Some readers asked if I would consider making my latest newsletter dispatch public, so they could link to it. So I posted it at Medium. It’s about, among other things, how I briefly became a tax lawyer (like and unlike my father), and how important it is for us, in politics, always to keep one eye on the money. Especially now.

It’s always fine to forward the newsletters, or to quote from them. As I’ve said, I don’t ordinarily post them online because I like the veneer of privacy. But once they’re out in the world I’m not invested in trying to control where they end up.

I can’t say the results of the election took me by surprise. Worrying that a Trump win could be coming didn’t dull the horror of the reality, though.

I’m trying not to give in to despair and not to let myself be distracted by the daily onslaught of his racist appointments, trammeling of civil rights, and blatant malfeasances.

Over at my Tumblr, I’m posting an action a day to oppose what he’s already doing. The most important one is to call the House Oversight Committee (202-225-5074) and insist on a bipartisan investigation of his financials and apparent conflicts of interest. I’ve posted many other ideas in the past couple weeks if you’re not sure where to start.

Lately I’ve been focused on unpacking, meeting the birds and trees in the nabe, writing my book, and doing my other job. I’ve been disinclined to take on much beyond that, but yesterday I sent my first Tiny Letter since January, and it felt good.

After a couple years of erratic dispatches, I think I’m going to aim for once a week now. SI’m always glad when a description I give at the beginning of something fits what I end up doing with it, and this one does: Ideas & Intimacies.

The letters aren’t archived online–I like the veneer of privacy–but unless I’m working on a new one, I usually send the latest to new subscribers.

I’ve lived in Brooklyn since 1999, longer than I’ve lived anywhere else, even Miami. It’s been good in many ways but also difficult for me. City life tends to exacerbate my anxiety. I’ve missed living near wild green places.

I’m sure I’d have a much harder time leaving New York than I realize, but I’d be happy to give it a try, if not for Max. The city is his soul-home. He can’t imagine leaving the communities of artists and musicians he’s part of — living anywhere that doesn’t have a Stereographic Association, for instance. After all these years, he still endlessly and lovingly photographs the subway. Even the asphalt seems to nourish him. We’re both introverts, but we have different needs.

So we’re moving, as people sometimes do in this situation, pretty far out into Queens. We’ll still be on a subway line but also right next to Forest Park, a hilly stretch of land with hiking trails and tangles of trees, bordered by lots of cemeteries. I’m going to get a puppy. At least for now, we’re not getting a car. 

We don’t move for nine days, but: goodbye, Brooklyn! Thanks, and fare thee well. I’m sure I’ll still see you pretty often. Excited to get to know you, Queens.

The publication party for The Queen of the Night, the magnificent second novel by my dear friend Alexander Chee, is tomorrow night at McNally Jackson. I was stunned and so happy when he asked me to discuss the book with him there.

Alex and I became friends before I read his first book. An instant easy understanding was possible between us that might have been impossible if I’d encountered Edinburgh — which is wonderful and true and utterly its own thing — before I knew him. Over the years he has become a kind of muse for me, as well as an advisor, though I don’t think I ever put it to myself quite that until I just typed the words just now.

He says he sees our conversation tomorrow night as an extension of the many we’ve had over the years. Most of those happened in private, obviously, but I’ve written about a few of them before: On creating the feeling you want the reader to feel; After the affair (on Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford); and Some company for slow writers.

The Queen of the Night tour schedule is here. You can follow along with the excitement at his Twitter feed.

I wrote about science and self and wanted and unwanted rodents: I, Rodent.

This is probably the strangest essay I’ve published to date. I like it a lot.

I keep meaning to mention that Best American Travel Writing 2015 is out and, as promised, it includes my short NYT Mag essay, “A Doubter in the Holy Land.” I’ve been reading my way through the collection and finding so many great things I missed when they were published last year, including Rachael Maddux’s “Hail Daton.”

Today my friend Sarah Smarsh told me that my Harper’s essay, “America’s Ancestry Craze,” is listed as a notable essay at the back of the new Best American Essays. (Her great essay on the shame of poor teeth in a rich world is, too.) This is gratifying, because the Harper’s essay led to the book I’m writing, which in turn has led to my inability to write much of anything else until it’s done. Not complaining! It’s just nice to know people are still reading my older stuff.

After I hand in a rough-rough draft of my current book chapter, I’m planning to start on the one that’s most related to the Lives essay. I’ve been reading widely for months in preparation, and I’ll also go back and reread everything linked from my 2014 Begats post on whether faith “has a genetic basis.”

