Recently, just as summer was ending, I unchained myself from my desk after completing a new book manuscript. The experience of writing a second book so soon after a first book reminded me of all the times I’ve seen people yank the innards from a dead bird, hucking the heart and the kidneys into the trash before roasting the body slowly in a hot oven. To say I was a bit cooked by the experience would be understating things.
I got to go to the woods for two long disconnected days. It wasn’t enough, but it’s what I had to work with. One night, I found myself walking through the trees in total darkness, then carefully toeing the rough edges of a hot spring pool. I laid back against the rocky edge, surrounded by rocks and trees, and looked up to the stars. Hours before I was frantically typing at my computer; now it was just me and the entire solar system.
I sat there for a long time, silent. The longer I stayed, the more stars came into view. Satellites cruised past, but I only started to feel irritated by them when Elon Musk’s Starlink crawled by like an astral millipede. Then, a few minutes later, a shooting star exploded across the sky. Nothing a billionaire can ever create will be as fantastic as nature.
After enough time passed, and my eyes adjusted, I started to realize the rocks and tree stumps I thought were surrounding the hot spring were … people. Everyone was just so quiet. So awed by all the stars. Here I thought I was by myself when, really, I’d been sitting there for the better part of an hour with a half-dozen other humans. I wanted to thank them all, really, for drawing absolutely no attention, for asking nothing and committing to a collective total stillness. But thanking them would have broken our beautiful spell.
This camouflage of total silence was refuge for me. It seems like that kind of down-time would do us all some good.
If putting words onto a page is the manner in which you feed yourself, like it is for me, you must always be promoting. Very few of us writers will ever have the luxury of privacy, like Cormac McCarthy had. We need the public to read our work so we can get more work, and in that process we, then, become public. We promote and we promote. Each time I do that, it feels like it is taking time away from the work of making journalism.
There are millions of ways to make journalism, I’m sure. Everyone does it differently. For me, it is a process of relationship-building. It’s about listening, and having long conversations, and hearing people who feel unheard. The rest of my time is spent researching, reading and analyzing. My favorite times on the job are after I have a story going, but I’m not quite to the writing part, when days are spent in quiet contemplation and conversation. It’s probably funny to hear that a person who spends so much of their time alone somehow seeks to be more alone, but I guess that’s what promotion does to a weirdo like me.
To write the first draft of this book — of which I can give you no sense of publication date because I, myself, do not know — I read a small library, requested records in four different states, did days of interviews, got people to trust me with their stories. That’s the special aspect of journalism that gets lost in all the promotion: the part where you are just a conduit for other people who trusted you to do right by them.
On that note, I wanted to update you on where your subscription monies have been going lately.
When the Moon Turns to Blood will be coming out in paperback on November 7. I can’t say thank you enough to those of you who have read the book. You can preorder it now for someone in your life: some of my favorite stores are Powell’s, Auntie’s Books and Elliott Bay Book Company. The paperback has a brand new chapter all its own. One thing that will probably surprise you to learn is that writing a new chapter for a book is not something writers get paid to do! So, really, the fact that I could carve some time to write that chapter is only because you subscribed to this newsletter. If you would like me to come to a bookstore near you, drop me a line and I’ll see if I can make it work.
Last week a man whose story I have been following for several years was quite suddenly released from prison. Jesse Johnson had been in prison for 25 years — the majority of that time on Oregon’s now-shuttered Death Row. It was a powerful thing to watch a man who had been sentenced to death walk out of jail with a couple of cardboard boxes of belongings and not a dime to his name. Eventually, I will have a lot more to say about this.
Pardon me if this edition is a little shorter than usual this month. I have just written 108,000 consecutive words, and my well is a little dry. For now, I encourage you: find stillness. Take a nap. Dictate your own pace. Tell the world about your work, and know that if it makes you feel a little queasy to do so, it does to me, too.
Many years ago, my boss was a woman who was also an expert on Myers-Briggs personality types. I had scored exactly in the middle of the Introvert-Extrovert trait. So I asked her about it, which am I?
She suggested I ask myself, "Do I feel energized or exhausted when I spend time alone? Do I feel exhausted or energized when I spend time with people?" She said that will give you your answer. I knew immediately, despite my M-B score, I was an introvert. Since then I have fully embraced it. As corny as it might sound, accepting that has been one of the great liberating events of my life. Enjoy your time alone and we'll see you on the flip side!
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