Here’s Your End-of-October Care Package

You really deserve to read or watch something nice.

How has it become that every time of year is an intense time of year these days? Can’t we just get a slow news month for once? Instead, here in the U.S., among other things, we get the impending midterms. (VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE VOTE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY PLEASE VOTE). Other places have major stuff going on, too. It’s like everywhere, everything, always, all at once. The world is so much, oh my lord.

We must care for ourselves, aunties. Some readers of this newsletter are carrying joyful and comfy care loads which are very part time, while others constantly perform the care labor of half a dozen people. Wherever you are and whatever your responsibilities and commitments, I hope you’re able to carve out a little quiet time to read something nice.

Because it is time once again for your monthly care package: a collection of writers and others communicating wise, compassionate, funny, insightful, surprising, and/or useful stuff around the internet. Guest curators Joyce Chen and Donna Wolf recommend a bunch of great links apropos of their area of expertise: poetic and artistic encouragements for young women (and old women, and people of all genders).

After that, I recommend a bunch of stuff, including:

• A giant pumpkin regatta (it’s exactly what you think)
• Cookie Monster tries to meet his A.I. mandate
• A very encouraging update about the youth of today
• A beautiful story about getting to sing with Brandi Carlisle
• Guess who’s unionizing?
• A weirdly high ratio of video content compared to the average care package 🤷‍♀️

Note that I’ve included gift links where possible, and gift links often expire after 30 days.

Make it to the end of the roundup to watch the cute kid video of the month: This month it’s a kid who receives some very big news. The cuteness factor is strong with this one. (Maybe it’s partly because Americans are suckers for children with British accents, but that’s really not the half of it).

October Around The Auntie Bulletin

Y’all aunties were so kind and encouraging and understanding when I wrote about how I can’t keep up. I just really love you.

We started thinking about the essential role of athletic coaches in the lives of kids, via back-to-back interviews:

• Million Coaches Challenge’s Kevin Connors talked about the skills that all good coaches need, as well as how aunties, parents, and community members can advocate for high-quality coaching for all kids.
• Megan Bartlett and others at the Center for Healing and Justice Through Sport basically blew my mind with their insights about how sports help kids regulate emotions and process trauma (seriously, if you haven’t read this one yet, you need to).

Katherine Goldstein unpacked her zeitgeist-rumbling concept of “deep casual hosting.” (Her book, Neighboring, is now available for pre-order, and I see from our Bookshop.org shop that some of y’all have already ordered it, because you are very smart and wise).

Have I mentioned in the past 100 words how much I love you? I sent out an SOS for advice for Auntie Bulletin reader Molly, whose kid’s best friend’s mother recently died unexpectedly, and the Auntie Collective delivered. Your responses have been so wise and so compassionate. It is not too late to catch up and weigh in. (Folks on Ghost, we’re talking about this one exclusively on Substack so that Molly only needs to check one place for guidance. If you’re up for it, come join us).

Nancy Reddy interviewed me about care and creativity. “Participating in the daily life of a beloved family is really what enabled me to recenter the writing life as a career. I haven’t put that into words before!”

A couple of highlights from the Substack app this month:

• I wrote a short thing about teaching the kids in my life to vote.
• I got in an argument with a commenter who believes nobody in their right mind would ever volunteer to be an auntie, LOL. (Check out the comments for the full exchange).

Our Guest Curators for October: Joyce Chen and Donna Wolf

I’m excited that Joyce and Donna’s poetry-etc. anthology, Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times: Advice & Poetry to Set the World On Fire, will be entering the world in a couple of weeks. The volume’s aim is to equip young women launching into adulthood to “imagine deeply, create bravely, and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world” – and really, that’s a key aim of this newsletter as well. I haven’t articulated this explicitly or often, but young women figuring out their paths in life are a core group whom I hope The Auntie Bulletin will benefit. We aunties are cultivating a world where young women, and young people of all genders, have choices about what they do, who they are, and how they build community. We want young people to be able to forge paths that are a genuinely good fit for them and which might, along the way, help to create a better world.

