Bookish Things In My Life Right Now (That Aren’t Reading)

August 13, 2018 |

I’ve been reading more this summer than I have in many summers. I definitely feel some pressure with more responsibilities in talking about YA for work to do that. I want to keep up, as well as continue to focus on reading backlist. . . but backlist has kind of taken an unfortunate back seat to newer titles this summer. I generally like dedicating a month to reading back list, but it just didn’t happen this year. At least not yet. I still plan on getting through Anne of Green Gables before the year wraps up. It just might not happen before the summer ends in September.

Where it would be easy to feel like I’ve worked too much when it comes to my reading life, I don’t think I have. Instead, some of the most fulfilling moments of my reading life have come from the moments where I’m not reading. I’ve had the chance to go to and to do some cool bookish things, though not all of them were about the books being read in my hammock with a drink in my hand (I did get to do that and still have plenty of time to enjoy that!).

I write this to remind those readers out there who maybe didn’t reach their goals that a well-rounded reading life isn’t about the tally of titles at the end of a specified time frame. It’s about how you feel knowing what you’re reading and what you’re doing in the bigger picture. If you’re happy, if you’re exploring, if you’re challenging yourself, then you’re growing a damn good reading life, no matter what number of books you rack up.

Here are some of the awesome bookish things I’ve done in my life recently and that have made this summer a solid one so far!

Attended A Harry Potter Festival

Last summer, I finally read all of Harry Potter. This summer? I grabbed myself a Slytherin tank top and enjoyed the amazing “Wizarding World” event my local community put together for the second year in a row. Though it ended up being dampened by rain, it was so cool to see both young and old dressed up in their favorite Potter-themed gear.

The highlight for me at the event? I got to meet some owls. I met an eagle owl, a screech owl, a barred owl, and a great horned owl at a program put on by a local raptor sanctuary.

Worked on a Proposal for a New Book

I have a book coming out in October, and after that’s out in the world, I don’t have anything planned. At least, theoretically. This summer, I’ve been chipping away at plans for another book and my agent and I have been going back and forth as to how to make the proposal as strong as possible. I’m really excited about it.

And as exciting? I’ve been also working on a novel. I got some great motivation at ALA.

Also? I had another idea pop into my head for another potential nonfiction idea. So there are three things cooking in my head at once. That’s a lot of balls to juggle mentally, but I enjoy the ideas of each and have been slowing poking away at the hows and wheres of each.

Completed My Library’s Summer Reading Program

You know what the best prize to get for adult summer reading at the library is? Money off your fines. My library’s approach to the summer reading program for adults is brilliant and simple: for each book you read and drop a review of in their online system, you earn $.25 off fines that are good through December.

The system allows you to set a goal, and in June, fresh-eyed, I set one knowing I could beat it a bit. But I ended up beating it by quite a bit, which was a nice boost. But more than the number, it was nice to see how wide-ranging the titles were I read. I picked up a little of everything: middle grade and YA fiction, as well as YA and adult nonfiction. I even got a little bit of literary adult fiction into the mix, too.

At one point during the program, I had a pretty big fine going on because, well, each time I go to the library, I check out too many things (the best kind of problem to have). It was nice to cash in my reading time for fine forgiveness . . . which meant I could check out too many more books, then repeat the process.

In the end, I read 30 titles between the beginning of June and end of July.

Bookstore Hopped in Chicago

My friend Rachel and I headed to Chicago a couple weekends ago to attend a pop-up art/interactive exhibit and I realized when we were driving down that we’d have plenty of time to make a stop or two beforehand. I suggested we take the Blue Line to Damon and go visit Myopic Books. She hadn’t been, but I have, and not only did we have a fun time wandering, I managed to snag a title I’ve been looking for. I’m trying to collect all of Megan Abbott’s noir reads — her very early stuff — and they’re surprisingly hard to find. But I got one!

After we did what we’d set out to do in the city, we went back to the area of Myopic and visited both Volumes Book Cafe (which we’d both been to before) and then I took her over to Quimby’s.

While I’d been to all three before, I always love stopping there and exploring. It’s such a cool area of Chicago and the fact there are so many bookshops within a couple of blocks fills me with delight. I only walked away with three books, which felt like a real victory.

If you’re ever in the city and want a bookish place to roam, you can’t go wrong with visiting those three stops. You get your used books, your new books, and your indie-focused, small press books.

