I gathered data, made some Facebook posts, signed some petitions, talked to friends. I got enraged, disappointed, sad, exhausted. I tried so hard to talk only using facts, to take each person’s opinion with equanimity, to truly understand the people who are on the other side of the issue from me.

Then someone on the internet called me “bovine excretia.” I think he meant “excreta,” but I didn’t confirm.

I’ve been listening to Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd. I don’t normally pick up craft books unless they’re being assigned in a class, but I’ve loved the way she presents her writing process — and the way she makes it feel like the source of the universe is available to anyone.

The thing that stuck in my mind after finishing the book was the chapter on dreams. I’m just delighted beyond words that Sue Monk Kidd finds answers in dreams.

Because I’m sitting over here with dreams that are usually an endless panic where I can’t open my eyes and I’m trying to convince everyone in my family to buy cactuses.

But Sue Monk Kidd truly finds answers in her dreams!

I decided to keep a notebook by my bed to write down whatever brilliant thoughts would come to me in the night.

And come they did!

For three nights in a row, I woke up singing:

“Vocalize … harmonize … jazzercise.”

Complete with jazz hands at the end.

And so I offer — to the universe and to the guy that thinks calling strangers names on the internet is cool — this answer:

Vocalize. Harmonize. Jazzercise.

Because one laugh, one smile, one clear note, one community in song, one group of people in leotards, is enough to inject a little kindness and joy back into the world.

From the land of my dreams, to yours — let’s make every place a place where anyone can find a little harmony and a little hope.

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It’s not a town on most people’s list of must-see places, but, let me explain my raging love for this place.

It has roots in Colorado, where I had a charmed childhood, spending hours after school on my pink and purple Huffy bike endlessly exploring — watching birds and bugs and streams. Heading for a certain copse of trees and pretending I was in Terabithia with my loyal Keeshond. I learned to ride horses, fly over jumps, look forward to the smell of oats mixed with oil. I didn’t have to pretend to be a mountain girl by wearing a lot of Patagonia: I was a girl and I was in the mountains. The mountains raised me.

When I left home to attend college in Provo — my first introduction to the place was the mountains, they jut straight up without any preamble, but their peace had a familiar homecoming. If my studies got overwhelming, I headed for the hills, just like back home. Usually Provo Canyon, but sometimes the back road around Utah Lake to watch the pelicans.

Life rolled on, I married, left the west for Cleveland then Ann Arbor, Michigan, followed by San Antonio and Alexandria, Virginia.

I found little wild refuges in each place, but I missed the mountains with a fierceness that I’m not sure how to describe. It’s that itch in your soul you just can’t reach, where you know something is off, but you can’t fix it, can’t satisfy it.

When I had a chance to move back west, I turned in notice and packed up in two weeks. Could not get here fast enough.

I live close enough to Rock Canyon to head there every morning. The sun slides out from behind the peak, glancing off the top of nearby Mt. Timpanogos. I brush my fingers along the rocks, hear the calls of the world waking. The mountains are prayer, they are divinity made corporeal.

I spent childhood summers up Provo Canyon, college nights and weekends, and now the canyon is the conduit from the mess of life to the peace of wild things, as Wendell Berry writes.

I want to call Provo Canyon one of my heart’s arteries, but you might think me dramatic. If anything, it would be understatement.

That said, let’s turn back to the title of this piece.

What do I do when a place I love like part of my body, part of my family, part of my ability to stay sane on earth, is threatened?

I don’t know!

And that’s what’s happening!

Recently, our local officials in Provo announced The Vesper Amphitheater Project. (I think I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s constantly on my mind right now.) This is a 20,000 seat amphitheater that would sit at the mouth of Provo Canyon. And while I get personal about this canyon, I think it’s worth confronting this project no matter where you live, because, more than likely, there’s something like this slated for a wild place near you.

I’m devastated by this Vesper Project and how enthusiastic my local officials are about it.

I’m huge live music fan, but this is the wrong place for a mega-amphitheater, hotel, and shopping complex. There is only one road in and out of Provo Canyon, and it’s miles from a freeway. All I can see from this project is loss. Losing birds, plants, insects to pavement. Losing the sounds of the earth to traffic. Losing the access to the Uintahs for the weekend because of the difficulty getting through the canyon.

I’m not calling myself any kind of expert on gravel pits or city planning or amphitheaters, but I am calling myself a person who loves the canyon. This project (which is much more moveable and scalable than a canyon) is not the right thing for the single road from Provo to the wild spaces to the east. Any time I think about it, I get sick to my stomach. I get depressed for me and my kids and all the kids and people in this area who won’t be able to get to the mountains when they need to.