And I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of poetry to this end. Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is cool because it’s a poetry anthology, but it’s also a series of love letters and encouragements to young women. Donna and Joyce reached out to forty extremely cool women and femme and nonbinary people and asked them to select a poem and write a very short letter-slash-essay-type-thing to accompany it. It’s just – it’s just really nice. It’s a really nice idea and I approve.

If you’ve got a young woman in your own life who’s currently figuring out how to navigate uncertain times – and really, aren’t we all? – Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times is a worthy book to send their way. And now its editors have some links for us.

Over to You, Donna and Joyce!

With the publication of Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times just around the corner, we’ve been spending a lot of time together getting ready for the launch and talking about life. And change. Lots of change! At 39 and 60, we’re at different stages of life, but it turns out we’re thinking about many of the same things: the changes we choose, the ones that choose us, and how we find our way through both.

Life can be so dang hard, even in the best of times. And somehow, it’s also easy to forget how short and precious it is. We both lost friends this summer, one to suicide and one to cancer, so we’ve been thinking a lot about where we find comfort and how we offer it to the people we love. We’ve been drawn lately to books, poems, music, and other things that offer perspective, spark our curiosity, or make us think a little differently. Here are a few we’ve been spending time with.

Donna has found wisdom in Nick Cave’s The Red Hand Files, especially Issue 363, where he speaks so clearly about the liminal space of grief. She’s also read and reread Yehuda Amichai’s poem “The Precision of Pain and the Blurriness of Joy” and Lucille Clifton’s “blessing the boats” too many times to count. Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow was a balm for Joyce as she tried to make sense of how beauty can exist amid so much pain.

We’ve also been thinking about the other side of change and the possibilities it opens up. Donna saw Brandi Carlile twice this summer, and her new album, Returning to Myself, speaks directly to how she still feels about her kids being grown and gone.

Joyce swears by a friend’s beloved social media account, Read a Little Poetry, a platform that champions poems and poets. Of late, two poems really resonated with her: Inua Ellams’s “Fuck / Time,” about the relentlessness of time, and Mary Oliver’s “Self-Portrait,” reminding us we can always be in love with life (“and still full of beans”). Donna, meanwhile, finally saw Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World. Fueled by courage and nature, she faced change, kept going, and landed the Pulitzer at 49.

When we needed a break, unbeknownst to each other, we both started cooking to cope – Donna because her partner started a GLP-1, requiring a dietary shake-up and a lot more beans! Shout-out to Ottolenghi’s favorite bean recipes. Joyce’s choices have leaned sweet with savory flavors, including Eric Kim’s Gochujang Caramel Cookies. Think bittersweet, to match the complexities of life.

So that’s what’s been keeping us company these days: a little wisdom, a little escapism, some poetry, always poetry — and a whole lot of beans.

Back to Lisa

“Giant pumpkins are grown with size, not seaworthiness, in mind. Every so often, someone would tumble out of the pumpkin into the lake. A safety crew (with actual boats) would pull up to pull capsized and drenched racers out of the pumpkins and take them—pumpkin and human—back to the dock to dry off. At the starting line, one of the crew would get to work bailing water out of the gourd so the pumpkin could be used in the next race.” A dispatch from the Giant Pumpkin Regatta.

“The sugar-hyperactivity myth has survived for decades because sugary foods tend to be served during celebrations that are otherwise chaotic and overstimulating, such as Halloween, Christmas, and birthdays.” (gift link)

On Tuesday, November 10 at 9am Pacific / 12pm Eastern, I’ll be co-hosting a free movie club about the new film Take Me Home – which is all about care and about which so many people I trust have been raving. The film stars Anna Sargeant (the director’s sister) as a Korean adoptee with a cognitive disability who is caring for her aging parents. It also stars Ali Ahn – who plays Eidra in The Diplomat and is, i.e., a total badass – as the main character’s overburdened sister.

Several unspeakably cool people will be attending the movie club, including:

• Liz Sargeant, the film’s director
• Ai-Jen Poo, internationally recognized care activist, founder of Caring Across Generations, and one of my personal care activism heroes
• Courtney Martin, event moderator
• Anya Kamenetz, Lane Anderson, and Allison Lichter, my co-hosts

Register here for the live Zoom gathering, and you’ll receive a private screener link and password so you can watch the film at home (for free) before we meet. Please join us!

Cookie Monster tries to meet his A.I. mandate: