Bree Stilwell

First this week, a very warm virtual hug to my new readers. I’m so happy we found each other and am deeply grateful for your time and attention.

You may have gotten a hint of it from the story that brought you here—I write Caravan to connect, and hopefully to inspire. This newsletter is a conversation, a way for me to focus some of our common experiences through the lens of my own, and I literally can’t do it without you.

So please do comment, share, hit reply. And if you’d rather stay incognito, that’s okay too. I just ask that we spend a little time together through the alchemy that is writing and reading.

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Next, a brief seasonal backstory.

The autumnal equinox is my new year. Most resolutions are made in January, broken in February—mine start with the sun crossing the equator.

It’s taken me fifty years to make the connection, that my birthday has likely everything to do with it. It’s September 23rd, which is plus or minus dead-on.

For me, it’s a season that pulls no punches. It’s an onslaught of information, as if every falling leaf bears a message. And from here to the end of the year, to the solstice, I’m feeling some atypical forces at play.

Historically, I lose a couple pounds. I get stronger and faster, put in more hours, take on more or different projects. I also get real stressy. Apparently there’s something about the quickening march to the end of the year that makes me want to turn around and run it one more time… but better.

And also, because we’re all contradictory AF, these months are my clear favorite. Fall in the northern midwest is downright mystical, and the corridor into the holidays is paved with dried blood and glitter and gumdrops.

It’s an intensely heady time and this year feels extra. Anybody with me?

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We’re all tribute-ed out (which is a tragedy itself), but I can’t not mention Diane and D’Angelo.

I spent an afternoon with Diane Keaton in 2010. I worked for a big culty winery in Napa Valley at the time and she was a big fan of the architect who designed it.

It was often my job to entertain the VIP’s coming through—politicians, celebrities, massive spenders. Some of them didn’t even get to taste the wine. I was paid to both tease and please.

I didn’t have to do either with Diane.

My nervousness—because what nerdy tomboy who grew up in the 80s didn’t idolize Annie Hall—evaporated within seconds of seeing her face.

From across the massive gravel drive, and with the smile that needed no introduction, ‘HI!!’

She was tiny, her face finely lined like a fingerprint, her whole body vibrating with joy and curiosity. She was the most secure human being I’ve ever met. She hugged me and captivated me and we had the most lovely time together. I can feel her energy here as I type.

We mistakenly view it as a fine line, the threshold between self-importance and self-assuredness. But they’re not at all grades of the same syrup. They each involve an entirely different approach to life—part innate, part experiential, part deliberate.

That balance flows, it’s changeable, and we don’t always feel or operate in a way that suggests we have any control over it.

Diane, from what I could tell, had it mastered.

Her authenticity was no gimmick, she was just that aligned. She fired on all cylinders; her fuel, only she could ever know. She was disarming and powerful, generous and commanding, accessible and strange all at once.

And, she owned all of it.

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I never met D’Angelo, which of course feels strange because of how intimately I lived with his music. Like a dream coagulated into memory… did it happen or not?

I was nineteen when his debut album Brown Sugar dropped. That’s a colloquial word choice, but it’s also legitimately how it felt. Like something that hits with the impact of having fallen from the sky.

Black music had already been important to me from a young age, but it was also something I felt insecure about. As a white, farm-grown girl, I wasn’t sure if it was okay to love music that felt it might belong to someone else.

As a young woman, just beginning to find my sexuality, spirituality, individuality, D’Angelo’s music was a mainlining of all these things. I LIVED that entire first album, bathed myself in it. It was how I wanted to move through the world—lusciously, unafraid of my own contradictions, laying my heart down.

Four and a half years after Brown Sugar, he released Voodoo; nearly ten after, Black Messiah. Both found me in the same way in which I assume they were made, as a sign of a human’s times.

Just three full-length records of his own and a smattering of guest appearances on others, and he’s gone. His body taken by cancer, my same disease1 at my same age.

