Recently, I've been doing the NYT crossword puzzle on my phone. I tend to do them in pieces over hours or days. Sometimes I actually finish them (a Monday is likely, a Sunday is rare). Sometimes I just marvel over how frequently the word "orb" appears to be a correct answer. Is it a trick? Is it an Easter egg meant just for me, an inside joke mouthed by a stranger through a plate glass window? Orb. A word that is, to me, equal parts funny and beautiful, like a cross between a crystal ball and a bubble.
If you're reading this, you may know that this newsletter happens when it happens, meaning sporadically. Not even when the mood strikes, because the mood strikes fairly often—if you can believe it—but the real writing (the writing this instead of something else, something I owe myself or someone else) happens when I find myself pulled into the vortex of wanting to know and be known.
There are so many unknowns, so many brutalities in our world, yours and mine. I consume the same articles and video clips as many outraged leftist friends, most of us radical or leaning that way, most of us wishing we could donate, vote, riot, and rally our way into a better collective.
At a local level, I have my version of belief
I believe in the people who sweep broken glass out of grass in the park and fill free libraries and stand in traffic to help kids cross the street safely and disappear garbage in trucks every week. People who volunteer, get paid, scrape by, do well, are court ordered, are hapless, are hopeless, are learning, are dreaming, are joyful, are perhaps doing whatever they're doing to better their corner of the world out of love.
Like the flowers I planted outside my (new) front door last month, sometimes we shrivel and sometimes we bloom. Sometimes we do both: Take, for instance, a single flower I planted that curled inward even as it sprouted new little buds on either side. There is no hidden meaning here, no dying so another can live. None of that. Only flowers, all of them, and good intentions.
There is a season for everything
Whether that's doing the crossword (even when, especially when, a hard-won answer is SETMENU and you know OMAKASE would've been far superior) or finally buying a salad spinner or screaming really loudly in a field—if you have access to a field. If you don't have access to a field, you are welcome to imagine this newsletter unfolding before you like a scrap of paper, growing green, lush, fit for screaming. It’s yours.
There are so many things I want to remember to share with you. To laugh about, or cringe, or wonder aloud. Often, I’m overwhelmed and so I don’t begin. But what I tell myself then, if I have the capacity and the wherewithal, is that all I have to do is begin. So here I am, beginning again. With you.
Events and announcements and, wouldn’t you know it, some Little Happies
I was honored to celebrate two gorgeous new books last month: Michele Filgate’s second (!) powerhouse anthology, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, in which I have an essay—which you can read right here in Lit Hub, though you should buy the whole book because it’s a great book; and Julia Drake’s magnificently funny, charming, and disarming YA novel, Lovesick Falls. (Let the record show that I would buy a spinoff or sequel featuring any character in this book.)
Bonus: Michele is coming to Philadelphia on Monday, 6/30, when the two of us will be in conversation at B&N, moderated by Philly’s literary dad (patent pending, mark my words), Eric Smith… and you can register right here, right now.
The weather might be up and down forever, but summer is indeed coming. And that means: Writing Co-Lab Summer Camp 2025 is upon us! I’m so glad to be leading a generative “power hour” again this summer. All new prompts, all genres welcome, all you. Plus, enroll right now and you can use code CAMP15 for 15% off tuition! It’s such an amazing group of instructors with offerings for everyone. (Plus, you’ll get recordings so you don’t have to worry if your schedule doesn’t align with everything you want to do.)
I’m also thrilled to share my Electric Literature interview with Leigh Sugar, a truly one-of-a-kind poet out now with FREELAND, a wholly original debut poetry collection. I had the honor of being interviewed by Leigh for EL back when Disappearing Act came out in 2023. To continue the conversation around incarceration, love, and identity was a full-circle gift.
Get to the point, the point being Little Happies
Happy Pride! Being is believing. Being is everything.
I had the privilege of seeing Jean Smart in Call Me Izzy on Broadway this weekend—a whirlwind jaunt, what a perfect day trip. As I wrote on my Instagram story after: She’s a magician. A human firework. Love.
The TV series Be My Guest with Ina Garten: I’m late to the party on this one, and what a party it is. A celebrity talking about their childhood and rise to stardom/success/happiness, and then making meatloaf with Ina? Yes. Done.
I have the great fortune of doing an event here in Philly in September (9/15! Save the date!) with Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, and I’ve gotten to read her debut memoir, Holding: A Memoir About Mothers, Drugs, and Other Comforts ahead of its publication (8/26). This book has been a touchstone for me. Also, a good reminder for writers, readers, and marketers that while the drama of addiction (like, in my case, the drama of prison) might be a powerful hook, the real magic, the staying power, comes from the bright star at the center of this story: Karleigh herself, and her stark, enchanting sentences.
Speaking of magic: While I slog my way to the glittering finishing line of many, many scrolling pages of a YA (fiction) book, another project has my parallel attention. (We’ll call it that; it’s not exactly distraction—it’s more productive than that.) I’ve been working on an essay about a trip to Atlantic City, and with it, one of the strangest and most captivating performances I’ve ever seen. (And not for the reasons you’d think.)
Yes, sadly, The Equalizer may have been canceled. But my love for it will never die. Five seasons of Queen Latifah is always better than no seasons at all.
Last but certainly not least, I have a real life on-purpose library in our new house. It’s not yet unpacked, but soon. Slowly, surely, specifically. This was a room I thought was for some distant, hypothetical, mythical Jiordan. One more worthy, more ready, somehow. Sometimes we dream so large that it drifts up and away before we can make a grab for it; it can’t be contained, and then it can’t be recovered.
But once in a very great while, you open the door at the top of the stairs and there it is: pink velvet couch, green bookcase, and all. A dream, one you made come true.