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2 weeks ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Hi everyone,I’m running another “student of life” discount this week, where I offer an annual subscription to my newsletter for just $12. I know that a weekly letter is not the same thing that I offered in the past, but I am trying to hold things together here as best I can while dealing with this diagnosis of a rare blood cancer. This is the only income I have right now, and I’m paying for all of my treatments, imaging, medications, and appointments by myself.
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2 weeks ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,I’m sitting here in my living room and the sun has gone down. I have a candle lit. I cleaned the apartment today, and it took absolutely all of my energy. I’m trying to do it every week to keep things manageable. Then I went for my mandatory daily walk, down to the river and then back.
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1 month ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
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1 month ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,The magnolias and the dogwoods are blooming in the park at Les Halles, where teenagers from the outer suburbs come in via the RER trains to sit on the concrete benches and smoke cigarettes and eat fast food in the city center. I don’t have much that I can share with you this week.
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1 month ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,I am writing to you from the Luxembourg Gardens, and it’s a warm day for early March, with a little bit of sun shining from behind a thin veil of gray clouds. All of the trees that I can see are naked, but if I look more closely at the chestnut branches overhead, I can see that the buds of the leaves are visible, though not yet breaking.
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1 month ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Hi there,It seems my attempt at being writerly went a bit amiss today, and a few people did not understand my post. I’m sorry if that was confusing. This is why I think maybe I should not be writing publicly at the moment.
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1 month ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,It’s about three or four in the morning right now, and I’m on a cautious upswing after a bad midweek. I haven’t been outside for a few days, but it might happen later on today. I don’t know. The only drawing I did from life this week was this:I know. Inspiring, right? Yeah, not really.
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2 months ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Here is the bottom half of a digital painting study, work in progress—Morning commuters on Metro line No. 3. Dear Friend,Well, it was a sunny, not-too-cold day in late February, although now the sun is starting to go down. I don’t have much to offer today I’m afraid. It must be so tedious to get letters that routinely begin with how poorly I am doing, s…
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2 months ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,It’s a bit after 8 a.m. and I am writing this letter in bed. Morning light is coming in through the orange curtains, and I am listening to an archived recording of Four Saints in Three Acts, an opera by Virgil Thomas with libretto by Gertrude Stein. Yes, that Gertrude Steine.
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2 months ago | 
awritersnotebook.org | Summer Brennan
Dear Friend,Forgive me, I am too cluttered and muddied to give you something beautiful. It has been a bad week, and I am doing poorly. In the book The Little Prince, the little prince asks the pilot who has crashed in the desert to draw him a sheep, but the pilot is struggling to draw a sheep. His sheep looks more like a goat, or it’s too old and won’t live a long time.
