Monika Magdalena Woods: I’m writing to you from the first month of the new decade, the first month of our project of a running yearlong conversation. It feels like a psycho year for us to choose to do this- but I am also choosing to start this year off from a place of optimism and hope. I’m anxious and eager to read this in January of 2021, and trace our path across this year.

It ALSO happens to be the month your debut novel comes out, and I can’t not talk about that. You and I are actually in a years-long conversation about writing and publishing, since we’re both writers with publishing backgrounds. (Or in my case, a publishing person smudged with writing…) We both kind of used to say, like, “someday if my book ever comes out, which it probably won’t ever, I have no idea how I’ll navigate the publishing process, not that I’ll ever find out!” We have always both been careful not to take writing and publishing for granted. But, your book has come out, and I wanted to know: How does it feel to have published your debut novel? And why were we both always so cautious and self-deprecating? Have you been able to break out of that mindset? And how amazing is it that we have supported each other through so much time and writing and reading and working?!

Miranda Marchese Popkey: It’s February, and in Watertown, Massachusetts, where I live, it was sunny all day, mid-sixties. I’m guessing about the temperature, actually; I was too scared to check. Five years ago this winter I’d just started dating my husband and we were commuting between Cambridge, MA where he lived, and New York, where I lived; I’d go up one weekend, he’d come down the next. We were snowed in more than once. I remember the magazine where I was then working closing early because of a storm and deciding, on impulse, to surprise him with a visit—it looked like our offices were going to be closed the rest of the week. I was on the last train north out of Penn Station. Now I look at pictures from that winter—2014 - 2015—at the snow, four feet high on both sides of every street, and wonder if I was living through the end of something. Today, walking my dog around Fresh Pond, the ice on the reservoir all but melted, my coat unzipped, no hat, no gloves, my skin was humming with dread. The other dog walkers looked cheerful, like they were enjoying themselves; I didn’t understand. The poet Jana Prikryl recently tweeted, “Is it truly never going to snow again in New York City.” I read that and wanted to cry.

This is related, I promise. You asked about my novel, which came out in January, and which I am proud of and want people to read—about the experience of it being published. And I think I have managed to react to the process with an evolving and surprising (for me) amount of equanimity. For example: I only read my bad Goodreads reviews (of which there are so many! I owe Book of the Month readers an apology and also, possibly, a tribute of some kind—my first born?) once every few days. (That’s a joke! Mostly.) The truth is that I enjoy critique; when someone tells me what’s wrong with something I’ve written, it’s a chance for me to figure out whether I agree or disagree—like when you (pretend to) let someone else choose the movie you’re going to see because you know your own ambivalence is in part a lie but you need something to react naturally against to see past it. So reading reviews involved, in part, figuring out how I felt about the novel, a not wholly unpleasant experience—turns out I think it’s pretty good! But then after the initial rush, during which all my attention could be narcissistically occupied by the book’s reception and my own reaction to it, I was returned to the world and reminded of the various emergencies through which we’re living and the fact that my art in no material way contributes to their alleviation. Hence my anxiety about the weather. Every day I ask myself if there isn’t more I could be doing to make this world materially better, more just, less evil, and the answer is always yes; but of course the reason I ask this every day is because I can never quite convince myself to turn away from writing to devote myself fully to that work.

I was going to ask you a fairly boring question about how you balance your publishing work, your family life, and your art, but then it seemed too obviously like something you’d be asked by a women’s magazine. So, instead, I’ll ask: what are you hungry for? I’ve found that the older I get and the less time I have (and the more aware I am of this fact), the hungrier I am—to learn new languages (Spanish), to develop new skills or revive old ones (ballet!), to know more, period. This is the selfish part of me that won’t give up on work that feels (only) personally enriching—the part I tell myself I have to keep feeding if I’m going to be able to do the more broadly “meaningful” work. What is the selfish part of you most hungry for?

PS: Thanks for giving me permission to use my oft-ignored middle name! Hot tip if you’re trying to pronounce it in your head: the “ch” is a hard “c” sound (as in cut), not the more obvious “ch” sound of “cheese.”

MMW: I fucking knew you’d have a cool middle name.

Remember when I was optimistic about 2020 being better than 2019? It’s March 18, 2020, and I haven’t left my apartment in a week.

Now it’s April 12, 2020, and I couldn’t bring myself to ask you March’s question. Pretend this is coming to you in March. While you’re at it, pretend I never said 2020 would be a good year. I can’t handle thinking about my optimism.

