Sonya Cheney

Writer. Witch. Creatrix.

onward + embracing what might be a futile effort.

by 1 Comment

Another hideaway in my backyard

I saw a post–an Instagram story–earlier today that sparked a feeling of unfamiliarity in myself as I was, of all things, brushing my teeth. It was a pair of people in a park working on zines together, and I found myself wondering where that part of me went over the past few years. I’ve tried repeatedly to put out a new zine, even getting so far as writing, printing, and pasting a few pages together, but I can never seem to follow through. As much as it feels like something is missing in not creating zines in any regular fashion anymore, I also can’t find a desire strong enough to do it.

I also realized over the past few months that I don’t write poetry anymore. It’s as if I forgot how to do it one day. I forgot how much I enjoyed it, the feeling of sitting outside with a blanket and notebook and water bottle just writing. Instead, my days became full of toddler time–a different kind of joy and commitment, as I’ve changed diapers and cooked meals and generally tried to keep him entertained. Through it all, I just–forgot. In the best weeks, I would work for a while on my young adult novel, but after almost two years, it doesn’t feel much further along than after I finished the first draft. (Someday…, she says with fingers crossed.)

As you might notice by looking at the date of this post and the one before it, I haven’t found it in myself to blog in over a year, either. I’m not sure why, because blogging feels at least somewhat less–futile?–than assembling an entire zine that only four or five people will read. It’s not that maintaining a blog is easier, but rather that it’s more immediate. I can write for an hour or ten minutes or five days, and I can hit publish as soon as I feel satisfied with what I’ve put down on the digital page. As long as I don’t look at my blog traffic, I have no idea if only five (or zero) people read my posts, compared to selling zines and knowing exactly how many copies I’ve sent out of any given issue. And to be honest, it’s pretty easy for me to ignore the traffic numbers these days. Consider it just one more IDGAF side effect of another year going by.

The most recent page in (one of) my art journals.

I suppose, after a year’s hiatus, an update of sorts is in order. Let’s do it in the form of a currently list, shall we?

Currently

Watching // lots of YouTube–scrapbooking and art journaling channels, plant person channels, and witchcraft channels mostly
Reading // She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
Listening // podcasts: Someplace Under Neith, Last Podcast on the Left, Faculty of Horror, Sounds Like a Cult, and Good Mourning Nancy; plus a lot of emo + riot grrl playlists on Spotify
Making // prep/foundation pages for my Week in the Life scrapbook for next week’s community documenting period
Feeling // sad, grieving over the loss of my sixteen-year-old cat Charlie last week; grateful for the kind of life I get to live each day with my family
Planning // trips and visits with friends, all the way through November!
Loving // oddly enough, summer days. I was never much of a summer person growing up, and it still isn’t my favorite season (autumn, of course), but I’ve found ways to enjoy it so much more over the years, and I’m finally appreciating days full of lemonade, playing in the yard with Finn, and forever attempting to maintain a vegetable garden. (Spoiler alert: This was not my year.)

june 2020 | life lately.

by Leave a Comment

Our house was blessed with a loveliness of ladybugs (really, look it up!), and I take that to be a good sign for our future in this home.

I would surprise no one by saying there’s been an absurd amount of plain shit going on. Global pandemic, civil rights movements, murder hornets, alien invasion… Wait, that one hasn’t happened yet.

Anyway, you understand what I’m saying.

And in the midst of it all, survival–literal and spiritual–have been at the top of the list. In between sending donations, educating myself, and trying to support as much as I can in as many ways as I can, my life has still maintained its general status quo inside our rural New England bubble. It’s a privilege I’m trying not to take for granted.

