Mixed Media
February 2024 || A digital update with analog flair.
My Pen in the Air is a newsletter from the desk of an unexpected novelist filled with essays, poems, short stories, and monthly updates on life, writing, and more. Every post goes out entirely free to all readers (though you may opt to further support my writing through a paid subscription). // Sign up here:
Before we begin, I’ve got a favor to ask, because when you’re a big sister and you’re asked to share something important in hope for support, you do.
In early January, my brother-in-law Tim was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. This news was incredibly shocking, but his and Cearra’s collective response to it is not. Tim is steadfast and my sister’s a fighter, so with all the grit and determination you might expect, they’re walking this road the best way they know how: as a team, one step at a time.
In April, they, along with my nephew, will be participating in the Walk MS put on by The National Multiple Sclerosis Society, which is a tax exempt 501(c)3 nonprofit organization whose mission is “to cure MS while empowering people affected by MS to live their best lives,” through research, equipment, therapies, and more.
If you have the means and wish to help, please consider supporting their walk. You can follow that link to donate to their team as a whole or click on Roster to select an individual. Thank you!
A note:
You’re going to notice, pretty quickly, a slightly different tone to this update. We’ll call it a mixed media newsletter, blending analog elements with a digital face. Mid-month, we started a forty day digital fast until Easter. This isn’t very different from our experience last May, except a little longer, guided daily, and from the outset, more intentional and purposed.
I’d briefly contemplated taking the full time away from this space, but decided, instead, to do it a little differently. Showing up here consistently has been an enriching experience in my writing life, impacting the rest of my work more than I anticipated. I didn’t want to lose that “showing up,” even, and especially, when Resistance has been greatest.
What I hoped to gain, by sticking around, was this rhythm’s integration with the more unplugged, tech-free activities I’m pondering and practicing offline. Thus, I’ve committed to writing my drafts by hand and either typing transcriptions or sharing (digital, I know, I know) photos of those drafts. I’ll be condensing categories for a bit, largely for simplicity’s sake, and for February and March, we’ll consider them field notes from a digital fast.
It’s wild, the things you see when you quit looking at screens as much. Things you’re sure you would have missed, otherwise. Naturally, there’s the irony that you, dear reader, are viewing this on a screen because, alas, I’ve typed it up on one. C’est la vie. My laptop, though, may be the least detrimental and most generative screen I own, apart from my Kindle.
For me there’s the other, endlessly frustrating yet enticing one, the one that inspires Gollum-crouched hovering and staring, mindlessly stroking and scrolling. Even without social media, which we so easily assume the absence of fixes all, it still beckons.
The further it goes from my mind and my body — my person — the lighter I feel. The more my eyes and ears become attuned to the world around me, noticing. The more my dulled senses come alive to the glorious weight of simple things.
Which screen of yours, would you say, has the greatest draw? Does your computer feel different than your phone? Have you found the illusive balance between real and digital living?
A couple of weeks ago, by way of
’s emails, I ran into his tutorial on making a no-cut, no-bind zine from a single sheet of plain paper. For both work weekends, I brought along paper, brush pens, and colored pencils for those in-between spaces when the writing’s not happening but creative stuff still can.
Turns out, playing with all kinds of art (even when you aren’t particularly skilled at it), has been a natural and inspiring outflow of this time. Even the fam’s taken to making zines, too, on top of their plethora of other artistic endeavors.
Every bag I carry outside of the house now has at least one, small, unruled notebook, a writing pen, and a micron with which to capture thoughts or images in the moment. The writing is normal for me, though more pronounced, but sketching is not.
It feels the way practicing my Scottish Gaelic does — like I’ll never quite get the hang of it. The discomfort in persistence, though, even when I’m no good, is rewarding even still.
About 2 to 3PM every day, I’ve been hitting a wall. It’s not tiredness, but a sort of sadness that I’ve likely been numbing in some way without realizing it, until now. Perhaps it’s these cold winter days spent largely inside with less to distract me, now; I didn’t observe this pattern this last May.
One afternoon, I grabbed Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings (which I’ve owned for years but never read entirely through) off the shelf, enticed by it’s foggy, grayscale, barren trees between river and sun cover.
I read the first poem and then the second, soon startled to find the first and only line I’d marked in the book at some point, though I don’t remember reading it there (only hearing Mary read it aloud last year and knowing it was for me):
“So I just listened, my pen in the air.”
I laughed, and then promptly cried and kept reading, more than half the book in one sitting.
And so most afternoons, around the time I start to notice the same listlessness, I read a psalm, a few poems, and go outside if I can. It’s been a lovely re-centering habit and nice counterbalance to my myriad of varied reads right now. Between the classics, writing craft, discourse on personhood in the digital era, and book-related research, there’s a lot happening on the reading front.
I think that’s it for now, these notes from the field which some days feels more like a wilderness than I’d like, but full of the wild I know I need.
I hope you are well.
just one word! inspired! *per usual after any interactions with you :)
I found that reading news, audio books, and podcasts on my phone were some of my biggest distractions. They helped me "checkout" to myself at times. Thanks for sharing. I've loved seeing all of the creativity that's come from the digital fast. :)