I heard his death announced on one of my favorite local radio stations,2 by a show host that feels to me like a member of my own family. He struggled in sharing the news, at various times losing his words.

Sitting at my writing desk, I listened with my face in my hands and I cried.

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This being my season of going hard, I was already primed to feel a certain way about all this. And yet, I was surprised by what struck me as a little like survivor guilt, especially after D’Angelo’s passing—at midlife, the era we all start to figure our shit out (whether we do something with that information is a conversation for another day).

This is the voice I heard:

“You’re the same age, what have you done with your life?”

“Why does someone with so much still to give die from the same disease you’re surviving?”

“Who the fuck are you kidding? It’s too late.”

Ooof.

Our brains work by comparison, constantly attempting to make sense of the world through similarity or differentiation. We can know this rationally while still being incapable of applying it emotionally.

We want control, always, so our brains give us a route to follow. Emotions are turned on and we become occupied, working hard at the business of making life make sense.

It’s rough stuff. It’s why we get so easily distracted by what other folks are up to (and our feelings about said stuff).

It’s also why we create in the first place—to process and organize our experience by physically translating it through languages unique to us.

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I’m sharing some of the details of my grief here because I’m curious about it. It’s a little strange (and embarrassing?), the level of intimacy we share with people we only feel we know.

Celebrities, people who have gained wide recognition for the things they do with their lives, become known to us exactly because of how we identify ourselves with them.

We like what they do and how they do it, sometimes even in spite of one or the other. Some are reviled in the same way in which they’re adored. Many are admired by their life’s context alone.

I didn’t want to admit how affected I was by the deaths of these two individuals. Even with the expected outpouring of grief from fans, from people who actually knew them, the flashpoint of communal respect and admiration their deaths created, I felt sheepish about the intensity of my own emotions.

And then, just as quickly, it all made sense.

Whether you consider yourself an artist or not, we all create. We do it every day, with the choices we make about how we spend our time, who with, where and why. Many of us further illustrate those decisions through various tools of translation—words, images, music, dance, sport.

We all create, and so it makes sense that we idolize those whose commitments to their chosen craft give us such detailed and even hyperreal reflections of our own experiences.

We adore them because they translate our world back to us, distilled through their own experience and skill. Through their own decisions.

But let’s not allow their visibility to suffocate our own contributions, okay?

There’s no maximum quantity, no overflow point to creative work in this world. It’s beyond space, beyond the individual, beyond measure… and it outlives us all.

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Listening

Chris and I hit the live music jackpot a couple weekends ago, seeing two shows in two days. The way our time is jammed, we have better chances at getting struck by lightning at our dining room table.

• For my birthday, Makaya McCraven at Ann Arbor’s downtown gem, the 100+ year-old Michigan Theater. It’s a tightly seated fit in there, making the vibe even more communal; you’re physically touching your neighbor, which I love. If you can catch him on this tour, promoting his new four EP release, Off the Record, DO.

  Concerts like these are my church and this one left me vibrating with sacred energy

• The following night, Gaelynn Lea at a concert benefitting Disability Connections in Jackson. Admittedly, I wasn’t as enthusiastic about this one, only because the week had officially caught up with me.

  I’m not sure I can appropriately communicate how powerful her performance was. Her music is haunting, her virtuosity complete. She’s also disarming and hilarious, which made every single person in the audience feel personally invited.

• Here’s (our seven year-old) Lincoln’s POTW:

Reading

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and this edition in particular. With a forward by Guillermo del Toro, it gets the flowers due. The mastery, building fear not through event but through tone, has blown my mind wide open.

• Next (and quickly!) Frankenstein in advance of del Toro’s film version.

• Then, for the palate cleanser, Making Art and Making a Living by . Because told me to. (and also because Mason Currey is fantastic)

Wanting

• Dirty pastels

• These embroidery kits from

• Though I’m a Blackwing girl, through and through, seriously considering my own custom pencil

And, just because I can’t get enough…