“If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” G.K. Chesterton

I am a writer. I have always been but didn’t really take it seriously until my late forties. I’ve published memoirs, fiction, and poetry, and absolutely love the craft and the process. I’m resolved that I’ll never get rich doing it, but I realize that is not why I write. I do it because I can’t not do it. There is a line in the John Lee Hooker song, “Boogie Chillen” that goes, “Let that boy boogie-woogie. It’s in him and it’s got to come out.” That’s me, only with words.

When I retired in 2023, I knew much of my daily routine would be spent at the keyboard, but I was eager to pursue new interests, activities I never had time for before. In my first year, I rowed in an eight-person shell in a “learn to row” class and even tried curling at a local curling club. I took a pottery class and made some terrible pottery, but also a couple of pieces I was very pleased with. I found all three activities to be much harder than they looked. Through these pursuits, I discovered I enjoyed pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

I was also resolved to try my hand at painting. I had done nothing remotely artistic since eighth grade art class. I’ve never considered myself an artistic person, despite my knack for the written word. I always held writing as different from art, which I thought was much more difficult. Even so, I was determined to see if painting and fine arts were something that could be learned or maybe dredged from the depths of my muse. If there’s one thing that my writing has exposed, it’s that our imaginations are capable of amazing things if we set them free. I hoped that if it worked for writing, maybe it would translate to the canvas.

I started slowly with a few paint-by-number kits. I realize this is an artistic cop-out and something that a trained monkey could do if you’re good at training monkeys, but I wanted to ease into it and get a feel for spreading paint around. My first piece was the “American Gothic,” the classic portrait featuring the stoic farmer and wife in front of a barn. The process was tedious, featuring 46 different colors painted in small spaces with hard to read numbers. Tediousness aside, it was deeply rewarding watching the picture come to life as I went. When it was finished, it looked like the authentic portrait, but only if you viewed it from far away and squinted a little.

After a few of these entry-level paint-by-number kits, an artist friend encouraged me to go rogue and start painting freehand. I was apprehensive about beginning, so asked my son to give me a quick lesson. He’s pretty good with oils and has been working on his technique more and more recently. I figured he could show me the basics and get me started, even though I was using acrylics.

I chose a recent vacation picture of the mountainous Quiraing region in Scotland as my subject. In hindsight, it was likely too ambitious for the likes of an artistic rookie like me. The photo had multiple shades of green, impossible-to-portray contours and depth, and a hazy, cloudy skyline. Nothing like jumping in with both feet.

The training session went as well as could be expected. He showed me how to sketch major lines and focal points, set down a base layer, and the basics of mixing paint according to the rules of a color wheel. From there it was all me, and the first couple of iterations looked the part. My work was flat, two-dimensional, and composed entirely of too much dark green. My first lesson learned was, it’s better to start too light than too dark.

As I struggled to bring out depth and realism, I found some tricks that worked. I managed to bring a rocky cliff into the foreground using a rounding technique. Then, I successfully moved a mountain into the distance using color and shadow. But these successes were dogged by too many shades of green stemming from multiple attempts to fix the dark shade I’d started with.

It suddenly occurred to me that painting was much like my experience in the rowing shell or on the curling ice; it was much harder than it looked.

Somewhere along the way of that first lesson, the process captivated me. I was determined to learn from my mistakes and do better on the next piece. I also seriously enjoyed the focus it required, the trial and error, and the peace it provided me. Spreading paint was cathartic, even when I realized I’d made a grave error or bad color choice. It was all part of the learning process, I surmised, so I pressed on with a goal of “not perfection, just improvement.”

I have been at this new artistic hobby for three years now, and what is becoming most apparent to me is that I’m still a writer, not an artist. If you look at my art, it reveals this. Joking aside, though, painting has become part of my life and fills a different niche for me. I think everyone has artistic tendencies or potential, but like anything else, it takes practice and dedication.

As I paint, it seems my brushstrokes fire a different part of my brain than keyboarding. It feeds something within me. The satisfaction I get when someone says, “I can see an improvement in your work,” motivates me toward my next project. I’m a big advocate for lifelong learning, and my art, as bad as it is sometimes, has given this stage of life new meaning. I’m glad I followed my instinct and gave it a chance to bloom. Can guitar lessons be far behind?

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Jim Landwehr has published a short story collection, All That It Seems, and four memoirs, At the Lake, Cretin Boy, Dirty Shirt and The Portland House. Jim has also published six poetry collections, Tea in the Pacific Northwest, Thoughts from a Line at the DMV, Genetically Speaking, Reciting from Memory (eBook), Written Life, and On a Road. His nonfiction, fiction and poetry have been published in numerous publications and magazines. Jim currently serves on the board of directors for both the Wisconsin Writers Association and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets. He is retired and lives with his wife, Donna, in Waukesha.

As a kid I dreaded the days Dad called me to the basement to help him with woodworking projects. I’d open the door to a whiff of must and descend our rickety steps as slowly as possible. The thunder of Dad’s work filled the cellar.

As a sensitive bookworm, I struggled with the roar of power tools and Dad’s swears as he built. Usually he didn’t even need me, so I simply stood and watched, wondering why he’d yelled for me to come down. To toughen me up? So he wasn’t the only one working hard on a Saturday morning?

Every now and then Dad asked me to fetch a tool that he couldn’t remember the name of. Everything was a thingamabob, doohickey, or gadget. Even then his memory was poor, and my mind would race as I tried to figure out what tool he wanted, and then retrieve it before he grew agitated.

If I returned with the wrong item, it was inevitable: he yelled or slammed down the tool in his hands and went off to get it himself. I’d try not to cry while small specks of sawdust floated between us. Then he’d say some version of “Fine, you’re done. Leave,” and I’d creep upstairs, feeling both relief and failure.

Mom usually swooped in when Dad’s mood darkened, calming his temper or redirecting his attention to other topics. He didn’t physically hurt us, but still I feared the anger that slammed doors and broke the leg of their bed with a kick. I shrank from the sarcasm and put-downs that rose from Dad’s anger and made me feel smaller than our pet hamster, Marshmallow.

The threat of his outbursts keeps me at an emotional distance even now, 40 years later, while dementia chips away at his memory. Mom has passed, leaving me to stand beside Dad once again and assist, this time offering up lost memories instead of tools. I began helping my sister care for him two years ago, after my family moved back to my hometown.

Our house has a tall, red barn in the backyard. The former owners outfitted it as a woodshop, and when I first saw it, I was surprised to feel drawn in.

Inside, the air carries the sweet smell of pine, and sawdust crunches underfoot. Sun filters through its 100-year-old windows. In that warm light, I’ve discovered my own love of woodworking.

It started with building simple flower boxes because the cedar boxes I liked were too expensive. It felt rewarding to create something that was uniquely ours. Soon I’d made bookshelves, chairs, and even a sofa.

I love running my hand across the smoothness of a sanded board, and relish the promise of a new project, when the knotted boards still lean against my workbench, about to be turned into something beautiful.

When I first began watching DIY videos, many of the tools and techniques felt familiar. I recognized the miter saws along with router bits and tools I’d fetched for Dad, and recalled some of the techniques he used. I wondered: Could he have wanted to spend Saturdays teaching me?

The more I build, the more certain I become that he’d wanted us to enjoy tackling projects together. He just didn’t have the patience or emotional capacity to make it happen. A personality disorder of some kind, Mom once explained. I was young and forgot its name. I never asked when I got older either. It didn’t matter; his words did.

I feel close to Dad when I saw and hammer and drill. At least, I feel close to the part of him who loved working with his hands and wanted to connect with his youngest daughter over a hobby; the father who would’ve laughed at my mistakes and patiently fielded questions.

I feel close to the father he could have been.

And if I’m honest, woodworking makes me feel like the daughter he might have been proud of: competent and skilled.

Now I’m the one asking my teen daughter for an extra hand. I make sure our workspace is one where mistakes are okay and learning is something to enjoy. For our first project, we joined two-by-fours and turned them into a desk for my husband’s home office. When we opened a can of wood stain, the sharp tang was the same I smelled at 13 when Dad stained our deck, his curly hair thick and red with life.

At 86, Dad’s stopped building and has given me part of his tool collection. We talk about my projects often. When he last came by my house, we sat together on the front porch while he shared advice about how to renovate it. Perhaps that companionship is what he wanted all those years ago. Perhaps we’ve both matured enough to make a version of it happen.

Recently I asked him to join me for an upcoming refinishing workshop held nearby. It would be the first time we’ve worked side-by-side since I was in middle school. My invitation felt like forgiveness, and a chance to try again.

His answer was classic Dad. He didn’t say yes. He hasn’t said no. He’s probably forgotten about it altogether. I’ve reached the point where I’m okay with that, too.

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Colleen Wright is a freelance writer with personal essays in Chicken Soup for the Soul, Business Insider and more. She’s written for regional parenting magazines for over 20 years. Find her on Substack at Here Goes Everything.

It’s my favorite picture. The one with my hand over my mouth. Tears falling from my eyes that show a wild, joyous expression. Hand over mouth with all my fingers glued together, a muzzle, a container of triumph as if it could burst through the seams, the mouth being the place where it leaks first. I selfishly hoard these sensations. The special kind of joy wanting to seep like an overstuffed suitcase you have to sit on to close the zipper. Screw the overweight baggage fee, I’m taking it all.

Hand over mouth slows this process. Hand over mouth keeps the joy inside. You know the reaction. The “Miss America” I call it.

This treasured picture of myself captured in my figure skating career was just that. Me. Hand over mouth. I had just won my first Nationals, I’m in the Kiss and Cry, the throne-like area where we receive our scores, and I’m with my coach. Her fist is in the air with a victorious triumph, a wide-mouthed, toothy smile, and me in the background. Hand over mouth.

I left figure skating to heal. I left skating to heal both myself and my relationship with my body that the sport and its environment had been a toxic catalyst. I had fallen deep into my eating disorder at the pinnacle of my skating career, where the sport exacerbated my struggles with my body image. I was fresh off my bronze medal finish as a Masters competitor at Nationals, International skating goals to obtain in Germany and professional skater auditions on the horizon. But instead of working toward my new goals, I walked away.

I left skating to heal, but I also knew that I had closed the door on so much more. I shoved my skates in the back of my closet at my parents’ house, a signal to myself of complete resignation, much like burning my ex-boyfriend’s T-shirt because it still smelled like him. I put my skates away in the back of the closet of my childhood bedroom and out of sight. With much sadness and a tinge of regret, I knew it was time to move on.

I didn’t think I’d ever be able to live my life and have a hand over my mouth moment again.

What a shame.

Months after I moved to Hawaii, it was 2017, and I knew that the absence of skating would mean that something else had to take its place. Living in Hawaii means there’s limited options for this void-filling conquest, so naturally, I turned to surfing.

There’s a beauty and solace I had found in surfing, and it was in the smallest of reasons. There’s no mirrors in surfing. There’s no scales. There’s no mean, fat-shaming Russian coaches. There’s no concern with gaining weight during puberty or having the “right body type.” Surfing is inclusive.

