The Sunday Letter, #7: Leaps

Good morning, friends. Today marks the official start of my first week of life as a full-time writer. A whole year of this lies ahead. I wrapped up everything with FOLD last week: finished training my replacement, had our last staff meeting, felt the little twists in my gut as we all sat around on that last virtual call. On Friday morning I did the few remaining tasks I had left on my to-do list, and then I took the FOLD email off of my inbox and disconnected from our files. The rest of that afternoon felt a little like standing on the edge of a precipice, looking down into the clouds and wondering where the ground might be. Readying myself for the leap. And then I looked at that precipice for long enough and the clouds parted enough to show what came next: one stair, carved into the mountainside, one step forward, down—or up!—into the journey.

E.L. Doctorow once said, “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” This, I think, is a little bit of what that feels like—a precipice now, sure, an unknown stretch of inky dark, but the steps are coming. The way down (or up!) the mountain will come clear soon enough.

The irony of the metaphor and imagery is intense, because of course you’d never catch me going up—or down—a staircase like this in a million years.

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I’m feeling a bit gobsmacked, to be honest. Even though, as I talked about last week, I’ve known that this time was coming for a while, it still feels unreal. My whole life—my whole, entire life—I’ve carried this dream. The dream of waking up in the morning and having nothing to do during the day but write. It’s always been a dream tempered by reality—writing is nice, but how are you going to survive, how will you put food on the table, how will you pay for everything that needs paying with writing—you won’t!—and that’s why you need to have a day job. Writing was always the thing that got slotted into the after-moments. The time that was wrestled out of work and obligation and other necessary things.

Part of this was definitely my doing—it’s hard for me to justify writing as a thing that should be done when there are other, ostensibly more important tasks on the agenda. It’s been very easy for me to talk myself out of writing, to view writing as a luxury that I only deserve to do once everything else has been done first. My time at writing retreats has helped to re-orient that thinking somewhat—there’s nothing like walking into your own room at Banff or your own little writing cabin on the West Coast to help you understand that yes, this space is here for you, to do exactly this—but in my regular life it’s been hard. And it doesn’t help that the older I get, the more fatigued I become, so that finishing off the day’s work at 4 or 5 pm really doesn’t leave much else in the way of spoons to work on one’s own stuff.

And now, this. A whole year. A whole year for writing. A year that took shape in my mind over 365 days ago. A request put out into the universe and now somehow the universe has lobbed it back in all of the ways I could dream.

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In the photo The Pale Blue Dot, seen above, the planet Earth is the tiny, miniscule blue dot suspended in the rightmost ray of light. The photo was taken by the Voyager space probe on February 14, 1990, and shows Earth as it appears from the distance of 6 billion kiometres away. Carl Sagan, who was the one to suggest that Voyager take a picture like this before its cameras were powered down, had this to say about it:

“That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

I think about The Pale Blue Dot a lot these days. As I get older I find that my ambitions, such as they were, are softening. Or maybe they’re not softening so much as they are returning back to their starting point, this want and need to be a writer, to play with stories and create things that make people stop and think or throw books across the room. This slowly-dawning realization that this is all I want to do, to play with this aggregate of our joy and suffering, to consider my own story in the midst of the other billions of stories that have made up this one mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. This is all we have. Our time—we don’t get to spend it anywhere else but here. And so, if you can find a way to do what you love, to make that work even if only temporarily, why not? Why not take that leap, or that first hesitant step down the impossible flight of stairs, and see where it leads?

I feel so lucky. It is such a huge privilege to get to do this, and I am so thankful to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, both of whom have made this coming year possible. I’m also acutely aware that a great deal of privilege makes this possible. There are no children to look after, there are no (at the moment, anyway) large medical bills to pay, or otherwise significant costs that would make a lean year of writing life an absolute no-go. I am deeply grateful for all of it.

And I’m grateful to my past Amandas—the Amanda of over a year ago, the Amanda who was tired and sad and begininng to listen to that voice inside that said something needed to change. The Amanda of a decade before that, who’d just released her first book into the world and was sure that stardom—and not, as it happened, a decade of depression and struggle and beauty and laughter and sadness and grief—awaited. The Amanda of a few years before that, who wrote her first novel from sunup to sundown on Saturdays, the only day of the week that she wasn’t working. The Amanda before that, who sat dutifully in all of those classes about tense and action and dialogue.

The Amanda before that, long years before, who wrote I want to be an author in her kindergarten yearbook.

Sometimes the orbits that you take toss you out into the universe in all kinds of unexpected ways. And then, sometimes, those orbits bring you right back to where you started and you begin again. Just differently.

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And so, my friends, here we are. Some of you will have noticed that I have turned on paid subscriptions to Notes From A Small Planet. I am doing this as a way to see if there can, indeed, be a way forward with this subscriber model business. But don’t worry—The Sunday Letter will always be free.

Every Sunday for this upcoming year, I’ll be sending a Sunday Letter about writing life, about the projects I’m workng on, about the messy business of moving through grief and life and joy and love. I’ll tell you about my adventures in Scotland (not so long now, eep!) and share more thoughts as I move through this year of freelance life. This letter, as I’ve said, will always be free.

If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, you’ll get access to Drafts & Glimmers, a new supplement to The Sunday Letter. Starting on my birthday, next Sunday July 23, I’ll be sending out brief notes throughout the week about moments of delight that I’ve encountered in a day. It’s a mash-up of Ross Gay’s daily delight practice and the concept of the same name in therapy, coined by Deb Dana. Glimmers are moments of calm and joy, or safety and connection, that remind us we’re all connected to and a part of this planet. Our lovely pale blue dot hung suspended in the universe. Moments of joy throughout the day.

I’ll be sharing regular glimmers of mine throughout the week, and sharing them with you will help to keep me accountable to the practice!

And finally, Drafts. As a paid subscriber you’ll get access to drafts of new work that I am beavering away on—including soon-to-be-edited excerpts from Wild Life, my new novel that’s due out in spring 2025. I’ll share these excerpts on average once a month.

Thank you for being here and sharing this space with me, and reading along as this new adventure opens. I can’t wait to take that next step into it, and see what the future holds.