Hi Friends,
I’ve seen a lot of complaints on social media about the short days, and I’ll admit, it’s a little hard to get used to, and even though it really does happen gradually, once we set the clocks back, it feels sudden indeed. But winter is a great time to hunker down and write. It’s also a time to make the most of the light that’s left, which of course is a metaphor for our lives.
In the last few prompts, we’ve looked at the gifts we have received—those we felt grateful for and those we didn’t. This week, we’re going to look at some of the gifts we’ve given or continue to give on a daily basis. I started this newsletter as a gift to writers, a way to give back. And though I am still gifting one prompt a month, I so often tell my students that writers ought to be paid for their work, and so I took my own advice: the rest of the prompts and the archives are for paid subscribers, but I also know so many of us are struggling financially, so if you would really like the prompts and are finding them useful but really don’t have the cash to spare, please let me know, and I’ll gift you a paid subscription. No questions asked.
So often, we writers feel like we’re being narcissistic (and are sometimes called that by others), but I don’t believe that’s true. Our writing is a gift to the universe; even if there’s just one reader out there who needed to hear what we have to say, we’ve offered something valuable. The same is true for art. I hope you will see it that way when you sit down to write.
My friend Kim and I recently took a road trip around the Salton Sea in California. My friend Gayle Brandeis wrote a great novel called The Book of Dead Birds that’s set out at the Salton Sea, and since reading it, I had always wanted to check it out. I highly recommend the novel (she’s got a new collection of essays coming out, too, which is a real stunner). The Salton Sea is a very salty, land-locked body of water that was originally created when water broke through a canal that was created for farming, filling the ancient lakebed with water. Because farmers used so much water from the Colorado River and let it flow back into the lake, it has remained. In the 1950s and 60s, entrepreneurs built fancy resorts on its shore (which are now crumbling ruins) and even hosted water skiing competitions.
The Salton Sea has become an important area for migrating birds (since so much of our wetlands have been destroyed), but it’s also highly contaminated by farm run-off, so most of the fish have died off. My friend Kim says that on some summer days, the smell of dead fish is so strong, you can’t breathe. Also, on windy days, clouds of toxic dust swirl into the air to neighboring cities. If you look closely at the shore, the “sand” is actually thousands of ground-up fish bones. It’s been called the greatest ecological disaster in California’s history. So why would we want to tour such a place?