Produced a Podcast Episode of Recommended

Have you listened to Recommended? This Book Riot podcast interviews interesting people about their favorite books. I volunteered to produce an episode for the next season, which launches in September. Producing meant finding two fabulous guests to interview and editing their interviews to fit into the timeframe of the show. It was a total change from how I’ve been doing podcasts with Eric for Hey YA — we keep an agenda and kind of free wheel within it, readily ignoring the fact our show is 40 minutes long (we regularly hit that hour mark).

My episode won’t air until late September, but I had the total joy of interviewing two amazing women: Gretchen Rubin and Cynthia Leitich Smith. I can’t wait to share this with you when it’s available.

I also, at the same time I was doing this, set up a monster interview with a legend of children’s literature. I’m excited to see that writer’s responses and share it in the YA newsletter very soon.

Tell me about how you’ve stayed engaged in your reading life this summer (or this year!). I’d love to hear about your adventures beyond the printed page.

Falling In Love With Audiobooks Again

March 12, 2018 |

In the early days of STACKED, I was a big audiobook listener. I had an hour-long commute each way between home and work, and I could sail through audiobooks pretty quickly. An hour each way is about a disc each way, meaning I could get through a decent-length audiobook in a little over a work week. I worked my way through a number of adult fiction titles, some award-winning YA titles (I’d found that it was often easier to get those titles on audiobook rather than wait on the holds list for print), and nonfiction. And pretty quickly, I discovered that nonfiction on audiobook really worked for me.

But then I got a new job at a new library that was in my town. My commute went from an hour each way to a mere five minutes total. I tried audiobooks but they didn’t work for me. There wasn’t enough time to sink into them, and more, the job took a lot out of me, and I cherished the silence I got in that short commute.

Keep in mind, too, that this was in the days before digital audiobooks were ubiquitous. To listen to an audiobook meant getting a CD set or hoping you could score a Play Away. There wasn’t a convenient way to listen to audiobooks that weren’t in the car at this point, so listening during free time or during tasks at home meant a lot of work to get CDs to a device.

While I like technology, I much prefer laziness when it comes to things like that.

I left that job and worked from home for about a year before getting a job with a thirty minute commute each way. But, having gotten out of the habit of listening to audiobooks, I couldn’t motivate myself to do it.

But now, eight or so years later, working entirely from home and having done so now for four years, I have become obsessed with audiobooks again.

It began, though, with podcasts.

Gretchen Rubin, whose habit-forming book Better Than Before did not resonate particularly well for me, has a podcast with her sister Elizabeth I really enjoy. And it was there I figured out exactly why it is audiobooks are working for me again: the concept of the blank slate. It is with a hard reset or change in your life where you’re most likely to make change.

That hard reset, it turns out, was moving.

When I had to clean and pack the home we’d lived in for eight years, I started using Audible to buy an audiobook every month — this was a job perk, and I decided to take advantage of it. As it turns out, listening to an engaging audiobook while you’re scrubbing baseboards or emptying cupboards makes the time and tasks much more enjoyable. Being able to tote those audiobooks digitally in my literal back pocket made it easy to move room-to-room without cords.

I packed and cleaned and listened to audiobook after audiobook. I moved those items from our home in one state, across the border to another, and listened to an audiobook in the car as I drove. An hour each way, on top of the hours of packing and cleaning, meant blowing through book after book.

And then, the habit continued.

I’m not moving now. Most of my stuff has been unpacked. But I’m still picking up audiobooks and listening, adding additional credits to my account each month and splurging on daily deals for titles which sound interesting and ring in at just a couple of bucks.

I listen every day when I am getting ready in the morning. Twenty minutes here and there adds up. Pair those minutes up with spending ten or twenty minutes at the beginning and/or at the end of the day laying in bed and listening, and eventually, it’s close to an hour of listening each day. For audiobooks ringing in at 10 or 15 hours, it only takes a couple of weeks of listening here and there to finish a book. Particularly good audiobooks are motivation to get errands done out of the house, too: I can listen to forty minutes of audiobook if I choose to go to one of the bigger grocery stores in the next town. And each week, when I make the trek to teach yoga an hour away, I can blow through two more hours of listening.

Those little pockets of time add up. But more than add up numerically, they’ve added such a nice change of pace to my day and created a companion to the quiet that I otherwise find myself in. I’m a quiet person and keep a quiet home, but going all day without much noise or companionship because of my work setup can get overwhelming. Audiobooks give a sense of not only company, but it’s company that I get to control. When I need the silence to think, I can have it. When I need a story to let my mind wander, I can have it.

