For Earth Day, a meditation on theme

Or, I've realized it's okay if I write the same thing over and over

First, some official author business, as we are just a little over three months away from the publication of Donut Summer, something I somehow literally keep forgetting is happening. But when I’m able to remember, I have been able to get some things semi-together, so here’s information I have thus far:

• I will be having a launch event here in Portland, Oregon at the wonderful Grand Gesture Books on release day, July 29th. More info to come on that, but in case local folks want to mark their calendars. I may be doing more events, if I’m brave enough/mentally well enough to organize them, so! We’ll see!

• While Grand Gesture will obviously have copies available for sale at the event, I’m also partnering with local queer-owned indie Always Here for pre-orders from anywhere! I cannot express how jazzed I am to have both a romance bookstore and a queer bookstore in town now, and Always Here in particular is right down the street from where I live, making it especially easy for me to pop down and sign and personalize your books!

• I am also ALWAYS happy to go sign and personalize orders from legit any Portland area indie who will stock me lol, so some of my other favorites you can choose from include Vintage Books, Annie Bloom’s, or Broadway Books. (All of the above are also wonderful spots to visit for Independent Bookstore Day, coming up this Saturday!)

• Make sure wherever you pre-order from that you include a note about personalization before you press Submit—I’ll write/do whatever you want! (It has just occurred to me people will want me to doodle donuts. I assure you that even my doodles, like my signature, are not cute and whimsical like other authors’ but only embarrassing. But I will do my best.)

• All pre-orders and any book purchased at the event will also come with some Donut Summer-specific swag; I just…haven’t figured out what that will be yet? So, again! More coming soon!

• Reminder that you can add Donut Summer on Goodreads.

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This morning, when I realized it was Earth Day, it felt like a good time to noodle in this newsletter about something I’ve been noodling on in my head a lot lately: the fact that I’ve realized I have a thing. A thing I almost always want to write about, or include in my books, and that thing is the earth.

I have other Things, too—mainly, music, and relatedly, dancing; a penchant for fat men with beards (this is more recent lol); characters who are kind of obsessed with not being Good Enough. But including some type of environmental theme, in a way that deeply informs the narrative as opposed to being a repeated quirk, is increasingly and without a doubt the space I feel most comfortable in, most myself.

There are probably several reasons why Something Wild & Wonderful felt (and feels) like the book of my heart, but getting to write a book that almost fully takes place in nature was one of them. Like, if I could write a hundred more books solely about sad people walking through the woods, trust me, I would. In Heartwaves, Mae feels the best way to process her grief is to be by the ocean. In Donut Summer, the main character, Penny, is particularly concerned with climate change. She plants trees with a local non-profit whenever her anxiety is bad, to help herself re-center. She wants to grow up and help save the earth.

I have two works-in-progress I’ve spent the last year mulling over. In the one I’m almost done drafting, the female main character could be a grown-up Penny (something I only realized recently): she works for an environmental non-profit in Berkeley; the main plotline revolves around a dam removal project in Northern California, inspired by the incredible story of the Klamath dams. The other WIP is the follow-up to Heartwaves, which will take place on a small farm on the Oregon Coast. And when I tell you the actual plot of this book is nebulous at best, but yet I already feel so fucking close to it, because I know what my characters’ hurts are, and I really, really want to write about farming.

When I first started writing books, I felt a kind of self-conscious panic about so many things, but particularly when it came to uniqueness: that my books were too like other people’s books, that my own books or characters weren’t different enough from each other. TO BE CLEAR, I am still panicked almost all the time about the dumbest shit. But now that I have more experience writing multiple books, now that I have more experience with publishing and examining other people’s bodies of work from a critical writer standpoint, I’ve accepted some things. Like the fact that there are two types of people. Some people’s brains are just brilliant things, capable of coming up with completely new ideas every year, uniquely distinct from their previous ideas, while still being them, somehow. Man, I fucking love these people. What an honor to get to keep reading their fresh work.

And then there are some people who spend their whole artistic careers noodling over the same themes. Dressed up differently each time, sure, but essentially coming back to the same core questions. Some of my favorite authors do this, even if it takes me quite a few of their books to realize it. What an honor to get to keep reading their work, too.

Realizing that I’m probably one of the latter has been surprisingly comforting to me, a way to almost better focus on what I’m doing, to waste less time being panicked. I have long felt that writing is an opportunity to get to the core of ourselves. When I was in high school, I was deeply split for a long time about whether I wanted to go to college for writing or environmental science. In the end, I likely chose writing because it was the easier choice, in a way, and I’ve always been a bit of a coward. Writing was something I had always desired, deep inside myself, whereas I had no idea if I could hack it as a scientist. (And yeah, I probably couldn’t have.) It was especially decided when I visited the campus of Emerson (where I attended undergrad) and everyone felt like fucking freaks and I was like yeah, yes, this is what I want. (Emerson, being an arts school, did not offer any types of science programs so I did not have the opportunity to change my mind, but I did accomplish a minor in “science” while I was there. Science! JUST “SCIENCE.” Emerson, never change.)

Which is to say—focusing more and more on environmental issues feels like some kind of gift to myself, some kind of penance to that young person who wasn’t quite brave enough to become a scientist. Taking care of the earth, like engaging in healthy romantic relations, like loving ourselves, is a lifelong pursuit, practicing the same shit, over and over again. How lucky I am, to keep writing about that same shit, to keep investigating how to love both each other and the land we live on better.

Of course—while I’ve categorized these two types of writers as totally different, the reality is that nothing is so cut and dry; a lot of the writers who think of completely fresh plots each time will still, by nature of being a person, come back to similar themes over and over, too. And there are books I’ve written that have nothing to do with the environment, and I think those are equally important for my craft: How You Get the Girl, amazingly, doesn’t soliloquize about nature even once, I don’t think; another book I’ve been working on for some time revolves around the world of comic books. Working on something outside my wheelhouse is important to stretch my creative muscles. But more likely than not, a tiny spoke of that wheel will likely butt into those projects, too: Love & Other Disasters takes place almost entirely on a sound stage in Burbank, but my heart sang the most when I got to write about how much Dahlia Woodson loves palm trees.

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I’ve been contemplating ways to inject a little more joy into these newsletters, since the world fucking needs any bit of joy we can find. One day I WILL find the space to include more personal recommendations, I swear it, but for now—I find joy most often in my dogs and my garden, so I thought I’d start ending each newsletter with a random shot of both. The shot of Angus below has the bonus this month of showing you what an actual nightmare my bookcases (+floor stacks of books) are.

Hope you’re taking care of you as best as you can,

xo

anita