distraction no.99

Haunted Houses

Nova Ren Suma

October 28, 2022

On bad dreams, working in publishing, & the fear of the unknown

Photo by m wrona on Unsplash

During the years I worked a full-time job in book publishing I used to have a recurring dream about a rotting house.

No matter how a dream might begin, at some point I’d find myself back in the attic of the house: ceiling sloped down, dark decay, floorboards grotesquely soft and sinking into sludge under my feet, sickly pinkish-orange stains on the walls. In the way of dream logic, I was unable to leave this house and I desperately wanted out, yet at the same time I was bothered that there was always an unsecured opening—a door I couldn’t close, a gaping hole in the wall—and that other people could get in.

It is said that dream interpretation isn’t meant to be literal, but the feeling of being simultaneously trapped and not being secure does seem glaringly obvious to me now, in hindsight.

During the years I was having this recurring dream, I spent a lot of my time and energy working at my day job, taking work home from my day job, and freelancing side projects to help pay my Manhattan rent and bills because my day job never seemed to bring in enough. I call it my day job because my aim was to become a writer of books myself, but when night came around I was too tired from the day working in book publishing to do much else. I had less and less time for writing. My finances were in disarray. At one job in particular, I was so overwhelmed by my workload of urgent projects we used to call Red Folders—it sometimes seemed that everything was routed in a Red Folder, and so everything was urgent—yet I wanted to do a good job, so I would often take work home, unpaid, just to drown a little less the next day. I didn’t realize that this, in fact, made it seem like I could handle things I could not, setting unrealistic expectations for myself, and for anyone who came after me once I burned out. One of my happiest memories of that time was sneaking into the office on a Sunday to get a jump on work in time for Monday morning. I remember hiding in my office on the empty 14th floor with the door closed, carefully marking proofs of children’s books in a sharp red pencil. I felt such a sense of accomplishment, even though what I should have been doing with my day off was writing.

I had built a house for myself as a Writer in the City, but it was rotting all around me because I made everything else more important than my writing. And so, again and again in the night, that rotting house, that open trap, that dream.

I don’t remember when I stopped having the dream, only that it seems connected to when my life shifted and I started prioritizing my writing again. At some point I went away to a writing residency, so maybe it was then. Or maybe it was the job I took after that, when I stopped taking work home. Or maybe it was near the date my calendar reminds me of every year: May 1, 2009, the day I signed with my literary agent and a new kind of career began.

When I sold my book, I entered a new house. Shiny glass in the windows, walls on all four sides still standing, a roof that kept out the weather, a warm room with a comfortable bed. It wasn’t a sustainable livable wage by any means, because security is not a reality of being a published author, but it was an absolute palace to me.

What did I dream about then? Oh, the usual author nightmares: losing my laptop, missing trains and planes, turning in my manuscript late by accident, being surprised with the cover for my next novel by a creation everyone said was beautiful but was just a mass of overgrown hair. “We love it,” the publishing people in my dream said. “Don’t you?”

I didn’t have the dream about the rotting house for years. I had completely forgotten it until recently.

Because, earlier this month, I had the dream. Fifteen or so years later.

There I am inside the rotting house again after all these years. There are the shadowed walls, that same panicky pinkish-orange, and the roof sloping down in the corners, the soft grotesque blooms of mold everywhere I step. The doorways that have no doors and the stairs that caved in. There are people on the other side of an unlocked door and I don’t want them to come in and see this place, but also all I want is to get down those stairs somehow and get out.

Why is this so familiar? I think. Then from inside one dream I remember another dream. And the memory of all my houses connects across time and space and we are one.

The dream coming back makes me think there’s something I’m putting off from doing, something I’m allowing to go stagnant as I did before. I suspect I know what that is. It has to do with my writing—with something I want to write and have wanted to write for a long time.

In the neighborhood where I live now, there is a house behind ours that is empty. What I mean is it’s really the shell of a house. The windows are gaping holes with shreds of plastic flapping in the wind. There are never any lights on. I’ve never seen anyone go in and I’ve never seen anyone go out. It is always here, this small empty house facing our backyard, probably 100 years old like the house we rent, here on this block so long it remembers everything. I don’t know who owns it, I don’t know what might happen to it, but sometimes I find myself watching it, wondering.

I check for movement in the dark windows. I look for a change in the draping of the plastic. Just this morning I found myself staring at it while standing in the kitchen, the way you can lose yourself in the mirror for a second, forgetting who and what and where you are.

When the time comes, will that house be knocked down, or will it be repaired and filled up?

How many people lived here while it stood, saying they were going to do something and not doing it because other things got in the way, and then it was too late?

The dream coming back out of nowhere is making me ask myself questions like that.

How many times can you shake yourself awake in one life?

Once, I had a speaking engagement on an old campus where I gave a talk about writing and shared my book with an auditorium full of college students. I stood at the lectern looking out at a sea of faces and realized this was a moment to hold on to and remember, as something like this may not ever happen to me again.