There was a day I paddled out to Summers, a distant, middle-of-the ocean reef break about 200 yards from the St. Regis beach on the North Shore of Kauai. Clear blue water, cascading waterfalls in the distance, coconut palms littering the shoreline.

I wade in the water waist-deep as I wax my board, watching sets roll in and feel my stomach clench. My two friends start to paddle past me and into the channel, where I jump on my board quickly to catch up. I dig my hands and forearms into the water—an efficiency, a skill only learned through relentless practice. My breath becomes heavier, but the pounding and falling of mass amounts of water and force become louder, more cacophonous than I’m comfortable with. Still, I persist. I edge closer and begin to feel the habitual astonishment and insignificance that comes with the territory of dancing with the humbling and unforgiving ocean. I am an ant. I am an ant next to a large, alive, and relentless string of watery goliaths forming slowly in the horizon.

I glace at my friends, and they give me a smirk. I don’t do big waves. They know I don’t do big waves. They are likely thinking I am going to turn around. I always turn around. But not this time. I make it to the outside, the safe space where the waves don’t break. I straddle my board and look down at my shaking hands, then forward to the horizon, then back down to my shaking hands. I do not move. I decide I’m going to surf. I came to surf. I used to hurl myself into the air on a 4 millimeter thick blade, for god’s sake.

I caught the biggest wave of my life that day. The white water loomed over my head. When I made it to the end of the very long 100+ yard ride, I kicked out, turned around, and straddled my board.

Hand. Over. Mouth.

I floated in that space bobbing in the ocean as the shallow reef tickled my feet, and watched the waves following mine. It had dawned on me. Hand over mouth—it’s still a reaction to be had.

Surfing had morphed into a beacon. Surfing insinuated a slow, subtle transformation. The heavy and burdensome thoughts about my body were alchemized into pure and unadulterated joy.

How the fat surrounding my belly button or the jiggle of my thighs as I walked became less of a concern, even for fleeting seconds at a time. Surfing transformed my narrative about my body by simply changing my perspective into what my body could do.

The astonishment of this strong and tactile meatsuit, its infinite capabilities, reminded me it still worked in my favor, no matter what the fuck it looked like. Surfing opened up the cracks of my soul that abandoned my body and was the impetus for this new sense of awe. A newfound relationship, that of healthy admiration.

As I bobbed in the shallows, I peeled my fingers away from the coverage of my mouth, one at a time—and I felt love.

I felt only love.

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Amanda Blackwell is a writer whose work explores grief, relationships, body image, and the complexities of being human. A former competitive figure skater, her work blends memoir with cultural observation, examining the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to rewrite. She is also a TEDx speaker whose talk focuses on eating disorders in athletes. When she’s not writing, she can usually be found reading, surfing, skating, or searching for the perfect language to articulate an experience.

Every morning, a familiar message would ping me as I tied my shoelaces: Started seven-thirty. I’d wriggle my feet into socks and shoes, then rush out the house to catch my father for our daily walk.

For more than three decades, no matter where his work took him, he’d always ferret out a park within walking distance and circle it for forty-five minutes. When he retired and moved into a neighboring apartment, I became his satellite for the regular stroll. Within a few days of fixing our routine, he tossed in a new tradition—the cryptic crossword , one in which the clue is a word puzzle to work out the answer rather than a description or synonym of the answer itself.

As a family, we’d always pounced on the crossword page of the newspaper every morning. My gaze would often dart to the cryptic clues. I’d read them and reject their complexity in favor of my loyal friend, the simple crossword.

But imagine my delight when I glimpsed the method behind the madness in the pages of P. G. Wodehouse novels. In his novel Much Obliged, Jeeves, Bertie Wooster’s beloved Aunt Dahlia prides herself on solving the Observer crossword puzzle but struggles with one particular clue. A quick conversation with a new acquaintance not only resolves her conundrum, but also gives her insight into how she worked it out.

We dove in, like detectives attempting to solve their first mystery. Weeks passed before the crossword-setter’s tricks revealed themselves to us. But as we cracked each one, our confidence blossomed.

Only one flaw stood in our way—the filling in of answers while walking. But this trivial matter couldn’t stifle our enthusiasm. My father’s gnarled fingers clutched the paper that he had folded many times over to a width that held only the puzzle and the clues under it. We carried a pencil and scribbled in the letters in the steadiest hand we could. Later in the afternoon, when my daughter bounded home from school, she would grab the paper and pen down the answers in blue ink.

The clues challenged us more than we liked to admit. Only the anagrams came to us in a flash. We pencilled those in first, then ticked the respective clue. The ones that required our general knowledge took longer. Yet others, that read like riddles, worked the cogwheels of our minds. But we plodded our way through the little squares. Each time we struck off a clue we’d heap generous praise on each other. Often the solution would dawn upon my father, and only later would he figure out how the clue led to it.

At the end of the week, on Saturday night, we’d cast aside the paper, the squares bereft of letters taunting our puzzle prowess.

My morose expression would prod him to say, “Don’t worry, tomorrow morning, I will have all the answers for you.” That would invariably trigger a chuckle from me, for I knew he’d copy over the answers from the printed solution that would appear alongside the next week’s puzzle.

Stephen King admitted in his book On Writing that, for him, every day was a writing day. My father followed the same principle. Every day, no matter the weather conditions, his mood, or whether I accompanied him, he walked, and every day was a puzzle day. On rare occasions, he’d skip the Sunday session if he had enjoyed a peg or two of his favorite Scotch the previous night.

One fine cool morning, he suffered a partial stroke. Four days we spent in the hospital, while he underwent a battery of tests. His limbs remained unaffected by paralysis, and in the year of the Covid-19 virus, we regarded this as a silver lining. But swallowing became a chore, and a sense of imbalance ruined any chance of resuming his cherished strolls.

In the confines of the sanitized room, an intravenous drip had supplied the nutrition he couldn’t consume orally. But at home, he’d have to survive on a liquid diet, so he did, for the first week. We watched, pained, as he took sip after excruciating sip, gulping down smoothly on some occasions, but often collapsing into full-blown coughing fits. The liquids meant for the food pipe often found the windpipe instead, and after each swallow he cleared his throat several times, the sound reminding me of a train chugging reluctantly to its station.

The days passed in a blur of semi-liquid foods and a stream of medicines. I negotiated a new routine with my workplace and stepped in to handle the tasks he’d previously handled, like picking up my son from school.

Walking remained out of the question. Every day, he linked his wrinkled hand with mine and shuffled around the house for ten minutes, claiming he’d completed his exercise for the day. The crossword hadn’t slipped his mind, though, and he resolved to dedicate more time now to the puzzle.

When the Sunday supplement arrived one morning, a few weeks after the stroke, I found him attacking the clues with his usual vigor of old. But when he tossed the folded paper to my side, I noticed it was blank.

A couple of anagrams came to me instantly. He beamed and wrote them down in a shaky hand.

The walks still haven’t resumed, but the puzzles remain a cornerstone of our Sunday mornings. I long for the day when we note down the answers while breezing past our campus lawns, but until then, I’m content to bask in his company, and note down the answers he dictates.

As for the title of this essay, the avid puzzlers might have worked out that it’s a cryptic clue—for crossword.

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Gargi Mehra is a writer, a computer engineer, and a mother. She plays the piano and thrives on word games including crosswords, Scrabble and Wordle. Her creative writing has appeared in several literary magazines online and in print. She lives with her husband and two children in Pune, India.

The common wisdom for adopting a hobby as an adult is to pick something you loved as a child and try that first. I went the other way. I wasn’t an outdoorsy kid. I didn’t love snakes as a child. In fact, I was terrified of them. But what I would add to the common wisdom on hobbies is: Pick something that would impress your childhood self. The fact that I walk right up to snakes now would definitely impress my childhood self.

I was an angsty teen but never felt like I had a good enough reason to feel so tortured. So I concocted wild fantasies in my head: What if I survived a plane crash? What if I survived an animal attack? In my early twenties after moving to Southern California, I became fixated on the idea of surviving a rattlesnake bite. That would give me a reason for all of these…feelings.

My interest in snakes as anything other than bit players in an immature fantasy was a very slow burn. When I arrived in Los Angeles, a Western fence lizard skittered across my window. Coming from Canada, where our amphibians were more of the frog and toad variety, I was entranced by these exotic creatures who looked like dinosaurs in miniature. I learned to distinguish different varieties of lizards, including alligator lizards, slightly larger than the common fence lizard, with long tails and slithery moves that closely resemble snakes. You could say lizards were my gateway drug to appreciating snakes.

The first time I saw a snake outdoors, I was chaperoning a weekend camping trip with my then fifth-grade daughter and her peers. We had crossed a stream and trekked along dirt trails in the hills of Pacific Palisades. As we returned to the lodge, a big black snake crossed our path, and I screamed right along with the girls. Didn’t snakes belong in terrariums—behind glass at the zoo?

A few years ago, I challenged myself to do 50 hikes in a year. These hikes provided plenty of time for observation of animals in their natural habitat. One day, I was on the phone with my daughter when I heard a hiss. I looked down to find a rattlesnake crossing my path, perilously close. I needed to pay attention, so I quickly hung up the phone. But rather than beating a hasty retreat, I proceeded to do a full-blown photo shoot of the snake. As they say “Pics, or it didn’t happen.” I craved evidence of my brush with a wild thing.

I’m neither an idiot nor a snake handler. When I take my snake pictures, it’s by zooming in with my iPhone, not physically getting too close. I do everything I can to stay out of the way of all wild animals: sticking to the middle of wide trails, not stepping too close to the brush, never wearing headphones, and listening to my surroundings. I have no respect for the RFK Jr.s of the world who use snake handling as some sort of evangelical macho display.

Learning about snakes has been key to my interest in them and enthusiasm to be living around them. I have come to appreciate and respect snakes, naturally shy creatures who will usually simply slither away if they see people approaching. Maybe I even relate to them; as an introvert, I tend towards shyness and have been known to slither away when people approach me too. When snake bites happen, it’s usually due to human harassment or stepping into a grassy area where they don’t see that the snake is resting. The snake reacts defensively; they’re not lying in wait, waiting to attack humans. They require warmth and sunshine, so sunbathing is a physical need as well as an opportunity to find their next meal: a rabbit or a lizard or a ground squirrel, keeping the rodent population in check. My increased exposure to snakes from hiking served as desensitization to the fear I had associated with them.

Collecting snake encounters taught me that I can surprise myself, with the biggest surprise being the knowledge that I can change. I was able to go from a person fearful of snakes to someone whose day is made simply by seeing one. I have become someone who can identify a rattlesnake from a gopher snake by the head alone. Fun fact: Rattlesnakes have a triangular head, with a body markedly less wide, and some other snakes have the ability to flatten their heads into triangles as a way of posturing as a more dangerous species.

When I set out to do 50 hikes in a year, I thought hiking was my new hobby. Hiking is a habit, but my hobby is collecting encounters with wild animals. That’s my real addiction. Anything that can connect me to the wildness in myself is worth exploration.

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Kirsten Love writes about rare disease, medical mysteries, and parenting. She is currently finishing her memoir, Little Girls, about her daughters’ rare growth disorders. Substack @kirstenloveswriting and Instagram @ReadRunSew.

