Part of my job as manager is to walk the winding pathways and hunt for half-broken things. A lightbulb or lantern is almost always one of those things. If you can forgive my nonsensical shorthand, the current triage list reads as follows: three garden cement, four garden metal, four backroad black, six bridal pathway dangling, five driveway black. These are either lights that need replacing or lights that are no longer working and still stumping our electricians. (As a reminder: this is a fifty-year old labyrinthine property built mostly of brick and cement, so wires, plumbing, etc. run deep and are often hard to find, let alone operate on). But there are many burnt out bulbs I can replace, and many more incandescent ones the original owner used, which we are slowly swapping out for LED.

It makes a great date night.

Dylan and I start in the driveway, because here the lights turn on every night at sunset, so need replacing most often. They are also the only lights out of ~400 that are on an automatic timer, (making another goodly chunk of my job flipping the many switches). There are 62 lanterns alone in the front two acres where the house, yard and first rose garden sit.

I find a hidden lantern hitherto unknown in this area, completely swallowed in Ivy. I clear it out to find the interior corroded past the point of rehabilitation. I dress it back in Ivy and add it to my triage list.

We spend twenty minutes cleaning lesser corrosion off several other light bulb sockets, before finally googling what’s the best way to clean corrosion from light bulb sockets because up till now, we’d been using pliers in what Dylan called, “The worst game of operation ever.” (Answer: sandpaper and isopropyl alcohol).

We move to the outdoor kitchen area and replace one hanging lantern bulb that wasn’t on my list. We have one more question for our techno overlords, and at this point my grammar is wine-tainted: why dos a light that on flicker off when tightened? Google understood of course, and told us to pull the metal tab up so the lightbulb could have full contact. (It worked.)

This hanging lantern pictured below was not cooperative however, and no matter how much we pulled and tugged, the base would not disconnect from the top. Added to the triage list as a return-to-later project.

Dylan has a theory that, like himself, the original owner and builder of this property, Bob, must have been a night owl. Because to build an estate like this with your bare hands in a mere few decades must’ve meant you were working every day, all day. But that left no time to enjoy the place except for at night, which is the best time to enjoy it anyhow. Bob knew how to set the mood, that’s for sure. The lights are low and warm-toned and some are covered in leaves (like the one I mentioned before) and the light behind them acts as an x-ray, highlighting every gossamer vein and glowing, green pore.

It’s partly why we do these walks at night. Easier to spot the broken bulbs yes, but mainly, because it’s beautiful.

We move to the gardens, and it is here I am also typically collecting hidden debris from past events. Tonight - a champagne cork, a set of plastic silverware, 2 cups, a small box that probably once held decor. I add them to my basket, which already contains our wine bottle, pliers, old bulbs, new bulbs, a phone. We crawl through the bushes and plants to grab trash or check or change the lanterns. Enter; the spiders, who cast “creepy little shadows” as Dylan calls them while I shine my phone camera into their homes.

We reminisce about the years before we started dating, to our decade + long friendship. We like to play the game of imagining when we met, two cups of wine full and lantern-lit and glowing. It goes kind of like this: when do you think it was exactly? and I feel like it must’ve been in middle school and no, I think it was when I came to your house with Nolan and Jeremy and I probably tried to say hi and you probably just ignored me.

Then he scoops me up and I drop my basket.

“I may not know exactly when I met you,” he says, “Just that I’ve loved you as long as I can remember.”

So he’s loved me since probably the sixth or seventh time we saw each other, we decide.

All in all there are over a dozen different types of original light fixtures, with the black street lamps making up almost 150 in total. Our green metal lanterns and cement lanterns make up another 137 combined. Hanging chandeliers and a few other miscellaneous make up the rest. And the market lights we added line our fences and stairs and float above our reception court and aggregate to nearly two thousand feet.

What this looks like logistically on any given event night - A thirty minute walk to the 21 individual breaker boxes within the property, and flipping nearly double that amount of switches (37 to be exact). And again in reverse, sometime around 1 am when we put the estate to bed.

In our 2.5 hour date night we change fourteen light bulbs, fix two more, trip one breaker, kiss a dozen times, drink too much wine, etc. On the edges of the property, there are still a few beheaded lanterns that no one sees. Ah well, on a distant someday, not today, we will walk again and repair them.

The chatbot writer goes looking for the cure and our culture hands her the myth: read enough craft books and interviews and you will continually be advised what you really need is some kind of metaphorical Paris like the one Hemingway wrote about in his final memoir, A Moveable Feast. Beautiful architecture, cheap wine, and Gertrude Stein deciding you have potential and inviting you back every Saturday for revisions, etc. The reality is Gertrude Stein ran her salon on family money; the rue de Fleurus operation — the Cézanne paintings hung on the wall, the Picasso patronage, the Saturday evenings — all funded by income from the Stein’s San Francisco real estate, (managed by her brother Michael, who invested following the 1906 earthquake).

And a yearly $3,000 allowance from Hadley Richardson’s inheritance allowed Hemingway to quit his job at the Toronto Star and pursue his dreams full-time. $3,000 in 1922 Paris made them comfortable and by 1924 made them rich, because the franc had collapsed and Americans were living like royalty off the exchange rate. (He later left her and their infant son for another woman, but I digress…) The drinks flowed, the marriages consumed themselves more or less on schedule, and the myth of the vagabond writer was born. To be clear, the writers were dedicated and the feedback mechanisms worked, but it was purchased off the backs of abandoned families, failing livers, and struggling post-war economies.

Unfortunately now, “find a writing group” lands as the over-the-counter version of a drug that was discontinued a century ago. A necessity of the successful and fantasy for the uninitiated, this instruction assumes an infrastructure that isn’t here for most people (short of buying one with an MFA that isn’t guaranteed to pay you back). In reality most artists loot the Internet for community, while trying to protect the last frontier of unplumbed real estate: our interior architecture. Or what this Substack writer Abi Awomosu calls “faculty of imagination, of perception…”^1 The cost of this scavenging is self-depletion; we pay for each find with the attention we should be reserving for the work. To combat this we look for clues hidden in the texts of the successful.

One thing Hemingway gets right in his memoir is the “moveable” part of the feast. It can happen anywhere, in any home, and one answer to finding it lies in the hands of the same technology I criticized in the beginning. But we must be savvy and fight against the Internets seductive convenience and crawl to the other end instead. We must utilize its reach to find the people who understand our insular obsession with the particular arrangement of words. The people who can spend days sharing drafts and discussing books, the people who are ready to break through the screen and create their own Paris. If you are reading this, you have found one such person.

A PROPOSAL FOR REBUILDING PARIS, WITHOUT THE TRUST FUND

Which leads me to my next point:

IN DEFENSE OF PERFORMATIVE CREATIVITY, PROVIDED THERE ARE WITNESSES

It has come to my attention that another major benefit to creative gatherings is their inherent ability to capitalize on our performative nature. Instead of grabbing a monster energy drink from the fridge and staying in pajamas to write, we brew coffee in a green ceramic pot and braid our hair with flowers because the surrounding folk give us reason to. The aesthetics posted all over online and which feel difficult to maintain on a daily basis, are easier to engage in when done together. It works this way for writing too. When everyone is there to witness you being a “writer” you cannot pull out your phone mid-session to watch the fifth tiktok video of a dog chasing its tail. That would be embarrassing and rightly so. The creative gathering hands back the visibility in the way that matters. Posting online is a curated visibility and an easily forgotten one (you only need to be a “writer” for 30 seconds). When you are locked in a room together, pens in hands, surrounded by the books you wish to emulate, it becomes a lot harder to fake.

In my utopia there are long stretches of time where phones are left facedown and vending machines dispense mass-market paperbacks or zines from previous gatherings. Arguments about novels are mandatory at dinner. Each person brings offerings to share with the express intent to leave it behind, whether it is a piece of decor for the room, an artistic practice, craft supplies or a piece of their art, a book, an openness to receive or provide feedback, etc. Meals are curated, and that means real plates, real silverware, long banquet halls, family style feasts, and no plastic. Tea and wine abound instead of hard liquor. Beyond that, it is just you and your instrument, and all the right people to perform for.

MY SOMEDAY OFFERING

I manage a gothic estate that, in another era, would have been full of artists by now. The property has the history for it (hand-built by the original owner) and the architecture for it (inspired by the English countryside). Best of all the beauty here acts as a form of pressure; an ivy-crawling manor refuses your worst sentences in a way your kitchen table never will. Writers have always known this, which is why they keep breaking into borrowed grandeur. I'm working toward opening the space to creative gatherings, but it must be said that none of this requires an estate. A mansion is no more realistic for most people than 1922 Paris, and I refuse to end an essay about dismantled fantasies by installing a new one! The creative gathering is a mechanism, not an address. Build it in whatever room will hold a long table. There’s even an argument the bare room is better since it takes the shape of whoever and whatever fills it. This property comes with a history that isn’t yours while your basement comes with nothing. You choose the rituals, the art on the walls, the reading list, the hour the arguments start, etc.

The artists we mythologize didn’t inherit their rooms either. Stein’s salon was an apartment, the Dôme was a café that served anyone with two francs. They consecrated ordinary spaces by what they did in them repeatedly, and that doesn’t require a chandelier. The beauty is negotiable but the witnesses are not. So build your own Paris, and if you’d rather not start from a blank page, if you want to borrow the grandeur while you find the people you’ll keep for life, I know a house with the bones for it, and the door is not locked.

At its core, alchemy compresses into two Latin words: solve et coagula or, dissolve and recombine. This also happens to be the whole curriculum of aging. Eventually you live long enough to see the forever-evolving befores and afters. Kids becoming beautiful (and making decisions that seem too big for them). Coffee shops becoming trendy (now well-dressed in all the vintage furniture I cannot afford). Late night conversations becoming novels. Rot distilling to gold.

Alchemy’s strangest claim is about its raw material. The prima materia — the base substance you begin from — was described by the adepts as something common, worthless, found in the dunghill, trodden underfoot, recognized by no one. The first and darkest stage of the Great Work is the nigredo: the blackening, the putrefaction, the prima materia rotting in the sealed vessel. Alchemists depicted it as a corpse, a raven, a king in his tomb. Nothing transmutes that hasn’t first decomposed. The gold was never imported from outside; it was always in the dunghill, latent the whole time in the most overlooked stuff.

The rot before the gold

I once took two big risks at the same time and only one of them paid off. (Here defining “paid off” as a metaphorical iron still in my fire). I was twenty-seven years old, five years single, untethered and hungry for the world. I was offered an opportunity in California off little more than an evenings conversation. I would have to leave my current job and everything I knew. That was the first risk. The second was bringing along the man I’d recently started dating. About this man: He had a few good perspectives, (though I exhausted them quickly). Mostly he was great at repackaging what I said with a bow on top, judgment-free.

After his infidelity (surprise!) I got rid of him and found his essence in my life behaved like flour — it added bulk but not much flavor on its own. I could mix in whatever I wanted, and he’d take the shape of it, hold the unique ingredients without question. When he was gone, I found all the essential bits still there; I was the substantive part, he was just a fine filler. I don’t say this to brag, and in fact I still have to fight off a bit of embarrassment for ever dating him. Most humans I entangle with have pushed me to be a better version of myself and yadda yadda. If they left, I could see the holes they left and I’d try to grow a new part or two to fill it, grateful they revealed a blind spot. With him though, he left and I felt full. No holes. I checked.

After that relationship, I still came out altered (I believe in a good way), but by an almost self-fulfilling alchemical process. See, everyone had raised their eyebrows at our courtship, but I didn’t need them to trust him, I needed them to trust me. I trusted me, and even though the relationship failed, the trust with myself only grew. Because self-trust, in this frame, wasn’t a delusional confidence that nothing could ever dissolve. It was trust that I’d’ still cohere on the far side of dissolution.

The right fire over the right duration

Alchemy is, in some contexts, a temporal art. The transmutation can’t be forced, it needs gentle, sustained heat over enormous duration. Too much heat cracks the vessel and ruins the work; the adept who blasts the furnace fails. But too little heat and the fire never starts. Mircea Eliade, in The Forge and the Crucible, frames the alchemist as someone who collaborates with time and accelerates nature: doing in months what the earth, left alone, does in eons. The alchemist makes time. They master duration instead of being subject to it. One motto reads festina lente: hasten gently.

This reframes the oldest personality split, the introvert and extrovert, as something other than two kinds of people. But maybe it’s just two ways of getting the fire wrong. One failure runs too much heat, too fast: every hour pre-committed, activity mistaken for transmutation. The vessel cracks under a flame it was never built to hold. The other is a fire that was never lit: duration passing with no heat applied to anything real. This was me for a long while… the endless daydreamer whose base substance was hardly worked at all.

The more you indulge something, the more you get from it. Indulge in gossip and you find more chaos; indulge in the Internet and you get sucked further down. It works for most things, which is actually the good news. If you indulge in your prima materia, in your art, you’ll find more of that, too. Wring it dry and it will whet again because creativity has no bottom. Too often we fixate on the width of the well and forget it has the depth of an ocean. Don’t stand at the edge thinking it’s a shallow, oversaturated pool — that’s only the shore, where everyone first wades in and most people never leave. (Elitist of me, I know. I stand by it.) Swim, and keep swimming. One idea always begets another, which begets two more.

On leaving space

For those marinating in discontent (you want to dedicate your life to your art but keep getting distracted by complicated romances, random hobbies, your job, TV) fear not! Either it’s a passing obsession or a recurring one. Either you’ll make time for it or you won’t. This is the best thing about aging, and a reason not to fear it but to embrace it: aging only reveals to you your essence, your prima materia gone fertile.

Which leads me to the one opinion I can share, on how to bend time to your will like the alchemists of old. Don’t overfill your life, and if you already have, be prepared to prune some of it. Leave a space open to the unknown, to the hobby that will need somewhere to multiply. Leave room for growing pains. Put more logistically: leave time. Let yourself be bored. It applies to debt, too. Look at your subscriptions, your bar tabs, your Uber Eats receipts. Where can you prune? Don’t say yes to everything. Sometimes you have to say no, so that when a bigger, better yes comes around, you’re not elbows-deep hosting a friend-of-a-friend’s birthday weekend at your house, unable to disentangle. Or so cozy in someone else’s on-screen life you don’t want to live your own.

The goal of the Work was always imaged as a marriage, the coniunctio, the wedding of fundamental opposites: Sol and Luna, King and Queen, sulfur and mercury. In terms of our creativity, this manifests in different modes of hunger. The appetite for the world and the appetite for the interior, two principles that have to be married inside one person. Maturity is the wedding of the two, not the victory of one. Aging into self-trust is being worked by the slow fire. Hasten gently. You’ll cohere on the far side.

The kicker in all of this is I can’t even complain. The gorgeous stone alcove contains two mineral pools of substantial capacity (one of which is a 30-person jacuzzi), and I can use them whenever I please. Because I don’t just manage this labyrinthine, 18-acre estate; I get to live here too. My work is near constant, but so is the privilege.

The question unfortunately remains — is the number of dead animals I scoop from its waters equal or greater than my enjoyment of soaking in them? Add to that equation: the fact my late dog Scout loved the water. Subtract again the stress of trying to fix rodent-chewed wires at 11 pm so it can be ready for guest check-in the next morning. Mix it all together and you get the kind of job you can’t, in good conscience, complain about. At least, that’s how it feels.

Most rich folk with estates like these have employees like me to handle the unflattering bits. However most people like me don’t have employers generous enough to grant them equal access to their amenities in addition to running them. Because I live here, I am in charge of the following (in no particular order): the tours, the events, the laundry, the maintenance coordination, and the estate itself, which is fifty years old and constantly breaking and shifting somewhere under its many brick-laden paths, crumbling arches, and aggressive ivy. When a guest books their weekend wedding here, they have an expectation of order and beauty. Boiled down: I’m on the hunt for anything that could shatter that illusion; unfortunately in doing so I am repeatedly shattering it for myself. I am noting the dangers, the cracked glass, the loose shingles, the splitting tree branches. It’s my job to look for the broken bits, not the fairytale.

Critters are really the least of it (though break my heart the most). For a full rundown, please note: the hummingbirds who get trapped on the wrong side of the glass, the squirrels making beds in my vehicle, acres of spider web that spring back within hours, coyote mafias leaving poop right outside my door, rattlesnakes who sunbathe on the flagstone, the whole lot of them falling in our pools and being unable to climb out, and the MICE, the goddamned mice. I have spent more time than I care to mention cleaning up mouse droppings from various sheds and outbuildings, all the while worrying I might get hantavirus. (No symptoms yet.)

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Where the manor will really knock you off balance though, is in the Wonderlandian way she steals from you. Time, items, sense of place. If you set something down you may spend hours searching and still never find it again. If you need to get from the wine cave to the top of the manor’s tower, you will have no choice but to wind your way through pathways that loop you back to where you started instead of where you were headed. Acres of rose bushes try to snag you and stop you. It’s an ever-shifting landscape, an estate built for the sure-footed, an estate that, over time, grew a mind and heart of her own. Bricks emerge from nowhere – roots pushing them up when you’re approaching and sand shifting them back once you’ve passed. Really, the whole place is a trip hazard dressed as a daydream. It is the childhood fantasy you always had in your periphery, a land of opportunity, a template for anyone with a big enough imagination and a penchant for climbing stairs. This place, she could be dressed in fine silks and flowing fabrics or left to her own accord. Either way, she demands intention and attention and rewards you tenfold.

