Welcome back to Keep Writing, friends (or, if you’re new here, warmest welcomes to you; help yourself to the tall stack of pumpkin pancakes on the table as you peruse our archives).
I’ve been thinking about how where we live informs our writing in the same way a setting informs a novel or memoir, and the result was this essay. If you feel so inspired, I’d love to hear how your homes inform your own work.
It should be easier by now, this steady freefall into darkness, and yet every year it takes you by surprise.
This will be your fifth winter in Alaska, and the creeping ebb of light still catches like a bone in your throat. In the beginning, you watched the receding daily sunrise and sunset times like a fox eying the steel glint of a trap. Now you know better than to watch it overtake you.
Gaining six minutes of darkness a day is three hundred and sixty new seconds. It’s the time it takes to grind and brew a cup of coffee, to soft-boil an egg, to watch one-third of an American sitcom, to listen to the entirety of All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) or two-thirds of the 10-minute version. It’s a tiny moment, a small breath in the length of a day, and yet those sighs add up. Six minutes a day is 42 minutes a week, 84 in a fortnight, and two hours and 48 minutes in a month, and by the end of autumn, it will have you by the neck. No, better not to watch it take you. Better to go limp in its jaws.
What use are calendars this far north? The land is telling you everything you need to know: The creeping white up the scruff of the hares and ermines, the searing reds and golds of a dying landscape. The snow is coming fast down the mountains, and every day it inches a little closer to where you are. See how the land braces itself for what it knows is coming. Ask yourself why you are not doing the same.
So you set your jaw and busy your hands. You put away the last of the vegetables, the hardy kale and broccoli unbothered by a daily sheen of frost. Walk among the fallen leaves, breathe in their sweet smell of decay. Dust off the lamps, shake out the blankets. Pile the coats, the boots, the scarves, the mittens like nuts in a squirrel’s cache. Stand back at the end of each darkening day, appraising your preparations.
Is it enough? You wonder. A voice whispers back: Are you?
It’s a good question, a fair question, one you’ve asked yourself many times. Even before you moved to the frozen north, you asked it, again and again and again, never at ease with the silence that answered.
Because for every fearful story you’d heard about the long, brutal winters here, you never feared the cold dark itself. You feared that you weren’t strong enough to endure it. Sure, others could. Others had.
Not you, though, the voice whispered. Not you.
Five winters in, and what a glory of memories you now have to prove that voice wrong. How many photos of your frosted eyelashes, your grin peeking beneath your icy ruff, your chin raised to the low-slung winter sunset. Still here, still here, still here, you sing to the voice. And every time you see the first blade of startling green grass poke through the melting snow, it quiets. And every autumn, it comes back just a little softer than the year before.
Until this year, that is. Because last winter was the hardest you’d ever known, and despite everything the desperate, logical part of your brain is telling you, the fearful part sings louder.
You know, of course, that this winter will not be spent shuffling in and out of the hospital, hobbling a car seat across gray ice with your still-broken body. You know your days will not be spent in a small sterile room, holding down a tiny newborn’s arm so a stranger can watch blood emerge from it; you know your long nights will not be spent pacing in circles to soothe a colicky baby to sleep. You will not be juggling a thousand new skills to learn. You will not be in such new pain.
Your days then were a constant screech; now they are a song. Your ailing newborn has grown into a veritable sunbeam, all belly laughs and pink cheeks and clapping little hands. One traumatic winter does not beget another. You know this. The reasonable, rational part of you knows this. But still the voice whispers.
What is there to do when there is a long expanse of dark between where you are and where you are going? You pull up your hood and trudge forward into the black anyway. Step by step, movement by movement. You keep your eye on the faintest glow in the distance. You try not to think of moths as you move toward the light.
And you trust in what you know to be true: That if two heads are better than one, then next year the voice must be the softest yet. What a new glory of memories you’ll have to show it next winter: Two pairs of eyes grinning beneath frosted ruffs, two cheeks pressed together beneath the low-slung sun. Two pairs of boots punching through a crust of fresh snow, two mittens shaping snowballs beneath the laden spruce trees, two hands outstretched toward the hazy northern lights.
You will show this child, this little sunbeam, this brightest flame, all the riches there are still to be had in the leanest season. How the sun streaks pink over the mountains in December. How to tell at a glance if the snow is wispy and sugar-fine or sparkling and punchy or heavy and moldable in your hands. How in winter, you never miss a sunrise; how each one still knocks you off your feet. How the birches hang heavy with frost. How the green glow of aurora pulses and swirls. How, for all the sunlit fever dream of June and the autumnal dread that follows, winter is the most beautiful season in Alaska. How few people there are to see it.
