LivingSmall is Getting Dirty

New year, new project, new site ....

What are we doing here? What’s going on?

We’re changing our Substack

To avoid monetizing white supremacists, full-on Nazis, TERFs and other assorted bad actors. Which is a total drag because Substack is fun and generative and the conversations are terrific. Quite a lot of you subscribers came onboard in the past few months via Substack.

Since I love this community, and agree that we shouldn’t cede it to fascists, I’ll be cross-posting here, and chatting in Notes. But I’m de-monetizing this platform. I’m not surprised that, like most VC-funded ventures, it’s not as great as it seemed. I’ve had reservations since the beginning, when they explicitly funded a lot of right wing and transphobic writers, but it seemed like it got better? But then it got worse. John Warner has a good overview about the systemic nature of the problem here: [Corrected] Wrapping Up 2023. Looking Toward 2024

We’re sunsetting the LivingSmall blog.

I started LivingSmall in early 2003, just after I’d bought this house, to document the project of moving to a smaller town, attempting to shore up my future by living below my means, building community and local food systems, and trying to subvert the dominant narratives surrounding success. In the first year of the project, my beloved brother Patrick was killed in a car wreck, so this space also became a place to write about grief, and rebuilding a life in it’s aftermath along with all those other initial goals. I’m so very very grateful to those of you who have been along with me for this 20 year journey. I learned a lot from this project, but I also feel like my writers’ voice is stuck in some ruts there that I’d like to break free from, and so, that project will be fading into the internet sunset. (It’s self-hosted though, and all the content is on the website linked at the beginning of this paragraph, so it will live on, in internet suspended animation.)

What is Getting Dirty?

Getting Dirty is going to be a space in which I can begin formulating the essays that I hope will form the core of my next book (after the LivingSmall memoir project, which now has a shape, and is coming right along).

For decades, I’ve been interested in how we talk about materiality, and how, for the most part, we try to hide it. Think of the words we use: dirty, gross, unpleasant, leaky. Think of the associations: primitive, female, instinctive, uncivilized.

It’s why I chose this photo as the logo for this site. It carries the narrative of the whole materiality project. “Ooh look! A robin’s egg!” And then, on closer inspection “oh!? yuck! ants!”

Ants who are busy taking care of a rich food source. Ants who are busy breaking down the egg, back into it’s constituent parts. But there’s always that shock. Oh! That’s not what I expected!

I did one of Pam Houston’s workshops last fall, at Tomales Bay (it was terrific) but there was this sub-chorus of trauma from those of us old enough to have gone to graduate school in the 90s. Pam was a couple of years ahead of me at the University of Utah, and has a line about how she got there and was told not to write about “mountains or snow or skiing,” which as she notes, was about 95% of what she was writing about. And let’s just say that trying to do a PhD on ecocriticism, and feminist ecocriticism at that, was a discouraging experience there. I was told over and over again that since the postmodern dogmas of the day declared that language and the world had nothing to do with one another, that to write about the world, the material world, the world of embodied activities and ways of knowing I learned from riding horses and skiing and kayaking all through my twenties, was retrograde. I was told none of that mattered. None of that was interesting. None of that was a “fit subject for literature.”

In the intervening decades, as planetary crises have piled up, as they’ve started to overlap one another like the ice dams that block the Yellowstone river in spring, jagged blocks of frozen river surface driven up on top of one another by the gravitational forces of the current, it is more important than ever to think about how the ways we think and write about the world, effect the ways we act upon the world.

I’ll be writing about my entanglements with thinkers I’m reading. I’m very excited to be writing about books here. It seems like a whole plain of legibility has opened up in which we can explore that fertile space of entanglement between our ideas and the world-as-it-is, between the world in our heads, and the world at our doorstep.

This is the core duality we grapple with in Western society, between things and representation, between ideas and physical reality, between the tenor and the vehicle of any metaphor. In graduate school, I had a rant about the significance of the metaphor’s vehicle, that little horsecart in which the big, bald-headed, thinking Idea was carried along through history. I have always been interested in the horsecart.

Whenever I think about this problem of representation and the world, I think of Robert Hass. Praise was the first slim volume of modern poetry I ever discovered for myself, there in the long row of slim volumes of poetry in the Beloit College library, a long row made possible by the Beloit Poetry Journal. There it was, a little book that has been my companion now for over 40 years. And so, as introduction to the project, I leave you with Hass’s great meditation on the problem of representation in light of the beauty of the world:

Meditation at Lagunitas

BY ROBERT HASS

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

What does this mean for you?

Hopefully, not much, except for new content going in a new direction. Your subscriptions have all been ported over to Buttondown, who will be handling subscriptions, payments, and newsletter management. If you usually read me on the Substack app or website, everything will post there the next day after I send out an email newsletter, so that shouldn’t change.

If you’d like to subscribe for emails from the new site, you can do that here:

This link will also give you a choice to pay for a subscription. At some point, I’ll probably introduce content for paid subscribers only, but for the meantime, everything is available to everyone.

Thanks for following me, especially those who’ve come on board during the past few months, and I hope you’ll join me on this new adventure.