Which brings me to my next complaint-that-can’t-be-logged-as-an-actual-complaint. I have dreams for this place. But building while also repairing is never a good strategy. The two work differently, are logged in different parts of your brain, and asking it to switch between the modes wears down the internal battery faster than any dedicated day of solid, single-minded work. Her very nature (with all her spaces, events, and projects) is to yank me by the hair, to stop me before I can ever build momentum in one direction. It is why I become the accidental, last-minute wedding planner or event coordinator when the ones our guests hire often fall short. I am the catch-all, the last line of defense. Sometimes I can tame her, but it is rare. This place, she will swallow you up and spit you back into the thorns. She will laugh at you for trying to eat from single-use flatware and whip them off your tables with a gust of wind so precise it shatters the plastic. You will think you know where you’re going, you will think you’ve got it handled by yourself, and then the sheer size of her, the mighty heart of her, will turn everything you thought before coming here upside down.

I’d like to think we have a very good working relationship now. We respect each other. I rush in when careless guests try to move statues, climb into our fountains, and otherwise mistreat our ancient stone and antique furniture; in return she slows her winds by sunsets and bathes us in early morning fog. When a guest complains about something being overgrown, I first consult our gardener — the most under-appreciated and mystical of us all, Jaime — because if pruning at the wrong time jeopardizes the health of the plant, then that guest can kindly fuck off. No one is making you be here, and no one cares about your singular opinion on the ivy growing in through the windows.

You can understand the difficulty of holding a vision in Chaos and trying to enact any daydreams, but daydream I do. How we need café seating and a built-in coffee/pastry bar in our two-story gazebo. And to organize a property-sprawling, murder mystery game with a grand showdown in our hedge maze. And to host writing retreats that utilize our ballroom as a massive, Hogwarts-style classroom. And enjoy wine tastings and poetry readings in our hill-hewn stone cave. And, and, and…

And then another forest fire catches nearby and we watch with bated breath. Or a vendor goes rogue on our service road and hits a mainline pipe. Or my dog dies, I break down and run away to Utah, because I can’t handle being here without her, where hundreds of people will walk by my front doors laughing and drinking and making a ruckus and asking me for things and trying to talk to me at all.

My employer once joked it was the best job and the worst job. But it’s not even that, it’s chaos and then it’s recovery, it’s weddings and then it’s memorials. It’s a place that vanishes the rest of the world, where big and tiny things happen, and the one you least expect to go wrong goes wrong.

Then finally … a breather. I roam the gardens with coffee or tea or what-have-you, in hand. The morning is quiet, the fog is still slinking through. In the stillness, my mind leaves my body and floats to whatever craft I am working on. I watch our nearest but still distant neighbor roll by on her horse-drawn carriage. For me, uniquely, the beautiful and the wretched are not opposites here, they’re the same thing, experienced simultaneously.

I retreat to my deck, listening to Sylvia Plath read me her poems. I come across nine rows of church pews on Facebook Marketplace for free and get the go-ahead to bring them back to the manor and repurpose them into ceremony seating. I sleep outside sometimes, under 30-foot-tall billowing drapes and a chandelier braided in flowers. I ceaselessly find the joy. It is with my boyfriend Dylan, when I see him fixing bricks and painting breaker boxes in deep ivy green just for the creative hell of it. It is with endless free bouquets and the way Jaime calls sprinklers “sprinkles.” It is all our lanterns turned on at night, with the crickets going. It is when I check the secret floatie I have hidden next to the pool filter, to find two frogs clambering atop it, waiting to be carried to safety.

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This essay is my cabinet. Consider these the books, art, practices, people and palimpsests that I have traced over to build my creative life. They are the resources I recommend most often, return to most frequently, and trust to rekindle my curiosity whenever it begins to dim.

THE LIBRARY - A PARTIAL ACCOUNT OF THE WRITERS WHO HAVE BEEN FLAGRANTLY REARRANGING MY BRAIN FOR YEARS

My Sacred Text: Letters to a Young Poet — Rainer Maria Rilke

A collection of letters written between 1903 and 1908 after a young military cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus asked Rilke for guidance on becoming a writer. More than a book about writing, it is a book about how to build a life around art. I have returned to it yearly for over a decade.

“Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn't force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come.”

My Writing Instructor: Natalie Goldberg, particularly in her novel Writing Down the Bones

The best book on craft I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot. Actionable and accessible exercises.

Essay I Wish I’d Written: On Keeping a Notebook — Joan Didion

A reminder that the act of noticing is never wasted.

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write - on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there…”

Adaptation I Love Most: Wild

Made into one of the most beautiful movies ever by French film director Jean-Marc Vallée and starring Reese Witherspoon (screenplay by Nick Hornby). This was originally written by the one and only Cheryl Strayed, about her journey hiking the PCT in the 90s.

Memoir That Defies Its Genre: Why Fish Don’t Exist — Lulu Miller

Part biography, part memoir, part philosophical inquiry. A beautiful example of how seemingly unrelated narratives can be woven together into something larger and stranger.

“With each new fish, each new catch, each new name placed on a formerly unknown piece of the universe, came that impossibly intoxicating feeling. That sweet honey on the tongue. That hit of fantasized omnipotence. That lovely sensation of order. What a salve, a name.”

Favorite Lecture: A Room of One’s Own — Virginia Woolf

Nearly a century old and still startlingly relevant. Woolf’s argument for creative independence, solitude, and privacy feels heartbreakingly significant in a society that increasingly relies on and rewards immediacy, visibility, and external validation.

“When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

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THE SALON - CONTAINING SEVERAL PEOPLE I CONSULT WITH REGULARLY DESPITE THE FACT I MOST CERTAINLY WILL NEVER MEET THEM

Substack I Admire: Field Notes from Nowhere Girl

Dakota Warren likes to live very romantically, dare I say theatrically. I love her distinct style. I love her website. (Have you ever noticed how many author websites are so boring? JHC I might write a whole essay on this.)

Patron Saint of Podcasters: Anna from Wild Geese

I love this woman. She hosts thoughtful, reflective conversations and is the person who introduced me to digital gardening. (Which can be defined as: “…hyperlinking at it’s best. You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.”

The Industry Decoders: The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

Two literary agents breaking down real query letters and first five pages in real time. Equal parts illuminating as it is honest. Must listen for anyone pursuing publication.

Interview I Recommend to Every Writer: Ocean Vuong: How to Write Supremely Well

Vuong reminding us to take more risks and write with more idiosyncrasy. He says, “We are asked to be too awestruck by the canonical," and I can’t stop thinking about that.

Also -

John Green: We’re not Merely a Catastrophe

I will never get over the Green brothers. Hank interviewed John for his new podcast “Humans,” and sent me trotting off into a maze off topics I’d like to explore further. Like when Hank says of humanity: “We’re either the hero or the villain.” And John says he thinks Hank is giving us too much credit. That, “After we’re gone, earth is going to be fine. Earth is going to retain complex life... But there will be nobody left to listen to Billie Holiday records, and that’s a bummer to me.” He goes on to say, “I get a little frustrated with the relentless doomerism that claims humanity is merely bad news… Of course we’re catastrophic, we’ve always been catastrophic. But we’re not merely a catastrophe.”

THE WORKSHOP - OR, THE SYSTEMS I HAVE BUILT TO COUNTERACT MY NATURAL INSTINCT TO STARE AIMLESSLY OUT WINDOWS

Favorite Writing Practice: Café hopping with a pen and paper

There’s something very invigorating about the aimless wandering in between sitting on random park benches, or in oak-carved cathedrals, or at cafe’s hidden in between brick alleyways (I’m looking at you).

Favorite Reading Practice: Reading with a pen and/or sticky notes

I’m begging you to write down your favorite quotes and a summary of each book after you read it. Helps with memory retention and refining the gold. The only downside is I can’t listen to substantive podcasts while I’m doing chores anymore because of how religiously I now write these quotes down. Here is a quick list of three quotes still burning a hole in my pocket. And to think I might never have found them again if I weren’t writing them down:

1. “She was a committed romantic and an anarcha-feminist. This was hard for her because it meant she couldn’t blow up beautiful buildings.” - Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

2. “Kafka’s night-writings, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness, James Baldwin’s exiled clarity – none of these emerged from comfort or compliance. They were forged in the crucible of longing.” -Erotic Decisions by Tamara

3. “...he had this idea of double-consciousness, how Black people in America always have to be mindful of how racist white people see them. And how this applies to a lot of marginalized people, always having to look through the eyes of the folks who hate them.” Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

How I Get Unstuck: Boredom

The major benefit to the aforementioned podcast neutering is I have let my mind wander more often on its own. I have left my phone behind. On this, I journaled: And in the silence my mind comes rushing back to me. The part that wants to wear clown make up and organize a circus show for my friends, the part that wants to call my mom and talk about the wildflowers she’s planting, the part that wants to write about everything and trick people into reading it.

