I haven’t been writing much this month. I did write a quick etiquette guide for submitting to literary journals for JMWW, and have been adding some silly little entries to my new ecogothic newsletter Fear of Everything.
But between a move across the country, editing for JMWW, visiting family, teaching an online class, drying out in a heatwave, choking on wildfire smoke, and now a summer cold, my schedule has been up in the poor-quality air. I’m not complaining, of course (except about the weather and the sickness) because that’s what summer is for, shaking up routines and rituals so that whatever is loose can dislodge itself and make room for fall and winter.
Writers think a lot about changing seasons. In grad school, Greek mythology often formed the bedrock of someone’s image horde, like the story of Persephone and Hades. Tricked into staying in the Underworld, Persephone’s absence caused yearlong winter in the world of the living, but Hades agreed to let Persephone spend half the year above ground to give the living six months of bounty. The story is rich with metaphoric possibility: depression, domestic strife, hope, captivity, cycles. A lot of Greek mythology is like that; most ancient stories are, but Greek fables, full of jealous and petty gods and ironic twists of fate and heroes whose folly dooms their comrades, seem to persist throughout literature.
It influenced William Shakespeare (whose three witches in Macbeth mirrored the Three Fates) and Mary Shelley (whose alternative title to Frankenstein was The Modern Prometheus) and linguist and poet Beth Piatote, whose Nez Perce adaptation of Sophacles’ Antigone retells a story about mourning the unburied dead, but about Indigenous remains held in a museum. Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts takes its title from Roland Barthes’s exploration of a philosophical question: If the Ship of Theseus is replaced one plank at a time while at sea, is it the same ship when the Argonauts dock, or is it a new ship? Nelson, like Barthes, likens each new plank to every expression of love in a relationship.
A love of Greek mythology is part of my own origin story as a writer. Well, kind of. What I mean is that I played a lot of Age of Mythology as a kid because it had cool monsters and stuff. I’m not a classicist or historian of the ancient world by any stretch. My relationship to the classics is like Marge Simpson’s commentary on potatoes: “I just think they’re neat.” Yes, these fables are valuable for understanding the human condition, but they aren’t my bread and butter the way they are for so many other contemporary writers who revisit Persephone and Antigone and Circe with fresh, determined eyes.
Hermes (played by André De Shields in the 2025 Hadestown proshot) puts it this way: “It’s a sad song. It’s a sad tale. It’s a tragedy. It’s a sad song, but we sing it anyway.” The story of Orpheus and Eurydice through Americana and the iconography of the labor movement is one of many iterations of ancient literature made modern that works well because of its formal deviations from the original source material, not through strict attachment to them. I’m not (entirely) of the opinion that realism is the death of art, but the art I find myself more interested in lately is art that isn’t just a carbon copy of the human condition. It’s because of the contrivance of the form that Hadestown is more moving, a more interesting way of inhabiting an artist’s vision or “the miraculous/task of it” as Joseph Fasano puts it in his poem, “For a Student Who Used AI To Write a Paper.” The work of understanding, the work of iteration, is far more compelling to me than the trick of replication and imitation.
I’m getting my bearings in my new town to see what routines there are to follow, what rituals I can add to the next season. The indie bookstore here holds a weekly writing group. In the seventy or so minutes I spent writing with total strangers, I produced my first new short story in years. The community helped; the ideas I’ve let percolate for months have helped; the invitation to try something new without consequences helped; having conversations with my fellow editors at JMWW certainly helped. The possibility of ritual was probably the most inspiring, though. The idea that if this time it didn’t work out, I could try next week. I can build into this new chapter of my life the cycles and seasons I need, or at least, the possibility of doing so will get me to the next week, next month, through the last dregs of a good summer into the clean slate of autumn.
I have a lot of books that I’ve started, but for many different reasons never got around to finishing. Many of them are Christmas presents that I started during the holiday break but put down again shortly after the semester started because schoolwork and teaching overwhelmed my schedule. There are short story collections with dogeared pages where I stopped, and novels with a bookmark still stuck at Chapter Six, and poetry collections with coffee stains where I left off.
Two weeks ago, I graduated from UNL with a Master’s degree in English. It is the result of two years of reading, writing, and writing about what I read. More importantly, I had the pleasure of spending time with the friends and colleagues I worked with this past year. To celebrate the end of the semester and our program, several folks in my graduate cohort took a vacation by driving from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Crested Butte, Colorado, for a weekend next to a river. Soon, we will scatter and go our separate ways, and the slice of time we gave one another without responsibility, without the need to work for someone else, without tasks to fulfill, was a small slice of heaven (which is, as we all know, a place on Earth).
In 1902 on February 27, John Steinbeck was born, kicking off a wonderful century of war and economic strife. To celebrate his birthday, you can either have a disgusting beer milkshake or delicious mush or even a glass of extremely fresh milk. Or you can be sensible about the whole thing and make peach upside-down cake.
WordPress reminded me that today is my two-year blogiversary. I missed last year’s for the obvious reasons (grad school applications, Macbeth, mud wrestling, etc.). Today, though, I slide two years into the past when I was surrounded by the mess of my education: Beloved, essays on the Holocaust, a textbook on linguistics, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, and drafts of my own poetry. The liberal arts defined my life, but lacked definition; in a confused fervor I wrote 
