Friends, I hope that you’re staying warm/cool/safe in your respective locales. It’s been steadily sub-freezing here in Detroit. I’m building the nursery and when I go out to the garage to cut the wall paneling boards, the saws’ power cords are frozen stiff. We’ve taken Rufus, thoroughly bundled, on winter birding hikes, and I’ve been planning and plotting for the new year, and thinking about those of you in Los Angeles.
December’s Digital Mending Circle was, in my mind, a success! Several of you joined, even given the short notice of the announcement. The co-work energy was strong. Participants worked on admin-y stuff and personal projects (including a video game), and I managed to move my See You on the Bookshelf podcast episodes off of my lapsed Soundcloud account.
So I’m going to do it again for January. Join me Tuesday the 21st from 7:30–9:00PM Eastern for another digital mending circle. In case you missed my last letter, here’s the premise:
What, you ask, is a digital mending circle? A virtual co-working session for the kinds of oft-neglected maintenance tasks that accrue around our digital lives. Instead of darning socks and patching jeans, we update personal websites, delete unused accounts, work on side projects, or even just catch up on email.
Hit reply or email me for the Google Meet link.
Speaking of podcasts, we’re looking for some help editing and producing BookSmitten. I ended up doing most of it myself in 2024, and have limited capacity to do it in 2025. Let me know if you know someone.
Speaking of capacity, this Social Battery pin came in the mail for Julia the other day:
Introverts unite.
In issue #400 I wrote about KC Davis’s ADHD organization book, How to Keep House While Drowning. Here’s a new-year opinion piece by Davis with some refreshing interior photography of her untidy, un-cleaned-up-for-the camera (and presumably unstaged?) home.
I’ve only just started folding my clothes again since Rufus was born. For months, all of my clean laundry stayed in a basket on a bench at the foot of our bed. It worked so well that I still keep my re-wearables in the basket.
Of course, it’d be nice to have Simone Giertz’s chair for half-dirty clothes. I also enjoyed this tour of Giertz’s 630 square-foot LA home.
A mantra for 2025: Better messy and weird than clean and boring.
Speaking of new parents: Julia and I both thoroughly enjoyed Nightbitch. We, so many times while watching this movie, looked at each other in recognition. (Though I much prefer, to the movie poster, the book jacket of Rachel Yoder’s source material – designed by Emily Mahon.)
The film came highly recommended by my Antioch MFA mentee Lauren, who interviewed me for the current issue of the program’s literary journal.
I’ll end this Sunday letter with another letter: Matthew Olzmann’s poem, “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America”
Stay warm/cool/safe,
Jack