Dear friends,
So we just looked at our website and noticed that the last Recent Arrivals email we sent was in July of this year. That’s a long silence for us.
Part of the sincere pleasure of this job is sending out these semi-regular emails. There is something deeply satisfying and ephemeral about thinking about what to include in what is essentially a quiet, lonely corner of the internet. Remember blogs? We loved blogs. We loved that finding one was like discovering a muttering seer in a swampy wood. So much purpose for basically no one. The used book store equivalent is discovering a tenderly written, spiral bound community cookbook. Everyone in town knew of or wrote for the cookbook. A lot of time was spent putting it together. But no one outside of that little town really cared. It was beautiful, purposeful, relevant, yet entirely regional. Lonely corners of the internet can feel like that to us. Used book stores too. They’re out there holding space. Youtube videos with only one view. Band pages with 12 fans. Much of it is awful. Some of it is glorious.
We pursue that glory.
Both of us love to get slammed on iced coffee at the breakfast table and gun for the best line or joke or idea to send out to you, our dear readers. Those mornings, our snort-metres are on High Sensitivity. If Jason can make Vanessa snort as she reads, we know we have a good one. If Vanessa can make Jason spit-take his coffee then it’s a hit. Snort-wise we are doing fine. Jason cracked Vanessa up last night on the way to a public speaking engagement and Vanessa was reminded why she married him. Just writing about ourselves in third person is, to us, snort-worthy. It also advances the mystery of who writes these damned things? Is it Jason? Is it Vanessa? Is it both? Does it matter? How much is from one or the other? Authorship demands reduction. A sole genius. We are neither. We are a hive-mind made from passion and matrimony. We are, the two of us, a beautiful, lonely corner of the world, holding space for the things we love.
However, our little corner has been silent. This is because we’ve been moving back into our house. We had a house fire. We survived. We have moved back in. Our little house is back to being another lonely corner of the world, a sane, personal place amidst changing, ridiculous chaos. Great powers slam into one another. Gazillions of dollars breach this beach or that. We plant tomatoes. We buy a desk. We notice that three bunnies now live in our backyard. It’s not that we do not see the Great Powers, or have an opinion, or think they are good or evil or banal or interesting. We just know that our little corner has five views. Five, precious, views. Ourselves and our three kids. That’s who we’ve made this little place for.
It caught fire. It almost vanished. We fought the fight of our lives to keep it. And now we are home. We cannot express the relief we feel to notice that not one, but three bunnies live in our backyard. Or the relief that in the year we were gone, birds have nested in our abandonment. Our rose bushes are twice as big and gorgeous. Our hostas have gone berserk. We’ve been taking a moment to just be in this place, this remote, personal, isolated place, letting one bunny become two. Then three. Then seven.
They have their own view count too. They are not allowed to eat our tomatoes.
Much love,
Jason & Vanessa
P.S. Here are some books.