I just finished Hank Lentfer’s memoir Faith of Cranes this week. I think he wrote it for me. He chronicles his devastation at the devastation of the natural places around him and across the world to his arrival at a kind of equilibrium, realizing that the most important thing he can do is love the places that mean something to him.

Here are my eight attempts to grope for hope in times like these: where the people we’ve elected to protect not just the city, but the natural world that interweaves and surrounds it, put profit over any other consideration. (A phenomenon that certainly isn’t limited to my beloved canyon.) Many thanks to Hank Lentfer for this inspiration:

1. Is the world going to be eclipsed by the gears of the Industrial Revolution that remain hell-bent on processing beauty into a money-making venture?
   What can I do when the wild places around me are threatened by commercial development without regard environmental impact?

2. A lot gets buried underneath pavement.
   How do we notice and love what’s already there before deciding it should be a hotel?

3. “I [Hank Lentfer] have been motivated, like so many people, by what Scott Russell Sanders calls the ‘bite of conscience.’ But what happens when the cries swell beyond our ability to respond? How do we keep from being buried by a swelling sense of failure?”1
   Or what happens when the people we elect to steward the earth can no longer hear the bite of conscience?

4. Insanity often passes for progress.

5. How do you live a life so that joy remains when all else fades?2

6. “Hope, however feeble its foundation, bespeaks allegiance to every unlikely beauty that remains on earth.” — David James Duncan

7. “The only spiritually responsible way I know to be a citizen, artist, or activist, is by giving little or no thought to things such as saving the planet, achieving world peace, or stopping neocon greed. Great things seem undoable things. Small things, lovingly done, are always within our reach.”
   — David James Duncan

8. So, dear Mayor Judkins, the Provo City Planning Commission, the Provo City Council, Vesper Project Planners, here’s my question: Are you pushing for the Vesper Amphitheater out of love? Love for this place, for Provo Canyon, for the mountains and the countless living things that call that place home?
   If you feel like this is a project born of love, can you show me what you love?
   I have a feeling that the things you love most about this project are money, money, development, and cash.
   Why do you want your legacy in office to be the development of a natural Provo treasure?

I cannot express how utterly disappointed, heartbroken, and disgusted I will be if this project goes through.

But, I also pledge to continue in the spirit of Hank Lentfer, no matter the outcome on this project and countless projects that will likely threaten this same space in the future, to do small acts with great love.

Who knows where those small seeds of love will plant themselves?

The story of the earth can still be a story of beauty and love, as long as the individuals who still respect wild places continue to show their love for that wild beauty.

Will you join me?

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You’re right.

It would be better if they also brought back the way a personal pan pizza tasted in 1987 when you were 8 years old and you had spent the whole summer in one chair in the library reading books like that was the only thing you had to do.

Since I can’t actually do that, here’s the 12th best thing!

We can talk about books right here.

The Salt of the Universe

by Amy Leach

This is a collection of essays that fiddle with the idea of restraint and abandon, generosity and tight-fistedness, rigidity and improvisation. Also, pickles and prophets.

Amy’s essays have fantastic word play and wanderings. It makes me want to live inside her brain — which sounds weird, so forget I said it.

I absolutely fell in love with her writing after reading The Everybody Ensemble. It’s the kind of book I wish I had written, but I couldn’t have because it’s exactly the kind of book that only Amy Leach could write. As is The Salt of the Universe.

I got lucky earlier this year and introduced her at a reading when she came out to Utah and then got to spend lunch and the afternoon chatting with her. I have decided we’re friends. You can ask her if she feels the same way.

Amy is just a downright A+ human being. She is hilarious and insightful and well-read and earthy and nature-y and full of praise for all kinds of random things. This book is another treasure on my shelf.

This Land is Your Land

by Beverly Gage

This book feels tricky to write about. I wanted to read something festive for the US Semiquincentennial this July. I saw the subtitle, “A Road Trip Through U.S. History,” and I got super excited. A road trip through history? Yes, please!

This book handed me two major disappointments:

1. There is no road trip. At one point she does mention her car breaking down, but there is no folksy travelogue of going across country. (Even though she did!)

2. Gage said in so many interviews that this book was about accepting a country’s mixed history (the good and the bad) and moving forward with hope. But, I read the whole thing, and whatever thread of hope she felt like she left, I couldn’t find it. The whole book felt angry.

So, there you go.

Current Bookstack

Library book on my bedside table: The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo. Only a couple chapters in but so excited about this one.

Audiobook on my Libby app: The Searcher by Tana French. Only 7% in, but what a ride! Roger Clark, the narrator for this audiobook, should get about 8 and a half trophies. He’s off the charts!

