Monday, January 18, 2010

In honor of MLK Jr., This:

"Everybody can be great. Because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. . .You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love." --MLK Jr.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey there, Just found your blog by googling "me night nurse never want to plant de corn" and was reading through some of your posts. Why did you stop writing? I know it has been a while since you've written here, I hope this comment gets back to you. Are you working on any projects currently or can you give an update to what you have been doing?

Susanna Williams said...

Hello Anonymous,

Thank you for taking the time to read the blog and ask me for an update. I'm flattered that you are interested in reading my writing. I’m delighted that there is another person out there who is googling “me night nurse never want to plant de corn.”

I never intended to quit writing the blog. It just tapered off like these things do. It seems like all of my favorite blogs no longer exist. Like this one, there is one final post and no notice of why it has stopped.

Immediately after this post, I moved to Bogota, Colombia with my then-boyfriend for three months. The plan was to find a job teaching English and stay, but we decided instead to use our leftover money to travel in Colombia and then head back to Big Sur for the summer. We both worked in a restaurant there, and eventually I ended up teaching both high school English at a charter school and intro writing classes at a community college. I applied to grad school that fall, and the next year we moved to St. Louis where we lived for the next six years while I finished my PhD in English at Wash U. During that time, we got married and had a baby. I specialized in British Literature between 1880 and 1945, and I wrote my dissertation on the weird way that writing from the colonial center of Britain was surprisingly and suspiciously ahead of its time in its environmentalism. It was hard, and I didn’t like St. Louis. I got really into Ashtanga yoga for awhile; I took a lovely art history class on Gauguin in Tahiti; I took a travelling course that had me in California and Hawaii for a month (“Asian and Pacific Islander Experiences with Americanization”); I learned how to make Lebanese and Greek food; I did archival work at Hawaii Volcanoes National Park; I hiked the Kalalau trail. I went through a gnarly depression after I had my kid.

Then, in 2017, we moved to Seattle. The next year, I defended my dissertation, earned my Phd, bought a house on an island in Puget Sound, and had another baby. Now I mainly read cookbooks and the New Yorker. The best book I have read in the past few years is Barbarian Days by William Finnegan. And I am crazy about that other Pulitzer Prize winner, Kendrick Lamar. I have two little boys and am happily married to that old then-boyfriend. Recently I spent a month in Hawaii again. I’m figuring out the next step. Every night I have a new dream about what I will do. Last night I became a wildly successful ASMR YouTube star. The night before I opened an “upscale laundromat” in the Mission District in SF. As Gertrude Stein didn’t say, “It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.” I am not loafing, but I am also not afraid of seeming like I’m doing nothing. Things will come and the way ahead will present itself eventually. I turn 40 on Sunday.

Cheers,
Susanna

Anonymous said...

Thank you so much for the update and congrats on everything you have accomplished in your life! I hope many more wonderful things are awaiting you in the future

Michael R. Brown said...

Hi Susanna,

Came here from a search on Elaine Sundancer's "Celery Wine," which you and I seem almost alone in on commenting about on the web. Saw it pictured as an old book in a library on Instagram, was immediately drawn to it though knowing nothing of it beyond the cover ... drove 25 miles to a library to read it, and fell in love. Found your blog, read through some entries of the days of a gypsy soul, and know I know your later days too.

I'm glad you're still dreaming. :)

All the best to you, of the 2000s and today -

Michael