Author: Becca Connors

This is the summer interlude. A check-in with a promise. Although I doubt any of you are waiting with bated breath for my next missive, I promised myself that I would make this a more regular occurrence.

It’s summer and we’re in a big transition phase here. Liv has graduated 5th grade and is moving to middle school. We are emerging slowly from the pandemic and still keeping an eye on those variants and the vaccination rate. I’m still in the process of mourning and grieving and processing.

I’m still in the process of mourning and grieving and processing. My sense is that the grueling grind of capitalism will not let us pause and reflect and take stock. This has to happen individually between meetings or while driving your kid to and from school. We don’t know how to mourn collectively in a healthy way. After 9/11, we had these patriotic overblown events where we dive deep into the myth of our exceptionalism. More flags, more military bands, more words like freedoms, and very little reckoning. Of course, this is the plan because it feeds into our notions of power and entitlement. And if we really did reflect, we might see the ways our country is in the wrong.

Dear Friends,

Our innate desire to see things get better is being challenged daily. Every time I get myself stabilized, sense that I might be moving forward towards something, I get upset by the news. Even with the joy of a new administration, so much damage has been done and it’s hard to see a way through it.

I gain ground in this pandemic and then lose it. Doesn’t it always feel like a swirl of emotion — of joy and despair delivered together in one big wallop?

Dear Friends, I’m not really sure what to do with myself these days. These dog days of summer. These unbearably boring and crisis-filled days when we are forever in a swirl of refuse. On one hand, it’s mind-numbingly boring, and on the other, there’s people being shot because they ask someone to wear a mask.

I’m stuck in my house and blessed to be able to be stuck in my house.

I realize this is a double edged sword of blessings. I am privileged enough to remain at home and therefore feel it is my responsibility to CONTINUE to stay home. Yet by staying home, I am dealing with confinement in a small apartment and the memory loss that comes with this monotonous routine. 

When one graduates from a MFA program, one can be lucky enough to receive a Becca Cento:

Here’s the thing — I was digging into my past online, via livejournal. Before social media, before we livestreamed ourselves putting on makeup, before we were texting, there was livejournal. As a writer, this form of daily writing allowed me to connect with others, folks who I would come to know very well without ever meeting them face-to-face. I read about deaths and births and breakups and looked at wedding pictures.