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I’ve been in this state of frozen semi-panic for a while now. Especially since the proposed mind-bogglingly massive Stratos Data Center1 just up the road from me and then a proposed 20,000 seat amphitheater2 at the mouth of the canyon in my neighborhood — which would entangle and likely block one of the only access roads from Utah County to the Uintahs.

It feels like the world is being run by developers with lots of money and little (or no) regard for the people who have to live with their decisions. I don’t want to live in a world where money means you can call the shots. Because very few of us have the billions necessary to get our way.

Luckily one of the things I did stumble across in the tangled world of the internet was this piece by Clarissa Pinkola Estes titled Do Not Lose Heart (via the lovely ).

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world now. Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The lustre and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope.

Do not lose hope.

That last line struck. I dabble here with little essays about this and that, hoping that I’m adding more hope to the world, but I don’t think I always am.

I think hope is hard, hope is work. Hope is an effort. Especially when I have to witness the disappearance of civil discourse, basic human rights, and the rule of law. I am not always a hopeful person. But I want to be.

Again, the wisdom of Estes,

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. There is a tendency, too, to fall into being weakened by dwelling on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there.

I want to live in a world that’s run by wildflowers and bees, but I am weakened by ruminations on all that is outside my reach, all that I cannot change.

But Estes has a way of framing this feeling that I found really helpful:

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

I would so like the world to tip toward an enduring good.

This morning I walked up to Rock Canyon with Howie the dog, just trying to shake all this noise from my brain.

I went slowly up the canyon, trying to notice every blooming thing, trying to light my soul. (In this case, “every blooming thing” is not a genteel sort of curse, but an actual thing I was trying to do.)

And, blooming things are incredible.

This Antelopehorn Milkweed, for instance, is incredible. What are those petals inside the other petals? How is it so many different colors?

And this Spreading Dogbane. Such a delicate pink.

I’m not sure I know all the way yet what it means to show my soul, but I’m going to try. I know that moments in the mountains: just me and the sun and the grass, fill me. Whatever light I have, I want to shine. Whatever soul sparks I have, I want to give.

I hope all my small hopes, half hopes, glimmers and glimpses, add up to large hope.

And I hope that large hope lights you.

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I’m still a bookworm. In case that wasn’t clear already. (So is Kate.)

And what, you ask, does being a bookworm have to do with Large Hope?

Reading is my way into the minds and hearts of people who are different than me. It’s the kind of escapism that allows me to experience something I would never experience any other way and then to return to my own world more compassionate and empathetic, more hopeful and circumspect. I’ve encountered thousands of lives between the pages of books and those lives have changed me.

Knowing that I can change (that others can change) is one of the fundamental sources of hope for me.

The Hand That First Held Mine

by Maggie O’Farrell

Maggie O’Farrell is my new author best friend who doesn’t know me.

I started with Hamnet and The Marriage Portrait, and the book I’m about to wax on about, The Hand That First Held Mine, is my third in this burgeoning Maggie obsession.

My favorite one-sentence review is from NPR.org:

“O’Farrell manages to take two rather ordinary women in ordinary circumstances and create something extraordinary.”

It is an extraordinary weaving of two ordinary lives. The story is centers around two unmarried mothers. I don’t know how O’Farrell manages to write about motherhood in a way that is so detail-oriented, but also so full of compassion.

Take, for instance, this snippet from one of the characters interior monologue. She’s a new mother and goes through possible responses to the following question in her head: “How are you feeling about the whole baby thing?”

And it’s got an opening paragraph that gives me shivers every time I read it:

I’ll stop quoting from it and just let you read it.

Remarkably Bright Creatures

by Shelby Van Pelt

Did Not Finish

I recently gave up listening to Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I made it a solid six hours in, but I was having trouble relating to any of the characters and it was so complicated I had a hard time following the audio. It’s a book I could see myself trying again at some point. Or not. I have a lot of other things I want to read.

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In case you didn’t catch the matching dresses I made for Mother’s Day, you can hop back and see those here.

On to the books!

Hum by Helen Phillips is kind of like living through your worst nightmare as a parent of young children. The story develops in a world taken over by technology — and if you’re wondering if technology can take over our children even more than it already is, Helen Phillips says yes!

Hum could have easily become a sci-fi trope, but instead it deals with the complexity of this imagined future head-on in a really humanistic way. While some sci-fi/fantasy spends hundreds of pages building a world, Phillips drops you in and lets the world just wash over you, while she focuses on the people and the relationships in a little slice of time. I was on the edge of my seat and kept doing projects so I could hear the end.

I listened to Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman right after finishing Lessons in Chemistry. Kind of a masochistic reading combination.

And I’m about to break my own rules and spoil the book, so if you haven’t read it and want to, you’ve had your warning.

