Leonora Carrington, Pastoral (Angel Hunters), 1950 for many interesting thoughts about L.C., go here 

The early, June days of summer vacation were the pure greatest

Wednesday could be Friday could be Saturday could be Monday,  or every day was Saturday,   a total festive blankness, especially in the morning after breakfast, when nothing had happened yet but everything could. And in Seattle it could be bright but it wouldn't be hot, and the best was if it was almost-bright and almost-hot, the sky white with near sun and a négligée of cloud.  After breakfast I'd put on one of my mom's dresses—maybe the tomato-red, puckered cotton one that went down to my feet—go out into the garden by myself, stand probably near the big birch tree at the top of the hill*

*a very small incline between the garden beds

  a n d b e g i n t o d e c i d e t h e p r e t e n d

You start by standing there a bit, feeling the day, the air, the dew, getting a load of the light. What smells like what out here. Faint strawberry, maybe, or. What's the feeling. What's the drama. What kind of story is it.

Is it one where you're powerful with arms up, or drooping because of a sadness, or striding around in search of the thing because of an urgency

?

  Near the front gate are three pine trees and so that's basically a forest, and you might need to go in there to find it, an undesignated something. You might not even need to know what it is, it might be enough to have an attitude of "Oh, I better find it" and then walk there briskly and see if you find it—see if you feel like having a feeling of triumph or defeat when you get there under the three trees (by the fence, so prosaic there, ruining everything, a FENCE in a FOREST—fuck off, fence! I don't see you), standing on the dirt and brown needles—and if it's triumph, maybe you'll get a sense of the thing you found.   person ? important item ? clue ?

Maybe not. Sometimes the whole thing takes a while to kick in.

Wander over to the dogwood, see if this is a setting. Nah. The house is right here with the big dining room window where someone could walk in and look out and watch you playing and kill the atmosphere, god forbid smile at you in your dress with your face in the drama, like how cute or how dumb or both, what you're doing, which it's none of.

It's either going to take or it's not going to take, but hopefully a story will come that you can be inside for a good chunk of the day, at least until lunch.

And if it doesn't, you'll go in and put on normal clothes and get a book and go back outside. There's a hammock between the crabapple trees at the bottom of the "hill" and you can be in somebody else's story. Either way you're going to be in a story. That is how you do a day that's left up to you. 

Some kids are into swimming or bikes or games or climbing something and yelling and doing cartwheels but you do not appreciate any of that. You'll run hard across some grass and you'll enjoy it —it can feel kind of good, wind in the hair— IF IT'S PART OF A STORY WHERE YOU HAVE TO RUN FOR THE PLOT. But as you? To keep up? With people who enjoy physical triumph as an end in itself? No.

Now, in June of 2019, I'm forty-nine years old (for another minute) and in a less than a month my sons will be out of school for their summer vacations—noisy in the house, noisy outside, at general odds—and I will be fifty, and I'm trying to write a large fictional story and decide the pretend and it feels ridiculous if I stop to worry about it but it's also very serious.

I've been gently developing the world of these books for almost a year and a half, trying to do it nice and easy without forcing it into fake shapes or scaring it away.

The good news is that I didn't scare it away and I have enough real, true snow packed in this snowball (OH GOD WE'VE SWITCHED FROM A SUMMER GARDEN TO SNOWBALLS) to start rolling it seriously.  The, uh, other news is that I'm almost fifty and I'm trying to do this large, crazily complex, familiar-but-unfamiliar thing before I'm dead and none of us know when that will be.

My point: I'm going on a Weekly Zephyr hiatus for a few weeks. I gotta go great guns on this thing while I have quiet in the house for part of the day, and after that I have to grab every bit of non-boy-wrangling writing time I can.

I'm moving from the casual, gentle dreaming + building phase of this thing to the un-casual, focused, pour-it-on stretch that will last as long as it needs to last for the first book to have a skeleton and vital organs at the very least. Right now it's still only a very strong spirit with a personality. That's nice but nobody can do anything with it, like read it, until it's 3D.

