Dear Readers —
Early May, three years ago, I started sending this letter out. I sent it every Sunday for seven weeks in a row. It felt like a miracle—but one of those small miracles, like having a beloved bar at the corner of your block, or the first time you kiss someone who really knows how to kiss. The miracle was your attention. The miracle was to write and be read and appreciated. The miracle was to be read by my community: college friends, family, acquaintances, old work friends, people met travelling, writer pals, former teachers, my ex-therapist, the mother of my best friend from when I was four years old.
Writing is an odd thing to do, but it starts to feel truly bizarre when your drafts just sit on your hard drive for months and years, never reaching even a single reader. This practice, of sending out little personal essay-letters, says no to all that.
There’s some real irony, then, that it was exactly when I started working on an essay that would explain “What Is Lightplay” that the whole engine of this newsletter totally stalled out, like a stick shift in the carpool lane during rush hour.
On May 21 of last year, I sent a partial draft of that essay to my friend Hunter, asking him for any edits. It was an ambitious piece of writing. It had a table of contents.
Okay, okay, you can read my insane table of contents:
- What is Lightplay?
- Lightplay by the Numbers
- Who Reads Lightplay?
- Lightplay and My Career
- What’s Next for Lightplay?
- Influences and Inspirations
- Closing Thoughts
That draft was about a third complete. It clocked in at 2459 words.
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Writing projects have this way of growing. Sometimes they grow like an untended garden. Other times, as monstrously as Jack’s beanstalk.
In the months where I dragged my feet on finishing the essay defining Lightplay, I ended up having a whole bunch of different, contradictory thoughts about what I wanted to do with this newsletter. It had already grown from a weekly blog focused on food into a monthly publication with a feature-length essay, plus other stuff, released both by email and by podcast.
Oh, it also bears mentioning that last August I had a baby.
Out on parental leave, I spent the baby’s naps entertaining crazy ideas about Lightplay. Here are two:
- Not only will it be an email newsletter and a podcast, it will also be a print publication, only people will print it out on 8.5 x 11 paper on their home printers! (I took this one so far as creating print layouts of the first eighteen issues of Lightplay—you can see the PDFs, just go to the Lightplay archive and click “print” under the issues.)
- Hey, I’m already calling it a “mini-magazine,” why not go whole hog? I’ll release it quarterly, and each issue will be jammed with multiple essays, stories, poems, etc. And not just from me but from friends, from people I admire, from strangers even. Available by print, by website, by email, and with podcast extras. It’ll be great! (I entertained this scheme for an entire month, designing it in my head as I did the nightly dishes, pre-enjoying my fame and glory.)
Eventually I realized that the best thing I can do for my career as a writer is just to finish writing the book I’m working on. These magalomaniacal concepts for Lightplay were, basically, distractions.
In October I had the good sense to just go ahead and send out the essay that was supposed to come after the “What Is Lightplay” issue, a personal essay called “Night/Light”. It got a great response, as many of you sent me sweet emails in reply. My friend Vincent even assigned the essay to one of his classes at Mendocino College. (One can’t overstate how thrilling it is to have your work taught in a classroom.)
Still, that was the only Lightplay I sent out over the last 12 months.
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Wednesday, I was walking with my partner and our baby, and while normally we walk south from our apartment into the neighborhood called Beverly-Fairfax, this day she suggested we turn north, up into Spaulding Square. We crossed Santa Monica Blvd. and headed into the quiet residential streets. I always associate this neighborhood with being where Lady Gaga’s dog walker was shot during a bungled dognapping. (The accomplice who handed the French bulldogs over to the police recently sued Gaga from prison, trying to get the $500K reward money that was promised, “no questions asked.”) But we hadn’t made it all the way to the mansions of the rich and powerful when we started hearing the telltale squawking of parrots. We wandered, ears perked up, till we found the palm trees they were sitting in. There were probably fifteen or twenty birds (red-crowned parrots, the descendents of escapees), making various grating noises at each other.
The baby, strapped to my chest facing out, seemed delighted, smiling and listening and copying their noises. We watched two parrots groom each other up on one frond. Another stood alone on a higher frond, emitting charming gravel noises.
As we watched, a raven swooped in and landed in a neighboring palm tree. Behind it, another came in for a landing.
