It's been so long since I've sent a newsletter, you may not remember that you're on this list, but it feels like a good time to get in touch.
For one thing, in this week's People magazine (May 15 issue, page 166), the image of the serene, dancing fat nude by artist Jody Kim from the cover of my first novel, Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, is shown in the journal of Peach Friedman, a young woman recovering from exercise bulimia, who is the subject of the article. For more about this (and for keeping up with me in general, as some of you already know), the best source is my
livejournal.
I'm nervous and happy to say that I've finished a draft of part two of Spider in a Tree, the historical novel I'm working on about Jonathan and Sarah Edwards and their eighteenth century Northampton community, including the people they owned as slaves. The writing has been intense and relentlessly interesting to me.
In April, I went to the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale, where the director of the center and wonderful Edwards scholar, Ken Minkema, gave me all sorts of material, including letters and a spiritual diary from Jonathan's sisters and a copy of his will, which means I now know the fabric his vests were made of and what kind of dishes the family used, and – I knew this, but, still, terrible to see – that a ten-year-old boy named Titus was listed as property in the quick stock section, along with the horse, cattle and pigs.
As for the near future, I'm signed up teach an online course on writing the novel in June for the Inkberry writing center in North Adams, will have a piece on why fat girls need fiction in the first Fat Studies Reader (activists and researchers are trying to invent a field called Fat Studies – I read at the Fat and the Academy conference at Smith College in April, which also had that aim in mind), and I'm writing a lot, pushing to finish a draft of the novel. Generous friends Evan Sagerman and Marci Riseman have offered me a three week writing retreat in San Francisco in August. I plan to do intensive revision (and I'll also be reading at a femme conference – my first!) while I'm there. Along with the office space and working companionship that others folks have given me, I've been feeling both lucky and productive. Hope that your lives and work are going well.
Thrive.
Susan
