Hello Loves,
Last Saturday, Andy and I drove back out to Rockford, Illinois, a place we’ve been going a lot this year of the rehab of the knee, in this time of great, global sorrow, to go hiking in what has become one of my favorite bits of land in all of this great state—Howard Coleman Hall Creek Preserve.
Howard Coleman Hall Creek isn’t anything like what I picture when someone says the name Rockford, Illinois. Rockford is a mystery to most of us in Chicago, maligned the way so many places downstate or upstate from a metropolis are. I grew up in a place like that. Western Mass has a tone when it is said by Bostonians, Pittsfield, Massachusetts does too. So, I have a soft spot for the overlooked, ex-industrial places that are pulled into an uneasy orbit with shining cities. I heard a comedian once refer to Rockford as an abandoned abandoned factory factory. I think about that every time we drive in to its de-industrialized, dis-invested borders. I think about how Bell Bowl Prairie was once there, sacrificed on the altar of Amazon’s airport fulfillment hub and the jobs that came with it.
But outside the city, and in the borderlands of Ogle and Winnebago counties, are some of the most spectacular landscapes I’ve walked in northern and western Illinois. Howard Coleman Hall Creek being a jewel among them.
It is 350 acres of prairie, high quality (meaning very clean and full of biodiversity) stream, valley, oak savanna, and woodlands, bordered by corn fields and farmland and dairies and horse farms. It borders several other natural areas protected by county agencies and nonprofits, and so the expansive feeling of being able to disappear into endless obscure trail connections in amongst the marked trail system is profound. It is rare in this part of the world to have nature so protected that you could end up lost in its embrace.
I have craved going back to this place all year. There are enough trails that we can go and walk a different route every time, each of them gently returning us to the creek and its sounds, allowing us to cross, to bask in birdsong, to remember that Aldo Leopold did survey work there in his early career, to feel held and cradled by the gentleness of the land. We’ve gone back four times since April, a rarity in our hiking habits, and I would go back every weekend if I could, learning the secrets of the place, dreaming of revealing them to friends.
Walking Howard Coleman Hall Creek I imagine the people I would bring to the trail. I walk it visualizing standing in the spring meadow with Amanda, who surely has better binoculars than I do, who would tell me the birds we were seeing just because she knew them. I imagine walking with Lindsey and her husband and son. I imagine sitting at the picnic table at the top of the bluff, looking down at what Andy and I have taken to calling The Valley of the Trees and eating a cheese sandwich with Robin and telling stories about bears and Aldo Leopold and oak trees. It is lovely to imagine sharing the quiet emptiness and secrecy of the place with someone new.
One weird thing about being a writer is how much of your inner life is a profound secret from everyone around you. You spend your days, if you are very lucky, inhabiting the secret world of the book. You are there, inside language, narrative, story—working, working, working where no one can see you. Most of us work that way, often for years and years.
As the work unfolds, you share it more and more. You publish an essay or excerpt here or there, you bring the book to a writing group or trusted readers, you stand up in strange venues and read bits of it aloud to strangers. But the whole thing is still, largely, a space in your own mind that you hold, and a story you revisit and manipulate until it is done. Then, finally, the publishing dance of the seven veils begins. Agent first, then editors, then fact checkers and copy editors, then marketing staff and blurbers, if you are lucky reviewers and other writers and finally, finally, readers, or maybe just a chorus of crickets.
Knowing your book as it emerges is like knowing a place, like knowing Howard Coleman Hall Creek. You traverse the same place again and again. You learn every single trail and desire path, so you know the map, and somehow, also know the territory. You know it in lots of weathers, and under changing circumstances, you know how to talk about it, how to live into it, how to describe and parse and guide other people through it. You hold the place, and you hold them, and hope, just hope that they want to see that place alongside you.
I’ve gotten to share my writing with a lot of new people since this time last year. But I’ve also had to keep a lot of secrets about my work. Some of those have been very good secrets, about sales or accolades or big news. Some of them have been the intimate kind, secrets of what you’ll find inside the books I’ve been making for you.
When I broke my knee, just over thirteen months ago, I began what I have taken to calling the World’s Shittiest Writing Residency ™. I became a head in a jar, trapped in bed, unable to move my patella even a quarter of an inch, for more than four months. I could not go down the stairs to the place where the shower and kitchen are located, and my world became my big bed, the back door that looked out at the neighborhood, the blankets, the cats, and my computer, which gave me a way out of the narrow confines of my daily life and into the secret worlds I’d already made.
I rewrote both my books then. As I waited for the sale and then the announcement of the sale, and then the editorial passes for my memoir, The Mourner’s Bestiary, I worked on a redraft of my novel, The Weight of All the Water in the World. These two books have been dancing around in my head together in one way or another for a decade, and so handing off one dance partner for another felt seamless. They are separate, but also very much linked, about which more later as I try to prepare for their launches so close together.
I rewrote the novel, I handed it to editors, I sold the memoir, my editor handed it back to me, I rewrote the memoir, I handed it back to her, I had notes from the novel editor, I edited, I handed it off to be sold—every day, writing, imagining worlds, quiet and solitary, cats at my feet, while my leg healed and bowls of soup were delivered to me and I learned how to bathe in the upstairs sink and I learned how to walk again.
And here we are. And now the silence is about to lift in so many ways. The novel is edited and going out for blurbs. The memoir is at a crucial point where the last and most important work is being completed so it can be its very best, very highest, self.
And here I am, standing at the top of the trail, waiting to gather friends to shepherd you down into the place I’ve been making, mapping, inhabiting.
Look, I’ll tell you, this is the best view of the stream. There, that trail used to be a road. Look, that valley is being reborn as a prairie. See how they’ve restored the oak savanna.
We’ll listen for birds together. You’ll spot a northern flicker, and I’ll hear a Baltimore oriole, and then we’ll catch something out of the corner of our eyes, and we’ll miss it, but maybe it was a bluebird.
I’ll write soon.
Love,
Eiren
P.S. A note on subscriptions.
I like my tiny, cozy territory here on Substack. You know I don’t write very consistently, or even often. I’m trying to step back from the hustle. The readership I have here is intimate, and most of you open what I send you, resulting in a read-rate that is pretty enviable. We are small but mighty.
I was talking with a friend recently about that, about the slow burn and the small pool of people who seem to be kind and quiet in the way I hope to be in the world of self-promotion that is attached to making art in the US. I like the slow burn. I like the sense of abundance. I like the faith that the work will find who needs to read it. I like the space it gives me.
Still, a few readers have made pledges to pay for this work if I made a subscription option, and I think I’ll take them up on it.
I’m going to allow the option for you to subscribe. But—and this is the important bit—I’m not going to paywall anything.
I will write and anyone can read and if you want to send some monetary gratitude my way, I will graciously accept it, or try to, but I won’t keep work from anyone who can’t afford to chip in. It was so important when I was poor, ever so recently, that I could read what mattered to me. And while my books can be purchased when they exist (here’s my plea to get ready to pre-order as soon as I have links), you could also borrow them from the library, or ask librarians to buy them. I want this writing to work the same way.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need. I have the ability to write you, however inconsistently, and you decide if you have the ability to thank me with cash. You’ll never have to wonder what you’d get as a subscriber; you already have it all.