Then came the Q&A. There was a long line at the microphone and then a number of questions about the book I never feel comfortable answering, one by one by one. I said more than I usually do, and regretted it after. There was a book signing, students who confessed they secretly wanted to become writers even though their parents insisted they study something else, questions, connective moments, a series of names and voices and my head spinning, all beautiful and rewarding things.

Still, I felt exposed. I was a raw nerve walking around in her blue dress and lucky shoes. As soon as I was alone, I knew I’d crumble.

A friend and fellow writer who lived nearby had attended the event, and she and her husband brought me back to the guest house on campus where I’d be staying the night before my flight home the next day. This was an old house, large and elegant and completely empty… as I was the only campus guest for the night. The house was built in 1888, and it felt like it had witnessed many things and held many secrets, waiting for night to let some of those out. I was grateful my friend and her husband stayed at first and chatted with me before leaving me alone in it for the night.

After, I went upstairs toward my room, climbing the grand staircase, and sifted through the guestbook. Many names of visiting families, guest speakers, guest faculty, and the one innocuous entry that caught my eye:

“This place is haunted. I’m scared. Bye.”

The handwriting seemed like it could be a young girl’s, which told me the entry might be a joke, meant to mess with someone like me. And yet. Here I was, the guest author who just spoke about her book full of ghosts now to sleep in a house of ghosts, and it couldn’t be a more opportune moment.

But I was raw from the talk, from all I shared about the book and myself, from being seen. I spoke out into the empty house, letting my voice carry over the sweeping staircase, into all the dark corners and shadowed rooms, feeling ridiculous but still doing it.

If there is anything or anyone in this house right now, please don’t come out tonight. Please let me sleep, I said.

The house was quiet but for the creaks. The walls breathed, listening.

I’m tired, I said. That was a lot tonight. If there’s anything to see here, please don’t show me tonight, please.

The shadows coiled.

I’m not ready, I said.

I felt silly, I laughed at myself, but it was done. I went to my room and closed and secured the door. I tried not to let my imagination run away with me, which tends to happen in dark and unfamiliar places when I’m left to my own devices, even as a fully grown adult.

But that night the house listened, keeping its footsteps on the stairs and its shadows in the corners and its ghosts who stand at the end of your bed watching you sleep to itself.

I closed my eyes. When I awoke, the sun was shining through the curtains.

I don’t think I had any dreams that night. No rotting houses, no lost laptops, no computer screens bursting with ropes of hair. At least I don’t remember any. I didn’t hear any of the things I’ve since read about that students and faculty have witnessed in this historic campus house: the patter of feet walking the hallways, the opening and closing of the doors. I told the house I wasn’t ready and I was spared.

In the morning I put my name in the guestbook, packed my suitcase, and took my raw and exposed self all the way back home. I saw nothing, even if the house saw me.
Conversations with the Other Side

Nova Ren Suma

October 21, 2022

On spirit boards, playing with danger, & the struggle to finish a novel

There is no greater pairing than a misfit thirteen-year-old girl and her Ouija board. I was new in town, afraid to speak up, and sporting an extremely unfortunate haircut. I’d never been kissed. I loathed my odd name. I ached 24/7, in different inexplicable ways. I understood nothing and no one.

For a brief but intense time, my closest confidante was a board with accompanying heart-shaped planchette manufactured by the mysterious Parker Brothers—and, more specifically, the spirit I imagined was speaking through it. This communication device came in a box that said: Ouija: The Mystifying Oracle and was marketed as a game, but it wasn’t a game to me. I understood that it was meant to be used only with other people, and not alone. Yet on many a night I secured my bedroom door and carried it into my bed.

There, we had whole conversations I will aim to re-create from memory below:

What grade will I get on the social studies test?

B P L U S

Will anyone ask me to the dance?

NO

Should I go anyway?

YES

How will I die?

C A R C R A S H

When will I die?

M A R C H 7

Are you just trying to scare me?

YES

Will you stop?

YES

Is anyone thinking about me right now?

YES

Is it someone I like?

YES

Is it [seventh grade crush’s name redacted]?

NO

Who is it?

M E

What’s your name?

N O T T E L L I N G

Do you watch me when I’m asleep?

YES

Are you watching me right now?

YES

Prove it. What am I wearing?

C H E C K E R E D S H I R T

Here the conversation would end when I slammed the board back in its worn box and tossed it across my room, forgetting to say G O O D B Y E in the rush of needing to get it as far away from me as possible.

At this time we’d recently moved to a house on a dirt road, far away from my childhood best friend. I knew no one. This was the Catskills, the more remote and depressed area where tourists didn’t tend to go. There was nothing to walk to but a far-off gas station off the highway. There was nothing nearby but some scarce neighbors and what felt like acres upon acres of trees.

