A howl
Explaining my new newsletter
When I first moved from New York to Nashville in 2017, I started a private newsletter as a way of keeping in touch with the friends I’d made through college, grad school, and various jobs I held in teaching and publishing. The letters were short and colorful. I mostly talked about beautiful neighborhoods I’d discovered in Nashville and all the ways we’d adjusted to this new life. I was desperate to stay on my New Yorker friends’ radar. It was difficult enough moving to a new city in our 30s, and I wanted a way, separate from social media, to say: I’m still here. And even as a newcomer to the American South, I suddenly felt compelled to come to its defense, knowing how it’s perceived, because I, too, had made generalizations about it, and possibly still do.
That newsletter gave me a sense of structure at a time when I was still settling in, unemployed, and pregnant with the first baby. I took pictures around town and edited them, thinking of how I could entice my friends to come and visit one day. (Some of them did.) I made sure to send the letters every other Thursday, an arbitrary rule I made up for myself, mostly so that I could live with a better sense of what day it was.
I kept the content light and positive. Unlike the personal essays I’d published over the years, I never went deep into any topic or thought. If the newsletter had a face, it was me in full make-up, clean hair, Everlane clothes, and a smile. It was the version of me that my students and co-workers saw. The newsletter, in short, was elegant.
I have a friend who likes to describe me with that word, elegant, and this is the same friend who saw right through these newsletters for what they were, and admitted, with a slight apology, that she could no longer bear to open it. She might not have articulated it exactly this way, but the way I understood her was that my newsletters felt inauthentic to her, someone I consider one of my closest and dearest friends. At first I was a little hurt. The hours I’d spent drafting and polishing the letters seemed silly. At the same time, it was a relief to know that I actually couldn’t get away with it. That relief reminded me of when I quit a very good job in order to focus on my health. The relief I’d felt, dropping my smile and changing out of my uniform after my 8-hour shifts at McDonald’s in Tokyo where I’d worked in the summers during high school. The same relief I’d felt, leaving New York after living there for 10 years, though it would take me a long time to perceive it as a relief.
I remember telling my friend, over the phone, that it was okay to not read my newsletters anymore, because I would be sending her separate emails, directed just to her and maybe to a few other mutual friends. We’d keep in touch in our usual way, which was often tearful (the good kind), brutally raw, sometimes dark, sometimes a little nonsensical. I sent a few more newsletters to my bigger circle before dissolving it altogether, all the while keeping a more private chain of emails that continued to serve me when I needed to write, to feel less alone, to feel heard. I think a lot of my friends who had once enjoyed hearing about our new life in Nashville rightly assumed that I’d become swept up in the ever-busy routine of motherhood, and I was able to put an end to that routine without any feeling or guilt.
And yet here I am, a couple years later, starting another newsletter.
This time, though, I intend to go about it a little differently than before. In my writing classes, I often talk about what it means to write for an audience, and the importance of being aware of this when writing anything. Where my audience once used to consist of New Yorkers, I now want to include fellow Nashvillians. I’ve exhausted the topic of “Nashville neighborhoods to visit,” anyway, and I’m at a point in my life where I’m more settled in to the present and future, as opposed to looking back and thinking of all the comparisons I could make between the two cities, for the sake of my friends still living in New York. I also want to open this up to people I may have never met, and people who might be deliberating whether or not to take my class which is now completely online because of the pandemic.
On the one hand, it’s scary to widen my audience pool, because (at the risk of sounding cheeseballs), writing is a vulnerable thing. At the same time, this feels like something I need to do, for purely selfish reasons. For a few months beginning with the lockdown in March, Nashville had its own version of the 8 o’clock howl, a gesture thanking the healthcare workers and letting people howl from their windows at the end of another long day. It felt hopeful and unifying, while it lasted. Even our 2-year-old joined in. Our suburban neighborhood turned into a wilderness of werewolves, a magical thing for him, a cathartic thing for us as parents. Jin and I often talked about the relief of howling, and how sad it was when it stopped at some point during the summer, coinciding with the city re-opening despite the pandemic being far from over.
We continued to quarantine, I gave birth to our second baby, and we had an idyllic few months where Jin was done with law school and could take on parenting duties while studying for the bar exam (which will happen remotely in October). As I told my friends who checked in, we would’ve been in quarantine anyway because of the newborn. Our life was tough, but it felt doable.
But starting last week, Jin started his new job (remotely) at a law firm while I committed to being a full-time mom to two boys. I will still be teaching some classes through The Porch beginning mid-September, but these will take place in the evenings when Jin can take over the boys’ nighttime routines. So, our life is now a little tougher than it was before. But still doable.
What’s missing from my life, though, is the howling. The writing. The call to my friends, saying, “I’m still here.”
I can’t promise that this one won’t dissolve the way the other one did. Or that I’ll be regular with it. But as long as this lasts, I hope you’ll indulge me in my howling. This time, to anyone who will listen.