This blank slate of moving — this reset on my life — has given me the opportunity to fall back in love with audiobooks.

I’m excited to dig into the collection of audiobooks available at my new library, as Libby is now an option for borrowing and downloading easily. I’ve relied on Audible for the time being because I’ve got enough books available to me there that one credit a month has been sufficient — though I cannot recommend digging into Janssen’s guide to Audible for anyone curious about it or curious how to save money using it (those daily deals are GOOD).

I can’t wait for the weather to finally turn and I can resume a daily habit of walking outside. I can only imagine how many more audiobooks I’ll be enjoying while creating new paths and adventures in this new place.

Backlist July

June 26, 2017 |

Last year, I finally put into process a thing I’d been wanting to make a tradition in my reading life. I dedicated an entire month to reading nothing but backlist titles. Backlist titles seem to fall to the wayside, especially when it comes to blogging, since so many new and upcoming titles hit my doorstep everyday. I want to read them and talk about them, since that’s part of why they show up in the first place.

But there’s a special place in my heart for backlist titles. Backlist, as I define it, is anything published a year ago or further. I prefer to go deeper than a year, but a year is a good yardstick, as it allows for some “catching up” on the reading of big books from not-too-long-ago.

I dedicated last July to rereading (or as it turns out, first-time reading) the entire “Little House on the Prairie” series. The fact that I gave myself a month of no-pressure reading let me dig into the books in a way that’s often harder for me with new books. Since much of my reading life is public, I am less emotive than I am critical. That’s not to say I don’t express love or distaste, a moment that made me happy or angry. But rather, I don’t necessarily give a blow-by-blow of what I’m thinking or considering as I read. But going with backlist, especially digging into a series, allows me to have a totally unique experience in reading. I’m more emotive, as well as more willing to toss out theories and ideas, as well as share some harsh assessments of the characters which represent little more than my feelings about the characters on a reader-response level. It leads to thinking about and enjoying books in a different way. This, for example, pretty much sums up how I felt about the “Little House” series last year.

The backlist reading started a little earlier this summer for me, as one of my goals was to finally read all of Harry Potter. I’ve read the first three books before, but after that, I let the series go. This year, I wanted to go all in, start to finish, and have the experience I hadn’t yet let myself have — whatever that experience might be. Without the expectations upon reading The Series Everyone Has Read, I’m getting to enjoy what I like, hate what I hate (Ron), and have those ups and downs in a no-pressure way. As July rolls nearer, though, I’ve realized I might be mostly done, if not completely finished, with the series by then.

So it’s onto thinking about a series which would make an excellent Backlist July read, alongside the pile of other books on my list.

This year, it’s “Ramona Quimby.”

I remember reading these books as a kid and loving them. But I’ve been told again and again, for years, that they’re worth revisiting not only because they hold up, but also because they’re SO GOOD and there’s so much that, as an adult, resonates really strongly. I scored my copies off Etsy for really cheap, and am eager to take that ride.

My July list also includes a little bit of fantasy, some nonfiction, and a few YA titles I keep meaning to pick up but haven’t yet. I’ve been reorganizing and weeding my personal bookshelves, and stumbling upon some of these older ARCs has been motivating. I want to read them, then recycle them. And without the pressure to talk about them in any meaningful way, I am eager to see if what I think matches what was said about them initially, and I’m curious if there’s anything new I can add to the discussion.

From the writing perspective, it’ll be fun to find those tiny threads or sparks that encourage a whole post. Little things that might get missed during that pressure reading often make for some of the most interesting research projects which may or may not manifest into a blog post or two.

I always read backlist, but there’s something really rewarding in doing nothing but reading these older titles. It’s slower, more leisurely, and, as I discovered last year, actually encourages me to read more than I normally do. Maybe it’s the long, lazy days of July. Maybe it’s also knowing I get to be a reader first, then someone who talks about books second.

Backlist July is one of my favorite new reading traditions, and I’m excited to see where it takes me this time.

Tell me: do you dedicate specific time to backlist reading? What have been some of your favorite backlist binges lately? What should I consider for my list for this coming month and/or for future series reads? Let’s talk backlist traditions, since backlist always deserves more time and attention.