It is Zion’s 348th day in the shelter.

He’s a skinny, chocolate-brown pittie with cropped ears, gray hairs dotting his muzzle just beginning to poke through—hints of the frosty face we had hoped we’d never watch age behind kennel bars.

Today, he’s going home. The volunteer coordinator sees me returning a dog to their kennel and tells me: “Zion’s adopted.”

“Oh my god,” I say, trying to be as composed as possible because the second I move a single facial muscle, I will erupt into tears.

It’s too late; they come before I can turn away.

Minutes later, a fellow volunteer, Rachel, is filming his sendoff for her Instagram account showcasing our shelter dogs, which has amassed 40,000 followers. I am now sobbing, and Rachel catches it all on video. Mortified, but laughing, I cover my face and shoo her away.

Zion steps out, blinking into the sun-drenched lobby, his body loose and wiggly. Staff and volunteers—his people—gather, lining the hallway for soft cheers and goodbyes. He is the shelter’s second-longest- stay dog. The third-longest will be euthanized in a month. An animal’s future is never guaranteed in this place.

Outside, Zion bounds into the car of his new adopters, a retired couple still grieving their old dog.

“My husband was scrubbing the house all morning,” she tells me, eyes shining. “We had to get everything ready for Zion.” We laugh at the idea of vacuuming for a dog and cry together in the parking lot, two strangers holding the pure shock of joy.

For four years, I have spent nearly every weekend walking dogs at New York City’s open-intake animal shelter, a place where no animal is turned away and where space is constantly at a premium, and where dogs live in crates for months because a kennel is not available. It’s where every cat and dog (even the occasional pig or chicken) found abandoned in the city’s parks, streets, or vacant apartments will wind up. I began volunteering for one reason and one reason only: I wanted to hang out with dogs who needed, if just for a few fleeting moments, to remember how to feel joy again. To experience the world like a real dog again, not one trapped in a box for twenty-three and a half hours a day, on the best days.

What I wasn’t expecting was the women. An intergenerational group of volunteers whose passion for animal welfare either matches or outpaces mine.

I didn’t start showing up every weekend because I needed more friends; my social life was already full. But this community has quietly, profoundly reset the trajectory of my life. Diving headfirst into the world of open-intake sheltering with them beside me has given me peace, clarity, and a kind of companionship I didn’t realize I was missing, to guide my purpose.

Being a firsthand witness to the extent of my volunteer friends’ dedication quickly inspired me to show up more often than I’d initially planned. It made me understand that I may not be able to control the outcome, but I can control my ability to ease suffering in the moment.

They are the only people who understand the constant cycle of grief that comes along with volunteering at a shelter where animals die, the grief that can begin before one is even euthanized. Once a dog has been placed on the “at-risk” list, walks become more bittersweet, knowing this may or may not be the last time they get to sniff the treasure trove of scents in tree beds we pass, stare in awe at the family of geese commandeering the cemetery, watch the crowds of people watching for the bus, tails wagging in anticipation of a shred of attention.

After adopting my young, chunky American bully, Gizmo, a dog with an absurdly large head and disproportionately small legs who takes a full half hour to make it around the block, I knew my husband and I would be a one-dog household for a while. Gizmo filled every inch of space on our king-sized bed, and in my life.

Three months later, Connie arrived at the shelter, an elderly, deaf pitbull who waddled in on short, arthritic legs, her charcoal fur threaded with silver. I knelt to greet her. Even though I knew she couldn’t hear me, I said, This is just temporary, rubbing her chest. She blinked slowly. Something in me cracked open.

A few weeks later, my volunteer friend Elizabeth took Connie on a beach day—sand, sun, and requisite McNuggets. She posted a moving reel of their adventure, set to The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun.” When they arrived back at the shelter, I asked, “How’d it go?”

Elizabeth laughed. “I think she might be too slow for even Gizmo.”

I doubted it. It was clear Connie moved at the exact rhythm my life wanted to. In November, I adopted her.

Despite being ten years older, Connie regularly left Gizmo in the dust on walks. She was steady where he was goofy, unbothered where he was dramatic. Together, staring out the front door and barking in unison at absolutely nothing, all the time, they made sense.

Two years later, I lost her to cancer. A framed photo appeared on my doorstep: Connie on the beach, sunlight catching her fur, the words “Here comes the sun” beneath it. A note read, “From your volunteer friends.” I sat with it and cried, not just for Connie, but for the community that held us through both hello and goodbye.

In recent months, church bells in my neighborhood play “Here Comes the Sun” every morning, something I never noticed until Connie passed. Maybe it’s her way of reminding me I’m exactly where I should be.

Volunteering didn’t just give me purpose: It gave me a circle of women who provide me with proof that goodness still wildly, stubbornly exists. An unrelenting reminder that nothing we give is ever wasted.

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Emmy Favilla is a New York–based writer and editor. Her essays have been published in Catapult, Pigeon Pages, BuzzFeed, Gloria and other outlets, and she currently works as managing editor at Forbes Vetted. She is the author of A World Without “Whom” (Bloomsbury), a book about the intersection of language and technology. Emmy is working on a memoir in essays largely focused on her volunteer work with shelter dogs and growing up in NYC.

As a Taurus, I know that earthy, material things make me happy; they keep me grounded. The way a certain fabric feels. The scent of a particular perfume. A juicy burger with the softest bun, cooked to the perfect temperature (medium rare, of course). Because of this nature, I am ever the crafty-crafter. I love knitting, collaging, and baking.

With the world on fire, knowing this about myself is important more than ever. Grounding is necessary in global (and life) upheavals if I am (we are) to survive this.

Enter: pottery.

I’ve always craved to know what clay felt like, wet and spinning on a wheel. What was it like to get messy and make something from a blob of water and dirt? But as a girl growing up in an Asian immigrant household, getting dirty was not something I could do. You got dirty? You got punished.

Meanwhile, raised Catholic, I’ve always thought about the teaching that God is the potter and we are the clay. I wondered: What would it be like to be God? What would it be like to make something, to shape something from clay? And would I be able to breathe life into it?

I started pottery about a year and a half ago, in the midst of trying to understand who I was, now that I was divorced and a single mom of three. It had been two years since everything was finalized and legal, and I was still fumbling around in this new version of me. Who was I, now that I was single again? And not just single, but “divorced.” And in midlife.

When I started pottery, I was very focused and intent on “getting it right the first time,” whatever that meant. (How very Asian of me.) I followed the instructor’s guidance. I made sure I made no mistakes. I was careful in my movements. I was reluctant to trim, to sculpt. I wanted to make each piece perfect.

But what I didn’t know about this craft was that pottery was all about mistakes. They were inevitable. The whole point was to surrender and adapt.

Ha! As if!

After a year of instruction, due to my schedule, I had to shift to open studio hours where I would work independently. There was no instructor. Only YouTube videos if I got into trouble. But who wants to check their phone with mud all over your hands and a brown lump spinning wildly in front of you?

I learned how to surrender the hard way.

One time, I threw down about two pounds of clay on the wheel and started centering it. Or at least I tried. The thing didn’t stick and just slid off. I sighed. I stopped the wheel, took off the bat with one hand while holding the clay in the other, grabbed a fresh, dry bat, put it down, and threw the clay on that. This time a little harder. This time, it stayed and I worked on centering, reminding myself: I’m the boss and the clay cannot push me around (despite the clay actually throwing my hands around in wobbly circles until I pushed back and got it centered).

Another time, I was working on shaping a bowl and my pull was uneven—the bottom was thicker than the top. So I worked on drawing up the clay from the bottom to even it out. But then the dreaded Wobble showed up. The top part of the bowl was too thin and started to collapse. Wobble, wobble. I accepted my fate. The last time I tried to fix the Wobble, it didn’t work out so well (RIP, bowl). I got my pin tool and trimmed off the top half. My bowl was now a plate with a tall edge.

Last week, I had to smush down a bowl whose bottom I made too thin so that when I wired it off the bat, there was a big hole. I didn’t want to make the effort to create and attach a false bottom, so I just smushed it down back into a blob.

Time and again, I’ve been asked to surrender to the clay. Instead of being the God-like potter who was in charge, I was the servant, the one in service of the clay. What did the clay ask of me? What shape wanted to come through and how could I help form it?

What has emerged for me has been a practice in deep listening, in coming to pottery as a sacred act of connecting with the divine. And honestly, I didn’t see that coming. But what has come forth are sacred vessels that remind me of who I am and where I come from: a colonized people who have resisted and persisted for centuries, a people who remain despite the attempts at erasure.

My bowls are made from speckled brown clay, a symbol of Filipino “mixed-ness” as the people of an archipelago. They are then painted with underglaze, representing the attempts of colonizers to “civilize” us, to erase our “savagery.” Then, the bowls are carved using a technique called sgraffito to show that we still remain and we refuse to be hidden or silenced. The etching away of the underglaze says: We are still here, found in the symbol of the Filipino sun and the Tagalog word “kapwa” (which means interconnectedness, all are one from the same source).

Who I am has not changed. I’m still a Taurus. Still a Catholic. Still a daughter of Filipino immigrants. The only thing that’s changed is the way I’m showing up in the world. And I’m still learning, still changing. Thankfully, in the face of constant change, pottery has become the grounding and guiding force that always brings me back to Me.

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Leslieann Hobayan is a Filipina-American poet, essayist, activist, and host of Spiritual Grit, a podcast on spirituality and activism. She is the author of the chapbook, Divorce Papers: A Slow Burn (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a 2018 Best of the Net, her work has appeared in The Rumpus, Aster(ix) Journal, The Lantern Review, The Mom Egg Review, and elsewhere. She was awarded the 2025 NJ Council for the Arts Poetry Fellowship and teaches at Rutgers University. Find her on Substack at Adventures in Midlife! Find her sacred bowls at hobayanhouse.com/kapwa-bowls or on IG: @leslieannhobayan

Before I could actually read, I memorized entire picture books and performed them from memory while turning the pages at exactly the right moments.

Everyone really should have known I was autistic at that point…

But it was the 90s, so I went on masking hard, and my caregivers and teachers praised me for this freaky skill.

Meanwhile, I grew more and more frustrated as, one by one, my first-grade classmates actually learned how to read. I balled my tiny fists and tried to force my eyes to make sense of the letters on the page that allegedly represented the sounds that words were made of.

Months later, things finally began to click. Instead of feeling proud of myself, I began immediately plowing my way through chapter book series like Little House on the Prairie, Goosebumps, and The Babysitters Club to make up for lost time. I fell in love with characters and fictional worlds, and with the thrill of closing the back cover of one book and starting the next one again and again.

In my high-control religious high school, I could only choose from the approved curriculum or the church library. I was at the mercy of my parents to take me on special trips to the local library or Books-A-Million.

So when I showed up at university and fell in step with the smart, honors journalism students who came in with college credits coming out of their ears, I learned a cruel lesson that reading isn’t always just reading. Sometimes it’s social currency.

My first boyfriend loved Dostoevsky, and he wasn’t very nice to me. Reading the Russians was a way for me to win the favor of him and his friends.