North Star of Creative Rituals: Choosing my field notes over my phone (which I write about here)

This practice turns mundane moments like waiting for a bus, grocery store lines, sitting in the front seat of a car while your gas is pumping, etc., into something full of potential.

THE ROAD - IN WHICH I ATTEMPT TO DEFEND THE IDEA THAT A CREATIVE LIFE IS BUILT MOSTLY AWAY FROM THE WORK

Non-Creative Creative Habit: Actually doing the Thing

Returning to old saved articles, bookmarked tutorials, abandoned sewing project, and unread recommendations and finally enacting their advice instead of just collecting them. Then. Deciding you want more of it, or deciding you are done with it.

Creative Risk I’m Most Grateful For: Living in a van for three years

Living in a van taught me a hard lesson in pairing down my non-essentials. It also taught me how to trust my own company and as Rilke put it, “Enjoy the great silence.” Skills I use the most in my writing practice today.

Creative Lesson Learned the Hard Way: To stop rereading my work so damn much

I used to spend hours doing this and it subsequently took me years to finish drafts. Someone (I can’t find the person to credit but I believe it was Stephen King) said something about how rereading your work makes it feel inevitable. It becomes too hard to tell what sounds off or unnecessary, because everything sounds familiar. Just finish the first draft then go touch some grass. Then reread. It’s game changing.

THE LONG TABLE - CONCERNING THE PEOPLE I WOULD MOST LIKE TO FEED, QUESTION, AND OCCASIONALLY DISAGREE WITH

Dream Dinner Guests: (To be determined.)

This section is intentionally unfinished. The best cabinets always leave room for future discoveries.

Trigger Warning: Pet Death

Before:

We decide running away is a very Human thing to do. We decide this somewhere between LA and Los Padres National Forest, after we begin categorizing the world. Going eighty miles an hour on the highway Dylan starts it by declaring driving as Not Human (with the way we are all inches away from collision in our two-ton hunks of steel but pretend otherwise). Scout climbs onto his lap and sticks her head out the window, her ears flapping in the wind.

“That’s Human,” he says. Then joins her.

We’d packed up the dogs and a weeks worth of food, too many cameras, and a vase of tulips. The goal was to drive until we didn’t recognize the roads and the air smelt different. Until Scout and Jack were scratching at the windows to be let out cause they could see the wide open spaces and how much room there was to run. Stay until our nails were black with dirt.

We work at refining our list as we settle into a campsite somewhere on Tecuya Ridge. Our location blinks and loads and we are Uncharted — the town at our base called Frazer Park, with building names like Mountain Air Veterinary hospital. I know where all the veterinary hospitals are. Anyway, we’re 7,100 feet up, the van’s front wheels propped up on two rocks, bacon cooking.

“Letting little immigrant children pick your produce is Not Human either,” Dylan says, examining a badly bruised banana. “Eating with your hands is though.” He takes a bite and I add it to our growing list.

NOT HUMAN

- Online shopping

- Pre-cut fruit

- Six lanes of highway

- GPS voices telling you what to do

- Single-use anything

- LED candles

- Power tools

- Self-checkout kiosks (we fought over this one)

- Read receipts

- Storage units

- Same-day shipping

- Terms and Conditions

- Parade of Homes

HUMAN

- Campfires

- Hand tools (shovels, saws, axes, hammer)

- Drinking from a bowl

- Braiding hair

- Free-peeing

- Getting sunburnt

- Skipping rocks

- Binoculars

- Not using utensils

- Choosing the scenic route

- Pulling over just because the dogs want to sniff something

- Crying in the car

Night three I am texting Kailee about when she should meet us in Utah, which will be the final destination in our escapade. The projector is on, playing some sappy rom-com. For the first time since Scout’s diagnosis, I text the word euthanasia. I start crying. Dylan hugs me.

“I can’t— I’m planning this “thing” and she doesn’t even know it.” I nod down at her sleeping head curled in my armpit. “That’s Not Human.”

“I know.” Dylan strokes my hair and holds us. “But if everything were Human, she’d never have made it out from under the bed.”

Animals often instinctually hide when they are dying. I keep having nightmares where I didn’t wake up. “Not Human means she’s here now,” I say, rubbing her petal-soft ears.

It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, he agrees, kissing me.

The next day we head toward the beach because Scout loves being chased, by humans, dogs, and waves, she’s not picky. We roll down the mountain road until we reach the seaside. Her head on my lap.

I think about how driving is technologically mediated movement but grief is not. Grief has frozen me in time. I wake up and think cancer. I go to sleep and think cancer. Someone asks me how I am and I think hemangiosarcoma is a very aggressive form of cancer.

NOT HUMAN

- Fluorescent lights

- Faux plants

- Pugs and French Bulldogs

- Insurance forms

- Metal tables

- 24/7 access to streaming services

- “Skip intro”

HUMAN

- Winking

- Peek-a-boo

- Building sandcastles

- Showing off

- Aging

- Riding horses

- Walking sticks

- Leaving a voicemail

- Sitting on the ground or floor

- Treasure maps

- Poetry

- Finding shapes in clouds and rock formations

- Digging a grave

After:

When she’s been gone two weeks, we drive to a sacred Pine grove Dylan does not want shared on the Internet. My first camp without her. Dylan drags me away from the fire to collect more wood and watch the sunset. We follow the deer trail and I point to a boulder to climb. It hovers over us some 10 - 15 feet tall and Dylan says it looks like the imprint of a giant wiener, balls and all, and maybe it belongs to god. I crawl into the imprints, which are actually just pockets of white limestone carved by thousands of years of wind erosion - nothing mystical about it. I still feel reverent, as one does after a loss, praying for whatever exists of the afterlife to treat her well, please. We stay there awhile, sitting on gods left nut, drinking Caymen Jacks (blood orange being our favorite) while my heart tries and fails to untwist itself, to fathom her non-existence.

Every morning I wake without her I crash and break into a new reality. One where I have to rely on a failing memory and an aging brain, to know the truth of her — oh how very human she was! Maybe more human than me. With the lilt of her prance and how long she would spend searching for the perfect place to pee. The way she stepped in between Dylan and Jack when Jack was getting berated a little too long for misbehaving. The alternating colors of her nails. How she rolled down the van windows when we got off the highway so she could stick her head out, breeze facing, heart open, claws flexed around the armrest.

gonzo journalist hunter s thompson was blown from a cannon. environmentalist and author edward abbey was illegally buried by his friends in the arizona desert somewhere. my boyfriend dylan would like to be entombed with all his favorite ‘items’. there is only one similarity in these unique and individual requests -- they were made in advance to someone else. they were made by the person before it was too late to do so.

since i just turned the ripe old age of thirty i thought it was about time i prepared for my death. consider this my burial directive, which is hopefully a living document, one i can edit many times to fit a changing life before the version becomes final. if not, and i’ve died sooner than ideal, all the steps are laid out below.

step one: call the closest funeral home (or the police, i suppose, if it looks like a murder) and have my body taken to the mortuary. someone needs to confirm my heart no longer beats. you’ll need to refrigerate me fast, because I do NOT want to be embalmed. don’t resuscitate me either for that matter. & donate my organs, if they’re in reasonable condition.

step two: transport me back to utah.

just bury me immediately with the friends and family who can get there. no open casket or anything, this is just the burial party. if you want to do a memorial later, do that however you want. probably you can gather in the forest to grieve, maybe arrange yourselves in a circle around a fire. yes there better be crying, i just died jesus, let it out! and tell at least one embarrassing story.

carbon-neutral funeral services

at first i thought i’d want a mushroom casket, but upon further inquiry, have found they’re still very expensive. and the mushroom biodegrades in 45 days, which makes it a little pointless to begin with. it will take years for my body to turn skeletal unless i am 1. buried in warm soil, 2. well watered, and 3. turned regularly. so while yes mushroom caskets are good for the soil, you could just sprinkle some fertilizer over me damn. i think some of these sites are using the same guilt trip but towards the eco-friendly folk. i appreciate the option and i get the desire to have something nice for our bodies to be paraded around in, but there are less expensive ways to do this. ultimately i would like to build my own box, but if i don’t get around to it before i die, just wrap me in a shroud like this and bury me casketless.

step three: someone has to dig the hole. (3.5 feet deep, to allow for best chance of rapid aerobic decay) bury me in the forest where some hungry little earthworms can have their way with me. pine valley probably. plant a willow tree over top, and some wildflowers too.

step four: in tomestone arizona there is a grave that reads: Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44. No Les. No more. and an 1800’s grave in my hometown of salt lake city for ‘lilly gray’ just says: Victim of the Beast 666, and no one knows why. possibly my favorite epitaph, bette davis, reads: She did it the hard way. as for my own, I go to seek a great perhaps, might just be the most beautiful phrase for that unknowable possibility of what comes next. they are famous last words attributed to 16th-century french writer françois rabelais and popularized by john green in his novel Looking for Alaska and i am just as obsessed with them now as i was when i read them at 16. or maybe i’ll quote annie dillard in her book The Writing Life, when she reminds us: how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

No Embalming Directive

To make it official for the government folk:

I direct that my body not be embalmed under any circumstances.

