LEAVING LETTERS: "I took a bus..."
postcards from readers
I took a bus to Whangarei and sailed away.
—Elisabeth Eaves
Leave it to Elisabeth Eaves to bring travel into the mix for The Leaving Season Postcard Project. For fans of Eaves, this postcard will function like a kind of satisfying Easter Egg, almost like a real postcard from her rolling stone past, which she details in her gorgeous book Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents. She really did take a bus across New Zealand, really did sail away from her fiancé, joining a husband and wife on their way to Tonga, nearly dying in a storm on the way. If you haven’t read the book yet, add it to your list, but I warn you: it will inspire you to scroll for one-way tickets in the middle of the night.
This is why my co-editor Margot Kahn and I were so excited when Eaves agreed to write for our home anthology, This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, a few years ago. One of the trickiest parts of curating an anthology is collecting different enough takes on your theme, and we knew Eaves would approach the idea of home in a way no other writer could. The result was luminous. In “Inheritance,” an essay I still can’t read without crying to this day, she renders the sleepy isolation of the Baja Peninsula in turquoise and pink majesty. Landscape, under her hand, pulses with life.
As I tucked one of my Leaving Season Postcard Project cards into Eaves’ hands during AWP in Kansas City this past spring, she told me about her new book. I’ve only known her as a nonfiction writer, so I was surprised when I realized she was describing a novel. We’d talked travel and food and writing a year earlier over a delicious meal of cured seafood and olives at JarrBar in Seattle, but I couldn’t remember her mentioning fiction writing. I am always full of awe and envy when a favorite nonfiction writer defects in this way.
The result, as expected, is a starred review from Publishers Weekly along with lots of other heaped-on praise for The Outlier, her sexy new thriller that just published last week (happy pub day!!). You can read an excerpt here and check out her events page to see her on book tour.
“He sat on the barstool facing me now, and I noticed the way his thighs strained against the fabric of his trousers. I imagined putting my hand on his knee. That would be premature, but it was titillating to think about. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs, forcing him to glance down.” —The Outlier, by Elisabeth Eaves
(I told you! Sexy!)
Here’s the thing: Many of the postcards I highlight here focus on the emotional part of leaving. Much of my own book, The Leaving Season, does this, and the whole reason I wanted the present participle (-ing) to be represented in the title is because I thought it was important to nod to the never-ending aspect, the always-ongoing journey of leaving.
But every leaving ultimately boils down to a fiction writer’s sense of how to get a character from point A to point B. I appreciate that Eaves focused on the action of leaving in her postcard. The how, the physical manifestation. She took a bus and got on a boat.
And she didn’t look back, even when the waves threatened to capsize her.
WHAT I’M READING:
On My Nightstand: Guilty Creatures: Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida by Mikita Brottman. I wrote about this book for The New York Times Book Review (in print this weekend, in case you still have the paper hanging around!) and was very excited to have the opportunity to write the phrase “the two young couples had let loose in a kind of fundamentalist rumspringa” for the paper of record.
On Substack: I started this morning with Lyz Lenz’s powerful essay “Why Does JD Vance Hate Single Women?” on Men Yell At Me. One of my (many) favorite quotes: “Free women are destabilizing. Single women, single mothers, their existence, their radical happiness — it upsets the whole enterprise. Women and love are the infrastructure of this exploitative culture. You begin to examine love and partnership, question it, reject it, the entire system becomes weak.”
The Leaving Season Postcard Project was born out of my love for postcards and a suspicion that we are all leaving things, all the time. If you’d like to send me a postcard, please check out this link for instructions.
Want to be part of The Leaving Season Postcard Project? Or use the postcards in your classroom or bookclub? Send me a note!
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Buy The Leaving Season here, Welcome to Shirley here, Wanting: Women Writing About Desire here, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home here.
