July 25 Friday roundup

In this week’s podcast episode, I looked at how tracking the disappeared and those released from detention can offer a map for how to stand up against the repression expanding throughout the U.S. right now. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you want to read it instead of watching or listening, or if you’d like to explore links to people and events mentioned in the episode, you can find them in this week’s Tuesday post.

I’m writing from a friend’s little cabin in the woods in southwestern Virginia all this week, working nonstop on the manuscript of my next Arctic book, Snowblind. I’ve intermittently had trouble spending as much time as I’d like on it for the last few weeks, because there’s so much going on in the U.S. right now. So I wanted to leave my family to fend for itself for a week, go into isolation, and get a big section of the book drafted.

And going alone to somewhere pretty remote has definitely helped! But even on this trip, which was ostensibly going to let me focus on one thing for a few days, I’ve been caught up in other things. I’ve done posts for this newsletter. Due to everything happening in America, people are reaching out to me. Someone in Berlin wanted to send written questions about the Everglades camp, a columnist wanted to talk about our expanding world of ICE detention.

And requests from afar aren’t the only distractions. There’s construction happening next door, so hammers and saws are going at it intermittently. Even nature has chimed in. Apparently it’s a mast year, which means trees are producing tons of acorns and other objects that drop on the roof of the cabin day and night.

That said, being here is still calmer by far than my everyday life, and I’m getting lots done. But the intrusions are a good reminder that we’re rarely as isolated as we imagine we are—even when we want to be.

My friends let me borrow this space for writing. My husband is taking up the slack at home while I’m gone. An editor agreed to give me an extra week on a freelance piece, so that I could write and submit it after I get home. The people contacting me for opinions on detention developments in the U.S. are distilling whatever knowledge I have that might be useful and sending it into the world even though I’ve checked out for a week. Nature is dropping things on my head to remind me that it’s still there, too, and that I need to keep an eye on the long game, even when (especially when?) every daily crisis seems immediate and severe.

These days might feel lonely and brutal, but we’re all woven into the world in ways that are convenient and inconvenient. We still have to come up with a way to make our art, pay the bills, and find some joy, because no one is going to do all that for us. At the same time, we’re not likely to be able to do it all alone. The good news is that we don’t have to. This week is evidence that we can’t go it alone even when we want to. So we might as well support one another and find ways to get through all this together.

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