You’re reading this on Sunday, which means I have successfully submitted my hybrid memoir manuscript to the Autofocus’ open submission call. 49k words and 178 pages later, it’s done. The last month has been a whirlwind of diving back into this project that I started and abandoned last summer, enmeshing myself again in a period of life on which I’ve closed the door. It’s been an emotionally taxing as well as cathartic experience, but overall a necessary one. I’m proud of myself for having articulated those complicated emotions and collected it all into a somewhat coherent story. If nothing else, it feels great to have completed a writing project. It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I could say I’ve done that.

Now that this submission is out of my hands, my spring semester classes are finished, and school is out in four weeks, I’m looking forward to the freedom to play around creatively in the next few months. I have a couple story ideas floating around that I might grab onto, but I also would like to start journaling more. I used to be an avid daily journaler and in the last year or so have fallen out of the habit. My past journals were an indispensable resource in writing my memoir, and while I don’t plan on writing another any time soon, I want to get back into the practice of keeping a record, of collecting my bouts of free thought, of brain-dumping. I want to write with my hands again. Plus, after school ends in June, I want to see how long I can go without opening my laptop.

Recommended Reading

Sky Daddy by Kate Folk

What a delightfully weird and unexpectedly heartfelt novel. I read Kate Folk’s incredible collection Out There a few years ago and was floored by the imagination within those stories. I don’t think I’ve stopped thinking about “Moist House” (which is also in the running for greatest title of all time). The difference between Out There and her new novel Sky Daddy isn’t the creativity or oddity, because they both have that in spades. It isn’t the ability to unexpectedly devastate you, which is also true of both books. It isn’t the incredibly precise and punk-band-name-worthy titles. What sets these two apart (not in terms of quality — they both fucking rock) is awareness. In Out There, the characters and the situations they are in are undoubtedly weirdly, nearly otherworldly, but it is accepted. It’s part of a shared and accepted reality that makes some of these stories closer to magic realism than fiction. However, in Sky Daddy, the protagonist knows how absurd her behavior is, to the point that her deep shame causes her to live a double life in order to hide the extent of her strange desires. There’s no breakdown of the wall between the story’s world and our own. It is the wall, in fact, that creates the entire tension of this novel.

In brief, Sky Daddy is about Linda, a thirty-something woman who is sexually attracted and overwhelmingly obsessed with planes, convinced that she is destined to “marry” her soulmate plane, N92823, in a fiery crash that will destroy them both. Yet, she knows that this is unacceptable behavior in the context of the real world. She is aware that she must hide this attraction, or at least mask it as a desire for something more innocuous. At a Vision Board Brunch with her co-worker, Karina, and a group of stuffy, judgmental women, she masks her intention to marry N92823 as a dream of marrying a pilot. However, as she begins to believe that the universe is reading her vision board requests literally and thus incorrectly, her carefully constructed double-life begins to fall apart. The walls between the world she desires, in which sexual attraction to planes is legitimized, and the world in which she lives becomes shot through with holes that allow her secrets to leak through. The ensuing chaos gives us, as well as the other characters, glimpses into the various rituals associated with her plane obsession and the ways in which it is chipping away at her.

I would argue that this novel is low-key about queerness, and in a broader sense, how the world still shames women for possessing desire. The latter especially becomes clear in Linda’s relationship with Dave, which casts his flailing and promiscuity in an entirely different light than Linda’s. And while Linda’s desires can be viewed as straight as far as she considers planes to be male in gender, her sexual orientation is anything but heteronormative. Her attraction, which in itself hurts or affects no one else, is fully “other” within the contexts of Linda’s environment and the people she surrounds herself with, to the point that she harbors immense shame about it, that its existence is her most deeply held secret. The fact that she has to mask her true attractions as something more acceptable is absolutely queer-coded.

While this novel is a book about self-acceptance, sex, and grief, I think it is most effectively a story of friendship. The trajectory of the relationship between Linda and Karina is fascinating to witness. The character development of both women, separately and together, is genuine and unexpected as the power dynamic between them naturally ebbs and flows throughout the story. The final scene in the airport, where Karina’s acceptance of Linda comes full circle and Linda’s appreciation for her friend’s tender heart is realized, is sweet, gentle, and balanced and shows what female friendship at its best can look like. I feel like toxic female friendship has had its moment in the spotlight — it’s time to let that trend die once and for all.

Completely Unqualified Opinions

Let me preface — I know dick about fashion. Bare minimum about current celebrities. But I can appreciate the art of the whole to-do, and the fact that it's a fundraiser for the arts allows me to excuse the whole eat-the-rich aspect of it. Plus it's just a low-stakes, delightful thing to semi-debate about and follow in real-time online. So here are my completely unqualified picks for best dressed of the night, which have nothing to do with the outfits’ stories or adherence to the theme, but purely just what I think looks cool:

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Prompt

Two parts to this one:

1. Choose one of the “miniscule moments” from the list below or come up with one of your own. Describe this snapshot in agonizing detail. Overanalyze. Tell me about every crack in the coffee cup, the exact shape of the freckle, the movement of the garbage as the wind blows, etc. Don’t let anything happen yet. Just write about what you are seeing.

   1. something caught in someone’s hair

   2. an inconspicuous freckle

   3. a hair out of place

   4. a shoe untied

   5. the gas cap left open

   6. the cup of cold coffee

   7. a piece of garbage caught in a fence

2. Now let some action enter by writing around this thing. What has happened before to allow it to be in this state? What is currently happening? What will happen if the state of this thing is or is not altered in some way?

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Writing Update

I covered my update above so here is a poem from the manuscript. I wrote this during one of the first days of summer break last year when the world felt perfect:

The Big-Picture Window

We’ve been staying up late and sleeping in long because our days are filled with nothing but each other.

This morning I do yoga in my underwear to wring myself out

drink cheap coffee

and watch the plants in my window reach toward the sun.

‘Create length, ground yourself’ Adriene tells us

and together, we all expand, make more of ourselves,

propagate.

I am so proud of you, little monstera, my swiss cheese monster,

watching over your sister tomatoes, your chosen daughters,

pointing out the window, grasping for the horizon,

telling them, ‘someday I’ll let you go, and out there you’ll grow,

dig your precious roots into rich earth,

you’ll get big and luscious,

then you’ll be a real woman.’

Swiss cheese plants make me wonder about that curious disease

that riddles your brain with bullet holes

some name I can’t recall

So I google “swiss cheese brain”

“provolone brain”

“fontina brain”

“smoked cheddar with cracked black pepper brain”

and my blue light mother tells me to get back on the carpet

align my ankles with my knees with my hips with my heart

and fold myself anew.

Thank you for reading and supporting and keeping this going. I appreciate you all.

xoxo,

brit