My bedroom in that house was an extra room on the first floor, just off the kitchen, kept apart from the rest of my family, which was a blessing except for the nights I got scared. I’d sleep there in my checkered flannel pajama shirt with the covers over my head, aware of every creak in the wood-planked walls and every branch tapping the windows, wondering about the divide between the living and the dead. Still, the next night, lamp on and bedroom door closed, instead of reviewing for the social studies test I would get out the Ouija board and go for more.

You have to understand. I was thirteen years old in the time before the internet. I was hungry for connection, for a kind word from a cool stranger, for something to happen so my life could finally begin. I used to daydream about turning the magical, mythical age of eighteen and running away with someone who loved me and chose me, out the door and into the night, but five years was eons away. Besides, there wasn’t anyone who liked me back yet.

Back then, we didn’t even have a working antenna or cable, which means that our TV screen showed a fizz of static. If I’d been born later, I would have had the internet. I shudder to think who I might have chatted with at night alone in my room from that shark-infested sea.

What I had was the Ouija board, and the Ouija board had me.

To this day I’m not entirely sure who or what I was talking to. It did eventually tell me its name. His name, I should say. And it acted like what I knew of men, too: stormy some nights, gruff and barely offering an answer; but on other nights frantic and whipping the planchette from letter to letter so I had to rush to keep up. Sometimes it said kind things to me, compliments. Other times it made threats. Having this open doorway in my room to the spirit world brought about some challenges. For one, if I talked about it at school most kids thought I was weird (though there were one or two fellow thirteen-year-old girls who understood) or creepy, and the kids from religious families seemed to really not like it. And two, on nights I conversed with the Ouija board, it became near impossible to get out of bed at night once safe under the covers, so if I had to pee I had to hold it till morning.

The Ouija knew things about me no one alive was supposed to know. However, the fateful day in March it told me I would die passed over uneventfully with an entry in my diary noting I was still alive.

Now, of course, I understand how Ouija boards are said to work, the innermost subconscious and your own kinetic energy instigating the gliding moves of the planchette. Science, blah blah blah. My rational mind knows the answer and probably has always known: There is a deep and hidden part of yourself, aware of the things you don’t yet know, the keeper of your secrets, the holder of your dreams, the instigator of your worst and most ferocious anxieties, and sometimes in your loneliest of moments you can access that voice. You can communicate with it. It can make the planchette move toward what you maybe most want it to say. On bad days, this can be dangerous. On good days, it can help you not feel so alone.

So that could be it. Or maybe I was never alone in that downstairs bedroom after all.

Night after night, the voice in the dark spoke through the Ouija.

But then, as youthful obsessions go, the need for them wanes when your social life takes over. My diary shows the shift. I was the new girl at school that year in seventh grade, but soon enough friendships would emerge. Junior high school dramas that became the subject of furious diary scribbles, my crush’s name inscribed in pen on the pages then crossed out in darker pen out of superstition and shame. I would be gifted a telephone in my room: a pink receiver to get calls—not my own line, but still close enough—and there was one night I spoke to my crush on this phone. The line was all breathing and boredom. He had nothing of interest to say and we never spoke on the phone again. One day soon I would have my first kiss: grotesque and full of spittle and awkward tongue in the dark of a movie theater. My body would change. I would decide to spell my name Novah because it looked to me more like a name for a human girl until some kids at school started teasing me and calling me “Nova-huh” and I reverted back to what I was. The door inside me would close for a while, distracted by a mundane earthly life, until many years later, when I became a writer, when it would open again and I would remember.

Writing a novel—agonizing over it, questioning its very existence—feels sometimes like poising the fingers so very gently on the surface of a planchette and begging something, anything to make a move. The story must be inside me somewhere, fully formed. Why won’t it just spell itself out?

I may be seeking an outside force to come and tell me how to fix it, but that never happens—because in the end, a writer is alone with her page and all the work she has to get done. Still, when I’m begging my brain to navigate that work faster, I’m communicating directly with my own subconscious, my worst enemy and my best friend.

Will I ever finish this novel?

YES

Will it get published?

YES (It’s under contract, it’d better!)

When will I finish this novel?

SOON

How soon?

VERY SOON

My intimate conversations in the dark as a girl ended around the time we left that house on the dirt road. I was fourteen. My time with the Ouija board culminated in a bursting light bulb aiming to harm my baby sister and a fire—two separate events I’ll save for another time, or better yet keep on hand as fodder for my fiction. Whatever entity I was talking to, or whatever deep and buried part of myself was putting on a mask and playing pretend, was no longer reachable. The Ouija board was gone. The cord was cut. I grew up.

The sensation of playing with something dangerous has stayed with me though. It’s what I return to when I think of being that age. I remember who I was back then: a frightened aching openhearted innocent crafty girl. Bad hair until it grew out, flat chest, big imagination, not yet having the guts to dream big dreams. At times it makes me cringe and at other times it makes me want to cry.