The Seasonal Nature of Reading

May 8, 2017 |

One thing about being a writer and one thing about being a reader is that over the course of writing about reading, patterns emerge. I’ve found a really distinct pattern in my reading life in revising old blog posts and revisiting notes and lists I’ve kept myself about what and when I’ve been reading things.

Reading, for me, is seasonal.

This idea of seasonality has been on my mind for a while now, and it was something that really took hold during and following The Lady Project Summit in March. Everything comes in seasons, and if I take a page from the book of the world around me, I’d have see that much sooner. There are seasons when I need more rest than I do activity. Seasons where I can accomplish loads of things but my relationships take a back seat. Then there are seasons where all I want to do is talk with people I love and let my responsibilities become secondary.

This is also one of the big ah ha moments I’ve had as I’ve grown my work in photography — the more time I spend outside, the more I begin to notice how the world around me moves and functions.

Rather than trying to control these changes in seasonal needs, I’ve become to embrace them as necessary. Just as winter paves the way for spring and summer, seasons of life pave the way for new experiences and discoveries. And reading, while something that always finds its way into each of my seasons, is not always the primary goal or purpose or drive behind a particular season. It may be the case, too, that reading books isn’t a priority at all.

This period of time in particular, the one that blooms and blossoms immediately after a long winter, is one where I find my mind unable to connect with books the way it can at other times.

I picked up a book in early March to take with me while I traveled. The book, The Circus by Olivia Levez, is one I’d been looking forward to for months. I loved Levez’s The Island and knew this story of a girl who runs away from home because her father marries a woman she severely dislikes (step parent relationships are a never-ending source of fascination for me and a terribly underexplored theme in YA) would resonate.

But each time I opened the book, I couldn’t fall in.

I could fall asleep.

I could write an essay.

I could go out with friends.

I could let myself devour The Great British Baking Show.

I could let myself rewatch the entire series again. Then a third time.

Something about the act of putting the book in my hands activated a switch in my mind that begged me to do anything but read. In many ways, this last month has been one of my most productive and active and social and fulfilling. Yet reading, one of the basic needs in my life’s hierarchy, had fallen nearly completely off my agenda. I didn’t make time for it, and when I found time to settle in, I could find a million things to keep me from the book.

None of this was the book’s fault. It was the wrong time. The wrong place.

The wrong season.

My recent flight to San Antonio gave me a solid three hours to get some work done, as well as plenty of time to get in some leisure reading. But before traveling, I had real talk with myself: I knew I wouldn’t read the way I’d hope to while in Texas for a few days, so I shouldn’t weigh down my luggage with books that I’d carry and never consume.

It was that flight, with those restrictions, with that time, which allowed me to finish Levez’s sophomore read.

I flopped on the hotel bed after traveling and thought about the book. Little stuck with me, except for that last chunk of reading I’d just consumed. It was good, though nothing was completely outstanding for me. A good voice, but not as powerful as the one I’d read in The Island. An ending that was more wrapped up than the first book (and that untidy ending was a feature I admired, rather than a flaw that bothered me).

The book, marked read on social media now, became one I wouldn’t say or do much about. Not because I didn’t enjoy it. But because it didn’t come into my life during the right season. There won’t be permanence or resonance, and none of that is the fault of myself nor the book.

It’s the fault of simply wrong place, wrong time, wrong season.

When my trip ended, my life fell into a more familiar pattern at home. I’d been slowly carving more space into my daily routine for creative pursuits outside of writing and reading, and in a lot of ways, carving out that time meant winnowing a bit of the time I had for leisure reading in my afternoons.

But something magical happened, too — I found myself reading much better, and in the latter half of April, I blew through a good number of books. More than that, those books not only stuck with me, but they begged me to engage with them. I wrote reviews or incorporated some of what they’d given me into my own writing. I spent one afternoon after reading a professional development book and journaled about it privately. It was a kind of engagement I hadn’t felt in my reading life in quite a while, and it’s one where I’m allowing myself to stoke the fire and see where it leads me.

The seasonal shifts don’t always happen along the same lines that nature’s seasons do. Sometimes they run for a month. Sometimes for six months. Sometimes a year. Or a week or two. But I’ve come to listen to those shifts, to — if you will — lean into them, rather than attempt to hit reverse as quickly as possible. Because the more I let myself do the things that my heart and my mind are hungry for, when I come back to reading, I find myself more quenched, fulfilled, and engaged.