While earning a minor in British literature, I spent my spare time diving into the culturally-relevant, male-driven modern classics I’d missed. For me, it was the era of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nabokov, and all the way up to Vonnegut and Palahniuk. I loved the way my peers’ eyes lit up when I mentioned I’d read these prestigious authors. The books were fine.

College also meant spending hours watching young girls who were much more self-assured than I was, talking about their favorite authors and books from their bedroom floors on this interesting new website called YouTube. From them, I learned all about Looking for Alaska by John Green, Twilight by Stephanie Meyer, and, of course, a little series about a boy wizard by She Who Must Not Be Named.

For a while, I saw consuming this kind of content as a guilty pleasure, because the books they were talking about weren’t literary enough.

After college, with my first job, a first-generation Kindle, a tiny amount of disposable income and more free time than ever, I started reading an average of 200 books per year. During COVID, it was more like 300.

It was also during this time that I noticed the proliferation of book content on YouTube and other social media platforms. While my elder-millenial stubbornness keeps me from creating an account, I still feel BookTok’s influence on the platforms I do participate in. There are just so many “besties” babbling about what they’re reading. I love it!

These days I’m a marketer, and I make all kinds of online content for my amazing, inspiring clients. So, wouldn’t it make sense for me to make content online about books? On paper, maybe.

But I can’t!

I just can’t bring myself to talk about books on the internet. I’ve wondered if it’s because I don’t value my own voice and opinion enough. Maybe my strict high school and Dostoevsky-loving boyfriend killed my spirit for it?

But I don’t think that’s the real reason. If you scroll back to early Twitter, or stalk my ancient LiveJournal, you’d know that I’ve felt okay about expressing my opinion for a long time.

Now, though, reading feels like something for my personal, offline life. My relationships with online book creators are purely parasocial, and I want it to stay that way. I don’t want reading to become a performance. I don’t want it to be branded, optimized, and subject to any algorithm.

What I care about most is the books themselves. The books and like three people.

I dumped Dostoevsky Boyfriend fast. And after I broke up with another person who only read the sports section, I wrote a list of the qualities I wanted in a partner. The first was, “well read.”

Joke’s on me, though. My husband is six feet tall. He likes all of the specific pizza toppings I put on my list. He’s funny and kind. But he’s also been reading Dune for three years so far with no end in sight.

However, he will lovingly listen to me drone on about my favorite stories and hold me when my favorite characters die and laugh when I read him Princess Donut’s sassy dialogue from the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. He’s always down for any on-screen adaptation I beg him to watch.

He’s not upset that I don’t have a literary niche. That’s what I loved so much about those early creators as well. They weren’t brands. They were just bookish people figuring out life and sharing whatever they wanted. Their carefree attitudes toward posting made sense back then. In today’s algorithm-ruled world, I envy it, and attempt to channel it both online and off.

For me, reading will never be a performance or content. It’ll just keep being a major part of life, which I’m also still figuring out as I go.

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Caroline Newton started her career reporting in newsrooms, built social audiences and websites for universities and startups, and now helps nonprofits and healing practitioners tell clear, brave stories through the work of her own communications agency. After six years living abroad, she’s now currently based in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. She writes about this transition and about beauty, power, belonging, and care in unstable systems at Anchor & Drift.

When I purchased my first sewing machine, I was coming off a year of doubt.

Twelve months out of graduate school, I decided to accept that my dreams of writing would never pay a bill. I had found myself plagued with the inability to finish the projects I started, increasingly aware of the professional opportunity costs that came with sinking myself into words that would likely never be published. I was brimming with ideas, but each time I began to lay them down on paper, they appeared flat, lifeless, a pale imitation of what I thought I’d crafted so well in my head.

So I swapped in that energy for a job updating the Twitter account for a local nonprofit, assuming that letting go of my hifalutin creative aspirations would be a reprieve. But rather than free, I felt swallowed, detached. I understood I needed a new outlet, one that would touch the part of me that posting content could never reach. That posed a problem. With writing firmly cut from my life, what to put in my idle hands if not notebooks and pens?

I had a good ear for music, but my hand-eye coordination was shoddy at best. My fingers weren’t fast enough for the instruments I longed to play. I was too much of a perfectionist to draw, and while I knew how to knit one and purl two, the thought of knotting endless rows of yarn bored me. I remembered how to thread a sewing machine, but making clothes felt unpredictable and overwhelming. As a teenager I’d once tried to freestyle a pair of pajama pants; the unlined, cotton legs ended up only two inches in diameter, unfit for even my old dolls.

I followed some quilters online and had become interested in the methodical, quiet work. The most arresting pieces were made by hand quilters, women who labored over seas of fabric as they pulled each stitch tight against the last. A single class in the ancient task taught me that I didn’t have the patience for that deliberate, time-consuming ritual. And so I bought a machine, a lightweight beginner model with the Project Runway logo stamped on the side. Every time I set it up, I felt silly, unserious, unencumbered—exactly what I was looking for.

I compiled books on classic and modern quilting styles for inspiration and puzzled through guides to color theory before sketching out some simple blocks I might make myself. I found that I loved the math of it all, calculating fractions of inches for seam allowances and binding strips. I would trace all these computations onto multicolored fabric flattened under clear acrylic rulers designed for the task.

Predesigning the projects emboldened me. I created a strict plan of execution that left no room for the creeping doubt that consumed me halfway through writing an essay. Quilting inverted the typical creative process into one that mirrored my own, allowing me to front-load my energy and excitement into the planning rather than the execution. I created guides that I could almost mindlessly follow, the pre-cut pieces arranged to correspond with a diagram on my cheat-sheet, a paint-by-numbers made of fabric. By the time I stepped on the pedal and began to feel the machine hum under my outstretched hands, I didn’t need to be creative anymore. I could give myself over to the meditative quality of its technicalities: keeping the stitches evenly spaced and in a straight line; folding down the appropriate edges and corners; smoothing it all under the weight of stainless steel and hot steam.

Most surprisingly, I kept at it, even when a single quilt took months. A wall hanging gave way to a baby blanket, and soon I was designing a queen-sized bedspread. As always, I added my fractions, purchased new rolls of cotton and batting, cut each piece with angular precision. But I soon found this project pressed my Bravo-stamped machine to its limits. The needle shook each time it pierced the layers of textiles, and the blanket had to tightly contort to squeeze under its shallow arm.

Three months into the pandemic, I turned 30. After witnessing these battles and my continued commitment, my husband thoughtfully upgraded me for my birthday. He gave me a Juki, an industrial machine at least twice as heavy and four times as expensive as my first. We’d recently moved into a new house, and I hadn’t yet unpacked my first silly, unserious machine. In the crisp quiet of that early spring, I’d started scribbling again, almost compulsively, with more deliberation than I’d ever previously been able to muster. My mind wandered and refocused. As the pandemic continued to surge forth, I didn’t unpack my Juki either.

Four years later, I finally slipped off its soft plastic coverlet. So much had changed since I first sat down with my sweet Project Runway model: I’d built a business, sold my writing, and developed an outline of a book. But on a Friday morning in late September, I wasn't thinking about any of that. Instead, I sat down at my dining room table and reminded myself how to thread the machine.

I can’t say what came over me. I don’t think quilting had been on my mind. But my hands drifted, and my mind followed. Rooting around in a box of old scrap fabric, I pulled out a piece of naturally dyed cotton, a length once made purple and yellow with cabbage and onion skins that had almost entirely faded back to white. This cotton wouldn’t have been suitable for one of my old projects, but it felt perfect now.

I laid down my acrylic ruler and began to cut without planning or math. Somewhere, somehow, I’d freed myself from the rigors of perfection, from the path where I retained all of the control but none of the outcome. Here, with no guide, I realized I could make absolutely anything.

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Katie Carter King is a writer and researcher based in Atlanta, Georgia. She founded Magpie Projects in 2021, a boutique research consultancy that develops factually rigorous historical narratives for journalists and brands. A child of the Georgia Piedmont, she has also lived in Massachusetts, Mississippi, and California. Drop her a line at katiecarterking.com.

I sailed through the hospital doors wearing a pencil skirt and three-inch high heels, just 21 years old, all dressed up and packing what I believed were essential to the fight ahead: a tube of Necco wafers and the project—ten skeins of deep blue wool, two long wooden sticks and a cabled sweater pattern. Never mind that I had never actually knit. I needed to look good and hold something in my hands besides heartbreak.

My shoes slid to a halt in the doorway of her room. Under a small mountain of white blankets my mother whispered, “Take those damn shoes off, I could hear you a mile away.”

I kicked them under a chair and took her hand. We had a few days to wait for the tumor diagnosis.

Knitting had always looked like a slow way to nowhere. But what to do with my hands in the endless hours ahead? A week before I had asked my cousin to teach me, my voice wobbling. “Forget I said this is an old lady sport. I need something to do.”

She looked at me sideways. “In seven days?”

The basics seemed straightforward; knit into the front, purl into the back, keeping the flat and bumpy stitches hidden. I made copious notes. Then I ran through a local yarn store, grabbed a pattern, wool, and the needles.

As the hospital quieted down for the night, I pulled a metal chair to the side of the bed and balanced the instructions on my knees. I pulled the wrapper off the new needles and froze. I was immediately lost; cast on? decrease? turn cable? I searched my notes for clues. My mother’s breath deepened into sleep.

I flipped the pages back and forth, trying to decipher the symbols. Four decades before cellphones, Google, or YouTube for on-demand problem solving I was on my own, with the slimmest of knowledge, my only contact with the world a pay phone down the hall. The needles slipped this way then that, the yarn ball jumping around in my lap as I clumsily wrestled each loop on and off the needle. Then three stitches fell off and disappeared. I swore. My mother opened her eyes.

I knew she had knit once. Several hats and even a Nordic sweater she had made my father during their college courtship days. I wondered if he had kept the hats after their divorce. I wish I had taken them.

“Hold your hands steady!” she croaked, her throat raw from the breathing tube. “Sit up. Oh no, there goes another one!” I had envisioned myself as Florence Nightingale, quietly knitting in the corner, the peaceful rhythmic click of the needles relaxing my patient, but the mess I was making turned out to be much more diverting.

When the next nurse finally pushed sleeping meds into my mother’s veins, the first ball of yarn had had enough. It jumped off my lap and slow-motion rolled under her bed. I dropped to my knees and crawled my arm under the bed frame. When I stood brandishing a dust-covered ball of yarn I had holes in the knees of my stockings. My mother took one look at me and burst out laughing, wincing as the jiggling pulled on her incisions. Unwittingly, I had also packed comic relief.

“I know it will be beautiful. Eventually.” Her voice softened as the drugs pulled her under. I tucked the blankets around her and moved to the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar to keep her in my sight.

Back in 1980, when security was nonexistent and COVID inconceivable, family could stay the night. I whittled the time away cross-legged, back against the wall, a humming florescent light overhead. Regretted my outfit but leaned into my night vigil: sucked the Necco wafers one-by-one, chocolate first, refreshed my coffee from a machine down the hall, tip-toed into her room every hour to pushed the hair from her forehead and stare at her white face. After every break I grasped the needles again and kept going.

At about 1 a.m., sleep-deprived and staring at my hands in despair, a pair of white laced shoes stopped in front of me. Hands reached down, unraveled a knot in the yarn, then took the needles and picked up a dropped stitch. I looked up and smiled at a young nurse with sparkly earrings. “Looks good!” she said. “Hold your elbows closer,;it will take the strain off your wrists.” She headed back down the hall.

One stitch grew into inches of knitting. I concentrated: in and out, in and out. Cried about my mom. Laughed at my mess. Dozed using the skeins as my pillow.

By dawn my project was knotted and curled in my lap like a small navy dog in need of the emergency room. I fished a dime out of my purse, slipped on the abandoned shoes, and headed to the payphone.

“Well,” my cousin said evenly, “here is the most important thing you need to learn.” As she talked me through, I ripped the entire project out row by row and rewound the yarn, casting on for a smaller size. When my mother woke up, I procured tiny cups of vanilla pudding which we ate off elfin plastic spoons. She fingered the soft wool. Her blue eyes glittered.

That night I joined two communities for the rest of my life: children who lose a mother too soon and people who knit. I put my head down on the bed and she rested her hand on my hair. She talked about her travel plans. I knew despite the results we would fight to the end.

Lessons to begin again, no matter how hard.

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Alexandra Dane writes about what lies deep in the marrow: life, disease, memory and hope—always hope. Her work explores her mother’s cancer and her own: Cake is published in the 2026 food anthology If Memory Serves. A finalist for the 2025 Swamp Pink Prize in Nonfiction, winner of the Annie Dillard Creative Nonfiction award from The Bellingham Review, Alexandra Dane is published in The Sonora Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, River Teeth and San Fedele Press’s American Writers Review, among others. The tiny big things happen at www.alexandradanewrites.com and her knitting can be seen on Instagram at @adaneknits.

They were going to throw them away.

Four sets of curtain fairy lights, impossibly tangled, each with 10, maybe 12 feet of fine wire.

They handed me what looked like a three-foot cocoon.

“Have at it.”

I put them in the back seat of my car.

I couldn’t wait to get home and untangle them.

At home, I made my favorite ginger tea, grabbed a cookie from the jar, turned on the fire, and sat on a big Moroccan pillow so I could be level with the cocoon, formerly known as fairy lights.

Of the forty ends, only one was visible.

It called to me.

Here I am.

I followed its path through the cocoon, through knots, through crossings, through small tightening pulls that tried to split it away from itself.

After about an hour, I freed my first strand.

I wrapped it around my wrist in a perfect spiral, secured it with a hair tie, and set it beside me.

It wasn’t going anywhere.

Not until the others were free.

That was hours two through six.

Of day one.

While at work the following day, I realized my fingers were sore playing piano.

Funny. I hadn’t practiced.

Then I smiled.

My fairy lights.

Suddenly I couldn’t wait to go home.

To untangle the mess.

To discover the order in the disorder.

To return the lights to themselves.

At home, I sat on my pillow.

My husband made my tea, my biscotti, and turned on the fire.

He didn’t ask if I wanted help.

He knew the answer.

I tried to listen to music, but it was too distracting.

I had one goal.

Find the ends.

I had untangled seven individual strands the night before, but the cocoon had barely decreased in size.

How could that be, I thought.

Maybe untangling was like cleaning.

Before the cocoon could shrink, everything inside it had to loosen first.

I pictured the cocoon shrinking.

My hands hurt.

By midnight, with only a small dinner break and a single glass of wine, I had uncovered the first complete section of the nest.

One strand.

Made of ten smaller strands of the finest wire.

Threads, almost.

Tiny glowing hives along the wire.

So delicate.

And now, carefully wrapped, no longer at risk of tangling again.

I looked to my left.

Somewhere in that cocoon, there were thirty more ends.

Thirty.

I should have been exhausted.

But instead, I was invigorated.

The rest of the week repeated the first day.

Work. Tea. Cookie. Fire. Untangling.

I was finally on what looked to be the last set of strands.

Ten, maybe twenty ends left.

I held a needle used for embroidery.

Thick, but sharp.

It would help me separate the remaining ends with ease.

I looked behind me at my work.

Two completed sets of fairy lights, each strand wrapped and tied, hanging neatly.

Symmetrical.

Ordered.

I had even arranged the hair ties in rainbow order.

They made me so happy.

Now to find another end.

As I worked my way through the finally shrinking cocoon, I felt an unexpected sadness.

It was getting easier.

Before the fevers and the coma, I solved things quickly.

I used to finish Sudoku puzzles during intermissions at concerts.

Word games. Patterns. Puzzles.

My brain preferred shortcuts.

Now it takes the long way around.

It follows every crossing.

Every knot.

Ideas arrive slower now, but more completely.

The fairy lights only asked one thing:

Find the next end.

Then I picked the needle back up.

I separated the wires carefully, as if performing surgery on conjoined twins.

The last set took almost no time at all.

It was only midnight.

My hands didn’t hurt.

Or maybe I didn’t notice any pain.

I slowed down without meaning to.

I set the needle aside.

I would finish the last few the old-fashioned way.

Old-fashioned, as of last Sunday.

I remembered finding the first end.

How exciting it was.

How complete it felt.

I remembered that day’s cookie.

Warm.

The fire.

The tea.

I unraveled the last strand.

Somewhere along the way, the work had stopped being about finishing.

It had become finding the next end.

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Kari Burroughs Kraakevik is a composer, writer, and arts educator based in Colorado. She owns two arts education companies serving more than 200 students weekly and writes about embodiment, neurodivergence, performance, and modern womanhood. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Genre Society, Infocalypse Arts & Literary Magazine, Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, Larina’s Lit Lounge, and Divergents Magazine.

My matrilineal line can be traced in fabric and fibers, beginning with my great-grandmother Anna, who saved the scraps of her husband’s worn, patterned blue shirts to stitch together, making a quilt my mother found, unfinished, in a trunk in her own mother’s house in the mid-1990s. At one of my bridal showers, my mother gave it to me, finished by a tailor against a deeper blue background. I felt a shock of connection when I fingered it: work upon work upon work, gift upon gift upon gift, generation to generation. The quilt is so delicate and the shirts so threadbare that daily use is now hazardous to the fabric itself, but I cannot bear to let it go.

From my grandmother Jean, who was neither sentimental nor warm with us, came two crocheted blankets made with cheap synthetic yarn in colors I suspect were carefully chosen to match my brother’s and my bedrooms when we were teenagers. They are indestructible, useful for any number of tasks and destined to outlive everyone I know.

From Goldie, one of Jean’s five younger sisters—a broad, vibrant woman who hugged hard and spoke gushingly about anyone she loved—I was gifted the perfectly knitted pink sweater I treasure, its tiny, even stitches in horizontal lockstep reminding me of the day she tugged it straight over my chest and winked. These sisters bickered constantly throughout my life, each criticizing the other’s handiwork to me in thick Brooklyn accents. Now, despite the many washes they’ve had in the years since their makers’ passings, these gifts carry a kind of DNA that can’t be soaped away: in my family, what we do is make things for each other.

My mother Diane refused to learn crocheting or knitting. Instead, she taught herself to sew. At first, she made simple things from patterns and then, when I was very little, began to assemble patchwork quilts, not yet aware that she was taking up her own grandmother’s practice. Few in my generation made it to adulthood without a quilt from my mother; in fact, when my brother’s raucous childhood bed-jumping tore through the first one, he became the rare recipient of a second quilt. I can remember her laying her unfinished quilts across the dining room table, tape measure in one hand, basting tape in another, careful notes on yellow legal pads at the ready. My quilt, a pattern of brown and white squares with flowers and gingham, has been tattered and re-sewn, new edging added by tailors and new tiny yarn bows tied one at a time between the squares. I bring it out of the trunk where I store it when I have trouble sleeping; it’s made for a twin bed, not the king one I share with my husband, so it’s just for me: the imagined sensation of my mother’s ghostly hands smoothing it over me in the dark.

My daughter Ronni, great-granddaughter of Jean, taught herself to crochet nearly ten years ago, learning from videos online. Our collection of her handmade hats is impressive, the weights of yarn varying so that I have a favorite for every season. She has finished other crochet projects—stuffed animals, small blankets, coasters, flowers mounted on pipe cleaners—but the hats are my favorites. No one told me that someday my child would make me items so useful, perfect, and splendid. I wear the hats like secret report cards, privately gloating. My daughter made it, I tell the strangers who admire them.

It was a regret of mine, for many years, not to have something tangible to leave behind as my ancestors have and my daughter will. I thought I possessed only more ephemerally-productive skills; I thought of myself as a good cook and baker; a passable gardener; and a loving storyteller, able to bequeath memories and ideas and traditions, but nothing physical. I tried learning both knitting and crocheting and failed. Sewing requires the kind of precision that eludes me entirely. It wasn’t until I discovered the fiber art equivalent to paint-by-number that I began to create something that might, in the end, outlast me: cross-stitch samplers.

Cross-stitch, spanning the middle-ground of equipment requirements between the yarn arts and sewing, asks only for a hoop, a fabric grid, a needle, and a collection of embroidery floss. Beyond that, I need only what I think of as the recipe for each project: a pattern, downloaded from the internet, for a wreath of flowers surrounded by an irreverent bit of text. “DOING MY BEST” read my first wreathed creation, followed by “WELL SHIT,” “HAVE A NICE POOP,” “IT’S PROBABLY FINE,” and “A WISE WOMAN ONCE SAID FUCK THIS SHIT.”

Anna, Jean, Goldie, and Diane would likely be horrified at the language, but they would recognize the lowering of blood pressure as I sit down to work on each new project. They would know the hybrid sensation of productivity and relaxation that comes from taking up the fibers with one’s hands, the sweet reminders from threads stuck to one’s sleeve, the secret thrill of a new project as it morphs from unrecognized potential into a shape that can be discerned by passers-by. My great-grandmother, grandmother, great-aunt, mother, and I have shared, across time, moments of laying our hands on something we’ve made for someone we love and imagining that object extending long past our lifespans. Who else will hold this, we all wonder, and will they know who I am?

Sometimes my daughter and I sit together on the couch and work on our projects as we watch TV together. “Look how cute this is,” we each say, sometimes, but mostly we just move our hands in silence. The work speaks for itself and, we hope, always will.

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Debi Lewis is the author of the memoir Kitchen Medicine (2022). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, Pangyrus, Eureka Literary Magazine, Bon Appetit, Hippocampus, and more. Find her speculative fiction Substack at ThisCouldHappen.Substack.com.

My roommate and I live in a tiny walk-up apartment in New York City. Yet we still find room for what we affectionately call the “DJ booth,” a small table that holds my new DDJ-FLX-4 controller as I practice DJing every night. (My roommate is a very kind person who claims not to be bothered by my botched attempts at transitions.) Our TV stand doubles as a bookshelf for the two books I’m currently reading, and also contains craft materials that are perfect for multitasking with a movie.

We laugh about our varied kinds of play, which some internet circles have taken to calling “hobbymaxxing,” or the pursuit of multiple hobbies at once.