Mining that time and those emotions is what drives me to write the stories I do. Maybe it’s not surprising that the current opening scene for the novel I’m revising begins when my narrator is… wait for it… thirteen-years-old. (No Ouija boards were harmed in the writing of this novel. Spoiler alert: My next book is not a ghost story.)

The story may be something else entirely, but the writing is fed from digging into my most vulnerable moments. When I felt misunderstood and trapped and alone. When there were too many trees. When I scared myself every night.

When I wanted to grow up and leave, but had nowhere to go.

When I so wanted someone to say: I see you. I like you. I want to know you. I M L O O K I N G A T Y O U R I G H T N O W. And Nova—however you spell your name—I like what I see.
Tell Me My Destiny

Nova Ren Suma

October 14, 2022

On premonitions, scams, & the precarious dream to become an author

Photo by Ioana Cristiana on Unsplash (purple-ized)

Do you need to know what the sign looked like? It was neon. It was violet. It was flickering. PSYCHIC, it glowed: that singular word.

That was all it needed to say.

I was a young unknown writer in the big city and for months on end, possibly years, I was aware of this sign as I walked that particular corner. Sometimes I’d stand across the street, observing the dark plate-glass window. Curtains were pulled from end to end, shielding whatever went on inside, so all there was to see was the dark surface and the magnetic purple glow. I’d been brave enough, or naïve enough, to leave my small town and aim to be an author. I’d been brave enough to fall in love, to begin to trust another person wholly, to go broke horribly, to go into debt for a dream, to think that was a viable life option, to think someone like me should go to a school only rich people can afford, to risk everything and anything responsible and steady (and maybe I shouldn’t use the word “brave” to describe such things), yet for a long time I wasn’t brave enough to enter that establishment and hear my fortune.

It’s not because I was a skeptic, a close-minded nonbeliever. Oh no, I believed. I believed that inside that storefront, behind those pulled curtains, someone might tell me something about my precarious future and it would be the bad news I was afraid to hear.

But there came a day when I was walking past that corner and I had the money in my pocket, right there, in reach of my hand, as if meant to be. Exactly the amount posted on the door. This was a long time ago, and I think it was ten dollars. I was walking by that violet-lit corner on a free afternoon with ten dollars cash in my pocket—I had to go in.

My memory has blurred the location, which feels mystical even now as I think of it. This corner was on my way to my post office box—the address I gave out when submitting my short stories to literary journals (yes, answers still often came by mail, I told you this was a long time ago)—and so sometimes the post office held a piece of surprise benevolence and a rare yes, but more often in it was a box that spat up rejections, a box of doom. If the psychic was near my post office, then it must have been on Fourth Avenue. It was near the dentist where I would have my wisdom teeth removed, but not exactly. Was it 10th Street? Was it 11th? Possibly. Yes. It could have been. I think it was. Though maybe it’s best if I don’t pinpoint it for sure.

I pushed in a darkened glass door and entered at last.

There was no music. There was no chime. Only one person was in the dim, musky-smelling room.

It was a woman, younger than I expected, maybe even my age. She sat me down at a round table covered in scarves. I was struck by a few things at once and here my memory is clear: How ordinary she looked in her baggy jeans and saggy sweatshirt and dirty blond ponytail, a dreary look of boredom on her unpainted face. How small the room was, in fact, much smaller than the wall of windows made it seem, like a large storage closet. And how now I’d entered, now I’d sat at the table and allowed her to take my hands, it was too late, I couldn’t say never mind, I had to go through with it, I couldn’t leave.

Also, by then she had my ten dollars.

Maybe what struck me more than anything was this: If a psychic is truly psychic, with powers of sight behind metaphorical curtains I don’t even know are there… might she have found a way to a better her own life by now and not be so dour, so bored?

Still, I was there. It didn’t matter the aesthetics or that I could vanish into the ether and no one knew where I was. I was about to hear where my life would lead, if this gamble would pay out, if my dream would come true.

What was my question?

I wanted to be specific. I wanted to ask if I would become a published writer one day, if I would ever publish an actual book. I wanted to ask this question that meant absolutely everything to me, but in that dim dusty room, the curtains closed so no beautiful violet light peeked through, I couldn’t make my mouth ask it. I had split in half. One part of me was rising with doubt. But the hidden half of me, the child crouched under the scarved table, still believed in what was about to happen and she wanted to know. So I did ask, but as I remember, I kept it simple. I made it vague.

What is coming for me? What is my destiny? What will I be?

It’s impossible now to re-create the conversation as too many years have passed. Memory gives only bits: hands in my hands, uncomfortably warm, the biting scent of too much singed incense and the way it can cling to the walls of your throat, that burn, and then the thing she revealed next. The confounding, disappointing thing.

She did see my future! An image was coming. There was something in the dark void of wherever it was she went when she closed her eyes that she needed to share.

She said she saw my career ahead, and I perked up, my heart lifting, the future spines of the future books I hoped to one day usher into the light lining up behind my shoulders like eager ghosts.