Dan mentioned his surprise at the fact that I’ve maintained a consistent knitting routine even in the summer heat–I promise, it’s only because I’ve managed to have a fan blowing directly on myself any day that reaches eighty degrees fahrenheit or above. Otherwise, I would be nothing but a puddle of my own sweat, tears, and tangled yarns. I’ve been trying to branch out more in my recent projects. I’ve tended to knit a lot of socks in the last year or so, and I still knit a lot of them, but I decided this year to try mixing things up a bit. It began with the Find Your Fade shawl by Andrea Mowry, which, while a long process, was an absolutely lovely experience to knit. I feel like I learned some new things and it was possibly one of the most creative projects, I’ve worked on thus far. I followed it up with a set of Piitu mitts by Heidi Alander and the Ripple bralette by Jessie Maed Designs. Next in my queue? Colorwork by way of the Underwing mitts by Erica Heusser. (Note: These all link to the new Ravelry site, so please be aware if you been having accessibility issues.)

I’ve also managed to begin a new, as yet untitled, novel. Horror, young adult contemporary, set at a prep school. (Well, is the 1990s considered contemporary anymore?) I haven’t worked much the past week or two, but I have the most thorough outline I’ve ever produced, and when I do work, I tend to knock out a chapter in only an hour or two. I can say with confidence that I’ve been converted from a pantser to a planner. It’s been fantastic for my morale, and even if I don’t work on it in an obvious sense–i.e., sitting down with my computer and tip-tapping away at the keyboard–I’m spending a good amount of my time thinking about it and working through whatever roadblocks might crop up from time to time.

Naturally, I jumped on the sourdough bandwagon. My original plan was to work my way through Bread Baking for Beginners in a linear fashion, but when just about everyone on Instagram began to do it, I threw my hands up and said, “Fuck it! I’ll give it a go!” I don’t consider any of my first loaves perfect, but I love the feeling of maintaining the starter. I’ve named her Lilith (sorry, nothing cleverly quarantine-themed like so many others have done), and I keep her in the fridge for a weekly feed rather than daily in order to save on flour.

I’ve intentionally forgone a photo of the inner crumb because I’m still not happy with the size or distribution of the air pockets. Right now they tend to be collected towards the top of the loaf, which is fine, I suppose. The flavor is still wonderful and it makes a damn fine grilled cheese. But it’s something I plan to keep working on over time because, well, why not? I love baking bread. Dan especially loves sourdough. It’s a win-win for our house.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy through all of…this. *gestures wildly* But I also know that “normal” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, not if it looks like white supremacy and needless death and social inequity. But my hobbies, trite and inconsequential as they may be, keep me grounded. They keep me going. They keep me centered enough to come back to the fight for bigger and better things for us all.

alternate realities.

by Leave a Comment

I can’t sleep. I wouldn’t even say it’s that late (10:45pm as I type), but it’s the latest I’ve been awake in weeks. Since moving into our temporary housing, I’ve managed to fall asleep by ten every night and be up by six-thirty every morning. It’s been a wonderful routine, but something’s just off tonight, and I can’t quite seem to make it work. Maybe it’s something in the air. Maybe it’s the Beltane sabbat energy. Maybe it’s just poor luck. I don’t know.

As I was lying in bed, occasionally turning from my left to my right side and back, I went back to a thought I shared with my mom and a friend earlier this week, and it got me to doing a little not-quite-daydreaming.

Sometimes I think that if my current self didn’t have Dan–and now Finn–then I would live in a van, traveling the country with a dog (probably a hound), freelance writing, practicing photography, and being a nomadic witch. Or else I would live in a hut in the forest with a dog, and this time also a cat, and be a spooky witch of the woods. Mostly, though, it’s that van idea that’s stuck with me these past few days; when I was a teenager I loved the style of the old Volkswagen Buses, and over the past few years I’ve grown fascinated by the #vanlife. I’ve still only investigated it in passing–the occasional blog post read or scroll through the Instagram tag, but it’s intriguing, exciting to think about the possibility of that kind of freedom.

Instagram is, of course, the highlight reel of the lifestyle. There are certainly those who share the gritty behind-the-scenes realities of living a traveling life, the vehicle breakdowns and repair costs, the less frequent bathing opportunities, the dirt and cold and loneliness that can come with it all. But it’s still got an appeal to it. There’s an adventurous nature to it all and, like I said, a freedom that it conveys to see someone on the road or in a desert or a vast field with nothing but the things they can carry with them. Imagine that level of simplicity. It’s captivating.

In my dreams, these scenes are full of shades of orange and green and yellow and brown. There are scraped knees and dirty fingernails beside a campfire, a dog curled up at my feet. A camera or two sit beside me and a journal is open across my lap, page after page scribbled with stories and observations. This version of myself has a rawness to her that I can see deep in myself now but don’t know how to get out. I wish I knew how.

I can’t wait to move into our new home. The other half of my time spent daydreaming revolves around renovations—paint colors, furniture styles, and shelves upon shelves of books. But sometimes it’s fun—if a little sad—to think about what might have been if I were a different person. I’m much too dependent on other people to keep me company, to keep me functioning to a certain degree, to ever actually believe I could do something like live a van lifestyle. Still, it gives me a thrill to let my imagination run wild.

currently, in quarantine.

by Leave a Comment

This post contains affiliate links; if you choose to click through and make a purchase, I will earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Life is so odd right now. I’m not saying anything new. Even to me, someone lucky enough to maintain something of the same daily routine as pre-isolation, life is odd. Dan is home all day every day, compared to previously leaving for work by 7am and getting home by 6:30pm. We’re in temporary housing as we wait to close on our new house—quarantine is a challenging time to buy and sell houses, let me tell you. And Finn and I can no longer take aimless trips to the bookstore, to Target, to Michaels to kill time during the days. He’s still not quite big enough to “play with,” so to walk around shops with him was such a great way to keep him amused and to keep us from getting tired of our surroundings. Now, we’re lucky if the weather is good enough to go sit outside because even that’s been off the walls lately.

Saturday, we woke up to snowfall. Sunday, we went on a hike. Mostly, though, my time has been spent knitting and watching Finn and reading and playing with Finn and watching BuzzFeed Unsolved videos.

Rinse, repeat.

I did finally switch to audiobook for my current read—Kendare Blake’s Three Dark Crowns—because I just can’t seem to tear myself from my knitting enough to focus on a book. This will be a problem once I finish the second book in the series because the library only has the first two available. Maybe, by then, I’ll be a little past my current knitting obsession. I go through phases, knitting a lot, reading a lot, writing a lot. Lately, I haven’t had it in me to write at all. I haven’t even journaled since before isolation began, which is absurd because this is exactly the kind of incident that journaling could help me to get through. And aside from that, shouldn’t I want to “chronicle this historical moment”? To be honest, not really. I’ve seen a lot of scrapbookers on Instagram talking about documenting this period and the potential for future relatives or others looking through their albums, and it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t do my journaling or scrapbooking for anyone but myself and maybe my immediate family (in the case of Finn’s baby book).

On the one hand, it’s been nice not to think, “I need to document this,” but I also wish I felt that desire to journal. Scrapbooking is more of a challenge in between houses, but I have my notebook and I have a pen. I just don’t have the interest at the moment. I’m not sure why not, and I know it’ll come back; I often go through these kinds of waves. For now, though, it’s been simple living in quarantine: baking bread, knitting, and appreciating nature as best we can.

I’m grateful that my life hasn’t been in total upheaval throughout this and I know I’m one of the lucky ones. I’ve tried to do what I can with my privilege and power: buying from small businesses (and avoiding Amazon as best I can), staying isolated and socially distancing, and being grateful that my child is too young to remember this even if he has to live through the aftereffects. There’s a constant undercurrent of worry to my days, as someone who feels deeply for so many; even if I’m unaffected in my day-to-day life, I worry about my friends and family, about the vulnerable populations, about how those in power are handling (or not) this entire situation. I worry about the people who don’t seem to understand what’s going on—or maybe they just don’t care—and how their actions can hurt others who are just trying to get through it all. It seems trite, but I just want everything and everyone to be okay.