Dear summer,
Please stay.
It's Labor Day while I write you. All over the land, there are still coolers stocked with ice, beach towels drying on railings, and ripe tomatoes falling off the vines. My eyes are smarting, burning, and tearing from the sunscreen I applied to my face this morning. Crickets serenade me through my open windows. It's still warm enough that I don't mind my coffee going cold while I figure out what I want to say.
I hope I'll get outside in the sunshine, but I can already feel equally powerful forces pulling me forward. This practice that's always here for me: Writing.
This last weekend, I had one foot in the loose, unstructured pace of summer — Friday night I said yes to a spontaneous invitation to an outdoor concert and sleepover with my second cousin Tammi, and when Sheryl Crow (she opened for Tedeschi Trucks) asked, "Whoever said freedom was free?" the question resonated with me.
Getting freer has cost me money, relationships, and work; And, I've never been happier or more me. I have writing to thank for that, largely. And the friends and family who've stuck by me while I've grown.
Saturday, I danced barefoot in the grass at my cousin Damien's 50th.
And then Sunday, much to my surprise, I declined an offer to go to the beach, which meant I was going to miss the last day of a summer staple — hangin' at the beach with one of my best friends, Rachel, which often looks like this:
Cheers!
I could feel it, my soul already stepping into the deep September light, which is slant, as Emily Dickinson would have it: a little more serious and singing with the lure of new beginnings, my boys' return to school, and me putting my butt in the seat and finishing my own book.
The business-owner-mom anxiety hit hard as I hurriedly adjusted my focus to fall. The birthday package I need to shuffle off to Buffalo, the chinos and white shirts my youngest needs me to get and iron, the fridge I need to stock for the week. The class I get to try to fill by Thursday. Code-switching isn't always as easy or as cool as it sounds.
Meanwhile, I reflect on the very first version of my love letter to summer — the original draft.
Dear Summer, it's always been you.
Charming, perhaps with an air of flattery. Not risking anything, though. No skin in the game.
So this summer, I revised it. Now that I accept and continue to heal my abandonment issues and try to be more vulnerable, less attached, I added two words: please stay. (That's the line I opened this letter with — now you know where it came from.) Knowing full well summer will leave me anyway. That isn't the point. We can still play full out. We can still leave each other better than we were before.
Maybe vestiges of the guarded me remain. Maybe that's what saying no to the beach yesterday was really about: me leaving before I’m left. This summer was the epitome of short and bittersweet loves. So much happened I never-ever want to forget: My youngest's graduation and our trip to Maryland, the pool we booked on Swimply…our lazy afternoon lounge in it. The smell of sunscreen and ripe mangoes. My oldest son coming home from college and buying and cooking me fish à la Fjord, unprompted. My stay at Scilla's pondhouse. The way her friend Amber became my friend. Getting rejected by the NYTimes—on my birthday. Consequently sharing said piece with my summer session of Write Your Life to show them what great readers and editors they’d become. Realizing I was trying to do too much (mind you, a writer friend—thanks Ali—had told me this before; I wasn’t ready to hear it) and, at the same time, hadn't revealed enough of what was truly important. The consequent vulnerability hangover. My stay at Southampton Writers Conference. The way you could hear a pin drop when I read the opening to the book I’ve been determined to finish for too long (who's judging? who's counting?) at open mic night. The surprise I felt that the bit I read, I’d worked and reworked so often I didn’t think it was possible, I’d be flooded with raw, genuine emotion until there it was, coming up from my heart with no chance of getting stuck in my throat because I was reading to a live crowd. The way my voice will probably never crack again the way it did then. The way, when I finished, the MC yelled out, "Can anybody get this woman a book deal?" The respect I got afterward. It wasn’t a perfect performance; that’s what made it so powerful. The sense of community and friendship I felt there.
