Dispatches: The olfactory inspires

Sniffing my way through a process journal

All the delicious smells…

I’ve been working on a new project for the last few months. I mean, I’ve been working on an old project for the last few months. A project so old it feels as though it was practically birthed alongside me. Of course, I’d killed it years ago. Even before we moved to Oaxaca, I’d decided that the creative dreams I had nurtured when I had obsessed over its intricacies, its story, its characters, its maps, its music, could no longer fit inside my present creative landscape. I’d grown beyond it, I told myself, and so with regret I had laid it to rest in the that graveyard of stillborn stories. It weighed the heaviest among them, of course. Not many stillborn stories have unfinished drafts of 70,000 words and three notebooks filled with intricate character notes and worldbuilding details. Not for all of them can I recall the smell of the characters’ wedding night, the play of torchlight on the canals. It was a story of Mexico, before I’d ever learned Spanish or Nahuatl or upended my life to immigrate here. I didn’t know much about the country but what I’d read filtered through English translation and imperialism (so, truly, not much) but even so my feeling of connection, of something pulling me closer increased with every book. I researched for years before I dared write a word of this beloved project. By the time I finished the first 70,000 words I knew that I couldn’t possibly do justice to the ambition in my heart. So decided to move to Mexico and learn Spanish. A few months in Mexico and that had turned into geting a Master’s degree. By the time I finished my Master’s degree, I felt as though I had learned too much to ever use that knowledge in a novel. I formally abandoned the project. 

I thanked it for its service—it was most responsible for getting me to Mexico, after all—and I left it in the folder of unfinished things. Some of the ideas I had were repurposed into other projects, but oddly enough, most of it stayed intact. Sleeping, you might say, but no dead giant in the earth. 

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Sometimes when I love things too much, I try to avoid them. My safe place is a closet cleaned six months ago, musty with unopened boxes and heavy winter coats. I bury my head in packing foam and feel my cells dissolving into the spaces between the mechanically raised bumps. I press my hands into their wide black expanse and feel them compress and release, compress and release. Near me an air conditioning vent releases chemically cooled air. These smells of purely human invention calm me, mechanize me, make my body another thing, something created and not born, something frozen and not home. If I could just stay there, I would never have to die, and I would never have to be. 

But I decided a long time ago that I had no intention of letting him kill me. 

So what did the world smell like? What olfactory cues made me sure I couldn’t escape my metabolizing human meat-sack? My sour armpits stress-sweating into downy-scented clothes, my best friends and my sister all groaning and handing me a stick of deodorant for a touch-up before we go onstage for our big music day performance. Too late—everything has to get washed. Before I put it on, the sequined shirt smelled like my mom’s perfume, but not her body. Then the smells of food afterward, tomato and cheese and heavy umami yeast of Vace’s pizza, which never fails us, clotting the throat before we take a bite. The streets smell of pollen and green leaves and exhaust from the buses trundling up and down Connecticut Avenue. My best friend’s house smells like toasted flour and caramelized sugar, floral shampoos and a dozen curtains six months-washed, like freshly-vacuumed carpets and the burnished fur of her giant german shepherd. 

Oh, I loved it, even then. Go back further. My sister and I running in the backyard, playing spies. The fresh-cut grass. The surprise watermelon growing fat on the summer rains. The thousands of tadpoles swimming big-headed in the man-made ponds. We would scoop them out and watch them swim in our buckets, then dump them back in. Earth and rain. Pine resin from the trees that bordered our lawn. That sweet freedom that we snatched at because we knew it would be snatched back. How soon again before I needed that closet? How soon again before I needed those sterile smells of the never-lived? 

