On Heat

summer is here, book is turned in, fight camp is on

Summer is my season. I love heat. I love the sun. I love the feeling of sweat beading and sliding down. When I was still living in Florida I trained at a gym that is maybe the hottest place I’ve even been in my life. This gym had no windows, no ventilation. If we begged we could sometimes convince our coach to prop open the back door with a chair. I can remember a teammate collapsing into that chair midway through a session and facing the wild green of the backyard, breathing hard, sweat pouring from his body. Because the summer heat thrived in that gym. When we hit the heavy bags sweat puddled at our feet. My eyes burned from the sweat. The harder we worked hitting the bags and skipping rope and sparring the more the heat thickened and swelled. By the end of training everything was soaking wet: my hair, my clothes. I looked like I had been sprayed with a hose. When I took off my gloves my hand wraps were dark with sweat. Sweat dripped from my fingertips. The asphalt parking lot outside felt cool in comparison. I would stand out there and dump water over my head until I had cooled down enough to drive home.

The heat was so intense it felt exorcising. I felt stripped down, wrung out. I felt present in my body. The kind of heat makes it hard for the mind to wander; the needs of the body are too immediate. After training I craved sugar. Sometimes I’d swing by the Dairy Queen on the way home, bite right into the cold sweetness of soft serve swirled up in a cake cone. The ice cream would start melting right away, drip down onto my bare legs. At night I slept the deepest, more dreamless sleep.

Now I train at a gym in the Berkshires. The summers are nothing like Florida summers, but still we have our moments. A few weeks ago we had a hard night of rain, so the roller doors were all closed tight. We worked inside a dense, wet cloud of humidity. We had hard conditioning to do that night. The workout had a sparring component, which meant we needed to wear our rubber mouth guards, our headgear, for the duration, making it even harder to suck down that thick hot air.

By the end my clothes were soaked through. When I took off my boxing shoes my socks were wet. My shoelaces were wet.

I’m registered for fights in August. Fight camp is on. I love that feeling of being in the middle of something. Endings are weird. It’s that feeling of being in the thick of process and possibility that I miss after I turn in a book, which I did earlier in the month, but now I’m finding that same feeling in another space. In camp we work on the same stuff we always work on, but with a fresh sense of urgency. If there are certain improvements we want to make since my last fight we no longer have an infinite amount of time to do it; we have a deadline. That little bit of pressure is the terror and magic of deadlines, whether for writing or in the ring.

A couple of weeks ago I visited Bennington’s low-residency MFA Program to give a reading and a talk. I was there for twenty-four hours, just long enough to participate in karaoke night and to take a good long walk around that very beautiful campus. I was there during a heat wave, with highs in the 90s. The morning I gave my talk was blazing hot. It felt good to sweat under the bright lights of the stage. Bring the heat, I remember thinking. I’m ready.

During the Q & A someone asked a really good question. I can’t remember the exact wording but the gist was: What if each time you sit down to write you go so hard you burn yourself out? What if you don’t know when to stop?

I thought immediately about how sometimes new fighters turn up and, despite not being conditioned for the work, go incredibly hard for a few days, even on the days we’re not supposed to be going hard, and then vanish. They burn their bodies to the ground. I offered that our writing practice does not exist to hurt us; it should not be a weapon that we wield against ourselves. I suggested scheduling intentional breaks, more breaks than feel necessary even, and to use these breaks to attend to the body: water, food, rest, time outside, whatever. Going at a pace that is utterly unsustainable can be an avoidance tactic, a form of flight. See? I knew I couldn’t possibly stick with this. My coach says that a fighter can train every day but they can’t train at the same intensity every day. We don’t want to burn out after a few weeks. We want to build a space that holds.

Give it everything you’ve got. Seems like straightforward advice, but what is everything? How can we know when we’ve reached the outer edges of our abilities? It takes a tremendous amount of work, energy, faith, and fortitude to get even remotely close to that edge, let alone surpass it. It’s a long haul, ideally — and requires more than frantic, tempestuous bursts of effort. Have you given everything? my coach will ask me in the corner, before the third round. Have you done everything you came here to do? We pace fights so that we are able to give everything, truly everything, when it matters most.

The counterpoint to my love of heat is all the things I do to cool down. In Florida, I would pour ice water over my head in that steaming hot parking lot. I would stand outside in the rain. I would take cold showers. I would freeze towels and drape them around my neck. I’m from Central Florida, where we have beautiful springs. The water is translucent and gemstone bright; you can get an inner tube and float. In New York I love jumping into a cold lake. My dog hates the heat, but loves soft serve, so we’re on a little quest this summer to find the best pup cup in the area.** When I got home after that recent steamy training session I took him to a soft serve place down the road. Two kids rode their bikes around a gravel parking lot, in the brightness of the early evening sun. I’d changed into dry clothes but my skin was still warm and damp. I felt that familiar hunger for water, sugar, salt. I got a twist with sprinkles. My love for heat hinges on knowing how to break it.

The Final Bell—

• I’m teaching 2 craft seminars with the The Shipman Agency this summer. First one is “Making a Scene” on Sunday, July 12, 2:00-4:00pm ET. The second is “Building a Roadmap: How to Revise a Novel” on Sunday August 2, 2-5PM EST. Both are designed to expand possibility and to help writers bring new ideas + energy to their work. Come hang!

• I’m reading Earth 7 by the great Deb Olin Unferth, and I love the way the novel moves through time, the pace at which the world is revealed to us. I’m also reading The Best American Short Stories 2024, edited by Lauren Groff. I’d already read some of the stories—Marie-Helene Bertino, Lori Ostlund, and Paul (!) all have amazing stories in here—but I decided to read the whole anthology in order and there are so many bangers. Not all the way through yet, but adored especially Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” and Shastri Akella’s “The Magic Bangle” and Jamel Brinkley’s “Blessed Deliverance.”

**If anyone is curious about the leaderboard for the “best soft serve / pup cup” (Hudson Valley / Catskills) so far the contenders are: 1. Evelyn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Livingston Manor 2. Fortune’s in Tivoli 3. Jolly Cow in Lake Katrine.