Despite the heavy subject matter, I was more or less enjoying the book — right up until Eleanor Oliphant turns from a delightfully quirky unreliable narrator to a socially aware human being. I believe this happens as soon as she begins therapy. Here’s the thing: I did not buy the transition from the unreliable narrator to the reliable one. It felt like two completely different characters. And while I could believe that unreliable Eleanor suppressed memories of her mother setting her on fire and her sister dying and intense and horrific physical and sexual abuse, I could not believe that reliable Eleanor just sort of brushed herself off after all that stuff and carried on.

At least Lessons in Chemistry acknowledged the abuse and sexism. Eleanor Oliphant leaves these gaping holes in the story and in Eleanor’s personal awakening that are still distressing me. The ending was such a cheap shot. I just don’t think you can dig up that level of awful-ness, spend a few chapters in therapy, and then move on like everything’s hunky-dory. This book is one I probably should have DNF’ed, as they say.

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The sky tells me about the evening. Her teeth are blue. And when she smiles it’s a lake full of my own face — and the face of the moon. We ride the Skyhorse, before settling in its troughs of chalk, to pull blue silk over our faces. To sleep like loons, their hushed tambourine thrumming, as it weaves through our hair.

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Shoutout to for including me in her prompt!

Pre-order it! It’s so good! Comes to the US September 15, 2026!

Part of my job is reading a lot of books.1 (I guess I will need to gush about how delighted that makes me in another post.) And they are great books. I’m reading great books all the time. I actually try not to inundate this space with those book reviews. (Maybe I shouldn’t try not to?)

But, The Butterfly Season, was a standout for me this year, and it felt worth bringing here. Not only is it brilliantly written, with well-researched, well-thought ideas, but it is also a tender journey of moving from one way of being into a new way.

Talking with Lea this morning during her interview for , I just wanted to bottle the energy of that experience and sprinkle it on everyone I know. So engaging, sparkling, transcendent. That conversation, combined with the experience of reading her book, hit me in a really personal way.

Normally when I read nonfiction/memoir/essay, I feel like I am taking the author’s journey with them.

On the other hand, when I read poetry, I feel like I am taking my own journey, independent of the author’s.

Somehow Lea manages to fit this book into a middle space that I didn’t know existed. Reading The Butterfly Season is a poetry-like experience — true self-awakening on a very personal level — but with all the narrative and intelligence you expect from nonfiction.

I cannot wait until our Constant Wonder interview releases with Lea Korsgaard in September. She is delightful, hilarious, relatable and there’s nothing better than spending an hour talking about butterflies and the meaning of life — subscribe to Constant Wonder if you haven’t already so you can hear the interview as soon as it drops.

My Rating: Brilliant! Excellent! Love!

Genre: Nonfiction/memoir

Format: Advanced reader copy

Read it If: You love the wild world, or you want to be someone who loves the wild world. Or you’re a person feeling all kinds of feelings about who you are and what you’ve been and who you should be.

Steer Clear If: You’re looking for something plot-driven or something with actual answers to life’s biggest questions.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Absolutely.

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.

• “Lessons in Chemistry’s excellent experiment [is] quirky and heartwarming."

• “An irresistible buoyancy.”

• "Lessons in Chemistry is a breath of fresh air — a witty, propulsive, and refreshingly hopeful novel populated with singular characters.”

And I thought, “Cool. I’ll listen to that book while I sew a dress.”

I guess this is the moment in my life that I should reconsider my stance on not reading any sort of reviews or summaries of books before diving in because this book absolutely wrecked me. I listened like it was a highway car crash over two intense days. I was not laughing. I did not find an irresistible buoyancy. I was not heart-warmed.

(I did sew a dress.)

When the book ended, I sort of collapsed off my chair onto the floor and sobbed, loudly, for quite a while.

I don’t want to give you any spoilers, but I need to give something of a reason for my reaction. It probably isn’t everyone’s reaction — as evidenced by the quips above.

The first thing I didn’t see coming was the violence against women. It was so difficult for me to listen to that I phoned a friend to ask if I should even keep going. She told me that I should, and she is very smart. So I did keep going. But there is violence against women throughout the whole book. For anyone who has been the victim of sexual violence, it’s not a punchline.

And layered on top of that, the whole story is occurring in this remarkably sexist, misogynistic man’s world of chemistry in the 1960s. I do wonder if the sexism was supposed to be sort of over-the-top, in-your-face to make a point. Whether it was or not, I found it so deep inside my bones true to my own experience as a single mom trying to make a living for myself that it wasn’t humorous.

This book is heartbreakingly, absolutely true.