If temporary preservation is required due to timing or logistical needs, I request refrigeration only. I do not consent to chemical preservation, cosmetic embalming, or any invasive postmortem procedures.

It is my preference that close friends and family arrange for my burial as soon as reasonably possible after my death. If circumstances allow, I would like to be buried promptly.

This directive reflects both my environmental values and my personal wishes. I ask that those responsible for my final arrangements honor this request.

in conclusion

allocation of my animals, my assets, and my money will be discussed at length in a letter i’ve hidden between the pages of my favorite book. if you know you know. some kind of communal library out of all my books would be cool though. everyone could have fun overanalyzing all the words i’ve underlined in various books.

as for my journals and manuscripts and rough drafts: RELEASE THEM ALL. no i think bestie should probably read them first and decide what i’d be okay with sharing. proceed with caution.

“A place like this makes you want to live forever,” one of our guests once told me.

All manner of mischief happens here; people chase each other through our hedge maze and over our giant chess board. I was cheated on here, fell in love again here, and a short time ago, as legend has it, I officially aged out of the system and turned thirty.

I handled it well despite society’s unfounded obsession with early bloomers. Take for example, Forbes 30 under 30, which is I think, meant to show us peasant folk what the bright young elite of today are doing and induce awe at the riches they’ve accumulated so far. “In fact, 46 Under 30 honorees have gone on to become Forbes billionaires!” They brag unashamedly. “And now, in the midst of an AI revolution, they’re leading the charge. The new class is using machine learning to do everything…” The article goes on to say. Inspiring, I guess?

I’m being bratty. Some of the Thirty do genuinely excite me and deserve to have their work spotlighted, like Daria Balatsky, co-founder of Alga Biosciences, a company making “safe, scalable, cost-effective dietary supplements that reduce greenhouse gas emissions by making cows burp less.” Delightful! And former elementary school teacher Yasmin Barkett, who co-founded ROYO (Read On Your Own) in 2024, a website that “empowers teachers to personalize books in real time, letting students see themselves as avatars in stories.” I love it.

But then one of the Thirty was praised for raising $255 million to “sell AI agents that can handle customer service tasks for consumer companies…” So there can be even less shitty jobs for the rest of us in the 99% to fight over. I was also surprised to find a celebrity section (I guess I forgot I live in America). The subtitle: “Turning fame into a force for change.” Sounded exciting, but most of the celebrities were just praised for their heavy acting workload and/or abundance of lucrative brand partnerships.

“No matter what you do, you must also be a content creator,” 22-year-old Anna Cathcart says. “You're putting up a mini billboard any time you post something-- that's immediate marketing.”

I want to cry for Anna, thinking of myself at 22, and what it would’ve meant for me to perform an identity before forming one. (And don’t worry, they don’t give two farts about our concern or criticism because, in case you forgot, they’re future billionaires).

Success has become less about achievement and more about timing. Narratively, we are obsessed with prodigies and child stars and our framing of them makes success feel magical, which obscures other factors like privilege or pressure. We call it talent and ambition, but often, it is compliance shaped into something marketable. We already know many prodigies are highly trained from extremely young ages or are under intense familial or institutional pressure.

But it’s easy for critics to point out bad parents, generational wealth and predatory industries. The deeper, unfortunate truth is: entire systems are built to extract value from our youth. And it has only gotten more intense with social media, with children streaming and commodifying their entire adolescences. The younger they are when this happens, the more devastating the consequences and more likely it is they will fall into the same horrifying pattern: they rise to fame early, are punished for not knowing where to go next, disappear, and return to our awareness with some kind of paparazzi-fueled public unraveling.

We crown them with attention, virality and money. And then we watch them crack.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are hitting milestones much later in life than our parents did, according to a now famous 2021 Pew Research Study. Some of these milestones (like having children) may be better approached with time and intention, and their delay isn’t necessarily a sign of failure. (Of course we are still chastised by conservatives on the right, who warn of a declining birth rate while largely refusing to engage with the reasons behind it.) The study, overall, indicates an increasing instability and reminds us: culture spotlights the exception, not the norm. Yet we still expect people to peak early in a system where adulthood itself is delayed. The timeline is broken, but the expectations have stayed the same.

I personally have failed almost every writing dream I’ve ever dreamt for myself (finish a non-embarassing book by twenty-five, find an agent by twenty-eight and be published by thirty, ha). I am far too Alice-like to have found success so young, (i.e., wandering away to live in a van for three years, falling down the rabbit hole of trying to renovate a house alone, etc.) I needed those years of movement and unrest, of bathing in rivers and dozing off at laundromats. Because as I have aged, unwatched by a society at large (who would cheer on my failures and question my successes) my understanding of my self has strengthened, matured, and resolved. A natural productivity, unforced and unbidden, has emerged.

It is ironic how much better we get at prioritizing what’s important, focusing our energies, and managing our time, while (and maybe because) we increasingly having less of it.

Refuse the Clock: A Last Bit of Wisdom From Wonderland

It has become clear to me we are not afraid of failure — we are afraid of being late. At least I was. But success does not live in one singular achievement or one moment in time; it lives alongside it. In relationship with time. So let us resist the limiting (and very capitalistic) belief that we must grab at success while young (!) and instead embrace the wisdom gained from aging.

I am here to build a life (not just a career) around my art, so I will draw inspiration from the spinsters and the crones. And I mean those words with the most generous definition: Women who do not soften, but distill, their wisdom. Women who have outlived the need to be agreed with and fawned over. I am in awe of writers like la Genberg and Samantha Harvey, who live quiet lives perfecting their craft over decades. Their bio’s are short, their public appearances few, but their art — nothing short of transcendental.

When Alice first falls into Wonderland, Lewis Carroll writes her new reality with horrifying relatability. She stumbles through the disorienting landscape in the same dreamlike way we do when we’re on our phones… i.e., Scroll for ten minutes and somehow an hour is lost. We look up and rub our eyes and think, How did I get here? What did I gain? Usually the answer is ‘nothing’ or in the case of the hyper-productive who like A.I., ‘a capitalistic efficiency of the process which might entirely rob the artistic joy from said process.’

I turned thirty and I have fallen in love with time. In some cases this means I worry too much about losing it. It is why I run from Tiktoks, shorts, reels. And I think I can officially say short form content has not yet been fast enough to catch me. I love big ideas, long ideas, and I am traveling more competently through them. In the last year I have also turned off many of the podcasts or audiobooks I once had playing in the background, preferring to let my mind wander. I am better than I ever have been at sitting in stillness. Early in the morning, or after a day spent checking off work and household tasks, I walk in the yard with the dogs. I leave my phone behind. In the quiet my whole self comes rushing back at me. The part that wants to wear clown make up and organize a circus show for my friends, the part that wants to call my mom and talk about the wildflowers she’s planting, the part that wants to write about everything and trick people into reading it. The part that understands creating gets better with aging.

‘But Carly!’ you might cry. ‘Not everyone gets to live in Wonderland.’ Well, I say, I still have to work in Wonderland and working where you live can produce a strange sort of overstimulation. Thousands of guests pass through in a year. There is a constant whiplash between my desire to enjoy the gardens and live up to their beauty. It is both a place of escape and a place that needs constant tending. I often miss when I lived in my van, making $14 an hour tutoring English and sleeping along random Forest roads. I lived a life of simplicity before I knew what to do with it. At least I couldn’t afford to scroll (literally, couldn’t afford unlimited data). I think it is in our poorest situations when we should resist it the most.

I do consider myself lucky now but I am still proud.

Wonderland is full of time-obsessed characters, but time never behaves. Clocks exist, but they fail to organize experience. The White Rabbit is always rushing. For what exactly is never clear, but Alice sets her sights on him and chases him anyway. He can symbolize youth (something you will never catch since we only ever get older); he can symbolize what motivates us (money, success, the One Thing That Will Bring Us Happiness); he can symbolize anything you like really, particularly the things we chase. I like to think of him and all his impatience as a fallacy of the whole damn story, because success, and more importantly happiness, is one thing you can’t age out of catching.

