Fat Bear Week

Hello loves,

It's the most important sporting season of the year: Fat Bear Week.

Fat Bear Week is when the rangers at Katmai National Park set up a livestream of Alaskan brown bears catching salmon, and the public votes on which one looks the most gloriously rotund. This year's winner, I'm horrified to report, is 32 Chunk - a horrible ursine thug who killed the baby of last year's winner, 128 Grazer, live on camera. Nothing so thrilling has ever happened in the FIFA World Cup.

They think he weighs about 550kg, although this is just an estimate, because of course no one has tried to wrangle him onto a scale.

Bears are a great inspiration for seasonal living. Use the fat days to shore up for the lean. Feast when there's plenty, nap through famine. Stock your larder, so you have plenty to live off through hard times.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about as the days here grow shorter and colder: building the habits that will sustain me through the next few cold dark months.

So far, this has been an unusually distracted year for me, featuring adventures and frolics and silly fun projects and far too much time watching livestreams of bears catching salmon. I'm really hoping to dive back into a disciplined writing practice over the winter, to complete a solid draft of my next novel, Cuckoobird.

But Anne Helen Peterson wrote something about burnout years ago that I still think about often: paradoxically, often the solution to preventing burnout from work is to add more things into your life, to "develop several axes, instead of just one, for [your] life to rotate around."

I have a terrible tendency, when I'm tackling a big project, to try to "clear the decks" and remove everything else from my life except the One Important Thing I have to "focus on". I have had to learn and relearn time and again that this is a highway to exhaustion. So this time, I've been explicitly trying to add things into my life that keep me feeling full and fat and creatively fecund.

The big one, which is a huge surprise to me, is that I've somehow transformed into a running jock this year. Six years ago, I literally made a whole podcast episode about how much I despise running, and yet this Sunday, I'm going to be running my first ever half marathon. Please light your candles and whisper your prayers to 128 Grazer for me.

What's made the running routine stick now, and not the seven billion times I've tried to build a running habit before? Friends - the same source of most good things in my life. I literally belong to a running club now, which is basically IRL Hinge for really hot 25 year olds, and for some reason me. It's felt miraculous, finally feeling competent at something I never thought I'd be able to do at all. A whole new axis for my life to spin around.

I've also been stocking my creative larder. I've just finished writing an animated film set in the 1930s, so I've been watching a lot of 1930s and '40s animation, a lot of which is much more surreal and deliciously strange than I'd realised. I've fallen down a deep Max Fleischer rabbit hole: he brought us Betty Boop and Popeye, and a host of weirder and darker toons than what early Disney was making. It's striking how much cartoon logic is like dream logic. In words attributed to a Disney animator Art Babbitt, "Animation follows the laws of physics - unless it is funnier otherwise."

Garbage in, garbage out, they say, but that's fine because I love garbage. Pulpy, half-rotted rubbish makes fantastic compost for things to grow in.

I've been a little obsessed recently with the question of how we metabolise input into creative work. How you take some scrap you've observed in the world - a boy practicing clarinet on a park bench, a fat bear committing live-streamed infanticide - and spin this into art? I've been doing a small research project on how children’s and YA authors use journals as part of their creative process. Really, it’s an excuse to be nosy and rifle through other people’s notebooks, but officially I’ll be sharing the findings at the On Writing for Young People Conference conference soon, if any of you are children’s/YA authors or academics who might find this interesting.

You can't always be gorging, or always be hoarding. Seasons change. You can't just leave things in your larder saving them for something better someday. We don't think enough about how soon we're all going to be dead, how little time we all have for anything worthwhile. The time is now. The salmon is leaping, right past your mouth in exactly this moment, and if you hesitate, with a silver flash it will be gone.

“One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.” - Annie Dillard

What about you, loves? What are the habits, rituals and life-axes that are helping you prepare for the coming season, whatever it is?

Wishing you a fat juicy salmon,

Sam

Some other things in my larder

• Thank you for sending me your clown recommendations and clown stories! Two other options for clown shows you should see: Feast of the Clowns, a social justice clown festival that happens every year in Pretoria (thanks Sesihle!) and The Kings Collab in Cape Town (thanks Emma!).
• Alistair Mackay told me I have to read Stag Dance by Torey Peters, so I am and it's glorious (Alistair's recommendations never fail me). I'm also loving a short story collection by K-Ming Chang called Gods of Want, which I picked up from one of my favourite London bookshops Common Press - it's filled with the most astonishingly surprising sentences that never go where you think they'll go: "I warned my wife about them. They volunteered as our bridesmaids and came dressed in nets, fishhooks in their eyes, alive. They glued thorns into all the flower arrangements and stepped on my wife's dress until it tore, baring her ass, and then they used the veil to run around outside and catch hairy moths in its gauze. They knotted my tie into a noose and hung it from the church ceiling like a chandelier, but I didn't know how to kick them out once they were there. They brought gifts, fistfuls of worms and a downed telephone pole."
• Another axis my life's spinning around at the moment: knitting. I'm halfway through a vest, after which I'm going to attempt my first ever jumper. If any of you have a good raglan-sleeved pattern for very baby knitters, please sling it my way.