Will I return to The Circus to see if it works better now or in a couple of months? Probably not. The book came to me in that particular season for a purpose. It was a book meant to tell me to slow down, to be real with my expectations and desires, and enjoy it for what it was in the moment, rather than what I’d hoped for it to be.

Refilling The Well

September 12, 2016 |

I’ve been having a hard time reading this year. I know my perception of “hard time reading” and “not reading much” differs from the average person — I did just finish my 70th book, so I’m clocking about two a week — but it’s weird when you’re used to reading more than 100 or 150 books at this point in the year and you’re just not.

But my reading this year has been so much more satisfying than in previous years. Not necessarily because the books are better. Rather, it’s because I’ve let myself refill the well over and over, and I’ve listened to my instinct far more on what I’m choosing to pick up and what I’m choosing to put down.

Last week, I went on vacation with my husband to one of our top dream places: Marfa, Texas. We’d lived in Texas for a few years, but we never made the 6.5 hour drive out to west Texas. This time, we made the intentional decision to do it; we’d fly into Austin, then make the drive out to the desert.

Earlier in the summer, the two of us took a half a week trip out to the Denver area to see some friends, so this was our second couple trip together in the last couple of months. And one thing I figured out pretty quickly in that first trip was something I applied to this one: I don’t read.

I used to love the whole process of picking my vacation reads. I’d spend days debating which books make the cut and which ones would stay behind. But the truth of it was, I rarely read on these trips. I’d pack 4 or 5 books, and then I’d pick at a couple of pages while waiting at the airport and quickly discard it in favor of pacing the airport itself. When I get on the plane, I’m one of those lucky people who falls asleep nearly instantly. Then when I reach the destination, I’m conscious of leaving everything behind and living right in the moment.

What I did pack for both trips was my Nook. Out in Colorado, I did read. I woke up before anyone else did, since I’m a morning person, and I’d use the time to read a few chapters. I finished Kali VanBaale’s The Good Divide during one of those morning reading sessions, and I updated my husband on the story when he’d wake up. I loved the book, and I loved the slow, deliberate reading sessions, knowing that I was being intentional of when I was reading and I was fully aware of the moment I was in while reading (on an air mattress, in the home of good friends). The story and the setting coalesced into a wonderful experience.

I loaded up my Nook before this trip, but I wasn’t particularly excited about any of the titles on there. A couple of books I’d wanted to read expired, and given that this was a Dream Trip, my excitement was a bit dispersed.

Then we hit travel snags, and I suddenly needed a book to read. Right now. Something that would distract me from hours and hours of sitting at an airport.

I hit the O’Hare bookstore (note, this wasn’t the airport we originally had tickets to fly out of) and hemmed and hawed about what book to read. I picked up and put down tons of them. I left without a book. Then I went back and picked up more options, then put them down. O’Hare’s bookstore had some of those beautiful classics, including a cover for The Metamorphosis I hadn’t seen before (I was tempted). I ended up choosing the mass market edition of The Girl on the Train, which I hadn’t yet read. I picked up Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars for my husband.

And then I didn’t read.

For many more hours, I wandered O’Hare. And then when the flight finally came to be, I fell asleep, my dreams peppered with images of bowls of queso and margaritas.

I was disappointed about the delays. The trip was to begin with grabbing lunch with Kimberly, who I haven’t seen in a few years. My disappointment meant my concentration wasn’t there. Which meant my reading mind wasn’t there. There was some comfort in buying a book, but there was no response in reading it.

The morning after our flight, my husband and I tag teamed the drive out to Marfa. When we drive, I do not read. We have an understanding that when we drive like this, neither of us gets to read or sleep — we’re the second set of eyes. With driving such a huge expanse of Texas, it was hard not to keep looking out. It was beautiful and breath taking and there was so much to take in about the beauty of the land around us.

It hit me on the drive I wanted nothing more than to read a book about living in west Texas. About homesteading. About how you don’t feel like an insignificant speck in a part of the country where there is one person per square mile (a nifty fact gleaned at a rest stop Google session — one of my favorite parts of driving, the looking up of the things you see and know nothing about).

Marfa is a tiny artist town close to the Mexican border. But they have a pretty nifty bookstore, and as we discovered on the first evening there, a beautiful library with a lovely note to the community on the outside. I didn’t get a chance to go in, but I loved the love letter to the town. We did hit up the bookstore, located inside one of the new hotels downtown (…most of Marfa is downtown, I guess). It was a lovely specialty shop, filled with books about the artists who played a huge role in the community, as well as an extensive selection of Cormac McCarthy books — No Country For Old Men was filmed in places around town. Nothing caught my eye or scratched the itch of the kind of book I needed to be reading.

