Introducing: REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang 🌱

a new project / a new beginning

I am here to announce a new experiment for this newsletter. Instead of The Unexpected Shape Newsletter, this newsletter will now be called REASONS FOR LIVING with Esmé Weijun Wang.

The premise behind REASONS FOR LIVING is this: a newsletter featuring a guest essay from someone I admire that speaks to the title, both big and small, plus poetry, art, links, and resources that remind us all of why we keep going, both big and small. 10% of proceeds from each newsletter go to the charitable organization of the guest writer’s choice*. There is a paid option and a free option for subscribers; paid subscribers get access to a monthly Fireside Chat where we gather and discuss a topic that has to do with creativity and heart-work, plus two extra newsletters that are personal essays from me.

Because of the nature of the material, all standard REASONS FOR LIVING, which will, at least for now, come out every other week, will be free to everyone.

I already have a number of brilliant writers and thinkers—friends who have signed on to contribute to the newsletter—including your favorite poets, novelists, artists, and so forth. I’m so excited for you to be able to read their thoughts in future editions. As I said from the beginning, this is an experiment. We shall see how it goes, and I reserve the right to change anything about this experiment.

Also: to celebrate the debut of REASONS FOR LIVING, if you subscribe for a year this week, you will receive 20% off of the newsletter for one year.

Thank you for being here, friend.

*I hold the right to decline a chosen organization and will discuss this with the guest writer if this should become an issue.

my pack, my sweethearts

Because this is the first edition of REASONS FOR LIVING, I thought it only fitting that I be the first person to write the guest essay. I hope that over time, people will feel free to write all kinds of cartwheeling and freewheeling essays that are even only tangentially related to the title of this newsletter.

Dear Reader,

There have been a few times in my life when I thought that I would really, truly die. What comforts me is that each time this happened, I was able to feel an overwhelming sense of… calm. Whether I was inextricably unable to move in a wheelchair rushing through Customs in San Francisco Airport after an overseas flight or so otherwise unwell that I was sure Death would soon behead me with its scythe, I felt a quiet calm cloak me, and I thought: I have done all right with my life. If it ends now, I have done all right.

When I think of reasons for living, I think of that bland, calm feeling. After Our Cancer Year last year, death was consistently on my mind.  More clearly, memento mori, the Latin phrase: remember that you will die. Memento mori is the trope of artwork, often portrayed with skulls and rotting fruit, designed to help us remember our mortality and to keep us aware of the ever-present fragility of human life. Last year, when a family member was frustrated with my reluctance to do one thing or another for C’s benefit, they said to me: “We’re on borrowed time.” I was at first furious at them for not only being impatient with me during an incredibly stressful time, but also for reminding me that the person that I loved most in the world had bone marrow cancer and could be ripped away from me. Could be gone before I knew it. Poof, the magician has made the white dove disappear: the most beautiful, fluttering thing in the world. I was able to remember this without any help; to have someone remind me aloud felt like a stab to the chest.

These days, I feel much less preoccupied with my own death than preoccupied with the deaths of my loved ones, particularly C and our dog Daphne. When I entered the ER with a dangerously low blood oxygen level last week in the midst of my first bout of COVID, I was not afraid, but noted that C was driving more wildly than usual (note: he is the safest driver I know, even under such circumstances). I turned out to be fine, but I was never afraid. ER visits brought on by my own ailments for me are usually more annoying than anything else. ER visits brought on by something wrong with C, or even a non-emergency vet appointment for Daphne, have me on high alert.

I was recently filled with anxiety one night about the form of memento mori that feels everpresent these days: remember that everyone you love will die. And the thing that held me in place, that prevented me from levitating with fear, was to think: One day at a time. C and Daphne are here. They are still here. I do not have to think about tomorrow, or the day after that, or the month after that. I am thinking about right now. I only have to take it one day at a time.

You've signed up for writing classes before. 

Why? Because you care a lot about your writing—both practicing the craft and learning how to get better at it. With a dream of publishing terrific personal nonfiction in your own Substack, in top-tier journals and magazines, and/or in the form of bestselling books, you've diligently taken classes from well-known writers through well-respected literary organizations. 

But... the way you've been going about it feels, well, weird. Even confusing.

What if I told you that the problem is that nothing fits together?

When you take a lot of different classes from a lot of different sources, you're not getting a comprehensive view of the writing process. Instead of starting first with a holistic view and then leaving to take one-off classes with writers you admire, what you're doing is grabbing classes here and there, which leaves you more confused and lost than you were before.

You're one of the many brave writers living with limitations, who wants to write in spite of your circumstances.

And I want to let you know that we have a place for you, in our online memoir/personal nonfiction writing school.

The Unexpected Shape Writing Academy features the following astounding things

• a full curriculum

• access to our private Skool community

• an amazing library of guest lecturers who are some of our foremost experts on the topic

• monthly milestones (with themes to keep you on track)

• weekly Zoom co-working sessions

• monthly group coaching calls

• The Milestones Club with accountability check-ins.

The Academy is $67/month. Learn more about the Academy and sign up today.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Object Lesson: Still Life with Fruit on a Ledge by Cornelis de Heem

The themes of this newsletter edition are about the end of things and how they remind us of what we will do today, knowing that things will end. In what ways does it anchor you in the world to know that we all must die?

Answer this in your journal; answer this in the comments. I would love to hear your thoughts.

I paint all Bird of the Days. One random commenter will be selected to receive the one-of-a-kind Bird of the Day postcard in the mail.