notebook entry
Welcome back to Mommy’s El Camino.
7/18/25
I took this notebook with me all the way to New York and never opened it. I thought about it—mainly the day we went to The Center for Fiction, and I was sitting in a big comfy chair and knew I had two free hours, and also, the place is meant for writers. You know who I saw there? Around a table, writing, were white men and women. At a solo desk, a Black woman. On the couch behind me were two Black women having a long conversation in hushed tones, and the cadence and flow of their quiet talking soothed me. Also nearby was another couch, with a white woman sprawled on one half. At a small table with two chairs and some conspicuous outlets I had eyed, a white man came to sit, write, and have at least two phone conversations in which he said things like, I don’t fucking have time. I was amused that at least two of the writers I could see held precious little notebooks and wrote by hand. At one point an Asian woman came to sit in a chair and she also produced a pen and a notebook from her bag to write, then she left after about fifteen minutes. During my stay, my mini-afternoon residency, a young woman came in from the heat and high humidity and I recognized her and said her name. I stood and we hugged and greeted and she asked me something like, Are you working on a book? Which I realize now can sometimes feel like asking someone if they’re pregnant. My answer was garbled—because, am I? Am I “working” on “a book”—hard to even say what I’m doing anymore. I seemed to recall reading in this woman’s last essay that I’d read that she was working on a book, so I felt alright asking. We both sounded unclear to my ears. Maybe it was weird for her to see me in her city. I don’t know the story, or if there’s backstory—but at The Center for Fiction I won’t create a story out of nothing.
But it was funny to keep running into writers I knew. Random. Like running into Lynne Tillman on the plane. I realize I’m mentioning her name, and not the name of one of the writers I ran into. Have you seen Lynne Tillman? She walked by me on the plane as it boarded, and I tapped her arm and said, Are you Lynne Tillman, and she said, Yes, and from behind my mask, I introduced myself and she said, Oh yes! Wendy! and told me she was doing a reading on Saturday in Los Angeles. I didn’t go, because as I remember with every trip to New York, I step onto the plane home, and I need days and days to recover from the stimulation. I returned to an LA of grey skies and coolness.
It was funny and beautiful, though, all of it.
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