I’ve always been someone whose “free time” was suspiciously full. As a child, my mom shuttled my brother and I from soccer practice to ballet, from choir camp to math competitions. It was the late 2000s, when this well-roundedness was still heralded not as expectation, but as the liberty to transcend labels, be anything, and do everything. We watched Troy Bolton choose basketball—and theatre—in our favorite Disney Channel original movies. We read about Hermoine’s Time-Turner, skirting the limitations of time in order to learn as much as possible.

As I grew up, this blessed freedom soon became enforced. The best college applications weren’t just about excelling in one passion. Admissions officers wanted to see passion in multiple areas.

Even celebrities are hobbymaxxing now. One Vulture profile late last year described how actor Josh O’Connor “diversified his hobby portfolio,” like it’s something you can invest in, something that produces material returns and appreciates over time.

I worry that my hobbies aren’t simply things that intrigue me, that instead they’re a carefully calculated mix to paint me as someone accomplished, interesting, educated, and fun. When I unfold the “DJ booth” and try to deduce which combinations of keys and lyrics and instrumentals blend well into each other, am I really enjoying the meticulous process of turning the EQ dials and lining up the beats, or am I envisioning myself publicly performing and being admired for it one day? When I sit down to write, the experience itself can sometimes feel dreadful as I plague myself with doubts and criticism before 100 words are even on the page. Am I drawn on by a perverse love for the written word, dreams of reader appreciation, or both? Inspecting my hobby-related goals for this year only makes me question my intentions more.

I want to read one book a week. (Read: I am cultured.)

I want to write a novel this year. (Read: I am creative.)

I want to learn to DJ and book a club gig. (Read: I am fun.)

I can’t deny that I want all of these things and that I mostly enjoy working toward them. But are these goals really a product of my diverse interests? Or are they a sign that even in my leisure, I still value productivity, buying into a capitalist dream of the well-rounded individual who wants to be observed and lauded for achieving?

Perhaps hobbymaxxing is just an insidious manifestation of the #girlboss who does it all or a self-improvement trap, reminiscent of the Pride and Prejudice, Regency-era “accomplished woman” who’s expected to read, paint, play pianoforte, and keep an attractive figure, honing all the skills that comprise a privileged, upstanding citizen.

Time is finite, and resources limited. How can one do it all? As Elizabeth Bennet says, this accomplished woman would be “a fearsome thing to behold,” indeed. But then, because time is finite, how can one not want it all? The impossibility makes it that much more desirable.

We each only have about 4,000 weeks of life within us, if we’re lucky. I can see the beautiful fruit that could grow on each twig of Sylvia Plath’s fig tree if I picked one hobby and let it flourish. If I just focused on my writing, I might become the next literary star. If I devoted all my free time to practicing creative DJ transitions, I would be headlining clubs in Ibiza. If I read more, I could become a BookTok influencer, able to get my hands on releases early and meet the buzziest writers.

I can see and appreciate these possible permutations of myself. But I also fear what I would lose if I became a master of one, focusing on a single hobby so as to turn it into something profitable rather than something for myself.

I can’t decide if my efforts to try it all are at best, brave, or at worst, a very proud miscalculation of what is possible for one person. But at a potluck, who wouldn’t be tempted by the range of items in front of you at different times? Sue me for wanting a bite of each.

Mixing 2000s club hits together reminds me to dance around a little every day and gives me an appreciation for popular music, the way it rises and swells and brings us along on the journey. Reading helps me appreciate the lives and intellects of others, how the twists and turns of a few phrases can completely transform a worldview. And writing helps me appreciate my own thought process, at times outlining and at others letting something mystical flow through my fingers as I type away.

Is it so horrible, so depraved, if I cycle through them all and pursue what ignites me at any given time? Is it a life poorly lived if I dabble in everything, not long enough to be an expert, but free enough to have tasted it all?

I don’t think so. So I’ll wake up tomorrow and read my daily pages, practice my DJ transitions, and build out my Save the Cat beat sheet. I’ll go to bed tired, without an accolade to my name, but very full.

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Hailey Oppenlander is a public relations professional and writer living in New York City. She has too many hobbies and probably too many thoughts.

I’m not a sweet, young thing who would attempt a clichéd act of seduction. My demographic is middle-aged, and my get-up was less trench coat and thigh-high leather boots, and more black nylon poncho and-neoprene booties. Still, I was stark naked under my coat as I recently took an early-morning walk of shame.

It was my girlfriend who had encouraged the hobby that led to this out-of-character behaviour. “Just do it,” she said, followed by a dose of the kind of peer pressure that had me dropping acid with her in grade ten. “Everyone’s doing it. Celebrities do it. In my group we even take photos and post them in a group chat.”

Photos? This was supposed to be an incentive?

“I’m out,” I said.

“Agreed. At first it’s hard to get into it,” said my cool friend, “but once you take the plunge you’ll wonder why you don’t do it more often.”

Her enthusiasm prompted a little internet research.

Turns out I already had everything I needed. That is, unless I wanted some accessories to improve the experience—available, with a click of a mouse, to be delivered to my door in nondescript brown-paper packaging.

Proponents say it will cure just about any ailment. It’s supposed to boost mental health. It might lower blood pressure, decrease the risk of diabetes and reduce inflammation. It’s considered a workout. Apparently, all I had to lose was my muffin top. And, as I would learn, my dignity.

Whether any of the benefits are legit, one thing is sure. Athletes are doing it. Real professional and Olympic athletes. They do it all the time.

I’ve always wanted to be an athlete. I was sold.

But my pal lived far away, and I didn’t want to go solo. Nope. If I was going to dip into the icy (okay, cold) Salish Sea, I was going with a posse.

So I went online and found a cluster of cold plungers who meet at a nearby beach every morning at 7:45.

I bought booties and matching black neoprene gloves to hold my Raynaud’s disease at bay; Raynaud’s constricts my blood flow and turns my toes and fingers white and useless in the cold. My tender blood vessels seem to have inherited my hyper-sensitive personality.

I arrived at the beach at the appointed time, where eight other daring souls were clustered in the warming morning sun. The beach gave off the inviting musky, seaweedy aroma that smells like home to this West Coast gal. I followed the flock as they donned toques, disrobed to their bathing suits, and walked straight into the ocean.

Gasping, I crossed my arms tight to shield my chest from the frigid barrage. When my feet just barely grazed the pebbled bottom, I shivered and forced myself to breathe as everyone around me casually chatted.

Finally, at some imperceptible (to me) signal, the little gang turned and made for the shore.

I hunkered in that 51-degree water for five whole minutes—a triumph. That is, until I got to the log where we’d dumped our belongings. As my fellow plungers ducked under pricey swim ponchos to change incognito, I realized the impracticality of my terry beach towel. I’ll spare the details of my not-so-presto-change-o, but suffice to say my new friends have seen more of me than I’d been prepared to show on a first date. Thankfully someone had snapped the obligatory group shot before my Janet-Jackson-worthy wardrobe malfunction.

Early the next morning, any lingering humiliation had been washed away in the wake of my first full night’s sleep in a decade—a podium performance for this menopause-weary woman. Given the result, another plunge was a no-brainer. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to commit to the parka purchase, as I’d learned they can cost upward of $250. Besides, I had a black rain poncho I was sure would do the trick. I shoved it into my bag and headed to the beach. This time it was pouring. Only two other brave souls were waiting at the log. I undressed and followed them into the deep. To my surprise, the water felt warmer. Was I already an athlete?

Back on land, I smiled for the camera and ducked under my poncho. Unfortunately, it was narrower than I’d imagined, and the nylon was as inflexible as my frozen muscles. My newfound confidence floundered as I struggled to wriggle out of my sopping one-piece, finally flinging it into a clump on the sand. As I grabbed my bag of dry clothes, I noticed the other two women were dressed and ready to decamp but clearly too polite to leave me there exposed and alone in the rain.

“Having some issues?” said one, just barely holding back a snigger.

I took in her loose hoodie, sweatpants, and practical flip flops, then looked to the pile of workout tights, sports bra, socks and sneakers I’d brought. I knew I was sunk. I had barely gotten my swimsuit off; it would be all but impossible to tug any of those body-hugging garments onto my damp skin. So I held my head high, wrestled my feet back into the wet, sandy booties, gathered my stuff, and squish-squashed my way to the parking lot.

Ten minutes later, I sat in my driveway laughing as I peeled my bare thighs from the leather seat of my little hatchback, grateful to have made it home without being stopped by the police and arrested for public indecency.

Again, I slept through the night. I was hooked. Cold water immersion may not be the panacea proponents claim, but in our increasingly metaversed and cyber-isolated world, it feels great to start the day in community. Best of all, taking the plunge has forced me not to take myself so seriously. At 60, that’s a lesson long overdue.

My fancy new swim parka is scheduled to arrive at my door in its brown-paper package in three-to-five days.

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Kelley Korbin recently completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College in Halifax, Canada. She is working on her first book, a reported memoir about medical assistance in dying entitled Exit Stage Rite: Lessons for a Brand New Way of Dying. Kelley recently jumped on the cold plunging bandwagon in her hometown of Vancouver, BC and finds her wet, frigid mornings to be a welcome and surprisingly social accompaniment to her solitary writing practice. She’s been published in the Globe and Mail, CBC, Chatelaine Magazine, Ski Canada Magazine and The Jewish Independent Newspaper.

Four years after my 14-year-old daughter died unexpectedly, I started tangling. I kept telling my therapist I should be “over it” by now. She disagreed. My brain, once organized and sharp, was tired of wandering. I wanted to be done. Maybe not “done” with missing my daughter but DONE with the brain-mess. That part needed to go.

I learned about the Zentangle^® method from a client. “It’s kind of like doodling, but with a more mindful approach. I think you might like it.” I felt called to go.

I was coaching execs through big decisions, volunteering for theatre at concessions and backstage, planning family vacations. My life kept moving. I did most parts well. Then I’d stare at an open space on my calendar, confused about what to do next despite the lists upon lists of things that needed my time. I wasn’t used to that.

I told my new tax person, “I used to be really good at math and for some reason, now I can barely add two numbers. You’re gonna have to be patient with me.” I hired an assistant because it took inordinate energy to schedule clients through the snarl in my brain. I couldn’t even read a book.

My therapist told me my brain had changed; it was real. “You suffered a trauma, Ellen. You’re right that your brain isn’t working as it used to.” I didn’t believe her. I asked if I could get an MRI to prove it. Secretly, I wanted to believe her. Then it would all make sense and I could cut myself some slack. I feared no one would believe me if I said my brain had changed when my daughter died. That sounded like an excuse.

The founders of the practice created it to bring calm and beauty to all. “There’s no right, no anything, just patterns,” a certified instructor said. Showing up on Sundays and Wednesdays gave me something to do, an anchor around which I could swirl, something solid to come back to through the week. Even when I told my therapist I didn’t know why I kept going, it moved from “something to try” to a calendar block I scheduled around.

It starts with gratitude, something I needed. Then, marks on the page—four dots in four corners of a 4x4 tile of cardstock. Those marks are just that, a start. When I felt stuck, I learned I merely had to begin. I didn’t have to do everything. I could start small. Breaking the blank page was sometimes enough to take me somewhere. On weeks I couldn’t even comprehend an email, I could make four dots.

We connect those dots with lines, forming a border around the tile. One teacher liked to inhale before she started drawing a line and exhale slowly as she drew it. Deep exhales did drop my shoulders. My therapist had been trying to get me to breathe more deeply. This was a magic door to her dreams.

Next we make a string, a simple swirly scratch or a few lines, anything that divides the square into smaller containers for tangles. Tangles are what it’s all about. There are hundreds of them. Small marks that don’t look like anything until they nest together when something beautiful starts to emerge. I had the sense that was happening in me; maybe if I could wander through the fog, something beautiful would show up.

One instructor started class by saying, “Whatever is going faster than slow, let’s slow that all down.” Her words were a permission slip for me, freedom to stop performing my A-game.

Zentangle’s motto is: Anything is possible, one stroke at a time™. That became true as I walked through grief. When I tangled, I learned to hold the card up and look at it from various angles. Perspective shifted. I saw things hidden in different views. Over time I recognized different expressions of grief in my living daughter and in my husband. An instructor said, “Every so often, pause to look at the big picture to see the beauty forming.” Yes, slowly, there was beauty forming in my smaller family of three.

Then shading: the shift from flat, two-dimensional drawings to 3D designs floating in space, optical illusions pulling me deeper into the craft. “Darkening the background helps us see the thing as it is,” my instructor said. That’s probably true about grief. I don’t know what I really am yet, though.

When the leader said, “We are never too far gone to get us back to center,” I softened. I wrote those words on the back of the card, wanting to remember. Maybe grief wasn’t pulling me away from every single thing I thought I knew about myself. Maybe it would drag me somewhere better. I could hope.

We finish the hour and I have a beautiful something that invites me to stare. I rotate the angles and choose my favorite. “How do you know it’s your favorite?” my therapist will ask. “I don’t know.” That answer is my brain’s frequent response when she wants to know about my body—how I feel. I still don’t know.

I put my chop, my initials to say I made this, at that favorite angle. It reminds me I’m a creator, not only a messy-brained mom, missing a daughter. We turn on cameras and share our work. That’s the final step: sharing and appreciating the creation.

After we close Zoom, I show my husband. He holds it. Turns it. Considers something new. I show my living daughter. She gazes deeply. Tells me she likes it—or not. They look at every square. In the middle of the chaos, they pause to see another version of me, one with a little less mess. A better version of what I used to be, emerging from the shading.

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Ellen Ranson Moore is a recovering executive and Executive Leadership Coach. She’s at work on a memoir, but not for an hour on Wednesdays and Sundays. She lives in Maryland with her husband and daughter and has 36 Zentangle tiles framed in her guest bathroom, plus hundreds more like breadcrumbs through her grief. @EllenRMoore

No new hobbies! I already had too many projects. The cuff of a sock dangled from my knitting needles, a stretchy T-shirt waited to be seamed, an essay begged to be finished, and a piano part required practice.

But then, three years ago, I needed a birthday gift for my adult daughter Elizabeth, and I remembered a cute crossbody bag pattern I’d spied on Facebook. Everyone was making it. The slim, classy beauty looked perfectly modern, useful, and wearable.

Despite my oath to forego new hobbies, I bought the pattern to try it. I bought the hardware. I bought canvas for the body and leather for the flap. When I discovered trendy webbing, I bought that too, for the straps. This is not a new hobby, I told myself. I’ll make one bag, stuff $100 in the cute little zippered pocket, and return to my other projects.

I gave it to Elizabeth, and she loved its hook closure, multiple compartments, and, of course, its bonus bills. She slung it across her chest and used it every day for both work and play. Her friend Kassie admired it, so when the holidays arrived, I made one for her. Kassie’s friend Stephanie liked it too, so I made one more.

With each new bag, I experimented. Nickel shouted modern and hip. Bronze said antique. Woven webbing spoke boho. Making artistic choices satisfied my creative instinct, and thinking about a potential recipient added to the joy. What started with one bag morphed into a collection and became the hobby I didn’t think I needed.

I explored designs and bought patterns for larger totes. I sourced fabrics and linings, and soon oodles of purses and bags dangled from hangers in my closet.

Was my unintended hobby now an obsession? What would I do with all these bags? Years ago, my family stopped exchanging holiday gifts in favor of family time and shared meals. But when my sister-in-law made a festive dinner, I gave her one as a hostess gift. And when my niece brought me a present from her travels, I gave her one too.

Elizabeth discovered my stash of bags and said, “Oh, they would be perfect for the symphony orchestra raffle!” I gave her three.

Why couldn’t I abandon this new endeavor? What kept drawing me back to my sewing machine with new ideas for one more bag? Perhaps it had to do with where the bags ended up.

I’ve said for years that I should do more volunteer work. My only acts of charity are blood donations and participating in rallies. With my new hobby, generosity felt more accessible. I could work at my own pace, without uncomfortable tourniquets or harsh partisan politics. Each bag required thought, time, and energy, but the real satisfaction came from imagining who would receive it.

My other hobbies—sewing, knitting, piano, writing—benefitted only me. With a few hours of work, I had a new T-shirt, a pair of socks, a piano piece to play, or payment for an essay. Bag-making, however, turned my attention outward. When sewing for a specific person, I thought about their style. What colors do they like? Are they practical or romantic? Do they tend toward minimalism, or enjoy big and bold? Once I gifted the bag, my reward was watching them enjoy what I had made.

A few months ago, my cousin hosted a gathering at her house, so I brought a bag for her. Last week, Elizabeth picked out three more for this year’s symphony raffle. Eventually, each bag has found a home.

But what happens when everyone I know has been given a bag? Will I stop making them? I peeked at a favorite website last night, noticed a new design that would be perfect in linen and leather, and thought of a friend with that aesthetic. Now that bags have wrapped their way around my life, I realize giving one gift is nice, but two or three could be better.

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Nancy Jorgensen is a Wisconsin writer, educator, and musician. Her essays appear in HuffPost, Business Insider, Next Avenue, The Offing, River Teeth, Wisconsin Public Radio, and elsewhere. Her most recent book is a middle-grade sports biography, Gwen Jorgensen: USA’s First Olympic Gold Medal Triathlete (Meyer & Meyer). Find out more at NancyJorgensen.weebly.com

Smoketown’s potholed alleys are covered in ice and snow. By early afternoon it’s still below freezing, but Trellis Brewing’s parking lot is stuffed with stickered and bike-racked Outbacks and Tacomas and CX-5s. I blow into my hands and queue with 70 other cyclists memorializing the life of Alex Pretti, a Minneapolis mountain biker and ICU nurse killed by ICE agents on January 24, 2026.

The low, slate clouds over downtown Louisville spit wet snow on our helmets, mittened hands, and neoprene toe covers. We read out loud the signs we see on the backs of our contingent—“Chinga La Migra,” “ICE OUT NOW,” “Enough.” We wave to walkers who yell support, to drivers who honk in solidarity.

Alex Pretti rode bikes and died being a good neighbor. He was shot because he stood out, because he got in the way, because he challenged power. We pedal in remembrance, on big bikes and small ones, expensive bikes and cheap ones, joining 250 other rides around the world.

We roll out and face a driver who screams, honks her horn, flips us off with both hands, and charges into the group, braking her beat-up Nissan Altima two feet from a rider’s bent knee. Most of us shrug, because most of us are used to angry drivers. Most of us are used to anger.

At Tuesday Night Worlds, Lexington’s hardest group training ride, we get buzzed by trucks and muscle cars on Bryan Station Road. We’re doing 30 m.p.h. on our 20-pound bikes in our silly suits, and they’re passing within a couple feet at 50 or 60 m.p.h. in one- or two-ton vehicles, just flirting with some casual manslaughter. Lifted pickups slam brakes in front of us. Drivers use slurs as they throw what’s left of their daily Big Gulp out the window. These are good Americans who spray diesel exhaust and proudly display from their truck beds American and Confederate flags, whipping the wind.

We pedal hard, keep the bikes rubber side down, use our dumb heavy legs to make enough power to keep ourselves safe. Functional threshold power, FTP, is the magic number that tells us how much force, in watts, we can apply to the pedals in an hour. Our bike computers scoop up data on every ride, so we can compare ourselves to others.

It’s too cold to ride outside in the winter, so I sit on my indoor trainer, slurp green apple energy gels. I watch YouTube and Love is Blind and listen to Norwegian black metal when the plan calls for long, droning intervals. On these short, dark days the only power that matters is in the contact points. My stiff cycling shoes clipped into pedals, the torque of the sprint, the watts I can hold for 30 seconds or 5 minutes or an hour.

I’ve been forcing myself to spend more and more time at my threshold limit. Getting used to the pain as the minutes and miles pile up, working through the searing burn of lactic acid in my legs. Building tolerance. My FTP should improve, a new magic number bigger than the last. But I won’t know until I test myself.

I hate FTP tests. You mash the pedals for 20 minutes near and beyond your limit. But you pace yourself, too. FTP is an average of the effort you can hold over those 20 minutes of pain.

You grind. You ride at your current threshold for a few minutes and then you add more watts, a frog in a pot, a little more, 30 seconds at a little more, just one more minute at a little more. These efforts pile up and push back. You take belly breaths and drop your shoulders and make chicken arms. Your heart rate drifts, pumping harder each minute because it’s been pumping hard each minute. You doubt yourself. Your arms and back tense, you’re gripping too hard, fighting with muscles you shouldn’t be using. You tell yourself whatever you need to hear. You unclip and lie on the floor and wait for your hot thumping heart to hush.

How much more force can I tolerate?

Alex Pretti made himself big, tried to help. I hide at home, in the drops, curled like a question mark over my trainer. When the weather warms, I’ll roll Bluegrass tarmac, away from the city, alone.

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Brian McNely teaches at the University of Kentucky and races bikes. His work has appeared in Off Assignment, Bending Genres, Invisible City, Porridge, and in academic journals such as Philosophy & Rhetoric. IG: @bmcnely

Yarn is the common thread woven through all phases of my creative life. If it involves some form of string, I’ve probably explored it. Yet handspinning yarn is the hobby that lifts the most eyebrows and generates the most bewilderment over the time and effort involved. If you’re a person who wonders “Why would you spend hours knitting socks when you can buy a pack at Wal-mart for $5?” then I fear the economics of spinning one’s own yarn may shock you.

Very few get into fiber arts to save money. It can be done thriftily: using cheaper acrylic yarn, repurposing sweaters from yard sales, or selling finished items to support a yarn-buying habit. But the makers I know are in it for the beauty. We value the unique, the slow craft, the hand-dyed, and the precision with which we can make our visions come to life. Many of us have acquired a taste for ethically-made, long-lasting clothing. I could never afford (let alone find) a gold and green plus-sized cardigan in a Merino-cashmere blend from a retailer; but I have made one out of $280 and 18 months of intermittent effort, and I feel that value every time I wear it.

