June 28, 2025
Blogging “The Song of the Lark”
It’s summer and I will once again be blogging a Willa Cather novel over on Tumblr! This year’s will be The Song of the Lark.
In all honesty, mostly because there’s a PDF of a paper about this book that I’ve been desperate to read sitting in a folder on my laptop for months.
As in years past, not promising any particularly organized or deep analysis, just thoughts, questions, observations.
Tumblr tag is song of the lark!
June 23, 2025
New poem!
Hi all! I’m very, very proud and happy to have a poem out in the latest issue of the Champagne Room journal! It’s called “Coming Back in the Summer,” and it’s available here!
June 18, 2025
June colors
It’s been a summer of strangely cold and rainy weather in NYC so far, but the colors of some of the foliage in the Conservatory Garden are perfect for it.
June 10, 2025
A prayer to the future
I can’t guarantee it, but I feel like I’m probably not alone, having spent a lot of my life surrounded by apocalypse and disaster fiction, in having fantasized on some level, at some time, about starting over, societally. About how exciting and on some level hopeful it might be to be a survivor, to be part of a scrappy small community, to be engaged in rebuilding a life from the ground up.
Especially for people who’ve felt very disconnected from or mistreated by the world and society as it is, or ill-served by the structures we have.
I’m not going to be a grandmother at this point, so I won’t be telling the story of this time to my own grandchildren someday, but if I ever do get to talk to kids about what this was like—presuming we make it out the other side of this at all—I’d say, first and foremost, to forget about those fantasies. Don’t romanticize this.
It is in fact not romantic at all to watch society being torn down around you. Even if you’re not personally experiencing any of the worst day to day consequences yet.
Even if you’re still basically getting up and going to work and getting coffee and writing and seeing friends, planning summer travel and going to church and going to brunch and keeping the dishes and laundry done.
It is frightening and traumatizing in a way that is very hard to describe, and very hard to imagine, before you’ve experienced it, to have to watch evil, stupid men setting the future on fire in front of you and laughing.
Because indulgence of fantasy about tearing down the world, of burning it all to the ground and starting over, is a huge aspect of how we got here. We should never, ever have allowed any individual people to amass the kind of wealth or power where they could just do that, could just decide to remake the world in the image of their own adolescent dystopian fantasy, regardless of how many people’s lives they destroyed or upended.
Having just been through a life-altering pandemic and watching our public health and infectious disease defenses be dismantled and not knowing who is going to die now, who you are going to lose this time as a result.
You have absolutely no idea of the depth of grief you’re capable of feeling for federal infrastructure you barely knew existed. For programs you never heard of or thought about before. Because they were part of what quietly, invisibly kept the lives of you and everyone you know going off the rails from preventable disaster, or added value to your community in ways you never had to think about.
Dream about what you want to get to do in a world not falling down around you. In a world with appropriate, sustainable support for human beings, for human life, in a world in which the government isn’t actively working against you. Where there are resources and scaffolding for the best things any of us could dream. About how much you could do in a future that felt safe in a fundamental way.
What do you want all the time in the world to learn or to do?
Chavisory's Notebook 