7 Questions, 1 Artist, 1 Very Bad Year

From the New York Times: "We asked 75 artists to open up about their creative travails and triumphs a year into the pandemic." My invitation to participate in the 7 Questions, 75 Artists, 1 Very Bad Year Q&A must have gotten lost in the deteriorating U.S. postal system (or perhaps I just wasn't invited – what?!?) so I decided to tackle the seven questions on my own.

1. What's one thing you made this year?

I completed a major rewrite of GETAWAY, which will be my third published novel. I wrote a few poems, a short story, a few essays. My inclination has been to want to work on small pieces, but I feel a professional pressure to work on a new novel—and I have been writing a new novel, off and on, in an erratic process for many months.

It's been frustrating to not be able to just sit down and write every day like I used to, but mentally I'm just not there. After really pondering it I've concluded that there's something psychologically disturbing about even thinking about working on a novel, as I know it means doing the "same thing" every day for months—at a time when doing the "same thing" has little appeal after a year of isolation.

2. What art have you turned to in this time?

Tap dancing!!!! It has been my life saver! I was fortunate to move into a larger living space—my first house—just as Pennsylvania was shutting down. I'd never had so much space to myself before, and I found myself with a small extra room—once intended to be a guest room. I toyed with various hobby possibilities (I'd been searching for a new hobby for a while), and thought it would be ideal if I could find a "physical" hobby. I considered karate, yoga, and other kinds of dance (ballet, hip-hop, ballroom) but tap seemed like something I could realistically do alone with a middle-aged body.

I dabbled in dance in my youth: a semester or two of "running and jumping over puddles" in elementary school; a year of Saturday classes in middle school; a three-week summer dance camp as a teenager, taking ballet, jazz, and modern. I hadn't been exposed to dance and I wasn't "built" like a dancer (and thus wasn't encouraged to do it), but I had an internal drive and love for it. At seventeen I did one very intensive year of ballet—six days a week, two to four hours a day: it was my last chance before "aging out" of my parents' financial support of such pastimes.

In my mid-thirties I found a ballet class geared specifically to adults of all ages and body types, but it was disappointing to discover I'd lost the ability to do nearly everything I'd been able to do at eighteen. A couple years later I took a salsa dance class with some friends. It was super fun, but I ultimately decided it was a cult (long story). 

So there I was two months into the pandemic, fifty-one, and with a spare room. Tap dancing had never been on my radar, but I ordered a pair of cheap shoes. I found some YouTube tutorials, and quickly got obsessed. And apparently a bunch of other people did too: after realizing her videos were becoming more popular, Carrie Mitchell started a virtual tap class for those of us who were discovering (or returning to) tap. It soon became two classes a week, and those two classes have often been the only meaningful thing on my weekly schedule. The days still blur together, but on Tuesdays and Thursdays I have tap dancing to anchor me in the real world. It's incredibly fun, and I am stronger than I've been in years.

3. Did you have any particularly bad ideas?

Well, there was that time in late spring 2020 when I decided that, as a first-time homeowner, I should try my hand at gardening. I had no access to a nursery or garden supply store, so mostly I committed to tackling the invasive Japanese Knotweed plants on the slope behind my deck. This resulted in clearing a path for the deer, who then created a permanently barren strip of dirt and made themselves at home. I admitted defeat—the hillside was too steep, the deer too well established—and hired a gardener in late summer.

4. What's a moment from this year you'll always remember?

Many horrible moments watching my mother's mental and physical health deteriorate, culminating in sitting vigil at her ICU bedside in the hours before she died of complications from Covid 19.

In happier memories: my cat's blossoming joy with our new house and all the windows, and sitting together to watch the deer, squirrels, and birds.

5. Did you find a friendship that sustained you artistically?

It's probably a sad statement that I give my cat credit for sustaining me artistically, and in every other way. She is truly my constant companion. I shudder to think of the empty, giggling, talks-to-herself shell that I would have become without my Merpy* (*a pseudonym; name protected for privacy).

6. If you'd known that you'd be so isolated for so long, what would you have done differently?

I do not entertain hypothetical scenarios, on the grounds of utter pointlessness.

7. What do you want to achieve before things return to normal?

I simply hope to not lose my ability to string two coherent sentences together.

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There you have it. This is what the New York Times missed out on! (Notice how I gave the most space to tap dancing—truly an accurate reflection of the year's mental health priorities.)