Fran Magazine: Sunday Dispatch, Nov. 2-16

The super moon! Gladiator! Heretic! Barbara Pym! Muriel Spark! VIGDIS HJORTH! BALATRO!!!

This is the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch, a weekly culture diary for paid subscribers only. The Sunday Dispatch details what I’ve been watching, reading, playing, and listening to over the past week. Paid subscriptions help stabilize my writing career, but all readers — paid & not — are appreciated. You can also follow me on Instagram or Letterboxd (for free!). Thanks for reading!

Residency scaries

My time on residency has wound down to its inevitable conclusion. Already I can look at my inbox — “You’re invited to a screening of A Complete Unknown,” “Please get your documents ready for tax season!” — and feel a wave of generalized panic, though I know that will fade with the comfort of sleeping in my own bed and being back on my beloved Eastern Standard Time.

Has it been a productive time? People keep asking this. When I wrote about my schedule this past week, I neglected to get into what is and isn’t productive work. Drafting obviously essential in writing, but often a lot of what happens in drafting is a little bit counterproductive: getting stuff down on a page in order to make more work for myself later on. I spent the back half of this week doing far more deleting than writing — still hitting various word counts and other goals, but mostly deleting writing that you pretty plainly tell was written in the throes of “maybe having mono.” Beyond that, spending time near the water and in a more remote area — stars! super moon! deer! — feels restorative and productive in terms of thinking and understanding with a clear mind and heart.

it’s crazy a moon can look like this

I wrote one blog during my time in residency about the Conclave memes. You can read about those here. Because I didn’t anticipate going on a second residency this year, I made myself available for edits for work — some of those pieces should be coming out soon now that I am back.

How are you all doing? What have you been up to — reading, watching, listening to? Not to do “Fran Magazine readers wellness check,” but… it’s obviously been a strange few weeks. The year is almost over!