the way storytellers decant the story of life

my ADU dream, a Grace Paley poem, and a new morning routine

Apr 18, 2025

Happy Pictures of Crocuses Season to all who practice

Greetings, earthlings!

Hello!

Wow, it keeps getting worse! Everything is scary and insane!

Here are three other things I’m thinking about this week:

1. This interview about living near friends

A year or so after I bought my house, I started dreaming and scheming about building an ADU (accessory dwelling unit) in the backyard.

I made a gorgeous spreadsheet to organize my thoughts and plans. One tab laid out my intentions, including: to create more housing in a city that desperately needs it; to get more utility from my oversized urban lot; to make a smart investment. Another tab showed the soundness of the investment, laying out a month-by-month payback plan for a theoretical $200,000 loan at 5% interest over 5-7 years based on estimated rental income. Very practical, very objective.

But when I talk to people about my ADU dream, what I say is that I want someone to walk into my house unannounced at 8am in their underwear and say, “I’m out of half and half” while opening the fridge to use mine.

Some people get it instantly–being around people makes us happy. Science says so! I’m so grateful to live in Burlington, where dozens of friends and chosen family are within walking distance and where I have neighbors on both sides who I’ve texted to borrow sugar, baking soda, and flour. I know I’m already winning.

But I want it all. I want the privacy and control of having my own home and the connection, intimacy, texture, and growth that come with closer proximity to people. I think some of our personal and social ills could be addressed by abandoning the ideal of nuclear families siloed off in single-family homes and finding creative and modern ways to live more closely together.

I put my ADU dream on the back burner because it started to feel overwhelming alongside my other endeavors, but this Anne Helen Petersen interview with Phil Levin reignited my dreaming and scheming.

Levin believes the “‘tiny homes on a plot of land’ vision is doing a big disservice to people,” and invites us to think more pragmatically about how we might live together:

Culture Study

One Way to Live Near Friends

Big Secret: I can see the backend stats on this newsletter. That means I know that many of the people who open this newsletter the most aren’t paid subscribers. There are so many reasons why that might be the case, but if you have the means and you value the work here — and want to keep interviews like this outside of the paywall — consider becoming a paid subscriber…

2 months ago · 233 likes · 83 comments · Anne Helen Petersen

2. This Grace Paley poem

Yesterday I saw my favorite comic artist, Eleanor Davis, speak at Dartmouth.

Eleanor’s talk was about how her art and activism combine in her work. She spent a good amount of her presentation sharing the work of other artists who combine these things in ways she admires, including Grace Paley, whose work Eleanor discovered when The Atlantic hired her to make this portrait.

Eleanor read sections of Paley’s poem Responsibility while showing images of Grace’s work:

Responsibility
It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and
prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time

3. A routine I want to try

My most productive time is the morning, 6am to 10am.

I’ve been blaming my crossing guard shift (7:30am-8:20am) on breaking up my mornings and preventing me from making more of my comics and work. There’s truth to this… but mostly I’m spending my precious morning time disassociating on my phone.

Lindsey Stripling is an artist I love who seems far busier and more productive than I am. She recently wrote about her own struggles with her morning routine and shared this suggestion from writer Robbie Westacott. I’ll be trying it over the next couple of weeks: