The Way We Talk About Storms, School Visits, Query Letters, The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, Extreme Halloween Vibes... and More!
I feel like this is probably going to be another one of those long and esoteric emails—like my deep dive into Russia’s Mary Poppins (Meri Poppins, do svidaniya - 1983)—so before I fall down a rabbit hole:
I’m boosted and flu-shotted and I’m booking a ton of school visits this fall, if you’re interested in having me come to your school—my schedule’s filling up fast!
Scroll down for Little Free Library updates; a 10 step, no-stress query letter worksheet I made for my “Writing Youth Literature” students; and more…
Here’s me and Chaely at our dog park’s Howl-o-ween costume party. If you wanna see more pics of her costume (she was a butterfly), I posted some here!
There’s something so interesting about way we talk about (and then don’t talk about) storms whenever a big one hits.
In the beginning, there’s always that anticipation and adrenaline and bravado: the nervous energy of ten-thousand trending tweets. I felt it the other day, listening to the BBC on the drive to our local dog park. When I walked in and closed the gates behind me, the transition was almost seamless: everyone was ignoring five barking corgis to talk breathlessly about the storm. I joined in, of course—I’m the storm guy!
But in the aftermath, you can almost feel the shift.
Like floodwaters receding… the impulse to move on as quickly as possible.
I’ve written three books about extreme weather and grew up in Hurricane Alley—if you haven’t read the afterwords at the back of Storm Blown and Snow Struck, I talk a lot about my real-life experiences with hurricanes and blizzards there—but the more I try to understand that particular phenomenon (the excitement and then the aversion) the less I think it’s because of the endless march of our twenty-four hour news cycle…
And the more I start thinking about Romantic poets and philosophers… and Monk by the Sea, Caspar David Friedrich’s famous meditation on the sublime.
It’s been a while since I studied the sublime (heck, it’s been a while since I’ve listened to ‘em!) and it’s such a complicated concept, with so many evolving definitions over the centuries—but it keeps ringing in my ears whenever I try to understand how we talk (and don’t talk) about hurricanes.
I think the most common current definition of sublime is “beautiful,” but it was originally more about the awe-inspiring vastness of the natural world (“mingled with Horrours, and sometimes almost with despair”—the critic and dramatist John Dennis on visiting the Alps in 1693).
The conceptions of the sublime that I think about most define it as a terrifying confrontation with “anything that exceeds the ordinary limits of an individual's capacities”—which makes a lot of sense to me, particularly when it comes to hurricanes.
But for the Romantics, it typically meant a confrontation staged in relative safety… through art and poetry that was supposed to elicit a transcendence of self and a feeling of oneness with an overwhelmingly vast and powerful universe.
So for them, it was definitely more of a vibe.
The Daily Beast published an essay about hurricanes and the “Art of the Sublime” in 2012, a week after Hurricane Sandy made landfall.
It’s mostly about how we’re so disconnected from the natural world, and how you can see that disconnect in the lack of truly sublime art that’s being created these days:
“It takes the complete breakdown of our technological safety nets—seeing cars floating up Wall Street; watching tunnels flood and transformers explode, marveling at SoHo going dark—to shock us back to standing in awe of nature’s grandeur, as our ancestors did. But I doubt our current awe will last very long, as waters recede and power is restored. I can’t imagine much art coming out of it.”
Because, of course, we always end up looking away.
It’s the inevitable shift after a storm.
One of the reasons I wrote Storm Blown in the first place was because I was interested in that dynamic—about how we’re all swept up in the fear and excitement when hurricanes are distant ideas swirling in the Atlantic but tend to distance ourselves (if we’re able to) right after they hit—so I was excited when I came across a quote by Immanuel Kant about how the mind is both attracted and repelled by the boundless power of the sublime. That attraction and repulsion is exactly I’d been thinking about all week… and, bonus points: I also found an old essay he wrote about earthquakes!
