Hard Choices—with helpful links

This month I’ve been thinking about hard choices as a duck mom, a writer, and a citizen of a country under siege.

Mar 01, 2025

This is It Takes A Village, a monthly conversation about reading, writing, and community-building.

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our pond in snow

In this issue:

On the Farm
Writer’s Life
Book of the Month
Bonus: Not a Writing Prompt! Tips for Those Worried for Our Democracy

On The Farm

On a frigid morning in late January, I crunched my icy way to the paddock where the chickens and ducks live. The chickens made no move toward the yard when I opened their pen, but merely looked at me as if to say, “You don’t expect us to go out in this, do you?”

Marigold

I apologized to them for the lousy weather and made my way to the quack shack to let the ducks out. The ducks tumblied excitedly down the wooden ramp like bowling balls—all except Natalie, our largest Pekin. Natalie was stuck half in, half out of her big blue water bowl. Her size (she’s about eleven pounds) renders her awkward and, in her excitement, she had fallen. As I approached, I could see that her left leg bent under her in a way that revealed the bottom of her yellow, webbed foot. And there I saw every duck-owners fear: bumblefoot. I gasped audibly, then lifted her gently from her predicament, and examined both her feet. Both had lesions.

Bumblefoot (pododermatitis) is a callous-like sore in the bottom foot surface, often accompanied by bacteria. In later stages, if infection enters the bone, it can be fatal.

bumblefoot lesion

My husband and I examined all ten of our ducks, and every single one had lesions, some large, some quite small. We brought two of the worst cases inside to soak in an Epsom salt bath in our tub, then rubbed down their feet with Bag Balm. Because our ducks were rescued, rather than raised from chicks, they’re fearful, so catching and soaking just two ducks took us all morning—and seemed to do little good. We tried making mobile soaking tubs out of plastic storage bins, each with a couple of inches of diluted chlorhexidine solution, and holes cut in the lids for the duck’s head. In sub-zero wind-chill, we tried soaking their feet this way, but the first duck figured out how to pull her head down into the liquid and began drinking the medicated solution, so we had to abandon the project.

My husband and I sat inside at our kitchen table, frozen, exhausted, and grief stricken. We imagined possibly having to euthanize any ducks with advanced disease. I made an appointment at the Cornell Veterinary Center.

Veterinary care here is not like All Creatures Great and Small, in which a tweed-clad vet visits the farm. We’d have to transport the ducks to Cornell. But I figured if I took just one representative duck, we could apply the vet’s advice to all of them. Marigold, our smallest Pekin, made the trip in a large cat carrier.

We got good news and bad: the vet staged Marigold’s lesions at 1/7. “You caught it early,” she said. “There’s no infection, just a closed pressure sore.” But the vet’s advice was to transplant the ducks to deep water where they could take their ponderous weight off their feet. (Domesticated ducks, especially Pekins, are bred for their meat and therefore too heavy for their own legs.) We explained to the vet that for a year, our ducks have refused to go to our pond. We suspect they know it’s frequented by snapping turtles, fox, and mink—all predators. So instead, we provide two kiddie pools, heated in winter. But when the ground turns hard and icy, kiddie pools aren’t enough. We’d thought we were doing the right thing when we rescued them from a beach where they had no shelter and no one to care for them. But, as usual on this farm, we learned that nature rarely bends in the direction we assume or desire.

Consequently, we’ve made the hard decision to return our ducks to the lake shore from which we recued them. Father Brendan at the friary, which owns the property they came from, has agreed to let us place a low-slung shelter on his beach and to come there daily to feed and care for the ducks.

the beach to which the ducks will return

Our yard will be without their waddling antics and laugh-like quacking, but we hope that once they’re able to swim in deep water, they’ll have a chance at healing, and with our care, might still live happy, healthy lives.

Writer’s Life

Early in our marriage, my husband and I took a road trip using Google Maps to navigate. At one point, Maps’ disembodied voice informed us “There’s a backup up ahead.” We continued driving with no evidence of a problem. Forty-five minutes later, the unprompted voice interrupted our quiet drive. “It’s getting worse!” she reported. We glanced at each other and burst out laughing, my husband nearly wrecking the car. We still use that phrase any time we suspect something’s about to go horribly wrong, and it still makes us laugh.

Well friends, the business of writing is getting worse. The processes of publishing, promotion, and marketing are a pandering plead for social-media clicks. In my past couple of Substacks, I’ve written about my deep investigative dive into social media and the attention economy, and how I’m turning away from it. (You can read them here and here.) At this political moment, even the word “submitting” carries a new connotation I can hardly abide.

It reminds me of my former career as a doctor of physical therapy, when I worked for a large for-profit medical center. This was the sort of place where the CEO, a satanic figure named Jeffrey Romoff, made $18 million a year. In the hallways he had placed collection boxes for canned goods—not for needy patients or the general underprivileged, but for his own workers who didn’t make a living wage. It was the sort of place where supervisors began clinical meetings with threats about unionizing. (Such threats are illegal). The sort of place where, when I discovered unethical practices in a department, I was removed from that rotation with the admonishment, “Nobody likes you.” In short, it was a workplace where the powerful made sure we underlings knew we had no agency.

Publishing feels similar to me lately. I’ve heard from old-timers who say it wasn’t always this way. “Back in the day, it was unheard-of not to at least respond to a query,” an editor friend recently told me. “Things, “she said, “have gotten so much worse.”

