20 December 2025
Dear Friends,
Solstice greetings! Thank you for the many lovely responses to my first letter. I’m extremely behind in my correspondence! I’m blaming my admin job, where I’ve been sending emails to film festival entrants, et al, for hours at a time, since the end of November. When I get home, my eyes are basically…I don’t know...they feel like soup?
I have a stack of postcards to write & mail out. Postcard-writing is my spiritual practice now. I have so many, from a collection that goes back 30 years. And I keep acquiring more. I spread them out like tarot cards on my desk and let the ghosts tell me which one goes to whom. If you’ve written me recently & haven’t heard back: you will be hearing from me & the ghosts soon.
(If you’d like a postcard, sneak over to the CONTACT page on the website and send me your mailing address. Seriously, even if we’re strangers.)
Rye and I were recently talking about how if modern humans made any sense at all, we’d still celebrate the Winter Solstice as New Year’s Eve. The period from the Autumnal Equinox to the Winter Solstice is my most creative time. I sleep less. I spend more of my waking time in my head, sorting through the experiences of the year, and all the years before. Everything comes out in letters, and stories, and ideas building upon other ideas. It’s an almost manic period of needing to get it all out and see it on paper.
This October, right on cue, I suddenly had the urge to send the first chapter of Drift to The Paris Review. In the mail—because they still take paper submissions! For someone who loves to send mail as much as I do, how could I not? How have I never done it before? It felt more like a symbolic gesture than anything. Why not get it out of my hands? Send it to a New York slush pile—a better place than the cloud? (I sent a vintage postcard of Alaska with it, for good measure.)
Submitting felt unfamiliar—and energizing. At some point it dawned on me that what I was feeling was relief. I had been keeping the story to myself, and I finally let it go in a big way. Then—still high from that wild hair—I started working on this letter series, in the hope of hoodwinking myself into finishing Drift in the process.
An update on the book, while we’re at it:
Despite the November holiday business (pies) and the soup-eyeballs, I finished another chapter recently, and I’ve planned the next few. When I’m writing daily, I end each writing session with a plan for what to work on the next time I sit down. I think Cari Luna (most excellent Portland writer/walking friend) suggested that method, back when I was finishing Marrow Island on a deadline.
The chapters of Drift are not chronological—I’m working with more than one timeline again, and multiple characters in Isabel’s matrilineage. My dear friend Wren, whom Glaciers is dedicated to, sat with me in a Portland park rearranging chapters of that novel before I handed off the final draft to my editor. There might be another session like that, when I get to the end of Drift.
That I don’t feel at a loss for what to write next feels like a blessing. It could be that I’ve been stewing on the story for so long. But I wonder if it’s also the movement, the sending it out into the world, that’s making space for what follows.
Lewis Hyde’s The Gift comes to mind: “The gift must always move.” When anxiety and self-doubt start to creep in, I try to remind myself that my talents and skills, the words and the stories, they might come out of me, but they don’t belong to me. I can’t take them with me to the afterlife. Hoarding gifts, like hoarding postcards, is not an option in my new religion.
Most of my ancestors came from Northern Europe, where, in ancient times, Yule was celebrated in a circle among the Dolmens, with a bonfire and the High Priestess in a crown of antlers adorned with mistletoe. I am not a practicing Druid (apologies, ancestors—were Dolmens the postcards of ancient times?), but I believe they perform a pantomime of a battle between light and dark, in which darkness dies and light triumphs, representing the death that makes way for a birth: the return of the light and another go at the seasons.
The point is, you have to be willing to let something go and move on. That’s the practice; the work of a year. Every year. Especially a doozy of a year, like this one.
I don’t know what we’ll be doing chez nous for the coming Solstice. I’m anxious about hosting people, and slightly embarrassed about my desire to carry on a tradition. Maybe we’ll make some pretty cookies? Invite our chosen family & sweet new neighbors over, spontaneously? Maybe I’ll play a little song about mycelium on my banjo? The moon will be waxing crescent, if it’s visible through the atmospheric river. If only the abandoned field across from our house had some standing stones...
What are you shedding as this year closes? What are you sweeping from your path? What are you welcoming with the return of the light?
If you made it this far, read on for some year-end offerings.
LISTENING:
Thinking Like a Mountain — From Overseas: I listen to music as I write, especially early in the morning, so this is probably always going to be an ambient / new classical space. This album has been on repeat for the last month. I love the propulsive guitar on the first track here. Maybe it reminds me a little of Brian Eno’s “The Big Ship,” which I have on vinyl, thanks to Dad. Dad, you might like this one.
