even Mary Oliver was grumpy sometimes

Hi! You’re here! How are you? I am having a wild time this week and my head is in a hundred different places. What I really want to do is sit on the floor and think about all the people I love. And also the moon. You know the feeling.

I’ve been having a hard time concentrating on reading the last few weeks, a sad phenomenon we in the biz call a “slump.” A true and profound example of onomatopoeia. I’m just antsy. I’m distracted. My mind is a billion bees and they are all mad at me.

But, in the middle of this slump I did read something truly extraordinary, and I want to tell you about it.

First, a word on my brilliant friend

Laura Sackton

. Do you read her newsletter? It comes out every Wednesday just like mine and honestly Laura’s work is a big reason I ever felt brave enough to start my own newsletter in the first place. She is wise and tender and a reader and thinker I deeply admire. Plus her dog is an absolute knock out. Go subscribe to

Books & Bakes

you will not be sorry.

Laura posted on her instagram that she was listening to an audiobook called Wild & Precious: A Celebration of Mary Oliver. When I tell you I sprinted to Libby to put a hold on this audiobook. I run for Mary Oliver! I brake for Mary Oliver! You get it.

This wondrous book is an audiobook original and it features interviews with Mary’s friends and neighbors in Provincetown, her students at Bennington College, some of my favorite writers in the world like Ross Gay and Carmen Maria Machado, and more, all talking about what Mary’s work means to them. I loved it. I LOVE IT.

Like so, so many others, there have been moments in my life where it has felt like a Mary Oliver poem is what keeps my feet on the ground. I have repeated lines of her poems in my head like incantations. I have written them on little scraps of paper and carried them around in my pocket.

Three of my favorite moments from this glorious book:

• Ross Gay read a Mary Oliver poem about beans and then he was like “actually I have beans in my pocket right now -Alabama butter beans!” And then he laughed and laughed and laughed.

• There is a whole section on dogs and Mary’s dogs and her relationships with them and I won’t spoil anything except to say I ended up on the kitchen floor at the end of it. Carmen Maria Machado told a story I will never forget. And someone, I can’t remember who, said something I can’t stop thinking about in regards to Mary’s beloved dog Percy - What if Percy was Mary Oliver’s Mary Oliver?

• Finally, Samin Nosrat, described the moment she finally got to meet her hero, Mary Oliver, in person. She and a friend were tasked with giving Mary a ride back to her hotel after a reading in which she received a rock star welcome from a crowd of hundreds. Samin and her friend had to wait until Mary had chain smoked a couple cigarettes before they could get in the car and go home. And Mary kind of “griped” all the way home. And you know what? I might love this the most.

Mary Oliver wrote words that continue to save lives in the most literal sense. And she had problems and grumblings and cravings and addictions like all the rest of us. As Samin Nosrat says in the book, we like to think of Mary Oliver as this serene sort of magical forest creature, but she was very much alive in pain and hurt and wonder like all the rest of us.

It’s our great luck that she paid such close attention to this beautiful, horrible world, and that she wrote some of it down.

For our honeymoon in October 2021, Rebecca and I made a little Mary Oliver inspired sojourn to Provincetown.

At Black Water Pond

Rebecca mapped out different places Mary names in her poems and we visited as many as we could. It was one of the happiest times of my whole little life.

We brought Yaya along, obviously. Don’t tell Dunkin - he wasn’t even born yet!

My Mary Oliver.

Anyway, all of this was a long way of saying that if you like Mary Oliver or poetry or plants or dogs or the way the sky looks sometimes, this book might be for you.

And if you are struggling to see the good in any of it these days (honestly, same), just remember that Mary Oliver had a smoking habit and a tendency toward grumpiness so honestly you are doing just fine.

Oh and guess what?!! You don’t have to be good.

I love you.

Love,

Rosamond