Without writers, there’s nothing to publish, yet we’re paid poorly or not at all. On my 2024 taxes, I made $235 for an entire year of writing because most literary magazines don’t pay, and many larger, wealthier outlets like The New York Times and Newsweek pay only for certain types of columns (not for Tiny Love Stories or My Turn columns, for example. When we submit an essay, story, or even a book that’s taken half a dozen years to write, more often than not busy agents and editors ignore us. Rude silence is considered the way business is done.

In June of last year, I queried a publishing house with a sample of my book. The editor asked for the entire manuscript that same day, which I promptly delivered to the Submittable link provided. Since then, the manuscript has not been opened (which can be seen in the Submittable site). When I email the editor, which I’ve done twice, I get crickets. I’m left asking myself if this is even a press I’d want to work with, regardless of its excellent reputation.

Even when writers are fortunate enough to get a publishing contract, advances are small (between five and fifteen thousand is average for a first book), or nonexistent. There’s little to no assistance with marketing and sales. Many writers hire a publicist for around 10K because these days it’s the author’s responsibility to move books. A writer can hardly avoid going broke! And woe to the writer who doesn’t earn out an advance—such a one will be black-balled from a second book contract. The message: Writer, you are on your own, and by the way, lotsa luck!

Back when I finally got disgusted with corporatized medicine, I opened my own therapy practice. It was one of the smartest moves I ever made. As a driven, introspective perfectionist, I was able to do better therapy, make more money, and create a happier life for myself and my patients without conglomerated oversight.

With regard to publishing, I’d thought that a traditional deal from a small indie publisher, rather than going the hybrid route, would carry more prestige and therefore make me happy. It’s the same reason I picked a huge teaching hospital with amazing life-saving capabilities—I wanted to be part of the big shiny show. Well, the big shiny show starts to look pretty unappealing when your patience for bullshit has been worn thin by exhaustion, rudeness, and minimal benefits. And the more I educate myself about book distribution, the more I realize I hybrid publishing can be the superior option.

I remind myself that thus far my biggest writing success came because I made it happen without waiting for anyone else. When an essay I published in 2023 was not tapped by the magazine for submission to Best American Essays, I submitted it directly to the series editor, Robert Atwan, on my own. He said the essay, “Any Kind of Leaving,” was the first one chosen by guest editor, Vivian Gornick. (Unfortunately, the series no longer permits self-submission by writers not previously published there.)

Sometimes you’ve got to take the reins and make it happen in your way. What are your thoughts about hybrid publishing? Do you have experience with it? Leave a comment below.

Book of the Month

This month, I read Reading the Waves, the new memoir by Lydia Yuknavitch. I’m a huge fan of her earlier memoir, The Chronology of Water, so I had high expectations for this new book, and it didn’t disappoint. Yuknavitch writes so close to the body that sometimes her words make little logical sense, and yet they pull us along like a stream we resonate with as animals.

Interestingly, though memoir has been acused of being “navel gazing,” Yuknavitch sees memoir writing as a form of advocacy:

“I’ve chosen to spend my life creating literature as resistance. It’s where I want to put my energy, alongside legions of others who have given their lives to storytelling. It’s the ocean I want to swim in. Which means I’m in the waters of grief and imagination, of laughter and rage, of bodies that do whatever they want in the face of it all, of not apologizing for writing through it all.”

The book is a lesson and a blueprint for navigating grief and pain. “Storytelling lets you move,” she says. And storytelling is malleable because memory is malleable. She quotes Joy Harjo: “…memory is a living being that moves in many-layered streams. It is not static. It is not a backwards look. It moves forward, sideways, in spiral.”

Yuknavitch’s own storytelling, whether about her earlier marriage, the death of her baby daughter, or her relationships with people and place, meanders. She tells about how her husband gets lost hunting for mushrooms, the getting lost an act with an actual Lithuania name, “nugrybauti.” It is a metaphor for the book, this sliding into strange territory by following cognitive associations, only to come out somewhere familiar but with a fresh way of seeing. This is the most evocative kind of prose, its unexpected associations allowing stories to enter the reader differently, and in a more affecting way.

Bonus: Not a Writing Prompt

Every day, it seems, the proverbial shit is hitting the fan. The news (and this particular northeast winter) makes everything feel hard, including writing. When so many people are suffering here and abroad due to decisions made in Washington, I find myself asking, “What use is writing?” It all seems so trivial and unhelpful. Consequently, I’ve added advocacy to my daily to-do list. I find that once I do something, anything, to advocate for democracy, I feel better and the writing comes more easily. If you’d like to try doing the same, here are some suggestions:

Writers for Democratic Action has a call out for writing submissions, which you can find here. They’re a welcoming organization and they also offer a nifty civic action toolkit which may be helpful to you.

When I get ready to make phone calls to representatives, I use the site 5calls.org. The site gives you a list of topics you can choose from, a background on each, and a script to help you talk to whoever answers the phone. If you need help finding contact information for your representatives, go to usa.gov/electedofficials.

Indivisible is also a great organization. You can get on their mailing list and they’ll send you emails about what’s happening, invitations to zoom meetings, and ways you can help.

If you have more suggestions, please leave them here in the comments. Thanks!

It Takes A Village