring!
Your friend,
Sarah
Friday August 2 2019
Dear Sarah,
It is the last gasp of the week! After 8PM on Friday night! And here I am getting going on typing up my letter to you. It was the kind of week where I started writing my thoughts to you as I read your letter last week — an eternity ago — and I have them here now with other notes I jotted along the way. And it’s also been the kind of week where I can hardly believe Monday and Tuesday were part of this same week, they seem so long ago, like years in the past, like my junior high years or my first years out of college. But really, they were just hours ago, and it’s been a week!
Last week when I read your letter I was peaceful and satisfied right alongside you. Your letter and your reflection on your multifaceted life made me think about a conversation I had earlier in the week before I’d read your letter, with a woman I’ve met in Minnesota who is also a writer. We were talking about different kinds of writing and ways to make a living in different niche spaces. I was asking her about her writing work in marketing, different from the work I’ve done as a grant writer, and she was talking about meeting a woman who was an editor helping writers work through their manuscripts, and that woman asked her, “Why would you want to be doing this when you’re already doing that?” She asked me a bit about grant writing and I asked more about her work, wondering if I should expand my writing skills into other professionally marketable areas. We laughed and talked about how the grass is always greener on the other side, and then when I read your letter I thought about that. The way that it feels natural to ask friends how to do what they do; wanting always to do something a little different than what I’m already doing; a recurring possible dissatisfaction with the things in life that have become familiar. But there’s nothing inherently bad about the familiar, is there? (Topic for a much longer essay, I’m sure.) Professional gandering and jumping about between work and careers feels like something new, but is it really? How different are our jobs? They are different, but as jobs, they boil down to jobs. Your letter made me feel that it’s always important to remember what we have going, because it’s easy to forget those things that are always there, even if they’re the things that make up a happy life. We’ve talked about it before and I know you don’t forget it! It was a treat to read your letter of last week at the close of that particular week.
This week was busy with lots of eyeball time on the computer screen and I turned at one point to jot down some notes for my letter to you, and the feeling of writing on a piece of paper with a pencil was so sweet I could hardly handle it. It was like a relaxing massage for my face and my mind. I thought I would return to handwriting my letter in full this week; instead I have a collection of jottings and my fingertips on the keyboard to lace them together. The more time I spend in front of a computer screen the more I treasure pencil and paper. The texture of the paper — even just a ream of recycled printer paper from Office Depot, where the cashier concluded the ringing-up of my purchase with a firm and simple, “Come back” — how my pencil moves over the paper, the bite of the graphite into and across the page. The page feels meatier than it used to, after hours and hours spent staring at a flat bright screen. It’s like I’m sculpting the words instead of just setting them down, like I am pressing my words into the tooth of the paper. It’s like running on different surfaces, the change you feel when you move from pavement to grass, or pavement to a wooden boardwalk, or the occasional springy freshly tarred street. Your body feels the energy it takes to run on different surfaces, the rippling effect of the hardest pavement up through the body, around and down, what it takes to stay intact with each pounding step. Writing by hand is in large part an aesthetic experience for me — if I didn’t like how my handwriting looked, would I still do it? (Would I still be me? It’s that integral to me at this stage in my life.) I’ve cultivated my handwriting over the years, and it’s changed over the years, but writing by hand stays with me.
Last week when I wrote my letter to you I was ready to say, Maybe glass just isn’t for me. In my neon class last week we were working with 15 millimeter glass tubing, a large, thick glass tube that requires a lot of heat to make it malleable. This week was our fabled fourth class — when we’ve learned all the basics and can mess around a bit over the open flames — and we were back on the lighter-weight 12 millimeter glass, and instead of working against circle patterns (the most confounding shape!) where it’s easiest to see exactly where you’ve gone wrong, we were working loop-de-loos, heating six inches of glass tube and making twists, almost-knots, practicing the feel of having that much hot glass to bend, seeing how long you could keep it in the heat, how much heat you could carry out of the flame so you could bend and tweak your loop, long seconds when you realized you had enough heat to keep finessing it, to shimmy your loop into place as you liked, and then back into the flame for the next one. I used to think I was a rules person, and I thought maybe I wasn’t a glass person, but as usual I am never only one thing always. Last night I looped molten glass again and again, got better at it loop by loop, and last night I enjoyed myself, and enjoyed the hot breeze of the flame near my face, warming the front of my body as I turned the glass. Maybe I am a glass person!
It’s been an eternity since I talked with you and I wonder how you are! Looking forward to reading your letter momentarily!
Until next week,
Yours,
Eva