In New York, everything fits: on being published while travelling
I know it must be because I am a tourist, entering and leaving when I want to, and never needing to fit myself into the city's difficulties --- but New York always opens (itself up to) me.
I’m in Manhattan, on 76th street near Central Park with O—, waiting for Levain Bakery’s famous chocolate chip “mounds” in the concrete heat. They are ok; a nostalgia for a Wonder Years kind of American childhood. A middle-aged man joggling his mobile phone lines up after me. He keeps asking no one in particular but loud enough for most of us in line to hear, “Will it be faster if I order through the app? Do they have a QR code?” When the bakery employee comes out to usher in more people from the line, he asks her the same questions in a tone that’s impatient but polite.
Behind him, a posh-looking family with two young children line up. He must have started asking them questions too. I overhear them say they are from Toronto.
“Oh, how are the fires up there in Canada?” He asks in his gruff and booming New Yorker accent. An accent that feels like home.
“Oh they are mostly passed now”, the mother in a Diane von Fursternberg-style green wrap dress replies.
He nods. “That was rough. It was bad here in New York too.”
I look at them, knowing my CBC column on parenting and wildfires came out earlier that day. I didn’t want to be obnoxious or involve myself with the huffy man or the couple that actually looked like they belonged in UWS (where I was staying with my best friend and his family), but this was too New York to pass up. That is, New York as the place of possibility and connection. New York as everything in its place, with a place for everything.
“Actually, I filed a story with the CBC about parenting during those wildfires and my piece was published today.”
“Oh wow! Really, where can we look for it?” The woman asks.
Before I can reply, the man immediately points out, “You’re a writer eh, yeah I know some writers too, not Jack Kerouac or anything...”
I smile coolly.
I am a fucking writer in New York City, a place I wrote some of my first slams over twenty years ago, imagining being up on stage at the Nuyorican Poets Café. The stage has changed but the desire is the same. You can’t quell what you really need. Sure, me in New York now doesn’t look like the fantasy of my early 20s, but now I’m a mom in a supportive and fun family, something that never entered my imagination then.
The CBC piece I wrote was a result of participating in a two-part Writing about Climate Change workshop with Fatima Bhutto, a Pakistani writer.
Bhutto was fierce, clear, and urgent.
Go after the stories that matter to you, go after saving the world, yourself, our children, the things that will disappear before you can realize they are at risk. First it will be little things, conveniences, here and there. We will adapt, but then it will be bigger things, like being unable to leave the house because of tornadoes where they’ve never been before, wildfire smoke for days, flash floods, or extreme heat warnings. When climate crisis deniers talk of governmental lockdowns, this is not what they mean, but this is what is at stake.
Charged up, I scribbled the above in my notebook right after the workshop; a note to self paraphrasing her advice.
The following week, taking her advice I decided to pitch CBC’s First Person, a column I had been reading for a while that shares Canadian-centric stories often written by immigrants. The pitch was loosely based on a previous entry I wrote on Substack. The editor accepted the pitch and asked for a draft within four days.
As an emerging non-academic writer, I was surprised at how much the CBC team revised my piece, although going back to re-read the column, I realized all the pieces have the same “voice”. I had Bhutto in my head as she told us that the NYT re-writes almost all the stories filed. Academic journals hardly have editors (a grave oversight on the legibility of academic writing) and while my editors at ESSE have been wonderful and provoke my arguments, they don’t reshape my essays. I didn’t mind, not for now anyway. Parts of my intimate style were there, but in a way a more general audience could grasp.
You can read it at the link below:
With a sky full of wildfire smoke, how do I give my children the carefree summer they deserve?
The piece is about losing the little bits, grieving the little bits, and as a parent, figuring out how to contend with a disappearing future when children are an emblem of the future.
Gen Dread author and activist Britt Wray talks about this better than I can. What do you do when faced with the foreclosing of future’s potential but you don’t know how to explain it to your children in a way that will be appropriate for the way they understand the world? My son and his baby sister have enough to contend with—the inter-generational trauma from both sides, and the slew of concomitant oppressive ideologies making our lives unliveable.
Losing the little bits becomes monumental when the weather oscillates between extreme heat and thunderstorms for days and our babysitter cannot take our daughter for an afternoon nap outside—a chance for us to finally have sex on our bed because we sleep in the same room with her in our small home.
Sometimes the desires the climate crisis hinders are trivial or fleeting, but they are what make up a life.