The allure of making one’s own yarn is harder to explain, even to dedicated crafters, since a braid of hand-painted fiber is not much cheaper than a skein of yarn, and making the yarn adds considerable time to the process. So, if neither time nor money are saved, why do we spin? For me, it’s because the act of making yarn is a bit of modern magic. You take a handful of fluff, mix it with physics at the tip of a spinning wand, and create something new out of nothing in an instant. Ta-da!

I could watch loose fibers twist themselves into orderly strands of yarn forever. The movements are so simple that pre-industrial era children as young as five years old were responsible for an entire household’s spinning needs. Using a spindle, it’s a portable form of relaxation and productivity. If you’re a neurodivergent dopamine-seeker like me, it’s a pleasant visual and tactile stim, with bonus yarn at the end! And it’s just one more avenue for creative expression and control over producing the exact garment you envision.

But I have a secret: For all that I love to spin, I haven’t finished very many handspun garments. It takes a long time to create something from nothing, and in my 16 years of spinning, I’ve completed only five projects from fiber to finished object. I’ve spun and knitted one hat, two cowls, one pair of mittens, and one shawl. This doesn’t sound like much, especially when compared to the ~260 projects I’ve knit or crocheted with commercial yarn over the years, but I treasure each handspun item more than any of the rest.

When I hold a handspun piece, I remember its origin, the feel and color of the wool as it flashed through my fingers, the specific way the fibers twisted into thread, the sometimes surprising characteristics of the finished skein after plying and washing, and the delicious energy it had during knitting that only handspun yarns possess. Each piece is a tactile reminder of when and where I was while I spun it, the stresses it soothed, and the pleasures it provided.

I started spinning while earning my Master of Science in natural resources management during graduate school. After hours of research stuck at a desk, I craved a creative outlet, and knitting just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I needed the excitement of learning a new skill, but it also had to be simple enough to calm my burnt-out brain. I needed a reason to get away from my desk and back into my body, which spinning does as well. So I watched a few videos, bought a spindle and the wrong type of fiber, and spun my first terrifyingly lumpy yarn—but I was nonetheless entranced because I had made it myself and that was amazing.

I dove into books about fiber and its sources, tried new techniques, and leveled up. I collected spindles and a couple of wheels. I spun as much as I could, through heartbreak and triumph and exhaustion and fear. Spinning was the perfect tangible demonstration of how small, stolen bits of time and effort added up to big accomplishments, something that I needed to see during grad school and afterward when I was planning a wedding, getting married, and struggling through my first pregnancy.

Soon, I was too busy and burnt out even for spinning. My toddler wouldn’t stay out of the spinning wheel and I couldn’t find a moment for myself. My spindles were bundled into pretty wooden bouquets and stuck in vases on the shelf. My rainbow of unspun fiber was stashed away. I focused on healing, working, mothering, and mending a marriage that was past its honeymoon phase. I got pregnant again, had my second son at the start of the first COVID lockdown, and life continued to spin out around me. I lost loved ones, had career shifts, and felt like all my energy went toward holding things together. For a while I became the spindle, and my efforts were the force that twisted a good life out of desperate handfuls of unruly time and raw materials.

Eventually, when my kids got older and home life became more manageable, global life became more stressful…so I picked up spinning again. This time around, I needed its grounding force. In the face of unending environmental and political horrors, I ached to make something beautiful. I savor the facts that my handspinning hobby is off the grid, that the resources I spend on it support women-owned small businesses, and that the items I make will outlast whatever happens during this shitshow of a political era. I want my children’s children’s children to be able to hold what I’ve made and know that hours of my energy were poured into it. I want them to know that when society seemed bent on destruction and things really sucked, some of us still made things. We makers create our own joy, beauty, and function out of nothing, and that is absolutely worth something.

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Alicia Morandi is a biologist, environmental consultant, and mother of two from Rhode Island who writes poetry and essays during the midnight hours. She likes to spin yarn, knit, crochet, and play ukelele during stolen moments. She posts on Substack at unmask & make and Instagram @amorandimakes.

I get obsessed with word counts. I think most writers do. And yet, I have picked up a new hobby that involves words I never count: writing and sending cards and postcards.

This hobby is actually a return to old habits. As a member of Generation X, I saw my first computer in high school. After a summer away from home, I made friends who lived all over the country and we spent the next few years writing long letters to each other about our lives. My parents divorced when I was in high school, and when I left home, my childhood belongings were largely scattered or disappeared. I would love to find those letters again.

When social media started becoming popular in the early 2000s, I was a little hesitant. But it reconnected me with some people who were important and that drew me in. Ten years later social media was an important part of my work as a non-profit communications and fundraising manager, and it was also a tool I used to connect with friends all over the world. I was certain it was a net positive. It didn’t give me the negative feelings about myself that other people reported, I figured I was adapting to the pace of technology.

Like almost everyone else, my trip downhill on the social internet happened slowly; I almost didn’t notice. I stopped reading except for articles that were posted by friends, and eventually fed to me by the algorithm. Focusing on writing felt impossible. Time went by, and habits became a lifestyle. Then last summer I got a new phone, and didn’t log into Facebook, X, or Instagram. I kept only Substack.

I got so much time back. I’d spent hours of my life scrolling through things that weren’t necessarily bad, but they weren’t things I deliberately selected. Instead, they were presented to me as if I’d stumbled upon them, but they weren’t my proactive choices.

Enter postcards, which I have complete control over. Postcards give me an opportunity to look at an image, think about who that image reminds me of, and then send a short and directly relevant message to that person.

My girlfriend bought me a set of pens and stamps in January 2025, and I started buying postcards. Now I’m experimenting with making my own. I’m not claiming any kind of anti-tech analog purity; I write them in front of the TV while watching basketball, Stephen Colbert, or Gilmore Girls. Then I walk down to the mailbox and send them away.

This is a wildly imperfect system, and I love that. There is no “sent mail” folder, and I often completely forget what I‘ve written to someone and have to rack my brain when they respond. I also don’t keep track of who I’ve sent postcards to. If you adopt this habit, you might be more vigilant, especially if you worry about equity or have siblings who’ll be upset if you sent a card to one but not the other.

Another small word of caution: So many of us are feeling overstretched, stressed out, and at max capacity, and there are people who receive postcards or letters in the mail and take their arrival as a kind of guilt-inducing act. I know that I’ve felt this way in the past when folks have reached out to me and I haven’t had the energy to respond.

I chose to follow my instincts here and focus as much as possible on people who express interest in the practice. Lots of my friends send texts saying that my postcard made their day. They talk about what a joy it is to get real mail. Many of them have started buying and sending their own. My last post on Facebook, after not posting for quite some time, was to ask if anyone wanted to join my postcard list. It drew a very positive response.

One of the most recent cards I sent was to the daughter of one of my oldest friends after we met for dinner over the holidays. I wrote something like this:

Someday you’ll be at dinner with a friend that you know right now and they, or both of you, will bring one of your grown children. It will feel like a total blur, and a total blessing. xoxo -- Emma

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Emma Margraf is a Northwest writer with words in The New York Times, Folks, and her Substack, Bites of Change. As a former Sassy magazine reader she is also very excited to have contributed to Another Jane Pratt Thing.

Two Februaries ago, I sat in a bar in Shoreditch watching the Kansas City Chiefs play the Philadelphia Eagles for the Super Bowl at 2 a.m. I’d never cared about sports enough to go to bed quite that late before. But I was actually invested in this game, partially because of the homesickness I felt after recently moving abroad, and partially because of the then-novel romance between my favorite songwriter, Taylor Swift, and some tight end. I wasn’t a football fan, and hadn’t been one—at least, not since the Pittsburgh Steelers gave the NFL a regular run for their money circa 2009. Still, I convinced a group of friends to gather and watch the Big Game for the first time in years.

The bar’s environment was exhilarating. Just for the night, I’d chosen to root for Kansas City, and every suspenseful play or ambiguous call got my blood pumping. Not only was I having fun, I felt like I was part of a community, maybe for the first time since moving to London in January 2024. When I cheered, so did half the room. When I gasped, so did someone else three tables back. Having neglected sports for theater early in my academic career and attended a college where attending the weekly football game was almost laughable (sorry, boys), I was pleasantly surprised by just how much fun I was having.

I waited another year for my next Super Bowl experience, and after that game, I craved more of that feeling: sitting on the edge of your seat, banking on chance and a prayer, feeling the excitement of the strangers beside you and holding your breath together.

I decided to just pick a sport to get into and begin learning it. Basketball was an easy choice. Why? The NBA was the one league where Pittsburgh didn’t have a team. For me, football, hockey, and baseball were already covered. But I could untraitorously root for the New York Knicks in the city I’d lived in since college.

I can’t claim I had absolutely zero experience with the sport. My dad was a local basketball star in high school, and I’d followed in his footsteps—up until middle school. Not a natural athlete by any means, it was clear quickly that my above-average height for a 10-year-old girl didn’t make up for my lack of ball-handling skills. More so, at the time, I thought that athleticism was something you were born with, not something to work at. You either had it or you didn’t. So I set my basketball knowledge on a shelf, only to return to it 15 years later.

I began by zooming in closely, learning my chosen team first. A friend of mine gave me the advice to “First, just learn the name of a single player you find hot. Then learn the name of the guy he passes the ball to. And keep going.” Although I didn’t lead with a basketball crush, I did follow her advice in part.

I learned the key players of the team, googling their records and alma maters and going down ESPN rabbit holes to figure out when exactly they’d joined the team and how their stats had changed. I watched games with one eye on the television and the other on my phone, following the Google play-by-play to make sure I didn’t miss any moves.

It was one of the biggest learning challenges I’d thrown at myself in years. I was practically starting from nothing. But that admission of absolute ignorance gave me absolute freedom. I had no shame in searching, “What is a field goal?” or “Difference between a guard and a point guard,” because how would I have known the answers?

After I watched a game, I’d tune into the Knicks Film School podcast by , listening to the breakdown of the previous night’s matchup and the hosts’ predictions for future games. I learned what their cited statistics meant and compared them to our rival teams’ stats. When I didn’t understand something, I had friends to ask.

Being vocal about learning the sport has come with its own rewards. Twice now, friends have offered me spare Knicks tickets. The first time I walked into Madison Square Garden for a game, I was absolutely beaming at the chance to watch the action live alongside my fellow fans—with even NBA legends in attendance (even if, at first, I had to look up who they were). I’m proud to still be learning about basketball, and unlike in my career-adjacent interests, like writing and filmmaking, where I feel the pressure to be an expert all of the time, with basketball, I’m happy to lay all of my cards on the table. A year ago, I knew nothing. Now, I know something. Isn’t that something?

My sporting experience has been a reminder that I can always start over from zero, and not every interest has to be a career-driving opportunity. When it comes to basketball, I’m proud to admit that I don’t know the answer. Just give me a few minutes, and I’ll figure it out.

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Alexis Buncich (she/her) is a writer, actor, and producer based in between New York, London, and Western Pennsylvania. She loves writing about the Earth, culture, love, and the comedy in being alive. You can find her work in Worth and Nonprofit Quarterly. She explains Taylor Swift lyrics at Taylor Swift, Explained and runs a weekly NYC/London events newsletter at Overt Consumption. Learn more about her work at alexisbuncich.com.