I would become a video editor, she said.

That’s what she saw.

It was such a specific relegation of a role, so definite, so… disconnected to me, and random, and yet she was sure. Wouldn’t it have been better to be a bit more vague with a girl’s future, so she might find her way toward believing in it? But no. She was adamant that’s all she saw. Am I a video editor now? she asked me. No, I said. But I must work in video, she said, in movies, in film? No, I said. Do you mean books? I asked, thinking maybe she meant book editor and may have misspoken. But she said no. Not books. She was sure it was video, she saw moving images on a screen, that’s what she saw.

The ten-dollar reading was over, but if I wanted her to do a tarot spread to find out more, the costs were listed on the wall.

I left the curtained room. I did not pay more. I remember feeling guilty (losing ten dollars was very felt for me then), but also angry. At myself for being so trusting, for being duped, for hoping someone would spool out a glorious fate for me like a brightly unrolled carpet, for caring, for doubting and then worrying that this vision might actually be true and it meant I wouldn’t make it, I’d fail, I’d never publish a book at all.

All I can say is I walked home that day so adamant I would never ever ever become a video editor or get any job that was anywhere connected to anything involving video, because if I did it would be the nail in the coffin that meant I would never become a writer. And I wouldn’t let it happen. I couldn’t. I would make my own destiny. I would prove this random woman who called herself a psychic (and while we were at it every litmag that was rejecting me) wrong.

I used to think that finding out my destiny would lock the track down, and allow me to run toward my rainbowed horizon with open arms, not worrying about stumbling because I knew I’d get there since it had been foretold. If she’d only said she saw books in my future, I wonder if it would have helped me believe in myself enough and take the steps to make it true. But in fact, it’s the opposite that happened. With the rejections coming in, and the glimpse of the future indicating it was not to be, I became even more defiant that it would happen. That I would make it happen. Even if it wasn’t my destiny. That psychic was wrong. Anyone who said I couldn’t do it was wrong.

When someone tells you something is not yours to have, don’t you often think, but why not? Don’t you sometimes then want it even more?

The psychic played me for ten dollars, sure. But that experience also helped cement it in my mind. I would publish books. I would determine my own future.

Now let’s jump ahead.

One afternoon this summer, my partner (the same person I fell in love with all those years ago) came into my writing room while I was prepping for a novel-writing workshop I was about to teach. I was at my desk facing out into the room, which is where I sit now as I type these words. Behind me is a tall bookshelf nestled into the wall and on it are all the books I’ve written and published: the duplicates of all my author copies, spine after spine after spine. This is what the image on my laptop screen showed as well: me in my chair, and behind my shoulders on the shelves climbing up to the ceiling, the books I wrote.

I was working on putting together a short introductory video of myself talking about writing for an online class I was teaching. I’d just watched a tutorial on how to do the basics of iMovie, and I was fiddling with the trims and the titles and restraining myself from doing too many fancy fades.

My partner smiled at me strangely. “Hey, do you know what you are?” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“A video editor.”

And out of nowhere I remembered that violet sign, and the tiny room, and the hands taking my hands, and what I heard, and together we laughed and we laughed.

Because after all this, all these years later, I suppose this one hot afternoon in June of 2022 proves that poor sad psychic right. My destiny foretold on Fourth Avenue did come true.
Omens

Nova Ren Suma

September 30, 2022

On dumpster fires, publishing pitfalls, & what authors can still control

When I first moved to Philadelphia, I saw an omen. It was my first weekend in the city in the spring of 2018. I awoke late Sunday morning in the apartment we’d just rented in Center City and headed out to go get coffee. But as I emerged from the lobby I discovered a LITERAL DUMPSTER FIRE directly across the street. I stood there, mouth gaping, but so did a number of others. Everyone was calm, as if this is a thing that happens here often, and so I took my cue from them, snapping this picture with my phone and then just witnessing the fire burn.

After some time I wondered if anyone was going to do something or if we were waiting for it to go out on its own. It wasn’t spreading. But it wasn’t stopping either. Was I supposed to do something? Were we all? No one seemed alarmed. No one even spoke. Then, after a time, two people wearing all black came calmly out the back door of a restaurant and each poured a bucket of water over the fire, dousing it in a last hot breath of smoke.

It was over. People started walking down the street once more. A car passed. The morning went on.

But I admit I was shaken over the symbolism. I’m the kind of person who sees signs in everything, from a random song playing to the words or numbers in a patch of graffiti, so of course I wondered if my walking out at just that moment to see this was an omen of some kind.

You see, I’d just made the decision to leave the only real home I’d ever known, the city where I’d lived my whole adulthood and had always thought I’d grow old in. I might have stayed there forever, like one of those old nonnas in the building next door who’d walk so very slowly together to the market with their hair up in colorful kerchiefs, stooped over their grocery carts, sometimes needing help with the front door. I used to see those nonnas all the time… and then I didn’t any longer. I don’t remember when, or if one was left without the other, but at some point they disappeared from Sullivan Street. Just as I had, to move to Philadelphia.