It stirred up for me the feelings that are always simmering under the surface. I try to pretend that the difficulty of being a single mom in the workforce (and in the world) isn’t the wound that it is, until something like this puts it all into sharp relief. It is truly difficult to stomach the difference between my life and a man’s life. I don’t think I’ll ever get over it — and it hurts even more to know that no one cares if I do.

So, the book wrecked me. It broke my heart. It wrung me inside-out. But it was necessary and perhaps even good for me.

I think my blurb would read more like this: “Lessons in Chemistry is a heartbreaking move through a world made to make women feel like quirky misfits, like the butt of all the jokes. Thankfully it ends with the woman wielding a large knife.”

Genre: Semi-literary fiction (?) masquerading as upmarket chic-lit

Format: Audible

Read it If: You can stomach the tough stuff long enough to get to the payoff.

Steer Clear If: You can’t take this level of misogyny or violence against women.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: No. (But, maybe?)

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A woman commented in church yesterday that she always felt inadequate as a mother, like she wasn’t living up to some standard of perfection. Everyone in the room agreed. There was a collective chuckle as women described failed dinners, dirty houses, unwashed laundry. Even though I have plenty of those things, I couldn’t really feel like a part of that collective agreement.

I can tell you what I was more worried about as a young mom than a dirty house or an underdone pot roast:

• Affording food that the kids would eat, like cereal and cold cuts

• Working my tail off to move up from my entry-level position

• Finding childcare with people I could trust

• Pushing through the bleary exhaustion until bedtime

• Putting the kids to bed so I could work another couple of jobs

• Sleeping half-awake, afraid a child would need me or someone would break in

— And this isn’t about how my life as a mom was harder than everyone else’s. Because it’s not. It’s so useless to compare levels of difficulty (unless you’re playing Mario Kart). —

This is about how often, how very often, I felt like I was utterly failing at the part of my life that was the most important to me: Giving my kids a safe and loving home. And I think that is a feeling that most parents can relate to.

But yesterday my daughter (as she does every year), snuck into my room while I was snoring and left a note. She listed things I’ve taught her that my thirteen-year-old self couldn’t have imagined teaching anyone.

• Self-confidence

• Home repair

• Respect for herself

• How to keep dreaming

She’s my baby, almost eighteen. I’m staring down this next year, my last precious moments with her as a child. And then it turns out that she’s no child. Both my kids have had experiences that pushed them to a level of maturity that wasn’t, and still isn’t, fair.

I don’t think the world owes me any credit for who my children are.

They are so wonderfully and amazingly themselves.

The thing about being a mother is that you get to watch as these souls unfurl and spread and find themselves. And that’s what I want to celebrate. That some miracle of the universe let me be part of their lives.

Can parents mess life up for their kids? I mean, yeah.

But most parents aren’t. Most of us are trying our level best.

Most of us are remarkably adequate mothers and fathers.

And as a midlife woman, not always sure if I did something useful in the world, I think being an adequate mother is enough for me.

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So, it’s probably no surprise to you that when I saw the acronym DNF everywhere, I thought someone intended to type DNR (do not resuscitate) and instead made a slight move south on the keyboard and got an “F.”

Turns out DNF means Did Not Finish.

I guess this book lingo has been around a while but I just hadn’t noticed. I was too busy reading.

I used to finish every book I started, but at this point of my life, I just don’t have time to keep reading things I really don’t like.

This is not the same thing as dropping a book that challenges me or makes me question myself — I like books that push me and my thinking.
These books were just bad.

And so, when it comes to lame reads, I side with Bartleby the Scrivener, and say, “I would prefer not to.”

Here are all the books this year that I’ve journeyed partway into and rather than continuing, thought to myself, I would prefer not to.

2026 DNFs to Date

My Oxford Year by Julia Whelan

I hated this book. I hated the characters. I hated the writing. But I was willing to hang in there (sort of), because I had it on Audible and that always feels like an obligation. The main character, and her love interest, are absolutely insufferable and nauseously self-serving. I got to Chapter 23 of 30 and just got so annoyed and angry that I did not even care to find out how it ends. For other DNFs, I might look up a summary — but for this one — No.

Do people like this book?

Please weigh in.

Mrs. Endicott’s Splendid Adventure by Rhys Bowen

I got about halfway through before I realized that the characters were going to remain cardboard cutouts, the plot was predictable to the point of utter boredom, and the writing was vapid. I have a feeling there is a giant audience for this type of comfy, formulaic stuff, but it isn’t me.

When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill

This book broke my heart. I was so excited that Barnhill was writing a novel for adults that included women turning into dragons. Dragons! Her earlier novel, The Girl Who Drank the Moon, is one of my all time favorites: a gorgeous collection of truth and magic and growing up. But this book was so disappointing. The dragon-stuff felt coerced and contorted to fit a political statement. It isn’t so much that Barnhill has a clear point of view she wants readers to understand, but it was so didactic and so forced that I couldn’t hang with it. Apologies, Kelly. I hope that you decide to rewrite this for children because I think that would be brilliant.

