Lisa Sanchez

In Print

Behind the scenes at Elisabeth Thurston Fraser and Miya Hirabayashi’s bicoastal workshop, a beautiful anthology is bumping its way along the trail from imaginary-dream-book to real-book-on-paper-in-hands. I can think of a few reasons why you might like to reserve your copy right this very minute.

First of all, the cover. You should definitely buy it for the cover, which features a dreamy image by Judy Pak. You are definitely going to want this baby on your coffee table (and probably on your mom’s coffee table too).

Secondly, this print edition is an extension of The Equals Record, a digital window into the stories of women living life, making art, and thinking hard about the world. The anthology includes 30 original essays around the theme of “exploration,” accompanied by illustrations and photography and divided into sections on cartography, uncharted territory, nostalgia, and souvenirs. The essays and art are the work of many wonderfully talented women, including Erin Loechner, Emily Matchar, Erin Boyle, Kathleen Shannon, and many others. Prepare to be inspired.

Finally, if that’s not enough to seal the deal, you will find an essay of my own nestled between those two covers. It’s longer than what you’ll usually find on this blog and will transport you (I hope) over landscapes on screen and underfoot. For now, it’s in the able hands of Elisabeth and Miya, and I’m looking forward to meeting it again on the printed page.

May 9, 2013 / write a note

Outside the Lines

When I took my first workshop with the poet who became my thesis adviser, his first advice to me was to get a bigger notebook. Like, a really big one.

I had a thing for poetry in very short lines and was totally overusing the line break. I really didn’t think my notebook had much to do with it (That’s just how I write. Short lines! It’s my thing!) and couldn’t see the logic in carrying around a giant drawing pad for the purpose of writing poetry.

Still, I tried it. And it changed everything. All of a sudden, the page was so big that I wasn’t seeing the page anymore. I was seeing unbounded possibility.

When Editorially was first announced, my heart leapt. The fact that someone was trying to reinvent writing on screens for screens and was doing it so thoughtfully—well, it just made my heart sing.

I tried it out first in my work with Brian on Uncommon. It took a moment or two to readjust to working in a new way, in a new kind of space, but oh, it was such a clean and beautiful space, so I kept going.

I was such a Pages person for a while and then a Google Docs person. But lately I’ve been writing everything I can Editorially.

The collaborative aspects work really well, and Markdown makes the editing process about a million times easier. But the thing that really sold me? No page breaks.

Have you ever tried writing on an infinite page? Well, let me tell you, it is a wonderful thing. In fact, let’s scrap the idea of “pages” altogether, shall we? It’s so freeing to write and edit a piece as a whole, instead of worrying the whole time about the page count.

It’s as much fun as coloring outside the lines and then just tossing out your coloring book and painting on the walls.

P.S. Speaking of coloring outside the lines and painting on the walls, have you seen what Elle’s working on lately? Amazing.

April 25, 2013 / write a note

You could hear a pin drop

Things have been very quiet around here lately. As in, literally, very quiet. There are two main rooms in our apartment, and there’s a desk in each. From mine, in the bedroom, I can hear my sweetheart typing away at his, in the living room.

The only other sound is the pup, who occasionally rolls over and lets out a big sigh, or trots back and forth between the desks, in hopes of rounding up at least one of us for a walk.

This is how we’ve been spending our afternoons and evenings over the past few weeks, typing and clicking away, noses pressed firmly to the grindstone, except when we meet up at the table for dinner, or sometimes, cheese (thank you, Granpa).

Austin Kleon was so right when he wrote that sometimes you just have to be boring in order to get things done.

In other news, my latest post, “On learning new things,” is up on the Equals Project today. Also, sometimes I wish I were typing away on one of these.

Typewriter via Gallivanting Girls

February 11, 2013 / write a note

Music to my ears

When it comes to music, I have to confess that I’m a little like a toddler. I tend to listen to the same handful of songs over and over and over again, until I get tired of them, which sometimes takes months or years.

In fact, a couple of mixed CDs I made when my husband and I first started dating are still in constant rotation in the car. What can I say? When I find something I like, I can’t help but love it to pieces. Sometimes it’s hard to make room for new things when you feel like you’ve already found the best thing ever.

But last weekend, a new album arrived in the mail from my fabulous friend, Rory Michelle, and immediately took up residence as the new soundtrack for my life.

My favorite track is “Funny Little Thing.” It’s playful and sweet, and it sounds like it just dropped into this world from another time.

How about you? How do you discover new music, and what are you listening to lately?

January 24, 2013 / write a note

For the love of it

On Sunday, I started reading David Foster Wallace’s essay collection, Both Flesh and Not, with the 24-Hour Bookclub. I had never read his work before, so I had no idea what to expect. I just downloaded the Kindle book and started right in.

After ploughing my way through a couple of essays about tennis, an assessment of the American literary scene of 1987, and a very philosophical review of a very philosophical book based on another philosophical book, I had to stop and wikipedia the guy. I felt as if I were rummaging around in his attic, catching glimpses of a delightful, albeit disparate, collection of his Most Favorite Things.

I wanted to go back and rename all of the essays. Chapter 1: “My All-Time Favorite Tennis Moment.” Chapter 2: “My Most Favorite and Least Favorite Things About Writers These Days.” Chapter 3: “My Favorite Book of the Year.” You get the idea.

If I could find one thing in common among the various components of the collection, it was that David Foster Wallace loved all of these things. My favorite essays were the tennis essays. I highlighted the heck out of them over on Readmill, if you’d like to see.

Here’s one of my favorite lines:

For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s.

And another gem, also from one of the tennis essays:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform—and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

Although I don’t know a thing about tennis (and can’t say I’ve ever seen an entire match), I came away from these pieces floating and teary-eyed and practically signed up for tennis lessons.

But after my superficial tennis love wore off, I wondered why these essays worked so well, while the others seemed praiseworthy but less compelling alongside them. In every case, I was relatively ignorant about the subject matter, perhaps even more so for tennis than for the others. And although each essay was rooted in love, it seemed that for tennis, all other concerns and pretentions melted away. What was left was uninhibited passion and masterful storytelling.

I started blogging in earnest one summer after a trip to San Francisco to visit my friend Diana. I had told her I was considering it but had no idea what to write about. All of those “How to Blog” blog posts I’d been reading told me I needed an angle, a common thread, a topic, a niche. But Diana told me, simply, “Just write about things you like. The common thread is you.”

That was all I needed to hit the ground running. And I think, for the most part, I’ve been able to do just that—writing about things I like and enjoying myself thoroughly in the process—here in this lovely space.

Sometimes, though, it’s easy to lose sight of love as the driving force behind writing and sharing that writing. This is especially true when I get caught up in reading blog posts about how to blog (I know! Why do I keep reading those?!? The titles are just so catchy!) and start worrying that I need to write about Very Important Things or keep up with trends or package everything I like into a neat little package of things-that-go-together.

In fact, the things I love do not necessarily match one another, and they are mostly not so new and trendy. The things I love are sometimes a little random and often a little old school. So this is just a little reminder to myself and to you that the focus of this blog, for 2013 and forever after, is to simply share with you my favorite things.

January 9, 2013 / write a note