Past Inside the Present, the label run by From Overseas’ Kévin Séry, has a radio station on their website that plays a non-stop loop of songs by the label’s artists. It’s like the weather inside my head. It’s great for making art (or bread, or love) to.
The Quiet Burrow — Harry & Isla of WhiteLabRecs: an absolute delight of a podcast from the label that put out Time is Coming to an End, which I recommended last month, and another ambient album I’ve been into, Stars & Silence by Slow Dancing Society & zakè. Harry Towell, the label’s founder, and his daughter Isla, age 7, put together a short-and-sweet listening experience mixing ambient music with Isla’s musings and research on her interests. It’s mellow, cheerful, and full of wonder. In this year-end episode, the theme is rocks. Do you like rocks? Who doesn’t like rocks? When my kiddo was 3 or 4, I’d put him in the bathtub with agates and jaspers and anything else we found at the beach. We’d scrub them with a brush and examine them, then check our books to identify them. Best bath toys ever. Anyway, this podcast is a treasure. Listen with little ones and take a bath with rocks!
READING: Everyone’s making lists of the books they read in the past year. I did a lousy job of reading books this year, since I spent half of it moving, fixing up a house, and getting settled in a new city and job. Before falling asleep at night, I mostly read periodicals till they fell on my face: The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, Anarchist Review of Books.
So, here’s a partial list of books I remember reading in the last year. These ones stand out in my mind, for whatever reason. Maybe they collectively say something about my headspace?
Nonfiction:
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer: A shorter (and less academic) book than Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, that explores Native plant ecology as an example of a gift economy.
Good Things by Samin Nosrat: probably the most-gifted book among a certain set of creative, food-loving types this season? We gifted it to our chosen family/regular dinner party friends for their marriage in October.
Full disclosure: Samin is my celebrity crush. She writes beautifully about food and where it comes from. She’s an artist. She pays close attention to the raw materials and tries the weird things to find out what happens. (Burnt honey!) And she writes candidly about struggles in her creative process and life, which I appreciate, in an online world full of influencers & food blog slop. (Do not try that random recipe on the internet. Do. Not. Just get this book.)
Fiction:
The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk : I keep thinking about the narrative voice in this one. The poor hero endures a lot of solipsistic male tirades (and you will, too), but have faith: the folk horror subplot is headed somewhere satisfying.
On the Calculation of Volume: Book II by Solvej Balle : Okay. Listen: I didn’t love it. In fact, I was kind of angry at this book? But I keep thinking about it. (I read Book I at the end of 2024). Many people—some very good friends whose opinions I respect—are into this author’s whole thing, with the seven volumes of this character reliving one date in time. Maybe you are—or will be—too. After I’ve cooled off a little bit I might read Book III, just to confirm where my feelings stand. Stay tuned.
Loved & Missed by Susie Boyt: a story about friendship, and mothers and daughters and addiction. Can a story be both endearingly funny and guttingly tragic at the same time? This book is. It reminded me a little of Rachel Cusk’s early novel The Country Life (possibly the tragi-comic tone). Susie Boyt is one of Lucien Freud’s many talented daughters/Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughters. Which has nothing to do with the novel, but reminded me that I loved her half-sister, Esther Freud’s, 1993 novel Peerless Flats, as well, though I read it years ago. Maybe 2026 will be the year to re-read that one.
My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman: I think I may have read this as my last book of 2024, but that was technically in the last year, if we’re going from Solstice to Solstice, right? This is a novel that imagines an interview with an author named Renee Gladman about a novel that she’s planning to write. It’s a little bit genius, a little bit beside itself, casting side-eye. It’s a novelist’s novel about noveling. Or not-noveling. I brought a passage to my novella workshop for discussion; a good time was had by me (if not all).
WATCHING:
Ghosts—the original British series (not the American remake): a life-after-death sitcom, perfect for the Winter Solstice. I introduced Rian to this silly show, which we needed, as a break from the ever-more-horrific news. My favorite character is Mary, who was burned at the stake for talking to plants. She spends her afterlife at Button House giving off a burnt-toast odor and instructing anyone who will listen how to weave a basket "five potatoes high." The plague-chorus in the cellar is also great. (All five seasons are on Kanopy.)
And that’s all for 2025, friends. I’m calling it: tomorrow’s the last day; fix your calendars. I hope you all have a warm and peaceful Yule, Hanukah, Christmas, and New Year.
xoLex
p.s. This is where I remind you that I have a BOOKSHOP.ORG affiliate shop. I’m not here to make money. But if you buy books from my page, or through any links in this letter, they will toss me 10%, which helps me cover my website/newsletter costs.