When I'm here in my writing space on what would normally be a Zephyr day and I'm totally stuck on my story AND have some things that feel fun to say to you, I will write one.

took a panoramic photo to show you my little office—I love it so much— those are noise-muffling curtains that open up so I can concentrate in here  (Photos didn’t load to Substack in the transfer from TinyLetter! Nothing makes sense! Picture some photos. Voila.)

I built this house—my main character's childhood home—to hold the energy of the books so I wouldn't have to hold it all in my own body because there's a lot of energy in this big story and it was freaking me out. The house didn't have "electricity" before but my friend Horse Lime, who is a Special Friend to the Story, sent me these lights and now a) it doesn't look haunted like it did without them and b) I keep them turned on so the house feels alive and occupied, like things are happening in there. It's got rooms, stairs. It's not furnished. It's not plumbed. You know. But it has mailing tape window glazing so the energy doesn't fall out and defeat the purpose.

and it has this hole on the top for inspiration to fall into and then the front door and windows hold it in there   When I'm writing I prop the front door open with this manufactured crystal fern moss thing my husband gave me and put these shoes and rug I got from a magazine facing out so the story can walk out the front door over to my desk. You can maybe see a pen lying down in there? I keep a pen in there to soak up the story and then I pull it out and use it, and hopefully it has whatever story in it that fell into the roof hole.

So that's the deal. I'm going away into this little office for a while to work as hard as I can to make this happen.

AND NOW

to play us out, and to celebrate the mysterious upcoming summer season, I'm enclosing a poem that an extremely talented reader sent in. It made me so happy to receive it and I think she's got fantastic advice for us. A poem doesn't have to be advice but it certainly always might be.

Instructions for the Coming Season by Lisa Loop

Dance around in a circle. Make the floor shake. Speak to the mercurial dead. Make a sweet curtsy. Throw your head back and roar like a silent, feral cat. Be the cat. Pee on the floor. Go take a swipe at the dog’s nose. Eat the recycling. Belch so loudly you scare the postman. Roll in the uncut grass. Pull the stones out of the wall and gawk at the rats. Climb to the top of the fence and spit at passing Teslas. Put on your finest dress. Pin on war medals. Take selfies and post them around the neighborhood, With little cut-out pieces featuring old Soviet propaganda, Sayings for passersby to take with them. Remind everyone of our brave countrymen at the front. Draw a map of Chinese Imperial history with pieces that move. Use this as a centerpiece at your next dinner party. Invite a pair of every species of villain in your circle of acquaintance: The Precious Fop The False Prophet The Shiny Sports Car The Dark-molasses Craft Cocktail The Tripping Saint The Hammocked Man Then see what happens. Any babies born from these meetings must be named after you, But you are not expecting, nor would you accept, the position of godmother. Charge a fee for your services. Your specialty; dawning on people. Make them sign a waiver excluding you from liability, But including you in ten percent of the profits. Make a daisy chain. Float hydrangeas and lilacs in the duck pond. Paint corporate logos on the turtles there. Offer a reward for their safe return. Walk around the church three times in a blue satin cape, Muttering curses in Pig Latin. Sit on a brocade divan in the rain, Making conversation with the heron. Laugh at all his jokes. (He is very sensitive.) Titter. Cover your mouth. Blush. Invite children to watch you ruin fabrics with a too-hot iron. Regale them with stories of wolves who chased you while skiing, And magic marmots who stole your jewelry. Ask them to get it back for you. Promise them candy from the dark web. Plant skunk cabbage and iceberg roses. Press ferns in your cell phone case. Look for a blimp to buy. Tether it to the community center. Dive for waterlilies. Float in the darkness, Listening to the carbon’s soft shift. Blow kisses to twinkling, distant suns. Dissolve.

Leonora Carrington, La Chasse, 1942