It’s strange to talk to friends, especially old friends, about meditation, even when they ask about it. It’s been so helpful to me, and I’m glad to share my experience when it might help someone else, but I’m also by nature averse to proselytizing. I really don’t ever want to hearken back to the fundamentalist kid me on church outings in public parks, interrupting happy picnics to hand people Jack Chick tracts about how their life is all wrong.

And also, there’s a part of me that still feels answerable to the person I have seen myself as being most of my life, the person attached to pessimism and cynicism and depression and to, on occasion, throwing my entire self, directing all of my energy and passion, into raging against injustice. I have conversations with that person in my head all the time. Which is complicated, because that person was a product of a lot of influences and experiences. That person was inconsistent and always changing, too.

Buddhism (that’s the path I’ve been heading down, after a lifetime of secretly feeling scornful of Westerners who called themselves Buddhist) holds that there is no such thing as a cohesive self, that second to second we are in flux, always transforming, and that if we allow ourselves to observe our thoughts and feelings in meditation without being caught up in them we can see how illusory our sense of a fixed identity really is. We can see how our narratives about ourselves and life and other people are actually much more complicated (and in my case, much more embarrassing and immature) than we think they are.

For me, in the moment, meditation is usually the opposite of bliss. The kind I do doesn’t focus on clearing the mind but on letting the thoughts and feelings be there without following them, letting them exist while returning over and over again to my breath. Sitting with myself like this can be and often is excruciatingly uncomfortable, but cumulatively it makes me feel better: less anxious, less depressed, less manic, less detached, and less angry, though at any given time I might be experiencing all of these things. My practice is especially valuable to me right now, after the loss of my friend Nelson and with many people I Iove going through very hard stuff.

Pema Chödrön writes of difficult feelings — and joyous feelings — as clouds overhead. They’re there, and they affect us, and there’s no point in chasing them as they move through our lives, and there’s no point in fighting them or trying to push them away, either. They’re ever-present and inevitable as the weather. It feels better when we accept that, is the idea. It feels better when we see our feelings for what they are, when we know them intimately and embrace the whole confusing swirl.

One of my favorite parts of my favorite book of hers, Start Where You Are, talks about how the beginner to meditation wants to master everything at once, wants to change immediately and irrevocably into a better self. But, she says, “the truth sinks in like rain into very hard earth. The rain is very gentle, and we soft up slowly at our own speed. But when that happens, something has fundamentally changed in us. That hard earth has softened. It doesn’t seem to happen by trying to get to it or capture it. It happens by letting go.”

Something that made me sad, then happy, then sad after my friend Nelson died was finding our email exchange about how he wanted to start writing again.

And thank you for thinking me a writer, or at least having the seed — I know that having the chops requires craft.  And craft requires time, sweat and not a little bit of Jameson’s.  I thought about what you said, though.  Maybe essays would be a start; the idea of writing the great American novel is outside both my ability and my reality.  I am starting to think that reading email for a living has reduced my attention span a bit too much for that level of dedication.  Sad, that.  But words will always fascinate and entertain me, so if they find a way to come out in a way that someone else would enjoy — that would be something.  Thankfully, some of them entertained you enough that summer to call me in the first place.

He sent this soon after the last time we saw each other in New York, in November 2012, right before Hurricane Sandy. I remember being so glad he was thinking this way. The letters he wrote to me while he was in the army — I’ve written about that era a few times — were a joy. I hoped he’d find his way back to the page.

Nelson and I first got to know each other in a high school writing class — the one I took my senior year that also led me to my friend Lili, who died ten years ago of pancreatic cancer, and to our teacher, Mrs. Kjos, who died of ovarian cancer in 2008. I guess this is what being in your forties is like.

Last night I dreamed that I was reading a collection of short stories Nelson had written, a book he self-published knowing he would die soon. In the dream he was still alive. Waking up this morning was the most bittersweet thing.

Friday was a super-sad day. But one really nice thing: at the airport on the way to our friend’s memorial, we got to pick up a copy of The New York Times with a mention of Max’s latest.

“The Brooklyn artist Maximus Clarke addresses a surveillance society in ‘Render,’ three panels with human figures that have to be viewed through 3-D glasses — and, in keeping with the theme, park rangers will be milling around.”

See it at the the old fort on Governor’s Island, as part of the Governor’s Island Art Fair, in September!

