Can't Stop, Won't Stop Reading: Final Weeks of 2020
Fingers crossed but I’m putting together a Zoom writers’ group. I really hope it works—I miss people. And I miss writing just for the sake of trying something new or playing around. Play is good; I’d like more of it. I’m leading the first workshop, “Two Truths and a Lie.” One of the stories we’ll look at as a model is “Two Truths and a Lie about Elizabeth Kinsley, