27 November 2025

Dear Friends,

 In the first of these monthly letters, I want to begin by saying thank you for reading this sentence.

Margaret Atwood’s oft-quoted advice to young writers goes something like this (no, I won’t look it up; it’s 5 a.m. and I don’t want to wake the AI):

“Just put one foot after another, one word after another, one sentence after another—and don’t look down.” 

For the last decade, I’ve been pretty cagey about my words and sentences. I rarely share them, even with those closest to me. I have four unfinished novels, and countless new beginnings. That feels like a lot, right? It’s probably about 300 - 400 pages of work. You might be wondering, given my previous success publishing, What the hell, Alexis?

I’ve received positive feedback from my agent, from a former editor, from the few writer friends who’ve seen some of these pages... Last January (2025), I was shortlisted for the Creative Capital Award (in the top 4% of the thousands of artists who applied, if I did the math correctly). The feedback has always been much like Margaret’s advice: good work; just keep going.

And that’s the point at which I lose my footing, holding back out of uncertainty and self-doubt.

This project I’m calling The Drift Notebook—these letters and the “ephemera” that I’ll post here—is an attempt to break out of that cycle.

I’ve been stewing on this project—just this little newsletter—for at least a year. Ask my unfailingly supportive spouse, Rye. Or my partner-in-art, my book wife, Nora. Or my writer-librarian friend, Elliott, who became my accountability pen pal during an online class taught by Corinne Manning, and who has been an obliging confidant and witness for three years. They’ll all concede: I begin a project, and just when I get going, I set it aside.

But I’m taking a lesson from Elliott and my other epistolary friendships: when I know someone I care about is on the other side, I get the words out there. I treat my novels like my worst critic is the only reader waiting at the end. From now on, I’m not writing to that asshole.* I’m writing to you, my literary friends and family.

*(It’s me; I’m that asshole.)

One of my unfinished projects—the one most precious to me, that I've been hoarding the longest—is a follow-up to Glaciers. Ten years after a day-in-the-life of Isabel, she’s a single mom, returning to Alaska for a funeral with her young autistic child, Ruth. As in Glaciers, I’m mining my own life and family history liberally, while continuing Isabel’s fictional journey as a librarian. The working title is Drift, which refers to anything deposited by a retreating glacier, from boulders to sediment. So, this is The Drift Notebook: a journal of a work-in-progress, an archive, a repository for the novel’s pieces as they accumulate.

The letters and posts here are my drift: I’m letting go of all the images and words and ideas of the last decade, in the spirit of leaving something behind.

So, thank you, thank you, thank you: for responding to the call, the text, the email, the postcard; for choosing to be here; for reading these words; for making it to the last sentence.

It’s taken me a while to get here, looking down the whole damn way.

xoLex

p.s. a few bits of drift for the moraine:

From here on, the monthly newsletters will be more like this, below, while the ephemera will include things like the image of Portage Glacier above.

NEWS:

·     The Italian translation of Glaciers, Ghiacciai, (translated by Marcella Maffi) has just been reissued by the very cool ACCENTO EDIZIONI, with an introduction (prefazione!) by the Italian author Viola Ardone. If you’re not in Italy & you'd like to practice your Italian, you can purchase the Ebook here.

 READING: virtual shelf-talkers of current or recently-read books.*

·      Almost Nothing by Nora Wendl (see above, re: book wife) Over a decade of friendship, I’ve been reading drafts of this book, imagining its future as a book in the world. This last summer I was at the Edith Farnsworth House in Plano, IL for the launch. It was hands-down the classiest, coolest book launch I’ve ever been to. I love this book and everything it represents. Please buy it, read it, and find out why.

·     Hurricane Envy by Sara Jaffe Sara Jaffe’s characters are as tender as they are uneasy, their orientation to everyone else’s reality always in question. They remind me of Claude Cahun photographs, in how they explore the sometimes surreal experience of figuring yourself out. I love how deftly Sara translates these understories—the lucid reflections on fleeting moments of existential vertigo.

·     Wolf Bells by Leni Zumas A long, long time ago, sitting in Yun Shui Teahouse, I had a conversation with Laura Gibson about starting an aged artists’ trailer park, where all of us broke artists could pool our meagre resources and live out our golden years. Leni Zumas—in her own humble-visionary way—immortalized this question of but how will we ever retire? in a novel about weird families, making-do, alternative models of care, and the slippery nature of community.

LISTENING: all my writing/gardening/walking/cooking music is on Bandcamp (or on vinyl).

·      The Night Has Eyes - THE SPELLS : an album recorded in the 90s but just released this Halloween. (Read about that here.) Don’t imagine Seattle grunge. My dad (musician) clocked it as post-punk New York. My first thought was Siouxsie & the Banshees. Or Patti Smith, if she made a witchy concept album? I don’t know—it’s great & I’m enjoying the hell out of it. The wicked drums are played by Leni Zumas, author of Wolf Bells (above).

·     Rebuilding - Jake Xerxes Fussell & James Elkington : modern Appalachian folk-inflected guitar; gentle and elegiac, it soothes all the beasts in our house, and cures a bad mood, too. This is the soundtrack to a new film (that we haven’t seen yet), with Josh O’Connor, who is somehow in all the movies I want to see right now.

·      Time is Coming to an End - Glacis & Polaroid Notes : perfect novel-writing music. My mom, Dorothy, used to play a lot of Windham Hill when we were kids in Alaska. (George Winston’s seasonal albums in particular). I’m still a sucker for landscape-inspired ambient & new classical.

 WATCHING:

·      La Chimera by Alice Rohrwacher : a beautiful film about a lovable fuck-up archaeologist (Josh O’Connor) and a cohort of Etruscan grave robbers. Isabella Rossellini plays the eccentric matriarch to a chorus of daughters. I keep thinking about the way the story unfolds visually; it’s kind of perfect. (Viewable on Kanopy for free if your library subscribes!)

*Hey! Is this font too aggressive? I want you to know that I have a BOOKSHOP.ORG AFFILIATE SHOP!

When you purchase books through my page and my links here, 10% comes back to me to help me cover the overhead costs of my website.

BOOKSHOP also supports indie booksellers around the country, unlike another online retailer (don’t get me started).

Bandcamp doesn’t give me anything; please just support musicians by paying for their music.

Thanks, again. xo