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When Dr. Godwin Baxter fishes a deceased woman’s body from the depths of the river Thames, he decides not to resurrect her unborn infant child but use its brain to bring the woman herself back to life. Thus Bella Baxter is born. Described so aptly in the book as “the soul of an innocent, trusting, dependent child inside the opulent body of a radiantly lovely woman” (p 36). After learning walking, speech, and masturbation, curious Bella impulsively decides to elope with Baxters lawyer (Duncan Wedderburn), while still only possessing the mental acuity of a child.

“I need more past,” Bella says before she runs away. “On our boat up the Nile a fine lady travelled alone and someone told me she was a woman with a past, O how I envied her” (p 61). She also unashamedly details her sexual exploits with the rakish Wedderburn.

Few experiences are as universal—and as narratively uncomfortable—as the first time someone realizes their body can give them pleasure. Perhaps the film’s greatest advantage over its source text, is its ability to visually portray a childlike discovery of sexuality without sexualizing children. This aspect may explain why the film resonated strongly with many female viewers. Being young and unable to voice sexual curiosities is a unique horror of childhood; many children lack the language when they need it and/or a safe environment in which to question their experiences.

The central tension of the film begins here but ends somewhere else. Bella is portrayed as a character without social memory — approaching sexuality like a scientist approaching an experiment. Yet the world she inhabits is structured by power, experience, and knowledge that she does not yet possess. While the books final twist changes the frame of the story entirely, the film takes a different direction. Unfortunately, it stops short of developing any coinciding vulnerability of a curiosity it seeks to explore, particularly how curiosity without language or social knowledge can invite exploitation.

Bella without Social Memory

Bella begins her second life without the accumulated knowledge that most people inherit through childhood and socialization. She does not yet understand shame, reputation, social expectations, gender norms, or the cultural scripts surrounding sexuality. Because of this, Bella interacts with the world through pure curiosity, and Godwin Baxter encourages this. Before she elopes with Wedderburn, the film shows her discovering masturbation, and script writer Tony McNamara writes it comedically.

Many children encounter sexuality long before they possess the language to articulate their questions, and attempt often precedes understanding. Bella’s condition literalizes this developmental gap. She enters adulthood without the cultural understanding that helps shape sexual behavior. On her travels, Bella encounters a world that operates under confusing societal norms. The people around her understand power, manipulation, and consequence in ways she cannot yet grasp. In short, Bella lacks social memory, but the world does not.

This allows the film to stage a fascinating experiment: What happens when desire appears before instruction?

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Bella as the Scientist of Her Own Desires

People often start experimenting during adolescence (and Bella is very much cognitively still in adolescence), ideally in a safe environment and/or with peers their own age or with a similar experience level. When we experiment, we rarely arrive at definitive answers. Instead, we receive feedback. These feedbacks typically accumulate slowly throughout life, into a tentative hypotheses about what we want and who we are, which must eventually be translated into language. However, after ditching Wedderburn, Bella’s sexuality is explored at an exponential speed when she is employed as a sex worker in Paris.

While Bella embodies this process of discovery, experimentation alone does not produce liberation and sexual freedom is not simply the ability to impulsively act. Agency requires language, reflection, and the ability to contextualize experience. The purpose of experimentation is twofold: to discover what one enjoys or does not enjoy and to strengthen the ability to communicate those preferences.

Curiosity Without Language (The Real Vulnerability)

Bella’s curiosity is celebrated throughout the film, but curiosity without knowledge is a vulnerable state to inhabit for long. In real life, children initially lack the language to articulate their questions, the knowledge to recognize exploitation, and the power to refuse unwanted situations. They learn by accumulating small misreadings of the world—moments when they trusted the wrong person, laughed when they should have objected, later realized a touch was not quite right, experienced a sinking feeling of realizing too late that a joke was not meant kindly, etc. These are not failures so much as the rough drafts of self-knowledge, with takes a certain amount of bravery and time to safely explore. These qualities coexist uneasily: curiosity and fear, bravado and confusion. Childhood is not pure innocence nor fearless discovery, but a volatile mixture of both.

The film hints at this vulnerability but rarely confronts it directly. Instead, Bella is portrayed as remarkably resilient, confident, and unconcerned throughout her experiences. She is never ashamed. She is never afraid. She is never uncertain. After a while, the absence begins to expose a missing emotional reality, one that makes the portrayal feel psychologically incomplete. Children’s experiences—whether loving or violent—can shape them profoundly for the rest of their lives. Yet Bella appears largely untouched by the emotional consequences of her encounters.

The film suggests these negative emotions, particularly shame, are largely cultural construct. But it is not only cultural. Negative emotions serve important psychological functions. They allow people to reflect on their decisions, reassess their behavior, and exercise agency in future choices. Yet these moments rarely appear in the film. Even when violence erupts—such as when Wedderburn attempts to kill Bella’s friend Martha by throwing her overboard — Bella responds with laughter. Martha herself appears strangely unconcerned.

The effect is unsettling. Violence becomes something to laugh at rather than something capable of producing any damage. This emotional invincibility creates a fantasy version of curiosity that downplays the real risks faced by people navigating sexuality without guidance.

Real-World Parallel: Sue Lyon and the Ethics of Sexual Representation

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, a story of child sexual abuse is told from the perspective of the predator himself: the thirty-seven year old stepfather, Humbert Humbert. The carefully constructed narrative exposes the warped thinking of an abusive adult without requiring an actual child to embody that exploitation.

“In literature, no one gets hurt, because literature is not real,” Tom Bissel says in an essay collection on Nabokov’s work. “Yet film and television sort of are real when you’re talking about children being tasked with roles whose impact on their lives they are in no position to understand.”

When Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel into a 1962 film, fourteen-year-old actress Sue Lyon was cast as Lolita. The film aged the character up and presented her as a seductive “nymphet,” effectively transforming a story about abuse into a narrative that sexualized the young actress playing the role. Producer James B. Harris said in an interview, “…Lolita—who, we made sure when we cast her that she was a definite sex object, not something that could be interpreted as being perverted.”

Ultimately, Nabokov did not agree with the portrayal of his character Dolores (twelve years old in the book). “Not only is the portrayal of this poor child grotesquely exaggerated, but her physical appearance, her age, everything has been transformed by the illustrations in foreign publications,” he says. “Outside the maniacal gaze of Humbert there is no nymphet. Lolita the nymphet exists only through the obsession that destroys Humbert. Herein an essential aspect of a unique book that has been betrayed by a factitious popularity.”

Writer Final Girl Digital argues in her Youtube essay that you can’t ethically or morally portray Lolita into a film: “When translating this warped gaze onto screen using real people and most importantly using a real little girl,” she says, “the fetishized, fantastical image of Lolita the nymphet becomes real, thus perpetuating what it sought to criticize.”

It is no wonder Sue Lyon’s film career only lasted until 1980. Lyon stepped out of the spotlight completely, and little is known about her personal life since then. Rumors of a sexual relationship between her and Harris on set of Lolita circulated but were never proven (like Humbert Humbert, Harris was also a married man in his thirties, meanwhile she was not even old enough to watch Lolita in theaters when it came out). She married and divorced five times, had one child who she would later become estranged from, struggled with her mental health, and only made one brief public comment in 1996. She said:

The Novel’s Final Twist and The Films Simplification

At the end of both stories, Bella inherits Baxter’s wealth and lives comfortably. However the novel and film diverge from each other through their narrative framing. The novel reveals that Bella’s narrative was constructed through her husbands perspective, radically altering the meaning of the events described. Bella addresses readers in a letter at the end of the novel and disputes the entire Frankenstinian nature of the story. She suggests that her husband constructed the bizarre scientific backstory as a way of explaining—or containing—her independence and sexuality. Her eccentricities become easier to explain if she is imagined as possessing a “child brain.”

Bella dedicates herself to social reform and political activism. She spreads the inherited wealth through volunteer work and advocating for women’s rights, birth control, and sexual safety. She becomes a thoughtful and hardworking woman, and this transformation has a clear and logical path from her earlier experiences. She reclaims her story from that of her husbands (and ultimately my only gripe with the novel was that we didn’t get to see more from her perspective.)

At the end of the film however, she is drinking gin and enjoying her independence. (Strangely, Felicity, a reincarnated Bella 2.0, acts as their new servant.) The film retains Bella’s narrative centrality but transforms her into a kind of lavish “girl boss.” This shift weakens the earlier thematic groundwork. Bella’s curiosity never really leads to reflection or transformation beyond the unradical choice to reject most of the obviously toxic men around her (except, somehow Max — the student of and co-conspirator to the mad doctor who reanimated her.)

