SOON, issue 3: Spring Review 2024
On the first day of official summer, here's a photo essay reviewing the events of (my) spring.
Welcome to Something Out of Nothing, a newsletter about meaning—making it, finding it, offering it. My name is April Sopkin. I talk about the writing life, teaching, thrifting, books, travel, obsessions and idle interests, and much more.
Spring Review 2024: I Love Temporal Leaps
March 30, 2024: Painting of two women on a pastoral hillside, one earnestly speaking to the other who is downcast and half-turned away. I was wandering the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and sent a photo of this painting to my best friend, who was feeling helpless and angry about a situation she couldn’t control. We’d talked on the phone earlier in the day, and we’d sent voice texts back and forth. “U n me,” I texted her along with the photo of this painting.
April 7, 2024: The tulips given to my son by his girlfriend. When I took this photo, I was trying to read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, and—appropriately—kept getting distracted by the tulips in my peripheral vision. Doing nothing while reading nothing.
April 8, 2024, morning: Along with teaching undergrads at a couple of colleges, I also teach adult writers at a community arts organization called the Visual Arts Center of Richmond. This is a moment in the middle of a freewriting session. I was also writing. I think this prompt was about summarizing a long stretch of time for your characters. We’d just read and discussed Lauren Groff’s “Ghosts and Empties,” a temporally expansive yet deeply interior story of a wife and mother out walking around her neighborhood every night. She’s attempting to both comprehend and escape from a recent revelation in her marriage. Months pass in mere paragraphs, then the story leaps into the future-tense with sudden clarity. I love temporal leaps in fiction.
April 8, 2024, afternoon: Let my undergrads out early for the eclipse but we still arrived too late to snag the free eclipse glasses on offer. I borrowed a pair for a quick 30-second look, then took a series of photos to try to capture something for myself. Here’s a selfie with the eclipse at about 80% coverage, taken in central Virginia, on a crowded soccer field full of faculty and students. Afterward, on the way back to my car, I crossed paths with a couple folks and let them know the free glasses had run out. A young woman raised the cereal box she’d fixed into a pinhole viewer and I nodded with appreciation. The older man she was with gave me a raised eyebrow. “You didn’t come prepared?” We bantered back and forth about my lack of preparation, both of us joking. He swept his hand over my head, told me my hair was glowing like a halo. I told him the eclipse was making people act strange. Looking at this photo now, though, I realize he was right about my hair. Also, I captured the eclipse on my forehead.
April 9, 2024: Spring semester was a mess. It was my first semester back after a grant-supported break to finish my story collection (still not finished, fyi), and I had something like 120 students between institutions. I’m still processing how overwhelmed and angst-ridden I was for those months, and I’ve been putting the work into figuring out how to reimagine my approach as a teacher, for my sake, my family’s, and my students’. I took this photo on the walk back to my car after teaching. Spring in Richmond is tree-lined sidewalks bursting with flowers. I probably stop and admire flowers like this around the same time of year, every year, mesmerized anew.
April 26, 2024: I’ve been working on a short story that I’m completely in love with—does not happen every time—and I haven’t shared it with anyone. I’ve just been enjoying working in the world of it, following what compels me and growing more and more confident in that instinct. In this photo, I’m reading an excerpt from said story at Flying South, a new reading series here in Richmond, put on by my buddy
and Bedfellows lit mag editor Jack Sadicario. I hauled my husband, kids, and mother to watch the reading. Everyone knows I’m writing a book—that I have been for years now—but the tangibility of that kind of thing is hard to make real for people, I think. Events like this are rare and special to me, for that reason: it’s made real for my most important people.
May 2, 2024: Virginia Beach with my mom. She’s a California girl originally, so the ocean is comforting and primal to her. This was a quick two-night jaunt and technically still off-season. Frigid water but a breezy low-80s made sitting on the beach for hours incredibly soothing. I was deeply burnt-out from the semester and getting over a cold (maybe Covid, we wondered in retrospect, after my mother caught it and took weeks to get over it). We lazed so hard.
May 26, 2024: My husband and I are going through the adoption process (in the waiting-to-be-matched stage of things). One of the ways people fundraise for their adoption journey is by hosting an enormous yard sale. We put out the call to our community: Give us your stuff! And people gave. And gave. And gave. I’ll write more about this experience at a different time, but just know: people gave and told their people to give and those people also gave, and our house shrunk considerably under the responsibility of storing several lives worth of donated items, but then the weekend came to have the sale, and people showed the hell up and shopped. It was an incredible and overwhelming show of kindness from strangers. I’m going to keep this feeling close in mind as we enter the worst part of election season.
June 4, 2024: For awhile now, I’ve been collecting fabric from thrift stores, just drawn to the beauty of patterns with no project plan in mind. After the yard sale, though, my brain was spent, and I found myself sitting down and hand-stitching pillows. It was an activity I could do on the couch with my feet up, listening to music or a podcast or watching something. The movement of my hands, the close focus on the stitching, the way the pillows literally became actual things, folded and flat then stuffed and dimensional, in my lap, over the span of a couple of nights: it was restorative. Most of the pillows turned out all right, I think. (Alas, one triangle-shaped experiment was a failure to reach the stars.)
June 20, 2024: Today is summer. My mom and I drove about 100 miles—the last 40 or so through the Blue Ridge Mountains—to visit the Factory Antique Mall in Verona, VA. It claims to be the largest antique mall in the U.S., and I did feel lost and awed most of the time, but primarily this was a pilgrimage to see the booth of one of my favorite YouTubers, Amanda’s Mercantile, a channel devoted to all things antiquing, thrifting, selling, styling, and some DIY. We strolled up and there she was: Amanda of Amanda’s Mercantile, up on a ladder, heat-gunning the paint off some doors in her booth. I’ve met a few actual famous people before, but this was my first experience with feeling a little bit starstruck. I didn’t expect it. I felt shy. But she was gracious and chatty, gave us restaurant and thrift store recommendations, and then my mom and I went on our way to wander, discover, and buy.
Gorgeous painting!
Very cool, April. Nice catch-up. Remember you can ask our writing group to review a ss or novel portion at any point.❣️