There’s something beautiful about grieving on the internet, all of us offering up our losses to each other, hoping to be touched and understood by each other when we’re at our lowest and most vulnerable, and there’s also something strange about expressing grief here. No matter how true and deep our sadness, when we offer it up online, it can get confusing. It can feel less real, but also more final.

My heart is heavy with sadness and love, for an old friend and his family, and for all of us.

Writing so much about my early life recently has brought back a slew of memories, and with them some of the first poems I memorized at school. I taught this one, by Jessica Nelson North, to Autumn when she was a girl, and she loved it.

Three Guests

 

I had a little tea party
This afternoon at three.
‘Twas very small—
Three guests in all—
Just I, myself and me.

 

Myself ate all the sandwiches,
While I drank up the tea;
‘Twas also I who ate the pie
And passed the cake to me.

I haven’t thought much about the other that’s been knocking around in my head — Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Swing” — since I learned it way back when. Now I can’t wait to teach them to my niece (three) and nephews (both four) the next time I visit.

Also, to try to describe a swing with a view of “Rivers and trees and cattle and all / Over the countryside” — an exotic thing to imagine even when I was young.

My mom was something like a mommy-blogger, in 1973. From the time I was two to two-and-a-half, she wrote these astoundingly detailed letters about our lives and me and Miami, typed them up in quintuplicate, and mailed them to the whole family. I have multiple copies of some of them.

They’re an amazing resource for my book, and they prove, as she’s always claimed and I’ve doubted, that I was talking in complete sentences when I turned two. Apparently I was also always concerned with remembering everything that happened.

On the one hand the letters make me happy, because I can verrrry hazily remember some of what she describes, and because they’re so full of pride and love, but they also make me sad, because I can see how lonely she was.

My Longreads profile of Orphan Black’s brilliant science consultant Cosima Herter — known to the show’s actors and creators as “Real Cosima” — ranges from science, chance, and emotion to Darwin, humanized mice, DIY synthetic biology, and much more. Here’s how it starts:

BBC America’s Orphan Black seems so immediate, so plausible, so unfuturistic, that Cosima Herter, the show’s science consultant, is used to being asked whether human reproductive cloning could be happening in a lab somewhere right now. If so, we wouldn’t know, she says. It’s illegal in so many countries, no one would want to talk about it. But one thing is clear, she told me, when we met to talk about her work on the show: in our era of synthetic biology — of Craig Venter’s biological printer and George Church’s standardized biological parts, of three-parent babies and of treatment for cancer that involves reengineered viruses— genetics as we have conceived of it is already dead. We don’t have the language for what is emerging.

It’s one of my favorite things I’ve written, and also one of the strangest. It’s very much keeping with the forward-looking aspects of the book I’m working on. And it has the endorsements of a whole lotta Orphan Blackers, including, Tatiana Maslany, Graeme Manson, and Herter herself, which makes me happy.

On June 6, I’ll be speaking at the Global Family Reunion about my family, my interest in genealogy, ancestry, genetics, and the things we know and stories we tell ourselves about inheritance, and how my fascination with all of this became the book I’m writing. My talk will be at 3:30 p.m.

The reunion, brainchild of AJ Jacobs, also features Jacobs, Henry Louis Gates, CeCe Moore, George Church, Daniel Radcliffe, Lisa Loeb, and many others, and is a full day of events held on the old World’s Fair grounds in Queens. Everyone’s invited.

Tickets are available at EventBrite. Proceeds benefit the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund. Free admission for kids.

I just learned that my Lives essay, “A Doubter in the Holy Land,” will be included in Best American Travel Writing 2015. The guest editor is Andrew McCarthy. Thank you for choosing my essay, Andrew McCarthy!

On March 5, Marie Mutsuki Mockett and I will be reading and talking about exorcising the past (all meanings of exorcise possible) at McNally Jackson at 6 p.m.

Marie’s wonderful new book, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye, is about death and grief and family and ghosts and so much more. She’ll read from it, and I’ll read from the working introduction to my book on the science and superstition of ancestry, and then we’ll talk about all of that and take questions and comments from you. Hope to see you there!

This image is from one of Marie’s childhood notebooks; she shared it with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop when they visited her writing studio.

At Slate, Ariel Bogle recaps a discussion I had last week with AJ Jacobs, Wilhelmina Rhodes-Kelly, and Chris Whitten on how technology is affecting the family tree. I talked a little bit about what drew me to research my ancestry in the first place.