And the hollow afterward. Maybe it was fear or procrastination; maybe it was wanting to share the joy of this long-awaited expansion with a partner; maybe it was the ever-human desire to love and be loved. I broke my year of hermitage by dipping my toe back into the dating pool. My call was well written, clear, and specific — in fact, I originally drafted it as a hundred-word entry for The Cut's personals column, in the old-fashioned classified-ad style. I fancied the concept as retro and vintage; the writing challenge real, so I wrote the following, determined to send it until I read their privacy policy and thought better of it. So instead, threw it up on an app promising to be different from the others, and now I’m throwing it up here because this season is about me owning all of me in all my human vulnerability:
Exquisitely sensitive native New Yorker living in Westchester (52 F) seeks mature, emotionally intelligent (Taurus, Scorpio, Pisces, Capricorn) man. Loves sunshine, good books, beaches, great conversation, laughter, an unhurried pace, and if you're a dog lover, you know what I mean when I say, a full butt wag ;) Would like to retire my Hella-Tuff armor and co-create the second half of life with inspiration and grace. Need presence, time, touch, lots of water, and an empathetic partner who's all in. You are kind, generous, protective, and wholeheartedly believe — no matter what you've been through — that big love is real, possible, and coming soon to a theater near you. Oh, yeah, and that you deserve it, too.
To my surprise, in two instances, there were a third and fourth callback. Ultimately, neither landed the part, which is a blessing for all parties concerned because, truth be told, they were fine actors. They’ll be perfect in an entirely different role than the one I’d described in my call. I’m so grateful that my powers of discernment, my willingness to stand for what I want, and some hard truths I’ve had to accept about me are stronger than ever. Thanks again, writing!
All of it — the wins, the losses, the leaving — became the compost for one more rewrite and this third revision of my letter to Summer.
Dear Summer, it's always been you. And it’s always been me too. I finally realize what your leaving has been trying to teach me all along: Soft sunrise palettes, roses as big as my head and fragrant as England, bare-skin-in-hot-sun-giving toasted coconut notes, all the salty watermelon, fierce orange sunsets, fireworks, dancing so hard, barefoot, on my birthday I broke my toe, those slow kisses replete with faces in hands, the clear night pocked with stars, the misty one’s fog making a room around us; they all live in me, all year round, always. My skin is dewy with the proof of it.
I'd ask you to stay summer, but I'd be a fool.
Write your life, folks, you'll never regret it. At J. Anderson's, we wrapped summer session last week. And this Thursday, Write Your Life Like a Page Turner returns to Anderson's Bookshop — our third session, and if the last two are any indication, this one is going to surprise you, too.
Here's what I mean. My students are so thrilled with it, so satisfied with what's happening, that most of them are in for a third go. And a few weeks ago, the brilliantly talented photographer Jane Sikorski (www.janesikorskiphotography.com) came in to take photos.
After the shoot, Jane told me she hadn't expected my teaching to feel so therapeutic—and I realized I should say so more often. This isn't a class where you learn techniques for good writing and go home unchanged. You heal. You grow. You embrace the creativity that’s your birthright. Sometimes, I joke that I'm not a therapist, "but I play one on TV," and I realize that joke doesn’t serve you or me.
I haven't wanted to take the therapeutic aspect lightly. I have the utmost respect for certified therapists — I've probably invested more in my own therapy than anything else — and I encourage my students and memoir writers to simultaneously be in therapy if they're excavating hard things. And I do think I need to come more front and center with the therapeutic aspects of my work.
That's the whole premise of The Clementina Collective, where no one writes alone. We figure it out together — the hard bits, the ones you're not sure you should write, or if anyone will care if you do — and it turns out that's not just good pedagogy; it's good for you.
📖 SAVE YOUR SEAT — Write Your Life
What: A 6-week course in craft and voice — structure, tension, scene, and the deeper work of writing without apology
When: Thursdays, 11:00 AM–12:30 PM, starting Thu 9/10 and running through October 15th. Mark your calendar to block the 15th for at least a double session–it’s sharing day!
Where: J. Anderson's Bookshop, Larchmont
Investment: $375
Invite a friend: This one fills fast—so get your butt in a seat, or tag someone who's been sitting on a story you know needs to come out.
Whether you've got a manuscript you've been working on for a decade or you've never let anyone read a sentence you've written, I created this course for you. We'll work on craft — structure, tension, scene, the stuff that turns "here's what happened to me" into something a reader can't put down — and we'll also do the less visible work: my inquiries require self-reflection; with my support, you'll stop apologizing for your own story, stop apologizing for yourself. Take up space on the page, in the room at Anderson's, and in your life.
See you Thursday. I can't wait.
Questions? Email me at clementina@clementinacollective.com.