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Normally Liane Moriarty and I get along pretty well. I know what she’s going to give me, and I generally enjoy it. But I couldn’t finish this one. Violence against women is really hard for me to muscle through, and if the characters aren’t likeable, it’s just a no.

Quicksilver by Callie Hart

This is the moment where you all find out that I’m not much of a romantasy fan. Couldn’t even get through the first chapter of this one.

The Theater of War by Brian Doerries

This entire book mansplains what humanities majors learned in our first semester of college. So condescending. Nothing revolutionary here.

After all that vitriol, are we still friends?

Your turn. Tell me what you’ve thrown off your book stack this year.

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I went to see Hamnet, the film adaptation, a few months ago.

I was absolutely floored. Emotionally wrung. Stunned. It was poetry in motion. I cannot stop thinking about it. It was the most visceral, moving portrait of motherhood I’ve ever seen.

So when I saw Hamnet on a table at the bookstore, I bought it: a.) because the cover is gorgeous and b.) because I was so curious what sort of writing had prompted the film. If the movie was poetry, did the book have that same feeling?

Happy to report that Maggie O’Farrell knows how to write a sentence. It’s the best possible combination of lyricism, compelling characters, and plot that I’ve read this year.

My Rating: 5 out of 5

Genre: Literary fiction that’s also a little bit historical fiction and sort of witchy, while also being a reader favorite.

Format: Read it book in hand every night before bed.

Read it If: You’re a sucker for a good sentence, interested in the ways history can be imagined, and have been looking for a little grace for Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare’s wife.

Steer Clear If: You get bogged down in lyrical prose or if a novel about a young child’s death would be too much.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Ephemera: Loved The Book Club’s take on Hamnet. If you’re not one for spoilers, watch the film and read the book before listening.

And if you’re the sort of person who wants another opinion on whether or not to read Hamnet, you’ll love Proofread’s quick take. (Such a great podcast for figuring out if a book is for you in 15 minutes or less.)

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

As soon as I finished Hamnet, I scrambled to get my hands on another Maggie O’Farrell novel.

I picked up The Marriage Portrait and was not disappointed.

Admission: I think I’m about to read everything Maggie has ever written. It just hits me so right.

My Rating: 4 out of 5 (because I feel like I should stop rating every book 5?)

Genre: Historical fiction with a very generous slice of imagination.

Format: Library hardback.

Read it If: You’ve been desperate to know how Lucrezia, third daughter of the grand duke in Florence, died in the 1550s.

Steer Clear If: You demand historical accuracy, and you need a tidy ending. Or you physically can’t touch a book that Reese’s Book Club has recommended.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: Yes

Some Favorite Sentences from the Book:

She covers page after page with [illustrations of] children . . . Babies on the backs of their parents, babies in cradles, babies on horseback, babies taking flight on outstretched feathery wings, to mingle in the blue and skim over treetops.

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Rereading that piece, I still feel that moment, like ice on my tongue. The sharpness of grief still taking space inside of me.

No one really preps you for what it’s like to lose an imagined future.

It’s these expectations, baked into us, that transform ordinary things like soccer games into great gashes of emotion that we can barely contain or understand.

I had built a future in my mind for me and my husband and our two kids: it was full of hikes and burned hot dogs and homework around the kitchen table and inside jokes and sitting on the porch and games of Boggle.

It didn’t happen.

But, the arc of life is long, and not all dreams died on that soccer field.

Over these eight years, I’ve built a career, made a home for my kids, found new dreams. Resurrected old ones.

I’ve become someone.

And this weekend, that someone loaded up the 2001 4Runner and took a load to the dump, tossing the red chair on top.

It was broken beyond repair from many years of happy sideline sitting. I saw my son find his groove in ultimate frisbee from that chair, saw my daughter play basketball, sat along the banks of rivers, propped myself up on the back porch. The red chair, turns out, was still a gift — even if it wasn’t always easy to see.

Goodbye, Red Chair.

I hope a squirrel keeps nuts in your drink holders and pulls threads for a nest. I hope your red reminds someone of a cardinal settling into a tree. I hope that you can fall to pieces, gently, turning back into earth, into a sigh, into the breath of someone else’s dream.

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Have you read this? If you have, can we talk?

This book reads like Agatha Christie hired Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and a few characters from The Great Gatsby to write one of her murder mysteries — all while Sophocles and Plato were in the corner of the room smoking and making snide remarks.

The writing is bonkers good. The characters are absolutely absorbing.

I kind of want to go back and read it all again.

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Genre: Literary fiction that is also somehow mass market.

Format: Audible listen while I was folding laundry for 22 hours and 3 minutes.

Read It If: You miss feeling like you’re in college. This book will keep you on the edge of your seat and also make you feel like you’re forgetting to turn something in to your professor.

Steer Clear If: You don’t have the stomach for 1980s racism, bigotry, misogyny. Or you’re not very good at suspending disbelief.

Would I Recommend this to My Parents: No.

Bonus: I can’t get enough of — and their new podcast, , did a great episode on The Secret History. Definitely recommend you listen after reading. (Or before, if you’re into knowing a lot about a book before committing.)

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Here are the reasons, beyond the normal ones, that this is remarkable:

1. I’m a single mom with full physical custody and a “co-parent” in another state.

2. I work full-time. And work another job part-time.

3. I’m short and it’s hard to find pants that fit right.

4. I started an MFA over twenty years ago and wasn’t able to finish because of stuff.

5. I thought that my dream of being a writer was over and out-of-reach and impossible and impractical.

6. I’m 46. And, word on the street is, this year I will be 47.

So I am proud of myself. And if you asked me how do it all, my only answer is, I’m not sure. But also, maybe ADHD.

There is a couplet from a particular poem that I’ve had tucked in my mind all these years. The poem is titled “The Ghost in the Picture Room”1 by Adelaide Anne Proctor and here’s the bit that I carry with me:

I believe that: We always may be what we might have been. It gives me hope.

At this same moment that some of my long-ago dreams are coming true, I’m also facing the reality of chronic health issues that are really bumming me out and some really difficult stuff with one of my kids. I spent most of yesterday in random, hiccuping sobs.

For some reason, there’s a part of my brain that believes someday I’ll reach a point in life where I am simply happy. Where I’m not always carrying hope and disappointment, grief and joy, success and failure.

But if life has taught me anything, it’s that emotions don’t ever come in the singular. There isn’t a magic moment where we can feel only our grief, process it, and then move on to joy. It’s always a mumble and mess of everything at the same time. I would prefer something tidier, but it just isn’t tidy, is it?

So here I am: happy and sad, thrilled and disappointed, fulfilled and confused, content and nervous.

Even with these heavy binaries, I’m ready to keep looking for hope wherever I can find it.

If I can always be what I might have been, then so can my kids.

And so can you.

May that hope easily find you, wherever you are.

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I’ll keep reading all the beautiful things on Substack that are free. And maybe someday, when the financial crush eases, I will subscribe to all of you.

In the meantime, keep coming back here for random advice, wandering observations, bits of philosophy and poetry, that hopefully keep taking us to a place of larger hope.

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I woke up, scanned the headlines.

Rescanned the headlines, just in case I made it all up.

Took my dog for a walk.

The world feels alien when I read the newspaper, but, outside in the morning, seeing the way my dog sniffs the curb, pees on a forsythia bush, barks at the sound of leaves blowing across the street — all against the backdrop of some of the most beautiful mountains in the world — reminds me that nature is more stubborn and more sure of herself and more solid and dependable than all the powerful men in the world.

Which makes me think of windows. (Also, defenestration, but that’s a thought for a different day.)

I had a poetry professor who said that the job of a poet is to show the reader the view out the poet’s particular window.

So, let’s pretend that everyone who says anything, is a poet. And all the poets (be they good or bad) are only showing us what they see out the window.

If you were sitting next to me right now, looking out my window, you might see a chimney, a street lamp, the beige stucco house with stains down the eaves. And when I look out my window with you, I might see the thumbs of leaves from the silver birch, the pink edge of the clouds, the snow etching out ridges on the mountain, the memory of the night we all ran out in the rain.

Same window. So many possible stories.

Right now though, it doesn’t feel like we’re looking out windows. It feels like we’re all looking through hula hoops — and we’re chasing these hula hoops down the street as they roll and roll and the stories change and change and change.

So, I guess the thing is, we all need to make sure we’re chasing the hula hoop we want to be chasing.

Like George. George from the 1985 film adaptation of A Room with a View. In one of my favorite scenes, he climbs a tree and then shouts with all the energy of his soul:

Joy!

Beauty!

Truth!

Love!

And his father explains to the picnickers nearby that:

He’s saying his creed.

He’s declaring the eternal yes!

I guess that’s the hula hoop I want to chase.

I want to look out at the world with people who have a creed of joy, beauty, truth, and love. I want to be with people declaring the eternal yes.

I can’t start wars, or end them. But I can at least write about the view from my room. And remind myself, and maybe even you, that the roots of the mountains are deep and the sky is enchanting at all times of day.

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I don’t recall ever getting the answer right.

But, let’s all think of this a different way. Imagine you’re looking out at the ocean from the white sand beach in Florida or that you’re nearing the summit of a mountain with carpets of wildflowers spread out under your feet or you’re piling up the leaves in your yard and it looks like gold or you see the first glimpse of a gold crocus blooming in spring.

Now imagine someone asks you, “What does it mean?”

It’s kind of a silly question, and I would guess that it wouldn’t bother you in the least if you didn’t have an answer.

The answer is: it’s just beautiful.

Beautiful things are beautiful. They don’t need a reason or an answer or an explanation.

That’s how I feel about poetry. Reading poetry is just like seeing something beautiful. It doesn’t need an explanation or an answer.

You can read it and say to yourself, “This part was especially beautiful.”

No other expertise required.

In honor of National Poetry Month, I want to share some of my favorite poetry collections. But if that thought induces panic, just think to yourself, Jes wants to show me some beautiful things.

First up, Heart in a Jar by Kathleen McGookey.

I love this book. It’s something I pick up over and over when I want to feel connected to the divine, when I want to feel like my story is part of the whole human story.

Here are a few lines from a few poems throughout the book that are just beautiful:

• Whale bones litter the only sky

• The pregnant skunk moves into the dollhouse—it is available—then nibbles hard-boiled eggs at the table set for three

• The mice let me crochet spiderwebs into a necklace for my teacher

• The star was dying, but I bought it anyway from the shop that sold used things

• The monkeys inside me are sick of speaking the wrong language

• My heart has fetched the stick so many times it does not feel like my heart anymore

I love the sort of magical, surreal, bittersweet way Kathleen McGookey puts words together. I can imagine bringing a star home, letting a skunk live in a dollhouse, crocheting spiderwebs. And they all feel like beautiful things. Things that help me feel like someone understands me, even though I can’t tell you with any sort of certainty what McGookey means by those phrases.

She is an absolute master of the prose poem. This particular book grew out of a moment in her life where she was thick in kid-raising while also confronting the aging of her parents and then the death of her father. The poems are quirky, heartfelt, and gorgeous. They are beautiful pictures you can look at again and again. Highly recommend.

Format: Paperback

Genre: Prose Poetry

My Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Read it if: You think you don’t like or understand poetry. Or you’re a mom (or dad) with complicated feelings about literally everything. Or you’ve ever wanted to hide under a desk at an elementary school Halloween party.

Steer clear if: You don’t have a heart.

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But, I guess I’m not here to talk about how I understand the book now or Margot Robbie as Cathy (or Catherine?) in an R-rated fever dream.

If you could step inside my ADHD mind, you’d find a tiny, wuthering swirl of Catherine and Heathcliff, the Epstein Files, ICE, drought, Ukraine, and Trump’s face — along with my grocery list, that moulding container of soup in the fridge, and how I need to find someone to help me carry a dresser downstairs.

Somehow all of this adds up to me thinking about my own experience with partner abuse. If that was a big leap, I get it. Not everyone looks in the fridge and gets riled up about the treatment of women throughout all of time. My mind takes pretty big steps.

I hate watching this disappointing slide in public discourse that encourages us all to laugh off sexual abuse, to call things “love” that clearly aren’t, to excuse men who are so far out-of-line, unrepentant, and repulsive that I cannot control my anxiety when I think of them. I want it to stop.

I want it to stop.

So here’s a list.

In case you’re looking for something different to say. This is a list of things that I would have loved to hear as I was trying to disentangle from an abusive situation. (And, honestly, I would still be happy to hear any of this, over and over. Reassuring a victim of abuse is always welcome — no matter how much time has passed.)

1. I see how much you have suffered. I see it, and it breaks my heart.

2. I see how afraid you are. I see that you are afraid all the time. I see that you cannot sit at the kitchen table, fill in spreadsheets at work, or get into your car without being afraid. No one should have to be so afraid.

3. I’m not sure I know what it’s like to be that afraid, but I do know that I want you to feel safe with me.

4. I will do whatever I can to help you feel safe. Maybe sometime you’ll feel safe enough to tell me what that is.

5. When you say you don’t feel lovable, I know you’re not fishing for attention. That man tortured you so thoroughly that you had no choice but to believe you were not lovable. It isn’t the truth. I will tell you how lovable you are as many times as you need to hear it.

6. You did not do anything to deserve being treated that way.

This list is me begging for a gentler world — for me, for my children, for you, for the people you love.

So, dear, Heathcliff and Catherine, Epstein and Trump, Putin and Zuckerberg leave your version of love to be eviscerated on that turbulent moor.

We don’t want no part of this crazy love.

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