From Your Overextended Correspondent

(My failure to do less, and all the stuff I did instead)

Sometime in the past year, I bought a really cool sticker at a bookstore counter. It said DO LESS in rainbow letters, and since I already knew this needed to be my mantra, I put it right on my computer—on the INSIDE, where my right wrist rests as I type, so I could see it constantly. Within a few months, my sweaty wrist had worn the whole thing to a white blob. Then I peeled it off.

Is this a metaphor? Maybe. Did I already know it was a doomed proposition? Yes.

This was the sticker, although these are NOT my fingers. Photo is from Free Period Press, which makes the stickers.

Anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of stuff. So much stuff that I’ve been losing track of it all, and haven’t properly shared everything with the world. So I figured I’d share a bunch of it with whoever cares, which presumably is the people who subscribe to this newsletter and only the people who subscribe to this newsletter.

I met LeVar Burton and awkwardly told him that he was Big Bird!

Hopefully it came out a little better than that. I was trying to express that I grew up watching him on PBS, and that Zooming with him was almost as surreal as meeting a muppet, and okay, this sounds worse the more I explain it. He was absolutely lovely, though, exactly the person you’d hope he is.

This all happened because on the penultimate episode of his podcast, he read an old short story of mine, “The November Story,” aloud in his perfect LeVar Burton voice—and then later he had a celebratory Instagram Live to mark the end of his podcast, and I got to be one of the drop-in visitors. I don’t think there’s a recording of the live event, but you can listen to the story!

Sing with me now: Butterfly, in the sky…

I wrote about a twenty-year-old email for New York Magazine:

Gmail just turned 20 (?!?!) and New York Magazine asked a bunch of writers to dig back in our emails for something we’d written in 2004, and talk about it. I found an email from a very wobbly time in my life, and picked it apart. Here’s the link; you can also read entries from writers like Major Jackson, Sloane Crosley, and Paul Murray.

For Poets & Writers Magazine, I wrote about writer envy and rage-vomiting:

If you subscribe to the magazine, you can read the article here.

And this link takes you to an un-paywalled version, although I highly recommend subscribing to Poets & Writers either online or on paper; they do great nonprofit work and are a fantastic resource for all writers.

I wrote for Oprah about learning Hungarian:

For Oprah Daily, I wrote a personal essay about family, place, and learning Hungarian.

The very cool live illustration that accompanies the article. (You can see it in action if you click through.)

You can read it here.

And it includes photos of my family, like these ones…

I edited the summer issue of Ploughshares!

Ploughshares is perennially one of my favorite literary magazines, and I was thrilled to guest-edit their summer issue. The process involved choosing half the work from finalists they sent me, and soliciting work from writers I admire for the other 50%, and then offering edits on what were already brilliant pieces. You can order the issue now right here; it features work from Dur e Aziz Amna, Ramona Ausubel, Peter Mountford, Khaddafina Mbabazi, DK Nnuro, Suzanne Roberts, and more and more and more.

I wrote for the LA Times about the heartbreak of the recent Alice Munro news:

This article was originally paywalled but appears to be available to everyone now, at least for the moment.

Also: A reminder that writers almost never write the headlines of their pieces, and the headline here comes off a bit harsher than what I’m saying, so please don’t judge it by that (and please try to remember not to assume you understand anyone’s article online when all you’ve seen is the headline).

My novel class is now available on demand!

In November, I taught a 6-part online “Novelist’s Toolkit” course with StoryStudio Chicago (where I’m Artistic Director), covering everything from outlines to tension to backstory to writer’s block to revision. People seemed to love the class (yay!) and we recorded it, and it’s now available on demand.

You get all the recordings (six videos, 2+ hours each), plus a bunch of handouts and exercise sheets. You can check out the course here.

And while you’re there you can check out shorter classes from Porochista Khakpour and Frances de Pontes Peebles; more on-demand classes are coming soon!

Palate cleanser; here’s something someone else did:

One of my favorite podcasts, If Books Could Kill, picked apart J. D. Vance’s book last year. It’s a satisfying and elucidating takedown, if you’re into that kind of thing.

I’ve been, like… canonized?

I once got in a huge fight with a college boyfriend over the idea of canon; I argued that it cemented us in hegemony and patriarchy (I was 20, and very passionate, and possibly drunk) and he, a straight white boy, was like “The canon is great and will never change!” (Okay, that’s probably not fair—he was very smart and it was likely a more nuanced argument, but that’s how I heard it.) Jump cut to 2024 and the New York Times list of best books of the 21st Century (so far) and what feels like at least a much more responsible way (they polled 503 critics and writers) to pick the best books of the past 25 years and, well, to this:

The Great Believers came in at number 64, which is flattering and overwhelming (and fundamentally wrong because no, it’s absolutely not a better book than The Plot Against America or We The Animals, numbers 65 and 66 respectively) and pretty damn amazing. I have no idea what 20-year-old me would think about this.

It’s at the very least a fantastic list of books, and I’m honored to be in amazing company. I’m confounded by Louise Erdrich’s absence, but otherwise in solid agreement that all the books I’ve read from this list are fantastic.

And then the fresh news from yesterday: There’s a second list, this one voted on by Times readers, that’s quite different, with 39 books the same. The Great Believers came in at number 38 there. If you’re someone who voted for it, thank you so much!

(Granted, all of this is not something I did, or at least not something I did recently. I finished writing that book about seven years ago. This is more something that happened.)

I visited another Substack!

A couple of former StoryStudio students have started a lovely Substack, as well as an online magazine, about art and mental health. They interviewed me, and you can read it here:

Artists' Chat: Rebecca Makkai

I did other stuff, too…

I promise I’m writing actual fiction, just not quickly enough. And also book reviews that I can’t talk about yet. And I’ve had a couple of lovely readings here in Vermont, where I spend the summer. And I’m teaching right now at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English and will teach at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in August. And in June, I joined the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars and taught my first residency there! I also made gazpacho.

I need another sticker, probably. One that says, like, Just give up on sleeping…? If you’re better than me at prioritizing your life, please tell me all your secrets in the comments.