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Monthly supershort original writing + Little letters of recommendation.
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13 Killer Brand Strategies for 2024
Someone told me, “I was surprised to see you write about war.” It’s not in my brand, she said.
Okay, so I will write about the mark I found on my daughter’s chest many hours after she fell down, how bad I felt for not noticing. How about the single brown freckle perched over each of her eyebrows—is that in my brand? I’ll tell you about the way my husband taps his feet while he’s asleep, as if he is dreaming music; I’ll write about the fog that licks down the hillside like a heavy blanket, the way it illuminated a spiderweb stretched across both our kitchen windows; is it my brand that I couldn’t see the web until after the dullness of the fog and dew, how fog can be gray and sparkle at the same time? Maybe my brand is the way I once knocked all the seeds out of a red bell pepper in one blow, the inside as perfect as the whorl of my daughter’s ear in the sun; how she was very sick and the doctor said she had a double ear infection but she didn’t seem bothered, how I wondered whether she was free of pain, lucky, or somehow already learning to pretend not to be. Is it my brand to tell you how the air feels in December in California, like a good apple cold from the refrigerator, or the decisive sound of a lid on a pot when you are done working and all that’s left to do is wait? Is it on brand to tell you my father’s sneezes are so loud they scare me into anger, so much that I haven’t lived at home in 18 years but whenever I see him and he sneezes he says sorry like a reflex and this is a kind of love; or how my daughter’s hair has grown so slowly she is three and we haven’t cut it yet and my husband asks if, when we finally do, he can keep a little bit of the irreplicable blonde that is disappearing forever, how he asks is this weird and I tell him no, this is love too. Not war, but okay, maybe I will tell you about watching a friend feed her two young children, and how her own mother leaned over and put some crackers in her grown daughter’s mouth when she had no hands left to feed herself—does that fit neatly into my brand strategy?
Today’s Letters of Recommendation
This very good, dry, not sweet at all nonalcoholic cider I had on New Year’s Eve. I had this and a fancy dinner and was in bed before 11, which is exactly what I wanted to do.
Getting old. I recommend it. Mostly.
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, by Sabrina Imbler. This is a book about sea creatures, but each one is also about human identity and love and oh my god it’s the book I would love to write if I were smarter than I am. Go get it immediately.