Although technology is changing the way we discover our personal histories, the reasons why people may begin to investigate in the first place have stayed the same. Curiosity, of course, but also a sense of history. Maud Newton told the audience how her interest in her family tree was sparked by the improbable stories her mother told about their predecessors. But the importance of ancestry cut very close for Newton. “I myself was basically a eugenics project,” she said. “My parents married because they thought they would have smart children together, not because they loved each other.” Her father was particularly obsessed with the idea of purity of blood, she added. “Someone suggested to me that there might be something [my father] was hiding, and then I got really interested.”

We had lots of fun; I don’t think any of us were ready for the panel to end when it did, and how often can you say that? The audio is below Bogle’s summary, if you’d like to listen.

In related reading: at Tin House, my series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry is ongoing. Guests so far are Laila Lalami, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Christopher Beha. And at The Begats, I’ve written in the last few months about Alexander Chee’s jokbo (gorgeous books recording his family history back to the Joseon Dynasty, which began in 1392), ancestor worship in the Old Testament, and some disappointing (but not too surprising) discoveries about my self-given namesake, Maude Newton Simmons, among other things.

The stark and stunning image above is a grave map — taken from Alex’s jokbo — for one of his ancestors.

A longtime reader wrote to ask if everything’s okay. He was concerned because I post here so rarely.

Everything is okay! My stepdaughter, Autumn, turned twenty-one! Often I still think of her as the little waving girl in the photo above. But she is an astounding young woman, a clear and compassionate thinker, a poet, a gift, my only child. Also, my goddaughter and her mom moved away. I miss them tons. And my cats died, a few months apart. Oof, as my friend Carrie says. That was sad. 

After Emily’s death in July, we got Florian to keep Percy company, and then after Percy’s death in November we didn’t want Florian to be alone, so we got Wanda. They’re great — we’re so comforted by their companionship and antics — but losing pets is as awful as Laurie Anderson says. I actually got Emily after I lost my dog, Ripley, back in 1997. After Emily’s death, I finally felt ready to have a dog again, but our coop doesn’t allow them. Neither, for that matter, did Percy.

Right now there’s a blizzard outside. I’m drinking water and tea and working on my book, which is usually what I’m doing, unless I haven’t refilled the water and tea recently.

The manuscript is due in 2016, and I asked for regular installment deadlines with my editor to keep myself on task, and I’m so busy writing that I actually got excited when an app I use to keep myself from wasting time online malfunctioned for a few weeks. It cut off my access to half the Internet, including this very site. I’m also working on a related profile-essay thing that’s taking me a long time to finish to my satisfaction, and I’m very excited about it. And I’ve been doing a lot of weird, wide-ranging reading, which I’m sure will all be reflected in my book, if you’ve missed my meandering fixations.

I hope to fixate here, too, from time to time. Until that happens, or in case it doesn’t, you can as usual more frequently find me on Twitter, Tumblr, The Begats (my other Tumblr), Instagram, and Facebook. It’s also possible to sign up for my verrrry sporadic “ideas and intimacies” dispatches at Tiny Letter. And I’ll be speaking at A.J. Jacobs’ Global Family Reunion on June 6, if you’d like to catch up in person.

For now, we’ve just gotta get through January. And I keep reminding myself, so I’ll remind you, too: the days are already getting longer.

If you’re interested, I’ve created a newsletter, ideas & intimacies, at Tiny Letter.

As it says there: please, come and go as you please.

I’ve always been interested in the ways writers think about family history—and especially about echoes, or the lack thereof, through the generations—if they do, as they work. I’m grateful to Tin House for allowing me to indulge this curiosity in a new series of brief but wide-ranging interviews with authors about ancestry. First up, Christopher Beha:

Maud Newton: When we first met to talk about the essay I eventually ended up writing for Harper’s, you mentioned an ancestral house upstate where your family spends time every summer. Do you think visiting that old homestead has influenced your thinking about ancestry?

 

Christopher Beha: Without a doubt. The house was built by the first Behas of my line to come to America from Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. They farmed for a couple of generations on land my family still owns, and members of the family continued to spend a lot of time there after my great-great grandmother moved the family down to New York City. So there’s a lot of family history there. There are still some Behas living in the area (though they pronounce the name differently than my family does), and there is a Beha Road not far from the house. I can walk a mile down the road to the churchyard and see the graves of Matthias and Theresa Beha, my great-great-great grandparents, who brought their family over 150 years ago. All of this has influenced my sense of ancestry as something that is still present in my world, even if it is often invisible.

