Cardio, Caffeine, and my very own Chapbook
A few months ago, on a blistering hot June day that predicted the infernal summer to come, I went on a late afternoon frustration walk to Little Flower Cafe.
These so-called frustration walks – picture a scowling woman speed-walking while listening to 120 BPM hip-hop – have become a frequent fixture in my life. They’re a work-from-home habit I wish I could attribute to James Clear or even Julia Cameron, but, realistically, I probably got the idea from TikTok. The goal, typically, is to come down and chill out, trading my amped up advertising energy for the comparatively placid persona I aim to cultivate around my children. Some days I do it, returning home satisfied and breezy, ready to indulge a million bedtime requests. Some days I don’t, and I instead find myself saying things like “If you aren’t brushing your teeth by the time I count to ten…”
But on that particular June day, the frustration I wanted to exorcise wasn’t corporate, it was creative. The writing wasn’t coming easily. My pitches weren’t being accepted. I’d submitted some of my writing to Bottlecap, a small press in California that had recently published a brilliant chapbook by an acquaintance of mine, but I hadn’t heard back. Crickets.
And then, as I was angrily sucking back an iced cardamon latte – there’s a reason I walk 25 minutes to Little Flower in Astoria instead of 10 to Starbucks on the island – the thing that never happens happened. I got an email from Craig, the editor at Bottlecap, saying he wanted to publish my chapbook.
Yes, the ‘sad woman gets a perfectly timed email’ moment. It happened to me and it did, indeed, feel cinematic.
My resulting chapbook – AKA a very short book - is called Cleave in Two. It’s about the intersection of work and life, and I chose the title in homage to the emotional complexity of being both a person and a worker in the world, often simultaneously. Cleave is a contranym – one of those rare and fascinating words that means two different, and opposite, things. Just as it can mean ‘stick together,’ it can also mean ‘split apart.’ I’ve pasted the full description of the book below, and it’s available to buy here.
The thrill of publication – of being able to hold a slim volume of something I’ve written in my hands – hasn’t, of course, eliminated the need for frustration walks. As Amy Poehler once wrote, “It doesn't matter how much you get; you are left wanting more. Success is filled with MSG.” So I’m back, as always, on my moody bullshit – AirPods in, body angled into the still-steamy September wind, moving at a New York City clip towards the nearest cute cafe, hoping that some combination of the cardio and caffeine will cure me. Waiting for the next lightning-in-a-bottle email.
—
Cleave in Two
There’s a Toni Morrison line, made no less powerful by the fact that it’s been quoted a million times by a million people in a million places: You are not the work you do; you are the person you are. And yet, the act of divorcing the two – of writing about life like work doesn’t exist, and not writing about work, lest you bore people to tears – bears little resemblance to how many of us actually live. For most people, life is a murky, maddening, and complicated combination of what we do for love and what we do for money.
Cleave in Two is a series of scenes and reflections about the personal, the professional and the intersection of the two. In it, the author paints a portrait of a personal life rich with meaning and a professional life as a brand strategist in which she assesses and invents meaning for her corporate clients. At home, she falls in love, grieves, tries to make art, and devotes herself to her children. At work, her parallel devotion is to questions like “If this hot sauce was a person, what kind of person would it be?” and “Does this beer brand have a responsibility to be an ally?