Was the dumpster fire a not so subtle sign that I’d made the wrong choice? If so, it was too late to change it. The move was done, the lease was signed, the keys to the rent-stabilized apartment let go, the money spent. The boxes were stacked in the new living room, and there I was.

Moving to Philly didn’t end up being what I expected: the pandemic came for us all soon after and I went full hermit, so I’m not sure what my life here might have been if that hadn’t happened. I do know we didn’t stay in the apartment where I saw the omen. I’m now renting a house in a quieter neighborhood away from any dumpsters, with a spacious writing office filled with books. We were meant to survive the pandemic in this house in Philadelphia instead of in our old tiny box on Sullivan Street in New York, and this is not one of my regrets.

Still, every so often, I find myself thinking of the dumpster fire that greeted me my first weekend here. I find myself transported back. Standing on the sidewalk passively watching it burn—doing nothing, saying nothing, a growing sense of doom creeping up my legs.

If you write books and try to publish them, I might ask: Does this feeling sound familiar?

Authors know that pitfalls in our writing careers can come on suddenly. You step out the door one morning and there’s a dumpster lit and roaring and you never even smelled the smoke. Or you can have a sense that something’s rumbling under the surface in the industry and you just can’t put your finger on it… and then some news of a consolidation or a downsizing or a natural sea change in staffing happens and your favorite marketing director or fantastic publicist or beloved editor leaves and it all clicks and you think, Aha, that’s what I was waiting for. There it is.

The smaller things too, the personal cuts. The nos. The lack of invites or the lack of support. It can be anything at all, that one disappointing surprise you didn’t see coming, that gut punch, that sting.

It might feel like it’s about you, but is it really? It’s more the fact that once we step into this industry, nothing is in our control.

Does this make me a pessimist or a realist or a passive ostrich with her head buried in sand? All I know is the fear about what can go wrong can be debilitating. Worrying so much about impending doom doesn’t help keep it away… or get a (good) book written… it only has me standing on a sidewalk panicking and looking around to see what might go up in flames next.

Lately, I’ve turned my attention inward. What I tell myself as I revise this long-awaited* book is that I can’t control what’s going on outside my door. I cannot control one single thing out there. I don’t know when another dumpster fire might reveal itself on this street or another, or when something amazing might fall into my lap. I can’t read the signs, because really everything could change at any moment. But there is something I can control. It’s myself. It’s the words I put on the page. It’s my story, this book I’m striving to write—as well as the other partly formed beginnings and halves and appendages of books I plan to write next, books I believe in, no matter who else does.

I can control only my work and how much of myself I put into it, not what happens to it and not what any of you think. All I can do is make this book the best I can, for myself. And if someone sets it on fire or spits on it afterward, at least I can look back on the effort I put into it—the choices that are in my control—without regret.

Last year, I was on the bus headed home from teaching a class in University City when a series of sirens started going off on everyone’s phones. The bus was crowded with strap-hangers and people piled into every available seat, and a bunch of us were getting emergency alerts from the city about a tornado warning. We were to seek immediate shelter.

Rain came down. The sky turned an ominous color. And yet the bus driver kept going along South Street without an announcement and without a reaction, and after a few murmurs that there was maybe a tornado about to hit, one woman jumped off at the next stop and ran in a frenzy down the block, but everyone else simply stayed on. Everyone around me was calm, collected, unfazed. That’s the thing about the people of Philly that I’ve come to recognize: They really have seen it all. I kept to my seat, the bus kept moving block to block, stop to stop, wind and rain whipping at the windows. And though I’d never experienced tornado warnings in any capacity like this before, my overactive imagination was visualizing a SEPTA bus lifting up in the sky and the ceiling ripping open and our bodies flying out the gaping hole into the Schuylkill, which is a river not at all pronounced the way it’s spelled. I was rattled with doomsday images, thinking of the person I loved who I wouldn’t see again, and the book I was writing that I wouldn’t get to finish and maybe that was okay, maybe I didn’t need to finish it after all, and any of the bad things in my head could have happened because they happen all over the world every day, but what came next was this:

The bus reached my stop as usual and I got off.

I was soaking wet by the time I made it to my front door, my heart beating wildly, but if this was another omen it didn’t harm a hair on me. The tornado passed us by. And beneath it, I was left alive to write another day.

* I don’t know if you would consider my next book long-awaited—but I really want it finished, so I certainly do!
Unidentified Flying Objects

Nova Ren Suma

September 23, 2022

On birthmarks, not belonging, & the selves we insert into our books

Image from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, 1956

I was born with the mark of a flying saucer on my leg. The birthmark is smooth, pigmented a light brown, and creates the shape of a long oval—a UFO setting off back to its homeland in the stars.