Bella marries Max in the book too but she explains she married Max out of convenience, thus making sense of why someone as independent and intelligent as her could end up with someone who was complicit in her entrapment. The novel thus was able to successfully explore how male narratives shape women’s stories. When the film removed this framing device, it shifted the thematic terrain: By focusing on Bella’s interiority and rapid development, it became uniquely suited to explore the effects this experiment had on her psyche. But Bella’s liberation resembles a version of empowerment defined by adopting traditionally masculine behaviors without questioning the structures behind them.

This imitation problem is echoed in an observation made by Rainer Maria Rilke in his 1904 letter to a young Franz Kappus. Rilke is speaking on the necessary and inevitable breakdown of rigid gender roles when he says:

“The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex.”

Bella’s journey sometimes felt trapped within this transitional stage. Rather than developing a fully articulated identity, she simply inherits the habits and goals traditionally reserved for generationally wealthy men. Drinking, sex, and accumulating wealth.

Bella’s story offered a fascinating opportunity to explore sexual curiosity and the cultural frameworks that normally shape and contort it. The films narrative shift makes it uniquely capable of exploring the vulnerability, and in some cases, privilege of taking risks. Yet the film ultimately chooses shallow, fast-tracked celebration over deeper examination: Fear, shame, and vulnerability largely disappear. What remains is a fantasy of liberation that sidesteps the deeper emotional realities of learning sexuality in a world structured by power.

The girl: a random tagalong to my twenty-eighth birthday party.

The book: ethically questionable and laughably unrealistic.

The result of the experiment... Still figuring it out, I suppose.

I call it an experiment because that’s exactly what it was. I fell into it accidentally, but not in the way often portrayed in literature and cinema.

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Misconception #1 : The affair-to-polyamory pipeline

In Miranda July’s novel All Fours, the protagonist leaves her husband and child to embark on a cross-country work trip, but ends up staying in a nearby motel instead. Over the course of the novel, she lies about her whereabouts, develops an obsession with a random rental car associate, and drops thousands of dollars renovating the motel room. Eventually, she cheats on her husband with an older woman, which results in the protagonist and her husband entering into a vaguely open relationship. After a year or two, the couple divorces but remain friends.

Stories framed as being about polyamory often seem to center around bored, upper-class couples and their very privileged mid-life crisis. I understand why affair stories have an audience, and that some couples have a misplaced desire to attempt an open relationship after infidelity. But successful polyamorous relationships rely on trust and honesty as much as, if not more than, a monogamous one.

In a monogamous relationship, there are often certain avoided topics. For example, you may not be allowed to admit you find your sister-in-law attractive. Or your partner is uncomfortable with you bringing up past sexual encounters or framing them too positively. Or maybe the topic of masturbation is avoided altogether. In polyamorous communities, dishonesty around these subjects is laughable.

I thought All Fours was a decent book. But the affair-to-polyamory pipeline is a tired cliché, and I didn’t find it personally relatable. Cheating is not polyamory. Throwing spaghetti at a wall to see what can save a failing marriage is not polyamory.

Here’s how it happened for me

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In high school I was sporty, and at various times, quite handy. I hung every set of curtains in my best friend’s house (but there is also a half-built cat tower in her laundry room). I experienced a coming-of-age depression, bought a motorcycle, learned guitar (then later sold the motorcycle and left a note book full of unfinished song lyrics in my closet). Eventually I went to college, and began working in academia. I’ve read hundreds of books (and set down dozens of others). Mom and I both have dreams of living off-grid, so I got into canning and horticulture (now the scraps of a very large garden bed are rotting in my parents backyard).

I am most ashamed of this last one.

My blessing and my curse is I am an accomplished romanticizer. Consequently, I have quit a lot of hobbies I was initially obsessed with. There is a natural course-correction that takes place as we age, a revising and a sharpening. But in a culture that worships grit, I experienced several conflicting effects before I could name or appreciate them. I once wrote in my journal that I was doomed to live a bunch of little lives, and nothing represents this fear better than my graveyard of abandoned projects.

Exhibit A: Gardening

What pulled me in: Post break-up blues and a whole lot of extra time on my hands. Living in a city for one month too many. Jess’s garden from Roots and Refuge.

The fantasy: Tunnels of green, endless cherry tomatoes, dirty feet, dirty hands, unbrushed hair, milkmaid dresses, tangled flowers, open space.

The reality: I purchased an unrealistic number of seed packets and grew two pepper plants and two tomato plants on my deck. I made salsa all summer long. After accounting for soil and fertilizer, I probably spent about $30 dollars a jar.

Why it was abandoned: I moved into a van and had no porch or land to grow from. (+ I almost cut my finger off building aforementioned garden beds for mom. Mom kindly let me off the hook.)

What I’ll keep from it: All the seed packets, greenhouse plans and garden layouts. A disdain for grocery store produce. A resigned understanding this is a retirement vision, to be picked up if I can ever afford an acre or two of my own.

Exhibit B: Bouldering

What pulled me in: A big, red rock, stretched across forty feet of St. George’s Pioneer Parkway, and a welcoming community of fellow dirt-bags.

The fantasy: Traveling from town to town, exploring places through their boulders. My dog, Scout, in my passenger seat and endless road in my rearview mirror.

The reality: My obsession at its peak coincided with my time living in a van. I’d stop in Salt Lake when the weather was nice and pay for a temporary membership at a climbing gym called The Front. I worked during the day inside their cafe, climbed in the evening with friends, then used the gym shower and parked my van on the street outside to sleep. My maps even began to confuse The Front as “Home.” For a few months at a time, it was.

Why it was abandoned: Moved out of the van. No nearby gym. A shower at home. Trips to the desert take all day.

What I’ll keep from it: A pair of overly expensive, well-worn climbing shoes and a chalk bag. The grip strength of a young man. An unhealthy fondness of heights, and a proclivity toward mapping the climbable routes of any passing boulder, tree, or structure.

Exhibit C: Lyra & Silks

What pulled me in: Videos of a spinning acrobat queen named Aisling and an ungodly amount of spite after I dumped my ex-boyfriend for cheating.

The fantasy: I finally learn to do the splits and maybe join the circus. Feathers, beads, strange apparitions. I get wrapped up in a carnival, murder mystery.

The reality: I hate stretching but I have strength, and spinning is fun. I train obsessively for a few months, pull off a few cool moves, and injure my ribs in a reckless body roll. Don’t learn the splits. I now get on less frequently now, despite promising everyone a thirtieth birthday show.

Why it will likely be abandoned: I may no longer have access to twelve-foot, structurally sound, ceiling beams like I do now. I will let myself procrastinate almost any type of physical workout if the alternative is reading a book or journaling. Because these are “Good For My Brain.”

What I’ll keep from it: $250 bucks in paid performances and a birthday routine of unknown quality. A whole lot of sparkly outfits and three solid steel hoops. A new understanding of my own gracefulness.

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In Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, she likens overwhelm of choice to the plucking of a good fig. “I wanted each and every one of them,” the narrator, Esther, says, “but choosing one meant losing all the rest.” So she stands in front of the tree, “starving to death,” and watches each fig fall to her feet and dry up around her. I am not like Esther, but I am close. The fruit around me may be dried, but there is also be a bite or two taken from each one.

Quitting isn’t the problem – not starting at all is far worse. Esther was paralyzed at the thought of all the lives she could not lead, and my only solution to this cognitive gridlock has been to eat immediately, ravenously, and without loyalty. Quitting, so long as you don’t leave someone else holding the consequences, is one of the most under-rated creative practices.

Here’s why.

1. You See What’s Left

Not noted above is my winter fling with snowboarding (abandoned after two concussions due to fear of early onset dementia) and an undying fantasy of riding everywhere on horseback (another retirement dream). I get random bursts of obsession with film photography, DIY, and interior design, and about once a year I resolve to sew a whole new wardrobe using only second-hand materials. I get my ass handed to me in pickleball by my parents every holiday and pull out my half-inflated rugby ball when old teammates come around. There are several jars of frozen bugs in my freezer, waiting to be correctly preserved…

Through it all, some have remained constant.

In my thirty years, there have been hobbies that came and went, but more importantly were the ones that returned. Whether due to logistical reasons or emotional ones, I have always been pulled back to writing and community based activities.

Writing, and all its forms — researching, documenting, collecting, is the only way I know how to successfully combine all my fields of interest into one cohesive, creative practice. It is also accessible and flexible. Writing can be crammed into thirty minutes or it can be obsessively indulged in. Writing can be solitary or it can be communal. All I need is pen and paper and something to wonder about.

2. You Become More Human

ChatGPT can tell you that a bouldering route is called a Project, and it can tell you how to interpret the rating system to determine the difficulty. But it can’t tell you how half of “climbing” is actually just sitting on your crash pads with fellow dirt bags, laughing and drawing straws to see who has to make the two-hour car ride back with Jake’s sweaty, old climbing shoes. (We tied them to the roof-rack).

How else can we confidently say a gardener always knows the weather and dirt never leaves from under her fingernails? Only a human could tell you that working in an upscale, members-only club with very few patrons is ten thousand times less interesting than working in a dive bar kept busy by over-sharing drunks.

In conclusion

There are a number of reasons we might stay inside a life of expired curiosity: fear of change, others expectations of us, or even our own initial investment. Endurance is often praised as virtue, even when attention has already moved on.

But experience doesn’t need mastery to be useful. Not every departure needs a reason. And essays don’t have to be finished in order to

Hey! Look over here!

Never before has our attention been so fiercely fought-over, which unironically reveals its value. And nowhere do we give attention up more thoughtlessly than in the tiniest slices of our lives — in the waiting rooms and elevators, in grocery store lines and drive-throughs, when the urge to look away from the world and down to our phone screens is the strongest. There are many ways to combat this. In one famous anecdote, Kurt Vonnegut insists on walking to the store to buy an envelope instead of, as his wife suggests, ordering a thousand of them to be delivered to their house. He explains the rituals he does on this walk and the people he sees, ending with “…we’re here on Earth to fart around.” And, of course, the computers will do us out of that.

I regularly experience a similar, hard-to-pin-down feeling of losing something vital, so in mid-2024, I bought a tiny notebook titled FIELD NOTES and stuffed it into my purse. On the first page, I transcribed a quote from Annie Dillard: “How you spend your days is… how you spend your life.” I didn’t mean for this quote to forecast, over a year later, my 2026 New Years Resolution: to write down one observation a day, for the whole year.

Classes and Categories -

When I first got the notebook in 2024, I intended to pull it out when I was bored at social functions instead of scrolling on my phone. One of my first entries is a disorganized tangle of overwrought sentences I tried to force into some kind of poem.

The entries got a little more interesting after I took the notebook with me to a soccer match I had an obligation to attend. To combat my boredom, I watched the match yes, but I also watched the players, the families, the coaches. I wrote: There’s always that one player on the sidelines, yelling at his teammates as if they can see the game from his perspective. Is he benched so often he’s forgotten you can hear absolutely nothing but the refs whistle when the adrenaline is roaring in your ears? It was a simple (and sassy) observation, but it felt revolutionary. It was more than a description of the scene, it reframed the scene entirely. It is a skill I’m just beginning to recognize, but exists in great writing everywhere.

In an interview with NEWSNIGHT, Donna Tartt likened jotting observations down in her little traveling notebook as the writer’s version of an artist sketching in a sidewalk cafe. “If you need a character, all you have to do is look up,” she said. And Joan Didion wrote in her essay on keeping a notebook, “Some morning when the world seems drained of wonder … On that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon…”

Looking back at my entries, I’ve discovered the forms my observations fall into, and how each form has distinct benefits. Every entry sits under the umbrella of Might One Day End Up In A Novel. But below that, there are two classes, non-fiction and fiction, for whether the observation is drawn directly from real life, or simply inspired by it. In each class, there are five main categories; Dialogue, Humor, Description, Commentary, and Misc.

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Dialogue -

I tend to write down a lot of dialogue — it is what I’m most drawn to recording. One of my favorite lines came from a guest who was visiting the whimsical garden estate I work at. He remarked and I recorded: “A place like this makes you want to live forever.” A lot of my loved ones appear in this category. When Dylan forgets things, he says he didn’t forget, I wrote. He says, “They are just misplaced memories. I have a crack in my brain where they blow out.”

I, like many writers, have warned those around me that uncopyrighted phrases may be stolen and repurposed. But a lot of the dialogue I’ve written in my Field Notes has come unbidden into my mind while staring off into the middle-distance.“The world loves me right now,” one entry reads, and I can’t remember if it was supposed to be funny or poignant, or maybe both. Either way, noting the way real people speak and isolating the impactful lines sharpens my own ability to write compelling dialogue.

Humor -

I also tend to write down the things that make me laugh. Because of this, entire sections of my Field Notes essentially became a love letter to the people I admire most in my life. A wine-drunk night in a hot tub with my best friend postmarked our dark humor.

Lydia: What would we do if one of us was dating an actual psychopath?

Me: I don’t think we’d ever get that far apart in logic.

Lydia: You know what I’d do first?

Me: Poison him?

Lydia: No.

Me: Entrap him in infidelity?

Lydia: Well yes, but not with me, that’s too obvious.

Me: Go for it.

And Dylan (my partner) shows up on almost every page. On one of our many camping trips, I stumbled away from the campfire to scribble.

Description -

I am not great at writing compelling description in my novels. With my Field Notes in hand however, I started noticing the details of craftsmanship and the difference in textures as I searched for something to fill in the lines. White swan fence, I wrote on a walk through San Diego’s Mission Hills neighborhood. Arched, metal necks. And as I sat in a seaside café the next morning: No trace of the sun except for sandy ocean hillsides that glow from its reflections. I put myself in places I want to get better at describing. Blurry sunset, smudged across the sky. Mountains, brushed with light. I wrote during a drive through the desert with the dogs. Jack and Scout, running through the sagebrush and sand.

“They’re gonna get rattlesnook,” Dylan says.

Sometimes the descriptions are childishly simple, little details that could belong in any book. Character who has to crawl in through her trunk because both her cars front doors are broken, I wrote, after overhearing a friend fondly recalling her first vehicle. Some advice I heard once: Look for the stories people repeat.

Commentary -

In my opinion, commentary holds the most advanced form of observation because an added layer of analysis is written in. It takes more time. No surprise I have the least amount of entries in this category, as I am someone who tries not to form opinion too quickly. An example I like more than my grumpy critique of the soccer player is one I wrote during the New Jersey drone freak-out of late 2024. I titled it: My Hot Take on the Drones, and below it wrote: I am pro anything that gets us looking up into the night sky. It doesn’t need to be revolutionary, but it should say something other than what is tangibly happening. Besides behavior and news, commentary can be around cultural issues, moral dilemmas, the state of the world… etc.

At the dog park last summer, I wrote: Scout looks for me in the crowd after she runs in many circles. When she spots me, she is immediately overjoyed. It is a visceral relief, like at any moment she might be abandoned, and when I am still here, when I choose her again, as I do every time, it is no less a miracle. Sometimes the entries are quite personal. Last fall while sitting on the porch with Scout, my hair pulled up in a two-day bun, my reminder went off to write something down. I thought for awhile, then scribbled what felt most true in that moment. Thank god for the days I do not have to be observed.

Misc -

I am in no way saying these strings of thought are good writing (let alone grammatically correct). Only they capture a small brush stroke of reality and my space in the world at any given moment. They are mostly ordinary - attempts to romanticize the mundane. Sometimes all I can say about a day is I enjoyed the warm chai, I wrote last month. They may be random phrases. Black Market Wisdom Teeth removal. Or I will write down words I liked: Behooves, Consolation Prize, Ripe. And lots of memories. Don’t forget [Dylan] grumbling about the Christmas beer [he ordered] and how it wasn’t very festive. “Can I get a candy cane or something?” He said.

In conclusion -

Mary Oliver suggests in her poem Yes! No!, that paying attention is “— our endless and proper work.” This year, I am framing it as an intentional and nurturing practice to keep my radar tuned to the small and (extra)ordinary. I plan to re-read the entries often. (As a side benefit, I’d like to describe these aspects of my days vividly enough to bring me back to them, so I quit losing so many.) You never know what you’ll catch when you’re holding the net out. Today, while sitting in my office to write this essay, I jotted the note: Wind is pushing the trees around today. Shadows dart back and forth across the window pane.

Our brain snags on things every day. Writing them down cements their importance and increases the likelihood we’ll remember them. Phones can work in a pinch, but studies strongly suggest handwriting better aids in preserving memory. Whether by the act of lingering on the sentiment a second longer, or by being more connected to the shape of each letter, the exercise is undeniably effective. It sharpens the way we look at the world and increases our ability to call back on details during conversation or in creation.

Ultimately, I am just another person asking for everyone to put their phones down and look up. But I am asking for more than that too. Engage in socially acceptable snooping and watch strangers in line at the grocery store. Who looks happy? Who looks angry? What are they buying? Look for meaning in peoples actions the way you did with your first crush. Assign generous interpretations. Sift through the world as though it is hiding great treasure from you.

It probably is.

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