The rest is here. Future interview subjects will include Laila Lalami, Emily Mandel, Celeste Ng, Saeed Jones, and Katherine Faw Morris.

In the past couple years my mom has taught me and reminded me of a few more of my Texan granny’s favorite expressions. Some highlights:

• Quiet as a little mouse peeing on cotton. (Usually used when someone reacts with stunned silence to some sort of diatribe or revelation.)
• You can’t get all your coons up one tree. (You can’t get everything you want.)
• Told them how the cows ate the cabbage. (Describes a serious dressing-down.)
• Pitiful as a sick kitten on a hot rock. (Depressed and listless, very sympathetically so.)
• She got her tail up over her back. (In preparation to sting, like a scorpion. My grandmother called scorpions “stinging lizards.”)
• Happy as a dead pig in the sunshine. (In blissful unawareness of some terrible or embarrassing thing.)
• Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (A phrase my grandmother often used when schooling my father on the ways of my mom, i.e., the intractability of Texan women in general.)

Just about every week for more than two and a half years, I’ve contributed a tiny column about the meeting of history and the present day to the New York Times Magazine’s “One Page Magazine.” The constraints have been considerable — I usually operate in sixty to eighty words, or thereabouts, subject to the vagaries of column breaks and dictates of the stylebook — but within them my freedom has been enormous. When Jon Kelly invited me aboard in the fall of 2012, he said I could write about anything I chose, and he was true to his word. I was sometimes asked to give my draft a second pass, but my subject, no matter how idiosyncratic or obscure, was never vetoed. 

Since then I’ve mentioned essays from many of my favorite literary magazines (including Tin House, A Public Space, the Paris Review, and Granta), cultural websites (such as the Awl, the Millions, and the Los Angeles Review of Books), regional magazines (including two longtime favorites, Oxford American and Texas Monthly), and many, many books and writers, from the well-known to the, in today’s parlance, emerging.  I’ve written about language and religion and sex and depression — all favorite subjects — and about Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Muriel Spark, Ford Madox Ford, Helen Oyeyemi, Catherine Chung, Jeet Thayil, Muriel Spark, Zora Neale Hurston, Daphne Du Maurier, Sherlock, The Sandbaggers, and Doctor Who. Never once has the first person intruded, except in quotes from someone else or the occasional 6th Floor post.

It’s been an honor and a lot of fun to appear in the magazine so regularly, but I’m regretfully taking my leave of the page after yesterday’s issue to work on my book about the science and superstition of ancestry. Huge thanks to the magazine for having me aboard, and to everyone who’s followed my wide-ranging interests there all this time. My last column is about Elizabeth Bachner’s “How to Shake Hands With a Murderer,” from Spuyten Duyvil’s Wreckage of Reason II.

With this shift, I’m officially, formally, indefinitely and probably permanently retired from anything like regular writing about books. (I need all my brainpower for my own work, and I respectfully ask that everyone please, please, please discontinue sending unsolicited packages to me.)

I have to say, it feels wonderful to be reading novels, when I can find the time for novels, as a civilian again. The three new works of fiction I’ve loved most recently are Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Christopher Beha’s Arts & Entertainments. All are suspenseful, philosophical but not ponderous, and gorgeously written, and all are books that might make you miss your stop on the train. I’m also reading Montaigne, and tons of books on heredity, and I’m re-reading Rebecca Skloot’s outstanding The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

Ancestry is a fundamental perplexity of life. We come from our parents, who came from their parents, who descended, as the Bible would put it, from their fathers and their fathers’ fathers, but we are separate beings. We begin with the sperm of one man and the egg of one woman, and then we enter the world and we become ourselves.

 

Beyond all that’s encoded in our twenty-three pairs of chromosomes—our hair, eyes, and skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature, our sensitivity to bitter tastes—we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve.

The June issue of Harper’s – with my essay on America’s (and my) ancestry obsession — will be available on newsstands for about the next two to three weeks, if you were planning to pick up a copy. The paragraphs quoted above are a teeny excerpt.

You can read more about the essay and my writing of it in the Dallas Morning News and at PEN, and hear more in interviews with KERA and Wisconsin Public Radio.

I’ll be at Cafe Society this Friday, June 6, to discuss the essay and the book.