Like a parent showing up for your wedding after missing the entirety of your adolescence, I return to this newsletter — with little fanfare and the promise of growth but no tangible evidence of it.
I’ve come back to inform you that I was craisins for Halloween last year. Craisins, or cranberry raisins if you will, are the dried fruit of a common varietal of evergreen dwarf shrub. I had wanted to be craisin, singular. But I decided to make jewelry out of craisins, plural, so that no longer became an option. When I posted about the costume on social media, I lamented that the outfit did not turn out how I had imagined. In my mind, the costume would be recognizably sillier. But the jewelry looked too real and my outfit too good. And lest I stopped the conversation to explain my gemstones were actually foodstuff, then it would be unclear. “My costume $&*##ing sucks this year,” I said in a post. In response, I received genuinely encouraging comments from very nice people. “No, it’s a great costume! So creative,” they said.
To be clear, I know that costume fucking rocked. But I also know the only thing funnier than craisins are craisins that hate themselves.
To be clear, I know that costume fucking rocked. But I also know the only thing funnier than craisins are craisins that hate themselves.
So, to the newsletter, yes. Once upon a time, about a year ago, this newsletter came out at regular intervals. At its best, one free letter every other week and one paid in between. But now it has been over nine months since my last correspondence.
It took a two-fold assault to knock out this letter. I lost a steady paycheck early in the year and a few months later became a partial caretaker to my grandparents. I love my Lola and Lolo dearly, and I would sooner kickbox them than let them think they are a burden. But change is change, and change brings dysregulation. Less money coming in and less time to make money, bingo-bango, ha-ta-ta—no more newsletters for old craisin boy.
The prime of this newsletter was 2022, the year the Queen died. I had a good groove then. I was clocking in a few hours weekly towards the letter, but it rarely got the stink of feeling too much like Work. I got to struggle, create, and enjoy summoning each new letter. I sent out over 40 emails from this account that year. But come 2023, every time I sat down to write, I’d get overwhelmed knowing that I didn’t have the hours it took, and I’d close out the tabs with minimal progress.
It’s universal to quit a habit we once loved. We take on more stress at work, or our loved ones get sick, and the makeup of our days changes. Returning to our sketchbooks when we’re juggling new doctor’s appointments can seem like an impossibility.
I am incredibly grateful for the audience that has tuned in and or contributed money to this letter, but admittedly, I spent a lot of last year thinking, why bother? Why bother with this newsletter when I have family business and trepidatious finances that take higher priority? It’s a question I imagine must ring true for many. Why bother composing a ballad? Why bother painting a landscape? Why bother threading a needle through a bunch of dried fruit to make a necklace? The answer, as I’ve been reminding myself, is because, as artists, we like doing such things.
In addition to whatever grander and nobler designs we have for the art we create, we are artists presumably because, at least in part, we like being so. And despite life's difficulties, when we find our footing, it’s worth recovering some aspects of our love for the creative endeavor. It’s less a question of ambition or creating for its own sake. That can be part of it too if you want, but I know that I like writing this letter. And for now, that’s reason enough to try and start again.
As my friend and fellow writer Daniel Nkoola mentioned the other day, most artists are not living frictionless lives. Often, the people who get to create great art are those who can worry less about finances, family care, and other challenging mundanities of the world. For that reason, kindness to yourself in recognizing what creative acts you can do with your material conditions is the most critical part of reintroducing habits you enjoy. Like an absentee parent trying to squeeze themselves into the seating chart during your wedding — my prior attempts to maintain this letter didn’t account for the lack of space. It takes many hours to write this newsletter, and in 2022, I had a few hours a week to spare for just such a thing. That was not the case in 2023.
In The Creative Act by Rick Rubin, the author suggests allotting smaller blocks to be creative. If you end up having more time – great – you may often find yourself extending it. But you will have done the disciplined thing of engaging in your creative process. This letter comes courtesy of that idea. With my changed life, I still don’t know how many hours I can devote a week to this letter and my other creative projects. I might not have hours to spare, but I do have many tens of minutes. Every day, at no set particular time, I spend at least ten minutes chipping away at letters like this one. If something else shakes up my life and that doesn’t work anymore, maybe I’ll try out five minutes a day or perhaps a single key press. As long as I’m creating and enjoying it, then it’s good by me. All this to say, congrats on your wedding kiddo. I promise to be in your life more in the future. Things are different now.