Spring Things 🌸🌼🌷

An intro for new subscribers & the latest goings-on

Hello!

Please excuse this break from our regularly scheduled programming (in which I drop you directly into an essay or, occasionally, poem). Because I’ve seen more than a few new subscribers lately (hi! thanks!!)—and, yes, also because I am taking ten full days away from my keyboard this month to sit my second meditation retreat—I thought I’d take a moment to re-introduce myself and this project.

I’m Jamie. Nice to meet you. :)

I’m a writer by both passion and profession. My work has appeared in media outlets like Fodor’s, SELF, CNBC and Ms. Magazine as well as literary journals ranging from Nashville Review to Fourth Genre—the latter of which nominated my essay, “Dessert,” for the Pushcart Prize this year. (Fingers crossed!)

I’ve been based for the last five years in Portland, Oregon, but I was born in South Florida—and I made lots of stops along the way between the country’s corners. I’ve lived in Boston, Santa Fe, and the tiny Appalachian town of Athens, Ohio; for a season, I traveled full-time in a 17-foot travel trailer, calling everywhere and nowhere home.

I landed in the Pacific Northwest just after I’d turned 30, when I was already thinking it might be time to get still. That was November 2019. You know the rest of the story—but I have to say, of all the places to get pandemic-stuck, I feel like I won the lottery here in Oregon.

As this trajectory probably makes clear, I’ve always been something of a seeker—and not only in physical space. I’ve also always been (what I’ve recently started calling on the dating apps) intellectually promiscuous: I like to play around with a lot of different ideas. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to settle with just one.

I do know for sure that I want to get the most out of this—yes, I’m going there—one wild and precious life. I have tried, always, to be intentional; I have found true intentionality requires openness to revision.

Along with all my changes of scenery, I’ve also often changed my mind—a fact that I’ve felt sheepish about. I kept finding myself writing essays that were essentially justifications of my mind-change moments: quitting grad school, re-applying for (and eventually declining the offer to return to) grad school, gaining weight, losing weight, trying psychedelics in my thirties; deciding to start drinking again after having stopped for four years. (Spoiler: I quit again this January. But probably not forever.)

Many of the essays were written from a defensive posture. They presumed judgment and hedged against it: I know this decision seems weird and counter to what I did or said before. Here’s the “why.”

Eventually, though, I came to understand that these essays, at least the best ones, ultimately failed as explanations—precisely becuase they kept proving to me that there was nothing to explain. The mind-changes I was justifying almost always made my life better, even if only by teaching me I’d been right the first time. As writing so often does, the process opened up even more questions, more ideas, more ways of seeing. The more I wrote, the more I thought: oh yeah. Changing your mind can be good, actually.

So: Welcome to Change of Heart. I’m glad you’re here.

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As mentioned above, this month I’m spending a string of days sitting in silence for hours at a time—and almost two full weeks completely unplugged from my cell phone and the internet (🙏🙏🙏).

That means, of course, that the time bookending that vacation is especially full (and extremely plugged in). So, in exchange for shorting you a real essay this month, here are a few of my recent publications elsewhere—and some book recommendations.

Recent Publications:

• Distance, Bodega Magazine (the first poem I’ve published in, um, nine years)

• Dessert - Fourth Genre (please really do cross your digits about the Pushcart!)

• Vectors - Colorado Review (if you are already a nervous flyer please think carefully before reading)

Best Books I’ve Read in a While:

• Tilt by Emma Pattee of

  Just One More Question
  (featuring: The Really Big One, IKEA; the Artistic Millennial Ambition Complex)

• Cosmic Tantrum by

  Sarah Lyn Rogers
  (featuring: Being baby, rigged games, court jesters in space)

• Motherhood by Sheila Heti (featuring: the biggest human question; the I Ching; in-line photos)

• Easy Beauty: A Memoir by Chloé Cooper Jones (featuring: philosophy; solo travel; the complexity and importance—actually—of beauty; basically I want to be Jones’s best friend)

• Normal People by Sally Rooney (featuring: I am really fucking late to the party on this one)

See you next month!