When I was young I was painfully aware of the UFO on my body because people would point it out to me when I had a dress on and my calves were exposed, sometimes even strangers walking by—“Is that a birthmark on your leg?” It was darker then, more obvious against my uncomfortably pale skin. And I was more uncertain of myself then, aware of everything that marked me as unordinary: this spot, my family, my shyness, my lack of religion (a Jew to some, not Jewish enough to others), my vegetarian diet, my inability to catch a ball or speak up in class, my outlandish hippie name among a sea of 1980s Jennifers and Heathers and Johns and Jonathans. I took to covering the birthmark with jeans or tights. Later on in high school I often wore black fishnets with dresses and shorts, which I loved for aesthetic reasons, but also, I admit, had the added benefit of distracting from the mark. The funny thing is, in reality, most people probably didn’t even notice my birthmark. I was more aware of it than anyone else, which is the case with most things you dislike about yourself. It mattered to me, and now, years later, doesn’t matter at all.

Now I go whole years forgetting it’s even there. The color has lightened, but it still has kept its smooth disc-like shape, and it’ll be a small surprise when I see it in the mirror, remembering it’s there. It’s a simple café au lait birthmark—so ordinary, so many people have them. They’re hereditary. I seem to remember a long time ago my grandmother on my father’s side saying it’s the “DeLaura birthmark,” which means there are others in her family line who may have had it, maybe on their legs, too, tying me to ancestors I’ve never met and whose names I don’t know. I’m not in touch really with that side of the family, but I’m marked as one of them.

Lately, as I get older, I’ve been thinking of the signs we’re given about the lives we live. Have I listened to mine? There are different beliefs all over the world that say the kind of birthmark you have—the color, the shape, the placement—is not in fact random. That it might hold meaning.

A birthmark could be what’s been called a “maternal impression”: some event or sighting a pregnant person has that makes itself known on the body of the baby. But if my mother had a UFO sighting in the months before I was born, she never told me. A café au lait “stain” as it’s called might simply mean my mother really loves coffee (in fact, she does—mystery solved?). The shape of the birthmark itself might be meaningful: a perfect elliptical, geometrically sound—what might this be speaking to about who I’m meant to be?

Some say a birthmark tells you how you died in a previous life. I look at mine and might ask: Did I drink too much caffeine and my heart gave out? Is it a gaping bullet wound? Did I trip and fall into a deep hole? Others say that a birthmark indicates the lesson you are meant to learn in this life. A birthmark on the leg in particular means that in this life I’m meant to learn to be independent, make my own decisions, and stand on my own. With all the choices I’ve made to get myself here—a writer who made impractical decisions again and again to follow her dreams, a woman who consciously decided to not have children and never regrets it—I might in fact be living what my birthmark has asked me to be.

But the UFO itself—the shape I always saw and took to calling it—what might that mean? It speaks to me about belonging, a feeling I’ve very rarely had, in any place and especially not in any groups of people, which can be especially painful and cause me to isolate and push things away. When I try to be like other people—to do what I see other authors doing in their careers or on social media, for example—I inevitably feel pathetic or disgusted with myself, and then I inevitably fail. So I’ve stopped. I’ve just stopped. Is this what it means to learn to walk on your own? To embrace the alien inside your skin and not hide who you are, even with a lovely pair of spiderweb fishnets?

Every book I’ve written has marked me in some way, different colored stains and shapes all over my body only I can see. The book I’m revising now exposes some of who I am, the girl with the UFO on her leg, the girl who didn’t belong and then who embraced the unbelonging and said it’s what she wanted. I see these things in the sky of my manuscript even if no one else will. This may be why the writing of it has been such a tremendously difficult undertaking, an experience I may only be able to speak about in the future, after I can look back on it from a safe distance.

The closer I get to finishing this book, the more and more it all comes clear, at least to me. This has been a long journey. This has changed me. This has wounded me. This will inevitably leave a mark.
Fear of Falling

Nova Ren Suma

September 2, 2022

On fears, unhappy accidents, & writers following their own timelines

Photo by Ginevra Austine on Unsplash

I have always been afraid of stairs.

In darker moments—literally when the sun goes down—a staircase becomes taller somehow, bending off into unknowable, impenetrable shadow. The fall down is longer, more dangerous. The prickling sensation along the spine comes. I start hurrying up. I can’t look behind me. I have to keep climbing. I can breathe only at the top.

This has been a fear ever since I was young, often rooted in specific detail to the different staircases of my childhood: the hard corner before the banister in Saugerties, the creaky sweep past the leaky window in Pennington, the ladderlike steps to the loft in Kerhonkson, the red hallway and then the lower-level steps of Woodstock, the long steep passage with the painted face at the bottom in West Hurley. When I think about it, it’s not the stairwells and creaking steps themselves, but more the act of turning my back and climbing. Perhaps it’s a fear of being followed. A fear of being eyed from the shadows. A fear of being pulled down into— what, I don’t know. A fear of falling in all the imaginable ways you can fall.

