SOON, issue 1
Welcome to 'Something Out of Nothing,' or SOON. This occasional newsletter will be about meaning--making it, finding it, offering it.
Do we know each other? My name is April Sopkin. You may have been subscribed to my old newsletter, a sporadic missive sent mostly during the thick of the pandemic. I’m relaunching. In this new space, I’ll still share about the writing life, as well as teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, thoughts about relationships, aging, and whatever else comes up. Not every issue of SOON will include talk of writing, but we’re going to start there because it’s where I’m at.
FIELD TRIP, or I Want to Be Done Writing My Book But I’m Just Not Done Yet
Last Thanksgiving my husband and I took a trip to Montreal. One cold evening, we visited the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for a retrospective of Venezuelan-American artist Marisol Escobar. We didn’t know who she was or what her work was like (beyond the museum’s website). She was a painter and sculptor—heyday in the 1960s but her career spanned decades—sometimes creating outsized pieces alongside miniatures (see The Funeral as an example). She made art about immigration, commercialism, her mother’s suicide, the natural world anthropomorphized, so much else; she played around with materials and didn’t shy away from colorful absurdity in her work. (Her human figures can be tall, boxy, brightly painted, so familiar and also way off. See Self-portrait as an example.)
It was not uncommon for Marisol Escobar to use her own likeness to cast a mold when she didn’t have access to models. This part of things—using her own likeness in a piece that wasn’t necessarily strictly autobiographical—struck a chord with me. Maybe it’s just what artists do. But it called back to the book I’ve been writing for several years, and on that trip to Montreal was working on diligently—and miserably—every morning at our hotel’s continental breakfast. I was revising a very long short story that I’d imagined would be the anchor in my story collection. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t find any kind of flow state but every word of revision was painful to summon, and by the end of that trip I had a bunch of handwritten pages that I cared so little about that I couldn’t even be bothered to keep track of where I put them.
Why did I care so little about those pages? The story was about being a young person crossing those tender first thresholds of adulthood and independence. And I wrote the first draft four years ago, at a time in my life when I was in fact leaving one phase and entering another—finishing grad school, getting married, becoming a stepmom, leaving the city for the suburbs. The story I wrote certainly was not representative of my exact experience but it was spiritually in line with the dreaminess and aimlessness I felt myself firmly leaving behind. So, why did I find it so hard to revise the damn thing?
It sounds simple, but it was a belated conclusion that hit me hard: I’d completely lost interest. In only a few years—from first draft to now—my creative interests had changed, my instincts and technical skill, too. By persisting day after day with this story, and making no progress, I was completely ignoring my instincts. Whatever likeness of my own that I had used to construct that story no longer reflected who I was or what I was compelled to write about. The belated conclusion: you have to write what you’re interested in, not what you used to be interested in. In the months since then, I’ve written yet another very long short story that will act as the anchor to my collection. It’s still about thresholds and phases of life, but it’s aged up and narrowed in on a single relationship. Here’s a random excerpt from the middle:
I wanted to mention the Marisol Escobar exhibit because I loved it and couldn’t believe I’d never heard of her before and what she had to say about her work resonated with me. And also, it had been some time since I’d visited a museum. Doing so brought me right back to why I think it’s important as a writer: admiring art in other mediums is a kind of cross-training. It makes suggestions to the brain from slant angles, gets us away from the line on the page, loosens and stretches the associations our work has been dwelling in. It’s okay to move on from subjects and stories that we once felt great urgency about—listen to your resistance, especially when it’s a continual feeling around a specific piece of work. Back off. Switch tracks.
Before my life as it now is (of marriage and motherhood and suburbia), I lived in the city across the street from two museums: The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. What a privilege to jog across the street and time travel whenever I wanted. Something about living in the suburbs makes a person rush around, destination to destination, fulfilling errands and going home. One of my intentions for 2024 is to break this habit more often and visit museums instead of stores. Another intention is to finish my story collection and move beyond this phase of forever writing my first book. I’ve been very patient with myself (this patience took practice, though) but I’m turning forty soon and there’s the inevitably cliched sense of urgency that I’m struggling to ignore. Recently, I was declaring to writer friends that I had a date on the calendar and I intended to send my manuscript out whether it was ready or not.
“I just have to be done,” I said. “I’m so tired of almost being done.”
And everyone nodded in agreement. Everyone agreed that it was exhausting and I should be done now.
And then a different friend said, “In the long view of your career, what’s another few months of waiting and working to get the book where it needs to be?”
It was what I needed to hear to shake off my angst once again. To go back to the page and do the work, day by day, line by line. To make something true and complete, as best I can, of what I know about this world through the stories I tell. To reflect myself in my work, at times, because I’m crossing thresholds and so are my characters and that’s beautiful and familiar, even if rarely autobiographical.
LOGISTICS, or How to Reach Me
I’m not on social media. This isn’t a big moral statement, rather the endless scroll made me dizzy and full of half-thought thoughts, and those feelings weren’t conducive to anything positive for me or my writing. My website has my bio, links to my published work, and info about upcoming classes. If you’re in Richmond, Virginia, I have a multi-week fiction class starting on April 1. We’ll be writing on the spot and between classes, experimenting with specific techniques of drafting quickly and freely. We will practice not overthinking. We will practice stepping to the side of our self-doubt and stretching away from well-worn habits. We will workshop, yes, but we’ll also engage in practical self-assessment of our individual drafting experiences, making space for our brains to acknowledge what we’re learning as we’re learning it—metacognition!—so we can take it with us when we leave.