Come Hike With Me!
Plus: Little Library Update, Time Capsuling with Richard Linklater, PA Reads YA + more...
Over the past couple of winters, I got into the habit of playing ambient nature videos on YouTube while I write. If you’ve spent any time trying to find the perfect writing music, we’ve probably fallen down the same rabbit holes that got me there.
For me, it started with streaming jazz or French talk radio… then putting together my own instrumental playlists, then getting tired of those and stumbling into endless drones like “Jurassic Park Theme 1000% Slower” (links to all of that stuff here).
I love finding new music and making playlists and even recording my own songs—that’s one of my true joys, flipping through record bins and doing deep dives into bands I’ve read about in zines—but for Snow Struck and Storm Blown, I mostly ended up searching for hurricane or blizzard sounds and writing to these long playlists of videos with titles like “10 Hours of Rain Storm Sounds for Serenity and Relaxation.”
Which is what got me here:
I have an old phone with a cracked lens and I keep putting off getting a new one because I’m really trying to not be on a phone all the time… so a couple of weeks ago I picked up a new [action camera] instead, because that felt like a better long term solution than borrowing Rachel’s phone whenever I wanted to snap a picture of a clump of mushrooms or something.
I clipped it to my backpack the other day, when I was exploring some Allegheny Land Trust trails in a forest that used to be part of an old mining complex. There’s a big ridge of industrial debris there, dating back to the 1800s, and that section of the hike was so fun to climb that I took a short video to show Rachel when I got home:
The next day, I decided to take my new camera with me on another adventure—this time to one of my favorite networks of trails in Western Pennsylvania… and once I (finally) figured out how to get the footage onto my laptop, I realized that I didn’t really have a choice: I was going to have to set it to ambient spa music and upload it to YouTube.
It was the least I could do, giving back to a genre that got me through a couple of tough Pittsburgh winters and triple that many book drafts.
I recently wrote a short story about hiking for a children’s magazine… more on that soon! But in the meantime, if you’re the kind of person who puts ambient nature videos on the background while you’re doing something else: come hike with me!
It’s not quite forest bathing, but you can almost smell the phytoncides!
I’m happy to share that I’ve joined PA Reads YA as an Author Ambassador!
PA Reads YA is a super-cool, teen-led organization that recently expanded to include Middle Grade (which is what I write, books for 8-13 year olds — back in the day you’d probably just call it Children’s Literature)… and I’m excited to help spread the word.
If you’re reading this Substack and you’re in Pennsylvania, you can find out more (and subscribe for updates from PA Reads YA) at pareadsya.com!
I did a Little Free Library update in my last email (thanks to everyone who shared my big radio interview!) and I know those are so sweet that they almost give you cavities, so I don’t want to do another one too soon… but traffic at our little library has been really picking up now that school’s winding down, and if you’ve been thinking about building or buying your own:
When I logged into YouTube to post those hiking videos, I found a bunch of old uploads in an account I’d forgotten about. Like, videos that go back to 2006—when YouTube was only one year old.
I found videos of me stretching and painting some canvasses, and of Rachel doing stand-up comedy. And old music videos from songs we recorded with friends.
You can’t see any of those if you check out my channel now, they’re all private—like old diary entries—but I have a birthday coming up and was feeling a little nostalgic, so I watched through a couple of hours of those last night… and I found one old video I made of the walk Rachel and I used to take to work every morning, from Brooklyn to the Flatiron Building in Midtown Manhattan:
I don’t know what I filmed this with (an iPhone 1?) but I’m so glad I found it, a record of some of my happiest mornings in New York: walking across the Williamsburg Bridge and into the Lower East Side with a thermos full of hot coffee.
The video is so choppy that I’m not sure how much of it you’ll be able to watch. The soundtrack—me messing around on guitar with Rachel on melodica!—is also pretty choppy, but what really struck me (last night at one in the morning when I discovered this treasure trove of old videos) was the continuity.
I don’t like to think too hard about the passage of time—and especially not before a birthday!—but that walk to work was a long time ago and here I am, living a life that feels pretty removed from those days in New York… but I’m still outside, walking around and pointing a little camera at the world.
It reminded me a little bit of this short film Richard Linklater made for the Pompidou as part of a career retrospective, “Another Day at the Office.”
There’s a section in that short where Linklater talks about how—when he went off to college—he and his friends used to record themselves on cassette tapes and mail those to each other instead of talking on the phone (to avoid long distance charges).
One of his friends mailed him a box of those old tapes when they were older and when he sat down and listened to them, he was expecting to cringe at hearing a younger version of himself—to be confronted with this big arc of personality growth—but what really surprised him was how much like himself he sounded, thirty years later.
"Overall, my take-away, is like... we all think we're changing so much—you know, like, 'Oh, I'm a different person than I was back then.' But I'm finding that it all feels very contemporary, it sounds like me.
I can just hear it in my voice, there's some project I'm working on. Something I'm excited about, obsessed with. Just seeing the potential in something, trying to work on it. I'm listening to that voice and I'm thinking, like, isn't that interesting—this relationship we all have. This persistent relationship we have our whole lives, our present selves' relationship with our past selves.
There's a constant there. I'm standing in the same place I've always been standing in, I'm just older. And more blessed, I guess."
People like to joke that kid lit authors write for the age they’re emotionally stuck in, and for me that’s pretty much the case: I’ve always felt like I’m thirteen at heart (now I’m picturing everyone who’s seen my record collection or skate pics nodding their heads), so that Linklater quote really stuck with me.
But I also think it’s easy to feel like we’ve all been just fundamentally changed by the stresses of the last few years. That's something I think about a lot, too.
So when I was uploading my most recent hiking video and stumbled across that old footage, footage that seemed to match the moment and creative impulse so perfectly, it felt like archival proof of Linklater's constant. And that realization was so deeply comforting—even as I listened to myself strumming a distorted and half-tuned guitar—that I almost wanted to soundtrack the moment with some peaceful spa music and set it against a deep green hike in the woods.
Until next time,
Your friend,
