This morning I read these beautiful words by Parker Palmer:

In my own life, as my winters segue into spring, I not only find it hard to cope with mud but hard to credit the small harbingers of larger life to come, hard to hope until the outcome is secure. Spring teaches me to look more carefully for the green stems of possibility: for the intuitive hunch that may turn into a larger insight, for the glance or touch that may thaw a frozen relationship, for the stranger’s act of kindness that makes the world seem hospitable again.

I'm in what Palmer refers to as the "mud and muck" of early Spring. This has less to do with the trails of dirty paw prints my dogs leave on the floor every day and more with the mucky thaw that seems to be going on inside of me as I dig deeply into the book I'm writing, prepare for upcoming speaking engagements, and write for "aleteia/for her," a new women's lifestyle site I love.

These tasks involve raking away matted, decomposed leaves, digging into the wet earth of memory and imagination, and planting seeds in hopes that they will take in water, split open, and sprout.

This first newsletter of 2016 is a list of what's occupying my work hours so far this year. If you are attending Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing, I hope to see you there. And if you're looking for a book of essays on the ups and downs of embarking on midlife, look for my new book, When Did Everybody Else Get So Old? in early 2017.

That is, if these wispy seedlings take root and bloom.

Until then, wishing you peace.

Jennifer Grant

I'll be attending the festival, Thursday, 4/14-Saturday, 4/16, and I will be speaking on these two panels:

Memoir: Lessons Learned, in Retrospect
with Carla Barnhill, Margot Starbuck, and Caryn Rivadeneira

‘Riting, Reading, and ‘Rithmetic: Three Realities That Prospective Authors Should Know
​with Robert Hosack and Justin Paul Lawrence

Also, stop by the Book Rescue Ink table in the Prince Center exhibition hall and say hello to Margot Starbuck and me.

I'm at work on a new book, a memoir, called:

When Did Everybody Else Get So Old?

Indignities, Compromises, and the Unexpected Grace of Midlife

My best description of it at the moment is that the book is about lessons I've learned in my forties, with an undercurrent of (and nod to) Fr. Richard Rohr's ideas about letting go of the "concocted self" at midlife in order to embrace the true self.

Should that sound overly profound and inaccessible, know it's about chin hairs and perimenopause, moving into a new phase of parenting when kids leave for college, and how midlife malaise can be swept away to reveal new clarity and gratitude. And, as ever, I'll probably slip something about Rick Springfield in there somewhere. #tradition

Stay tuned.

(The book will be published by Herald Press in early 2017.)