Then, abruptly, a ruckus. A dark shape dropped from the palm tree, plummeting, big, then separating in mid-air into two shapes, one of which flapped up away from impact at the last moment, and the other of which slammed with a loud thump into the roof of a black sedan.
Our eyes caught up and decoded what we’d seen: A raven! And a squirrel! Falling forty feet from the tree!
The raven flew away. The squirrel scampered off, evidently unbothered by its rude ejection from the tree and its loud impact a few seconds later. And there we were, across the street from a freshly-dented vehicle, in shock, having just seen the darnedest thing.
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I want Lightplay to have room for the everyday, the mundane. The bizarre. The raven-on-squirrel violence. The beautiful.
No good will come of setting such a high bar for myself that I never send Lightplayout. Or from making each issue such a massive hunk of writing that you, dear reader, don’t want to actually open it until you have a free hour. (So: never.)
After all my thinking about what I want Lightplay to be, I realized that most of all I want it to be personal and full of my voice. I want to have fun here. I want to try things out, experiment, grow.
I want to keep it light. I want to play.
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So, I’ve decided on some nouns for what Lightplay could at least be compared to:
- a blog
- a writer’s diary
- a column
And in the spirit of it being part column, I’ve assigned myself a few beats:
- the home kitchen
- making books
- household work
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Some things I’ve decided to let go of:
- Motes (annotated links to things I liked; I came to feel like I was doing this as homage to Robin Sloan’s newsletters)
- Land Reminder (while I liked the prod to think about the past and present of Indigenous people connected to the land where I’m today living, it started feeling like a chore, and something readers skipped; I will keep reading and writing about and supporting Indigenous people as much as I can.)
- Lisa’s Bookshelf (my partner Lisa Locascio Nighthawk has, in fact, started her own newsletter project, Not Knowing How, which in its first season is excavating memories of her adolescence by way of the Smashing Pumpkins album Adore; no bullshit, it’s brilliant; you should go read the thirteen installments she’s already put out, and sign up to receive the rest)
- The Lightplay Podcast (this was where I read each issue aloud, and the lesson I learned is: audio takes so much time! Plus, now I have a kid! And also, I already host a podcast for work! What was I thinking?)
- The Benediction (a short-lived feature where I was closing each email with a little poem or verse; sweet but ultimately too magazine-y.)
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After all that cutting, what’s left of Lightplay? Well, mostly it’s just you and me, here in your inbox, chatting it up. Like old times!
We’ll cook some food. I want to tell you all about the cake known as Ruins of a Russian Count’s Castle. I want to tell you about the bookmaking kick I’ve been on this last year. You’ve got to hear the sad tale of the dying jacaranda. And I want to write about truly mundane things, like sweeping and hanging things on the walls.
Sometimes, I might send out an issue made up of a more polished essay, like “Night/Light” or my other essays from last spring. But mostly, this will be more chatty, more personal, more of a hang.
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You know what really got me on the couch writing tonight? I wanted to tell you something I realized about cooking and Dungeons & Dragons.
In D&D, magic-users are separated into two primary classes:
- Wizards, who memorize a set number of spells every day.
- Sorcerers, who sort of free-style, casting whatever spells they feel like in the moment (though they too are limited in amount).
It’s a bizarre distinction, if you think about it. I used to scratch my head, wondering why that’s the way magic worked. But that’s world-building for you: this wasn’t about it making perfect sense, it was the way magic worked in this system, period. The tradeoff, as I recall, is that wizard spells tend to be more powerful than sorcerer spells, to make up for being less flexible.
My insight is that home cooks can be broken into two similar categories:
- Recipe-Heads, who decide what they’re going to make by looking at recipes, shop for the specific ingredients necessary, and then cook those dishes.
- Improvisers, who stock their kitchen with all sorts of food, what’s seasonal, what’s on sale—and then come up with what to make on the spot, often based on whichever produce in the fridge looks most wilted.
The trade-off is that Recipe-Heads often get to use specialized ingredients and make dishes from cooking traditions that they are not themselves expert in, while Improvisers can be much more flexible in responding to what the day needs and what ingredients are to hand.
It’s a false binary, sure. But I don’t know, it kind of blew my mind.
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I’m glad to be back; thank you for having me. And if you wrote me an email in the fall, and I didn’t write back, I’m sorry, I promise it’s not personal, life has been really overwhelming. Write again? I am always so moved to know that anyone reads this thing.
Jasper