Last night I sobbed for about an hour watching Little Women. I still and always get so worked up thinking about Jo. The movie was so good, emotional but not cloying, beautiful but not consciously so. I didn’t watch it until now because I knew if I watched it I would cry. The past 5 or more years I’ve really avoided watching things that would make me cry. But I planned to watch it and planned to cry last night. I found myself crying in anticipation of what I knew would make me cry. Have you seen it? The way the movie plays with the present and the past is really upsetting, and for some reason, Laurie telling Jo he’s married to Amy is even more difficult to experience than in the book. And the scene where Laurie proposes—it’s devastating.

The movie had this detached aspect to Jo’s life and experience that made Jo’s success at the end feel like such a win. And what it did to me, beyond making me cry, was make me miss my brain. Which is what I’m hungry for, and have been for a while now. I wish to have my brain back. I used to have a good brain. I do think it was unformed. That version of it, at least, made me ravenous for reading. I used to think that I was always one-amazing-book-away from getting out of any rut, any intellectual laziness. I could read a book that obsessed me, and it would recharge me and bring me back to myself. I don’t think that anymore. Maybe it’s because I feel old (my body hates me as well as my brain, to be honest), but I now feel like my brain has been completely ruined. I am not completely sure what’s been lost, but something is missing.

I’m trying to write. I’m trying to read. I’m trying to work, and sometimes, I can be successful, even really successful, doing these things. I think it’s more than just the anxiety and stress of the pandemic. I’ve felt this for a while now. I’ve been stymied on my novel, which I’ve been trying to finish for two years.

But after I finished watching Little Women last night I did feel a shift, and I was *hungry* to tell you about it. I keep telling myself it’s time to change and get my brain back. I went to California in February, and it was supposed to be a vacation, to get my brain back, a jolt out of my routine. But I ended up working really hard the whole time. Even so, the trip was really invigorating, but the best part of the trip was Sunday morning, when my husband and I took a really long walk punctuated by two meals. We hadn’t done that for a long time and it is my literal favorite thing to do. I haven’t had that freedom since I had my son in 2015, and it’s hitting me even harder than usual right now. So I know what I need is to walk and talk, and, now, I can’t. The same thing happened when I went to Rome, burned out, in 2016. I walked it off!

I don’t really have a smart question for you. I wish I could ask you something that would give you some kind of insight into yourself. Have you been able to keep running through this? How are you doing? Do you feel like we’re living lives of the mind more than usual? But mostly, how are you feeling?

MMP: Back when all this started, I drew up a little schedule for myself. Two schedules actually: a daily schedule and a weekly schedule. On the daily schedule were small tasks: take a walk every morning without my phone; read or watch something in Italian; spend at least ten minutes on Duolingo practicing Spanish. On the weekly schedule were larger projects I wanted to chip away at—a piece of short fiction—and reminders: cook something “fun” at least once a week; call my parents; contribute to a mutual aid project. I wasn’t trying to keep myself “productive,” as any number of encouraging articles and gentle-edged line-drawings on pastel backgrounds have (rightly!) discouraged us from pushing ourselves to be. I was just trying to keep myself sane, a goal to which the file names—“Schedule to Promote Sanity_Daily”; “Schedule to Promote Sanity_Weekly”—attest. I’m bad at working from home, struggle with unstructured time; boundaries in general: I seem to be able neither to set nor keep them. And so, predictably, the schedules lasted about three days. (I did finish that piece of fiction, though I’m not happy with it; I owe both my parents a phone call.)

I think the problem (“the problem”—as if there were only one! And as if, if there were only one, I would be the one to identify it) is that it doesn’t matter. By it I mean me. It doesn’t matter how early I wake up, how many vegetables I cook, how carefully I sort my recycling; I can write five hundred words in the morning and go for a run in the evening and I wake up the next day and there’s still a pandemic. Which: of course there is. And of course, this is always true—not that there’s always a pandemic, but that personal virtue doesn’t work change on a grand scale; I can floss all I want and it won’t bail anyone out of jail. Only now it’s so much clearer, the magical thinking in which I too easily indulge.

It’s hard for me to believe in the inherent virtue of happiness. I have wanted to be kind to myself—when I have wanted to be kind to myself—in order to make it easier for me to be kind to others. Kindness feels small now—not worthless, just, in the face of—[and here I would wish to insert some kind of glyph indicating a mute acknowledgment of a situation I feel unable to put proper words to]—small. And as long as everyone else feels like shit, as long as I can’t change that, why shouldn’t I feel like shit, too? Why should I get to feel like anything other than shit? (Because wilfully feeling like shit isn’t a form of solidarity; it’s a form of indulgence.) (There’s a whole argument in here about how individual action is all but powerless against something like a pandemic—or, ahem, climate change—unless accompanied by systems-level action, but don’t worry, I’m not going to try to make it.)

