“Ya know, ‘Skinny Dipping’ would make a pretty good name for your newsletter.”
My friend Mark Travis wrote that in an email to me six months ago on May 18th.
Back in May, Mark made his suggestion about my Substack’s name in response to an email from me about my early newsletter drafts. I told him the idea of sending those words out into the world left me feeling naked. I also wrote this:
It reminds me of being a teenager and lamenting the fact that I was too self-conscious to skinny dip with my friends. But then I realized: all I need to do is take off my clothes and then I AM that person. I just need one moment of bravery (pressing send, stripping off my clothes) and then it's done. I am a skinny dipper; I am someone who shares.
If these words sound familiar, it’s because I borrowed them for Begin Here, Skinny Dipping’s opening essay.
Two and a half weeks ago on November 2nd, Mark passed away.
In a way, everything I’ve written here begins with words written to Mark.
I met Mark in 2018 in a grad school short story workshop. We formed a slow-building, out-of-the-classroom friendship based on a mutual appreciation of the insights we witnessed each other share in class. From the start, our friendship was unique. I was twenty-eight and just beginning my life and career as a writer. Mark was a semi-retired career journalist in his early sixties. He was anticipating grandchildren the way I was anticipating buying my first car. When I left New Hampshire for California, we began a sporadic Zoom friendship and swapped writing for feedback. The Zooms grew into more frequent emails.
In many ways, we were so different, but to borrow a phrase from Mark: words were our core bond.
In February 2023, Mark sent me the final draft of a magazine article he’d written about a non-profit architecture firm. I read the draft on my way to a weekend in the Colorado Mountains and something in the article struck a chord. I thought the feelings would settle up in the mountains. But they only got bigger—a thread of realization and epiphany stringing itself precariously along. By the time I arrived home six days later, an entire universe had crammed its way inside my head. I tried journaling, but was blocked. The only way the thoughts made sense was in the shape of an email to Mark.
At that point, over the course of our four-year friendship, Mark and I had touched on our personal lives in the way that two writers talking about writing can’t not get personal. But this epiphany-themed email felt different.
The email took weeks to write. It was a many-layered, spiraling thing trying to get to the core of who I wanted to be as a person and a writer. When I eventually pressed send, my body felt both light and heavy.
Looking back on it now, I think it opened the door for what came next.
A few months later, in the spring of 2023, Mark’s long-time dear friend and writing collaborator, Mike Pride, passed away. One of the many bonds that linked Mike and Mark were Saturday morning emails they exchanged each week. I never met Mike, but felt I knew parts of him through Mark. I cried when Mike passed for the pain I knew Mark felt. I cried again when Mark asked if we could start our own Saturday morning email exchange.
I knew whatever new tradition Mark and I would create in the shape of what he shared with Mike would be an honor. I didn't know the full extent of what it would give me. Or how desperately I would miss it when it ended.
By loose definition, our Saturday emails looked back on the week with an emphasis on our writing lives. Progress reports set into the landscape of the past seven days. The emails ran a hand over the fabric of the week and picked up the threads that mattered. They danced between correspondence and essay, regular prose and what I call prose-prose, writing that sings as it drives its nail home. At a certain point, we began calling each other Writing Buddy, WB for short.
Dear WB, some emails began.
Your WB, some emails ended.
I cannot write about how Mark felt, but I can write about how his emails made me feel. How it felt to watch our friendship deepen. Week by week, sentence by sentence, with every photograph attached to the bottom of an email. I felt his joy as my joy. I sorrowed at his pain. A photograph Mark sent once of him and his wife Brenda at Lake Umbagog filled me with contentment. Videos of his grandchildren always made me smile.
Mark was a beautiful writer. Clear, funny, concise. With three or four words, he could sketch out an entire person or the mood of a room. Mark was an exceptionally good listener. He always asked the right questions and gave heartfelt, wise advice. His encouragement propelled me through many changes and challenges. It’s not that I told Mark secrets, but I found myself telling him things I don’t think I would have thought to tell anyone else. In a strange way, sometimes our gap in age and gender made it easier to simply say what I was thinking without worrying how it might sound.
The greatest gift from our Saturday emails was our friendship, plain and simple. But they gave me something else too.
I didn’t notice it at first. But slowly, week by week, sentence by sentence, I was discovering things about myself. Small, simple things, but bigger, initially amorphous things too. In order to express the more abstract, and often vital thoughts, I had to clarify them, melt them down until they separated into distinct strings of words that were both true and clear. And I did this because I had to. What would be the point in writing an email to Mark that he might not understand?
Years ago now, back in grad school, I tried with great effort and intensity to write things about myself and my life. Clear? Clear? Clear? my mentor wrote along the margins of my pages those first two terms. Looking back on those pages now, some of it isn’t even clear to me. I know some of my trouble was bad, rusty writing but I think most of it was that I imagined myself speaking to the whole world.
With Mark, I found myself saying exactly what I wanted to say, and saying it clearly because I knew exactly who I was writing to. The desire to say something to Mark merged with the desire to say something to myself. I became a better writer.
A year and one day after Mark’s invitation to join him in Saturday emails, I launched Skinny Dipping.
The desire to share and the confidence to do so was born from those Saturday emails. Skinny Dipping wouldn’t have been possible for the person and writer I was before. It was my dear friend
who gifted me with the initial inspiration and encouragement to begin this Substack. I have other important writing friends too; my best friend and fiction collaborator Ellie Nan Storck is an essential force in my life. But Mark made this possible. He’s been my first reader and trusted editor. He challenged me and cheered me on. When I told him I had doubts after pressing send on last month’s story, he picked the phone right away and called.When I began the first draft of this essay on October 1st, all was well. Mark was not sick. He knew I was writing about our friendship and gave me his blessing to do so.
In that early draft, I wrote these words as conclusion:
It’s hard to say exactly what this essay is about because to me it’s about so many things. The power of sharing. The joy of friendship. The particular joy of unexpected friendships. Cross-generation, cross-gender, cross-country friendships. Generosity. Tradition. Love.
A thank you.
But now there is more to say.
I miss Mark terribly. The infection that took his life came so suddenly; for me, there wasn’t a chance to say goodbye.
I cannot believe I’ll never see his name in my email inbox again.
Our Saturday emails were a point of gravity in my week. Everything important collected itself there.
I keep forgetting he’s gone. I see things or think thoughts and catch myself looking forward to telling him.
What do I do with these thoughts? Tell someone else? Write them down? Let them float away? Find a way to tell Mark anyway?
As grateful as I am that at least he knew I was going to write about our friendship, I wish I sent him that early October draft. No writing task has ever felt harder than making my way through these words changing present tense to past.
And now, I feel myself putting off the ending. Rejecting the goodbye. I find myself with everything and nothing left to say.
In the end, I come back to the way I ended that first draft. A thank you.
Without knowing, Mark helped me build the place and the instrument with which I could honor and grieve him. Without writing about him and without sharing my love for him with you all, I don’t know how I could begin to comprehend this loss.
So thank you, WB. I’ll look for you always in words and feel you always in my writing.
To learn more about Mark’s life and legacy, please read his obituary published in the Concord Monitor.
A lovely tribute to our dear friend, Sabine. He told me about your friendship; it meant as much to him as it did to you, I think. Here’s to more Saturday mornings, and to what you and he made them.
Big hug from me to you, Sabine. Really big.