violin(ce)?

so i played in a symphony concert yesterday! for the first time in [redacted oh g*d] years!

it’s funny—i’m not sure i ever considered going to conservatory, even in ye olde high school all-state era—i think music was something i stuck with because i’d started early and was good at it and somehow being good at it became a self-reinforcing motivational mechanism (also, college applications). but often it was what other people (i.e., teachers, who were all great btw) saw in the music that drove me—i think i’d started too early for it to ever not be a sort of task-based thing first, and a sensory and/or emotional experience second.

eventually, after college, i stopped playing.

part of it was just living in an apartment—the golden rule of thou shalt not ennoisen those for whom thou gets annoyed at for likewise noisening. part of it was committing more time and discipline to writing, the necessities of maintaining a day job, grad school, etc. but part of it was simply having nowhere to go with it—no concerts to prepare for, no teacher or conductor or chamber music coach to be accountable to each week. in the end, i’m not the kind of person who’s often deeply or intuitively touched by instrumental music, so i moved on without any real sense of loss.

the first time i walked into rehearsal for the community symphony last month, i almost burst into tears.

the familiarity of the clarinets and bassoons burbling in the back. the soaring tones of the cellos and french horns. the familiar contours of the violin in my hands, my fingers falling into place again as they warmed up. and as the pieces came together, in the weeks leading up to the concert: that sheer vastness of sound, the rush of playing in synchrony. to quote this is how you lose the time war: “imagine a person melded to a Thing, an artificial god the size of mountains, built for making war in the far corners of the cosmos. imagine that great weight of metal all around her, pressing her down, giving her strength.” an emotion so wide and full and irreducible that ossifies when put into words. except: that it felt like coming home.

i don’t know if this is a writing metaphor. i guess it could be? or just: that what you believe is gone can come back to you. that things once done out of want or ambition you can learn to do out of love. that there’s still time—or that music has a way of making time, for a couple hours on a sunday afternoon, to listen more deeply, to feel a little more alive.

in terms of writing news:

• these deathless shores went into its second printing and also, last week, sold as well as (if not better than?!) in august. thank you so so much to everyone who has yelled about it, requested it at their library, pushed it on their friends and/or nemeses, etc.! (optimal delivery state suggestion: gift it to the person you’ve had a crush on for nine-plus years to send an extremely ambiguous message.)

• my first novelette (i intended it to be 5k oops)—about literally hostile architecture, chronic pain, and the legacies of institutional privilege—will be published in these bodies ain’t broken, a ya horror anthology edited by madeline dyer that features disabled and chronically ill teenagers!

• there’s more extremely cool short fiction news but I can’t talk about it yet hrrrr

other announcements:

• the lit for lebanon (@lit.for.lebanon) auction (to which I’ve donated three copies of tds plus some art prints!) is running from october 23–november 2; they’re raising funds for dar el salam (@hope_darelsalam). there’s a bunch of cool stuff, so be sure to check it out!

reading/listening

• thank you halsey for the scorpio season album drop

• “little miss perfect” (joriah kwame / taylor louderman)—petition for an i kissed shara wheeler broadway musical PLEASE

• the goblin emperor, for the 6th time (it’s been a very comfort reads kind of past few months)

also, i was cleaning out my storage and stumbled upon this spot photo from 2013:

anyway that’s all for now, hopefully more soon. thanks for reading!