This is all very muddled, for which I apologize (I’ve been having trouble writing, and so have been doing little of it; can you tell). Mostly I think I’m trying to say I’ve been sad, and having trouble finding a reason to try not to be.

What I have found, occasionally, is a reason—a desire—to work, to produce, or to try to produce what I do not like to call art. I haven’t seen Little Women, but I’ve been reading an early copy of a brilliant friend’s brilliant book: Maggie Doherty’s The Equivalents. It’s about the first two years of the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a fellowship founded in 1960 to give ambitious women who had been forced by the pressures of family life to abandon artistic and scholarly pursuits the time and space and money to work. Doherty focuses on a group of five women who met during those first two years and became for one another a community within the broader Radcliffe community: sources of support and friendship and, crucially, conversation. There’s a lot of walking and talking and writing and talking and eating and talking and drinking and talking and talking and talking and talking—a real sense that, in dialogue with one another, these women produced art deeper and richer than the art each would have been able to produce on her own. It reminded me of you wanting to walk yourself into a new space, and how difficult it is to do that in a vacuum.

It’s the last day of April—well, really, it’s 12:22 AM on the first day of May, so, my question: what is your hope for your art? Reading The Equivalents, wanting to work, finding it difficult to work, it’s the question I ask myself. The pleasure of creating: do I want that pleasure as an end in itself? And if not, if I want to send that creation out into the world: why? It’s an enormous question, I know—but I’m asking because now more than ever (sorry), time is precious and needs are many. We squirrel away time to write, or we fail to, or we squirrel away time and we fail to write. Why squirrel at all? Why do we need it for ourselves, and what do we want it to be for others?

MMW: Hello from January 2023. We have time traveled. The past three years have been appalling, and I spent a lot of it mulling over your question about personal creation, actually, and coming to various terrible epiphanies.

The main one was realizing I write just for myself. I of course would like to share my work with others when it’s ready, but it’s just not why I do it. I love to write, I love to edit, but I hate to revise. And what I realized about that was, revision is for someone else, and of course it’s necessary, but it’s not why I write, to please others. A lot of times, I really like the work I’m revising just as it is, and for me, that’s a huge block.

I will always write, even though my practice isn’t really even able to even be called a practice. I squirrel away moments where I’m texting myself ideas and lines and images and then I copy-paste them. I’ll become consumed with something I’m working on, so focused, and then completely abandon and forget about it. I’ll even submit my work and manage to forget I’ve done so. It’s when the rejections come that I’m reminded!

So my other big epiphany about art and creation and myself is that I’m fundamentally not a performer. And I’ve realized that there is a performance aspect to art, even to writing, that I am allergic to, and is why I’m not able to inhabit my artistic self. Maybe it’s self-consciousness, but I don’t think it is. (Even though I’m not unself-conscious…) I’m not sure what it is! Maybe I’ve just observed the way iconoclasm and performance can dominate the art itself, how it can trick people. I don’t want to trick anyone!

It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen you, and I miss you! I also miss reading your writing, and I feel we’ve gone kind of dark on each other. I wanted to bring this conversation back to life for the THR The Past issue, yes, but selfishly, I wanted to have a reason to engage with you again. So I ask, what have you been engaging with? Has anything really captured your intellect? Do you still feel like intellect is something you have left? Mine comes and goes these days…

MMP: Hello from January 2023 and hello from … law school, where I’m currently in the second week of my second semester of 1L. You mentioned “terrible epiphanies” — wonderful phrase; my decision to go law school is the result of one such terrible epiphany, namely, that I no longer wanted a career as a writer. At some point since we last wrote, I realized I wanted to do more concrete work in the world; to attempt some small changes, some repairs. (I’m embarrassed, writing this. The hubris! To think I could be a person who affects changes, who makes repairs!) To be clear: I speak only for myself, that is, I mean only to critique and explain myself. There is, of course, writing that is also doing concrete work! But I didn’t — don’t — feel that my writing was doing that kind of work. Maybe I’ll change my mind — but for now, I read textbooks and I brief cases and every so often I open up an old Word Doc with some stray fragment of fiction and I read a sentence or two and then I close it again.

You asked about my intellect: if I’m being honest, I feel this first semester has dulled mine. As much as I’m learning, the new knowledge seems to be forcing other kinds of knowledge, other analytical methods, out. There’s a specific way I’m being taught to read in law school, a specific way I’m being taught to write, and a specific way I’m being taught to think — within a set of frameworks and procedures whose basic assumptions I both disagree with and also am required to learn. My hope is that I can learn them well enough to gain an understanding also of how most effectively to challenge them — but not so well that challenging them seems naive, beside the point, hopeless.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, it took abandoning writing almost entirely — if only, perhaps, temporarily — to realize how important it was to my inner life, to my construction of self. I knew — or I thought I knew — that I wrote primarily to understand something for myself. But that knowledge was old enough, rote enough, repeated as an interview answer often enough that I think I’d lost — before this last semester — a real sense of how true it is. I’m constantly in an argument with myself now, and without the outlet — the page — I’ve used in the past to sort out not only my feelings but the values undergirding those feelings, I’m often also in a bit of a panic, trying to figure out what it is I believe and why.

Which leads me to my question: does writing have this self-explanatory function for you? And if it does — what, for you, needs most urgently to be explained? And what about changing your mind? I think that’s one of the reasons I find looking back at my own past writing sometimes so painful: I see an older version of myself revealed as if objectively, as if for the first time, and when I disagree with that older self, as I often do, it’s hard not to hate her.

MMW: Doing concrete work in the world is a beautiful thing. I think it’s beautiful that there’s so many ways to do it, and so many decisions to make about what world you want to work in, and live in, and for me, what kind of world I want my kid to live in. I think I’ve thought the same thing, and that our worlds aren’t the same but they’re adjacent. It kind of sounds like… you’ll come back to your outlet someday, at least I hope you do.

But is arguing with yourself more or less tiring than arguing with the world? I feel like I’ve been doing both for so long! As a kid, everyone told me I should be a lawyer, that I’d be really good at arguing as a job, but lately, I’ve just wanted to make my own decisions, for myself, and ignore what other people are thinking. I am lucky because I now live in the middle of nowhere (kind of) and have a big boundary (the 495) between me and most other people.

I can answer your question very thoughtfully and honestly because I’ve started a new project, unconsciously, as I’ve embarked on a very new phase of my life. That has never happened to me in such explicit parallel before. The answer is yes! As I’ve started working in this new mode, I’m actually going back and remembering all these things I wrote in the deep past that foreshadow what I’m writing now, that prove so much of what I think about now has been swirling in my brain for a long time but buried, or maybe repressed, tbh. I love to think about writing and obsession working hand in hand, and I love to read about obsession. And so it’s very gratifying to see those tendrils starting to appear, and for me to be cognizant of them, in my own work. Those things I’m obsessed with are so mundane and prosaic: death, am I worthy of love, memory, fascination… I’ve also been writing a lot about being unhinged.

I’m so interested in your journey of not writing. I’ve been through it too. I wonder if every writer needs to go through a quiet phase? Do you think more writers should keep their thoughts to themselves for literal years? And have you been reading?

MMP: Have I been reading is a funny question because the literal answer is that I do little else. But I don’t think the kind of reading I’m doing — for class, from casebooks so thick and heavy it’s comical, or would be if I wasn’t toting them to school and back every day — is the kind you mean! Just now I’m on spring break; yesterday, I picked up Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy. Almost immediately I put it down. Not out of dislike — out of fear, I think. I was so scared I’d lost the readerly capacity I couldn’t even bear to find out whether I had or not! But then last night I read a friend’s (brilliant) manuscript all in one, fevered go so perhaps not all hope is lost.

A professor once told me that she was never more productive as a writer than when her child was a toddler. She was a single mother, and the only time she ever got to write was when her son was napping. And precisely because time was so scarce, she became extremely efficient. I bring this up because just now, I’m on Spring Break — we have the week off — and I am panicked; it’s just enough time that I think I might be able to do everything I need to do, which means I can’t justify spending (I wrote wasting and changed my mind; it’s not a waste! Or, I don’t want to think it is!) time on things I might like to do — but also I’m tired, and in the absence of intense time pressure, I want nothing more than to go completely limp. And yet I have noticed, during weeks when school is at its busiest, that sometimes my mind wanders, finds a line it likes, a series of words, and starts to turn them over, worry them — this, for me, is the very first step, or maybe it’s a pre-step, a kind of crawl or scoot-step, in the writing process. Which made me think of my professor’s anecdote — though to be clear, I have nothing more to show for my wandering and worrying than a new handful of word docs, saved on my desktop, each containing a sentence or two, more or less abandoned.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write another novel, or, if I were to manage to write one, whether it would ever be published. I do know it takes a long time for me to figure out what it is I want to say. People who write faster — maybe they’re figuring that out on the page; I do some of that, too, but I have to (choose to?) hold it all in for what seems like an eternity, until it’s an emergency, until that on the page work feels like an imperative and not a choice. I struggle with choosing to write. I struggle with choice in general. I don’t trust myself to know what’s important — perhaps you can see how that would be a problem.

This isn’t about writing, exactly, but I’m going to ask it anyway. As long as I’ve known you I’ve understood you as a person who trusted herself. You write, above, about making your own decisions, ignoring what other people think. What does that feel like? Do you have a sense of where it comes from? And how does it show up on the page? My lack of trust makes me slow, makes me silent. Or maybe it’s my fear, which flows from the lack of trust — I’m afraid to use the wrong words, and yet I’m always using the wrong words, and only seeing it after the fact. It’s not that I imagine you’re completely fearless, or free from doubt, but you move in the world with purpose and confidence; at least, that’s what it looks like to me, a person on the outside of your experience. I admire it, deeply, and I think I might want to be more like that — will you tell me about it?

MMW: I have heard a lot of people telling me that they’re scared to read. I am kinda scared to read too. For the first time in like my whole life, I am in the middle of multiple books I just can’t finish. I won’t say what they are. I even lost one. I have no clue where it is and I almost forgot I was even reading it. This feels shameful.

But I do think this kind of casual approach to reading is… NORMAL. And if I loosen up a bit, I won’t feel so much pressure, or so trapped, by the books I read. I always say my goal is to always have a bookmark in a book. But not three! But even people I know who love to read, they’re not writers, don’t work in publishing, they are also intimidated by the form right now. I think our attention spans are a little shot. But the thing is, when they do finally get over it and read a book, they feel more like themselves than they have in a long time, and I think that’s beautiful.

I almost can’t engage with what you asked. But I will say that the freer I feel, the better I feel. I wish I could be pricklier, meaner, iconoclastic, and maybe that’s a future incarnation of myself I can inhabit someday, but my whole life I’ve wanted to not care what people think of me, and I do think I get closer and closer to that goal every day. The thing that gave me the biggest leap forward to that has been not living in New York. The second biggest has been the failure of my novel. That experience gave me a lot of insight into why I write, why I work with writers, why we publish THR. I do it for fun, and for myself, and because you only live once!

I am going to ask you one last question, and bring it back to the idea of THE PAST that this issue is concerned with. I’ve been really preoccupied with moments in my life where I took a detour. In hindsight, there are so many that kind of stopped me from becoming the version of myself I am now, that I really like, until my mid-thirties. Do you think about this ever? And do you have any in your intellectual life?

MMP: Oh, dude: my entire life is a detour! I’m a writer in law school; I’m getting my second post-graduate degree! I have this problem — fear-based, again, always — where the only way I know whether or not I want to do something is by, well, doing it. So my past looks like — feels like, when I think about it — a whole lot of flailing: teaching; working in publishing; getting an MFA; translating; tutoring; publishing a novel; working at a non-profit; working on a farm; and now, of course, I’m in law school. But as I say, because this is my own demented, unhealthy process, I’ve had to — if not accept than at least learn to live with it. Every detour, I have to — try to — believe was actually a step on the path that led me to where I am now, a place where I know myself a little bit better or at the very least have, by process of elimination, determined what I don’t want to do and whom I do not wish to be. I mean — eventually I hope to develop a slightly more efficient process, given that I’m not going to live nearly long enough to try out all the possible lives I might want to live.

But you asked about intellectual detours: because I have trouble trusting myself, I have trouble also forming opinions except in accordance with or in opposition to the opinions of others. And very quickly this all devolves into deference to self-selected authority: if I trust someone in general, it’s easy for me to trust them to be right in every specific instance, without really investigating whether in fact I agree with whatever position they’ve staked out. And of course no one is right all the time, not completely. In any case: this has led me, I think, down long roads I only realized were the wrong ones when I finally looked up and discovered, Oh, this is not at all where I wanted or expected to be!

Though, if I have a dream for my intellectual future, I wonder if it’s more detours. Not head down, following a single train of thought, but allowing myself to walk alongside more, and more radical thinkers, trusting myself to discern, when and if the paths definitively branch, which one to follow.