It’s called “On the Causes of Earthquakes on the Occasion of the Calamity that befell the Western Countries of Europe towards the end of last year” (1756).
It starts out like this, but in German:
“We dwell peacefully on ground whose foundations are shaken from time to time. Without concern, we build over cavities whose supports sometimes sway and threaten to collapse. Unperturbed by the fate that is perhaps not [so] distant from us, we give way to pity rather than fear when we observe the devastation caused in neighboring places by the destruction lying hidden beneath our feet...”
It's basically a call for science over fear and a “blind submission to fate”—mixed with some practical urban planning suggestions.
There was a concern that a lot of Kant’s contemporaries thought the earthquake was some kind of “divine vengeance” (that’s from an Editor’s Note) so way back in the 18th century, he was writing these essays that essentially said, “hey, there are reasons this kind of stuff happens and it’s probably going to affect all of us, so… we don’t have to be scared, but we shouldn’t just look away or accept this as something we don’t have any control over—we should probably just figure out why it’s happening and make some plans going forward.”
Which feels… strangely familiar.
But this was 266 years ago!
That earthquake that Kant was writing about was the Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and it also makes a special appearance in Voltaire’s novel Candide.
I remember reading Candide back in high school, mainly because one of the main characters has a catch phrase! “This is the best of all possible worlds” is what Professor Pangloss said after every misstep and shipwreck and execution (a lot of bad stuff happened in Candide, that was the joke)—but Voltaire wasn’t being cynical when he satirized the professor’s optimism. The idea was that we have to have some agency in our lives and not just accept that all of the disasters that come our way are somehow inevitable. Which sounds a lot like what Kant was saying, actually.
It’s almost like those Enlightenment thinkers were on to something!
The way Voltaire puts it is “we must cultivate our garden.”
Reading about Candide in the context of the climate crisis and the sublime—where we’re always so captivated by storms or floods or wildfires until we suddenly aren’t (for those of us who have the luxury of stepping away when we’re overwhelmed by “nature’s grandeur”)—that feels like it should be our new global mantra, because this might not be the best of all possible worlds…
But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be!
#CultivateOurGardens2022
If you’re interested, here’s Voltaire’s description of the Great Lisbon Earthquake:
“As soon as they had recovered from their surprise and fatigue they walked towards Lisbon; with what little money they had left they thought to save themselves from starving after having escaped drowning. Scarcely had they ceased to lament the loss of their benefactor and set foot in the city, when they perceived that the earth trembled under their feet, and the sea, swelling and foaming in the harbor, was dashing in pieces the vessels that were riding at anchor. Large sheets of flames and cinders covered the streets and public places; the houses tottered, and were tumbled topsy-turvy even to their foundations, which were themselves destroyed, and thirty thousand inhabitants of both sexes, young and old, were buried beneath the ruins… The next day, in searching among the ruins, they found some eatables with which they repaired their exhausted strength. After this they assisted the inhabitants in relieving the distressed and wounded. Some, whom they had humanely assisted, gave them as good a dinner as could be expected under such terrible circumstances. The repast, indeed, was mournful, and the company moistened their bread with their tears...”
I’ve been having my “Writing Youth Literature” class put together a submission packet for the Middle Grade and Young Adult Novels they’re writing.
Lots of authors stress out about their “query letters,” which are the emails you write when you’re trying to sign with a literary agent (so far we’ve had two literary agents visit the class—THANK YOU Rachel Ekstrom Courage and Danielle Chiotti)!
So if that’s you and you’ve read this far—through all that sublime stuff and everything—here's my double agent-endorsed guide to writing a query letter.
Things have been getting spooky at our Little Free Library!
I added a bunch of Halloween books, hung our little fall wreath from the eaves, and am happy to report that the entire neighborhood is getting in the spirit:
I think that’s all I have space for now. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who’s reaching out about school visits, and downloading my novel studies and activity sheets, and continuing to support Storm Blown and Snow Struck!
Your friend,