Photo by Riccardo Pelati on Unsplash

This spring, I hurt myself on the basement stairs in the Philadelphia rowhome we’re renting.

These stairs are a short pass of creaky wooden steps, gray-painted and open to the dark below. This basement is unfinished, concrete floors with open areas of dirt and exposed beams, and it’s where we do the laundry. After living for twenty years in New York City and needing to use a costly laundry service because there was no close laundromat, this feels like the height of privilege. (This plus a dishwasher! Modern conveniences I appreciate with every usage!) But I always feel a little out of sorts when I enter the basement.

In a strange loophole in our lease that I didn’t understand but was told by the landlord’s real estate agent that it is fine and perfectly standard, we are renting the whole house except for the basement. We are allowed to store things in the basement and use the washer and dryer, and no one but us will have access to it while we’re here, but technically it’s a no-man’s-land. It doesn’t belong to us, even temporarily. In this way, the basement seems to belong to the house itself.

Beside the stairs is a separated area through a doorway that we call the brick room. In it is a light bulb on a string, the water meter, and… a random pile of bricks. It’s a small, dark cavern, and I am aware of it—very aware—whenever I climb the stairs into or out of the basement. I am always aware of the brick room. Sometimes I think of it while falling asleep in bed three narrow floors above.

Photo by J. Balla Photography on Unsplash

It was an ordinary morning. The laundry was finished and folded and I was heading back upstairs.

At first the climb back up was innocuous. I was aware of the brick room, but I didn’t look at it. It was daytime. There was no reason to allow any space for fear.

I hoisted an admittedly overfull laundry bag over one shoulder and time seemed to slow as I took my next step. A thought of the brick room crept in, but maybe even calling it a tangible thought is giving it too much credit. It was more a sliver of unease. I was stepping up and somehow I slipped, and in that long breathless moment I teetered, the weight of the laundry bag pulling me down toward gray concrete floor, toward bottom. I righted myself, jolting forward, and felt a small lightning strike of pain in my shoulder as the strap of the heavy bag pulled. But I made it upstairs. I rushed to the top of the steps, got out, closed the door, locked the door, dropped the bag, laughed at myself, and that was it.

Only, no. This was about to be a lasting injury that I’m still dealing with. Whatever I did to my shoulder (I thought it was only my shoulder) caused incredible pain in the weeks after, turning into a numb arm and hand, an inability to turn my neck or carry things or bend over, sharp prickling pins and needles running straight through to the tip of my index finger. My right arm, my right hand—my writing arm and hand—were barely usable for more weeks than I want to count. Doctors’ visits told me this injury was in fact a pinched nerve in my neck. That’s why my arm was burning with fizzy pain and why half of my hand was numb weeks and months later, and why it was painful to sit in a chair and attempt to type words on a computer, let alone work on my book at my desk.

Such a small thing, a slip on the stairs. I caught myself. I didn’t fall. And yet.

Photo by Icarus Yang on Unsplash

It goes without saying that my book deadline hit a frustrating roadblock, my momentum lost. I blamed the staircase. I blamed myself for over-stuffing the laundry bag. I blamed my irrational fears.

It’s months later, and I’m still healing. The rush of pins and needles in my arm and hand is far less frequent, and the pain is much more manageable. I can sit at my desk now, propped up with pillows and with a new ergonomic setup to keep my neck from bending. I’ve found ways to help (OMM therapy, stretches and other exercises, THC tinctures, Dragon Anywhere dictation software though thankfully I can type now without much/sometimes whole days without any pain). I’m getting better, yes, but the truth is this injury set me back for months. I ended up asking for a class I was due to teach to be canceled (technically postponed to spring), I stepped aside from other opportunities, I lost hold of my book. I had an allergic reaction to pain medicine and lost more time, then when I was leaving my house only for masked physical therapy twice a week, I somehow caught COVID and lost two more weeks of time.

I lost so much precious time.

Photo by Kyle Laviree on Unsplash

I have always been irrationally afraid of staircases. Yet if I think on it, this isn’t the first time I’ve hurt myself on a set of stairs (the cold iron steps outside Think Coffee on Mercer Street, the sweeping stairs that begged for leaps in Nef Studio at MacDowell), so it could simply have been healthy bursts of premonition.

What happened may have delayed me (and frustrated me), but it has also given me a forced pause, a time to rethink and reimagine, and re-listen.

Don’t concern yourself so much with what’s behind you.

Don’t worry about who’s watching.

Maybe I was wanting this to be a quiet, tucked-away announcement no one may ever read about why my next book is taking so long, but I also know this is only the latest obstacle to come during the writing of the third draft. There were other difficulties during the pandemic and during other drafts, other pits of dread and brick rooms of lost time and heartaches and mistakes, let’s be honest.

How many staircases are between me and the finishing of this book? What is there to be afraid of at the bottom… and also at the top?

Keep steady. Keep climbing. Don’t look back.