I didn’t read while on the trip. Instead, I explored. I saw the mystery lights. My husband and I and the other people who were out there watching the show that evening shared stories and theories; we learned one guy brought his family to this space ten different times and this was the first time they’d ever seen the lights. We wandered the campsite we stayed at, pet the dogs of other people staying there, and we even ran into another Wisconsinite, with whom we shared stories of travel, of how unbelievable the sky out in this space was. Even when I grabbed my book to read in the hammocks around the campsite, I put it down and instead watched the vast sky around me, felt the breeze, listened to the utter quiet of being in the desert.

One of the best parts of the trip, though, was stopping into the visitor centered. The woman running it was wildly enthusiastic about Marfa, and she told us about all of the places we needed to see, as well as the stories behind them. Our immediate trip after that was to the Chinati Foundation, where we wandered out into the land to see the famous Judd concrete sculptures. The Foundation is built on decommissioned military land that served as a German POW camp during the second World War. The sculptures, as well as the surrounding buildings filled with art, were the response to getting the land and making it mean something completely different.

Between the trip through the concrete sculptures, as well as our drive out to see the Prada Marfa installation, my husband and I had stories and theories to tell one another, as well as things to look up and read to one another. What did these things mean? How did they change over time?

Our reading wasn’t books. It wasn’t what we picked up or packed. It was what we were living right then.

One of the last stops on our last night in Marfa was one of the big hotel gift shops, and it was here I found the book I was looking for: a story about a girl whose grandparents made a homestead out in west Texas in the 1950s and 60s and what it was like for them to live in such a desolate place: A Stake in West Texas by Rebecca D. Henderson.

It’s a book that scratches all of my itches, and it’s one I cannot wait to read for the story, as well as the story behind where I got it, what it means to me, and what the longing I had to learn about this place meant to me before and during the travels. It is, as I type this, lost in transit with our clothes, our toiletries, our toothbrushes, our shoes, jars of honey, bottles of beer, and a number of other things. I’m eager to be reunited.

When we got back to Austin, our first stop was Book People, my all-time favorite bookstore. It was a sanctuary for me for the time I was living in that city by myself. On Saturday mornings when I wasn’t working in someone’s garage archive, I’d hop on a bus, then another one, then spend a few hours wandering the two-story store.

Remember when I said I didn’t pack anything but my nook?

That was in part because I knew I’d pick up a few things at Book People. And $125 later, I’m pleased to say I bought myself two books — including one that had expired from my Nook — and one for my husband.

We flew back to Milwaukee and when I got on the plane, everything changed. I needed to unpack the trip, the stories we heard and the ones we told, and the best way for me to do that was to read.

I pulled The Girl on the Train out of my bag and flew through 300 pages as we were in the air. Then the moment we got home, I tore through the remainder of the book. It was precisely what I needed when I needed it: a quick thriller which made me keep turning pages and put me back into my own space and turf. As soon as I finished that, I picked up another book, which I’m elbow deep in now, less than 24 hours after returning home.

There is a weird pressure to keep reading, to pick up the next book, to do more, more, more, when you make your life about books. When you identify as A Reader. You feel guilt when you’re asked if you’ve read something and you say no, you haven’t. Or worse, when you’re told about a book and you’ve literally never heard of it (the friend we stayed with in Texas asked me about a book by a UT Alumna, wherein I had to look it up and add it to my to-read ASAP).

The truth is, though, reading and one’s reading life is entirely personal. And sometimes being a “reader” means that you’re listening to stories in ways that aren’t about printed or electronic pages. Sometimes, it’s about experiencing stories in the moment, of asking people to share their stories, of reading those plaques on the side of the road, of paging through art books in a tiny collection, of enjoying the beautiful libraries in the middle of the desert.

Those are moments of refilling the well. Of remembering why it is you love to read.

Taking this break and leaning into it, rather than pushing to fix it, meant stopping and pausing. It meant finding momentum again upon return. It meant finding the hunger and passion again for stories, no matter how they’re told.

____________________

All photos above are mine. I started taking photography classes earlier this year, and it’s been another piece of my refilling the well. The stories you can tell visually, through little more than the lens of your phone, continues to impress and inspire me.