How to always angle yourself toward the sun to catch its warmth.
How to treasure the light when there’s so little to be had.
How to make your own when there’s none to be found.
And soon enough, the sun will come spinning back your way like an old friend, first in seconds and then in a minute and then finally in six minutes a day, 42 minutes a week, two hours and 48 minutes a month.
The voice will quiet for a long time. And you know it will probably return when the light starts slipping through your fingers again. But you hope you will have too many things to say to pay it much mind.
Here’s to making our own light this season, friends. May you have whatever you need in your creative nests to keep your own winter dark at bay.
Until next month—
Keep writing,
Nicki
Upcoming calls for submissions
Spotlight: Libre: The Bell Jar submissions
Halfway Down the Stairs: Fairy Tales and Folklore submissions
Spotlight Pick
Libre: The Bell Jar submissions
Send your most Plathian submissions to Libre for its November issue, which is themed around Plath’s classic The Bell Jar. “We’d like to see prose, essays, poetry, and artwork that acknowledge the bell jar in ways that rattle, expand on the metaphor, or pay tribute,” editors write. “No gas or suicide; let’s celebrate Plath as she lived, the way her intellect nearly vibrates through the page, how she lived on the edges of razors, wrote like a hellhound; the sheer volume of work credited to her is proof of her genius, a demigoddess of literature in all respects.” Send fiction or creative nonfiction up to 1500 words or up to five poems. Payment is $5 per piece.
Deadline: Nov. 11
Bloodletter: Horror about “lore”
Bloodletter, a feminist horror magazine written by women, non-binary, and trans writers, is seeking submissions for its upcoming “lore” issue. “We seek writing that pairs the personal with the analytical, exploring the theoretical underpinnings of the [horror] genre through an experiential perspective,” editors note. No word counts: “Length and style should be determined by the needs of the piece.” No submission fees, no payments that I can find.
Deadline: Nov. 1
The Groke Literary Magazine: “The Art of Rot and Decay”
“How do you rot?” ask the editors of The Groke. Send fiction from 750 to 1500 words (ish) or no more than five pages of poetry on “the art of rot and decay.” No submission fees, no payments that I can find.
Deadline: Nov. 1
Halfway Down the Stairs: Fairy Tales and Folklore submissions
This quarterly journal seeks submissions for its upcoming “Fairytale & Folklore” themed issue. Send 500 words or less of poetry, 5,000 words or less of fiction, and 3,000 words or less of nonfiction. The journal primarily publishes literary/mainstream work, but editors are open to all genres except erotica or children’s. No submission fees, no payments.
Deadline: Nov. 1
Interim: “A Commemoration and Celebration of Las Vegas”
“December 6, 2023, a shooter entered the University of Nevada, Las Vegas campus, killing three faculty members and wounding three others. This special edition of Interim seeks to celebrate the vibrant art and life of Las Vegas and to meditate on the violence in America that has become all too common,” editors explain. “Interim seeks poetry and essays based on these two themes: Life in Las Vegas beyond the Strip and responses to the crisis of violence in America. Writers who have made a life in Las Vegas are especially encouraged to submit in celebration of the city’s connection with the arts.” $5 reading fee, but no payments.
Deadline: Nov. 5
Full Bleed: Manifestos and censorship submissions
Send manifestos, submissions regarding censorship, or ars poetica poetry to Full Bleed for a special upcoming issue. See submission details for more information on each theme. Send prose up to 7,000 words or up to three poems. Comics and graphic essays are also welcome. Contributors will be paid “modest honoraria.”
Deadline: Nov. 15
The Quarter(ly): Semicolon submissions
Quarter Press’ print magazine The Quarter(ly) (“A Literary Journal with Some Art, Comics, and Analysis Thrown in for Good Measure”) is seeking semicolon-themed submissions for an upcoming issue. “It's the before and after, a longer pause, a moment, a separation of complex lists. It's punctuation. It's the link between ideas. Show me what you want connected,” write editors. This includes stories (anything up to 10,000 words, including microfiction), poems (up to five), media analysis (up to 10,000 words), and graphic stories (20 pages or less). Also note that submissions should include “fantastical elements: scary, happy, creepy, heartbreaking, bizarre, hilarious, whatever;” works that do not include fantastical elements are unlikely to be chosen for publication. Payment is $5 and a PDF of the issue; however, be forewarned that “in some instances where we’d like to publish a single poem, short work, or piece of art, we may not have the budget for a payout,” and writers are welcome to indicate they do not want to be considered for paymentless publication when submitting.
Deadline: Nov. 30
Oh Nicki, I almost cried. You are truly a gifted writer to capture these feelings in such tenderness and clarity. Ragna