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I’ve always been a scent-forward sort of person, but for the last few months, my nose has dominated my perceptions again. It started with this burgeoning memory of the packing foam, so strong my mouth pooled with saliva at the thought of my nose buried in its black expanse, crushing its secrets beneath my nostrils, subordinating my being entirely to its fine chemical substrate. Then Isma ordered a foam-based camera case and I realized that I was going to need to do a lot of work very quickly on my need to anchor myself in stasis and and un-death or I was in danger of doing significant damage to my lungs. I started noticing when I am overwhelmed with my need to rip open the camera case and stick my nose inside. It happens when I’m writing, sometimes. I touch something a little too close to a trip-hammer nerve and my shame comes barreling out of the cave where it likes to marinate its slime-covered tentacles and rather than face that monster down again today, I turn for the nearest thing that I can forget myself in.

Instead I hunt for other good smells. I have some essential oils that do in a pinch: vetiver, a balm of woods and grass and earth; cedar, sharp and earthy and red. I’ve flung dried rosemary all over my closet. But now that I’m paying attention, I appreciate so many more smells, the passing smells that roll over the mountain with the breeze and vanish with your inhale. Grasses and flowers crushed underfoot, smells inexplicable brought up from one hill over and swirled about me before traveling somewhere new. I don’t know what these smells are, but I accept them like I accept the similarly displaced sounds of the cerro. Something that I cannot explain, but that is gift that I can appreciate if I have the nose or the ears to perceive it. If I breathe enough, if I am quiet enough, my frantic desperation for the un-aliveness of VOCs diminishes and I become, in my quiet way, enough. Just like my dogs are enough, as they smell a hundred thousand more detailed flavors than I can, the lucky bastards. Just like every blade of grass is enough, and the wind is enough.

Then I can go back to my writing and the shame monster isn’t so terrible at all. She doesn’t even look like a monster, really. Someone just told her she was. 

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Which might be how I ended up coming back to this novel, my sleeping giant. Fair warning: some hard-headed industry analysis follows. I love YA but the market is so different from what it was when The Summer Prince came out I might as well be publishing on a different planet. The Library of Broken Worlds hasn’t come close to finding its audience, and I’m afraid that it quite simply can’t given the way the ecosystem works right now. I have so many more ideas for Freida’s world, but in the meantime, I need to live and feed my dogs and hopefully enjoy some commercial success with one of my novels one of these days. (I don’t ask for much! I don’t need to go on world tours or hit the top of bestseller lists or do the morning shows or whatever else denotes super-stardom these days. But I would like to feel…solid, one time, with a book. Believe me, I’m not modest, I know my work is solid—at least, I know that my last few books are as good as I was capable of making them. But that internal joy has never really translated into commercial joy for me, and…I’m forty-one. I wouldn’t mind it.) So when I was having a chat with my literary agent about where we go from here, she suggested that I think about an idea that’s simple enough to explain in one sentence but has enough depth that I can go all the complicated places that are a hallmark of my writing. 

I was going through every book idea I’d ever had, including the highly complex alternate early 20^th century Mexico novel I’d been working on, and next thing I knew I fixated on my old, discarded Mexico novel. “Mexico at the time of conquest” it said.  And I heard the flutes and saw the lights splash on dark water during the rainy season, only this time I could smell it too, because I’d lived there for years: petrichor and stone, algae and copal, something foul and something sweet. Their laughter. 

My heart squeezed. I’d never forgotten these characters. I just didn’t know what to do with them. What would make their story more commercial? What would give me enough to work with them for years? I had thought to ignore the conquista, but ten years in Mexico had proved to me the futility of the idea. Better that I write about the conquista, but about even more of them, nested conquistas that questioned every possible level at which one can be and be exploited by an imperialist. And then I jotted down, half in jest, “at this rate, they might as well get invaded by aliens.”

And that, dear readers, is exactly what I did. 

So far? No tentacles in sight.

Thank you so much for reading A Stranger Comes Home. Apologies for getting this out so late. I’ve been very sick for the last week and wasn’t able to write any faster. I’m still not feeling well, and while I’m (verrrry) slowly getting better, this Thursday’s might be late as well. If you are looking for the audio edition, that’s also fallen victim to my illness. I will try to catch up on everything in the next two weeks, health willing.