My First Houseguests
Circling HomeWork #45
Before we get started, you’re invited: three ✨FREE✨ virtual gatherings for artists!
Reminder of upcoming events! Our virtual art admin coworking meetup returns on Saturday, January 17 at 2pm ET. Take 90 minutes to get organized and jumpstart your admin tasks for 2026 (…or get back to the items set aside before the holidays). These low-pressure, friendly co-working meetups take place every month: virtually on third Saturdays, and in-person in Brooklyn on first Saturdays.
Let us know if you’d like us to send you an extra reminder and the Zoom link.
Also this month, we’re thrilled to be partnering with our friends at Paradice Palase to host a free, two-part workshop called How to Talk About Your Art. Designed to help you speak and write confidently about your artwork and creative practice, each online session will include practical frameworks and tips, guided opportunities to practice what you’re learning, and time for questions. We’ll meet two Wednesdays in a row, January 21 and 28, at 6pm ET via Zoom. Registrants will receive the recording and a resource packet after the event, so definitely RSVP even if you can’t attend live!
Read more about the workshop and RSVP at the links below.
Now, on to this week’s HomeWork!
Over the past few months, I have seen a flurry of essays on Substack introducing readers to the concept of Inviting People To Your House For Dinner. Is this in your algorithm? We’re calling it “Deep Casual Hosting,” or we’re calling it Weekly Friend Dinner. It’s supposedly subversive, it’s anarchic, it’s communal. I have skimmed these, or I have read just the headlines, and the emotion they generate in me is neither admiration nor a neutral kind of happiness, nor even judgement (it is not novel to share meals with people; get a grip), but rather envy.
I did not need Substack to tell me to share meals with people. I already know how to do that. Do you know where I learned? Church.1
Down to my bones, I believe that this type of everyday community is the best thing organized religion has to offer. I grew up with a parade of people in an out of my parents’ house all the time, from bible study or prayer groups to standing weekly dinners to impromptu lunches after church, from hosting missionaries when they returned from home to offering the spare bedroom to an acquaintance in between places, the boundaries of my family’s home were porous. This was not without effort; it was absolutely a value and intention in our family culture, and one of the primary ones that I carried with me into adulthood.
It’s also a value that is hard to exercise when you keep moving. In my post-college adulthood, I’ve lived in six homes in four states, with more to come.2 Moving is a requirement of my partner’s career. It also makes my favorite iteration of community practice (Come over for dinner! In fact, come over every week!) more difficult.
In our current situation in North Carolina, we have yet to build these local relationships successfully. I work from home and my coworker friends live 800 miles away. My partner works in a hospital, and I have met a few of his colleagues, but the nature of this particular commute is such that people from his job might live an hour and a half away from us. I’m not asking a woman I have met once, and who has two small children, to drive three hours round trip to come to my house for brunch. For one thing, why punish her? For another, I don’t even know if I like her yet!
Enter: The Guest Room.
So IRL friendship in North Carolina is not our strong suit. What do we have? Friends scattered across the country, and an extra bedroom. When we moved into this house, we decided to forego a set-apart studio for me in favor of a guest room. It took me a while to sink into the new space creatively, but overall it hasn’t been a big problem. And I love the guest room.
After the paywall: how I furnished the guest room, my first houseguests, and what I cooked for them.
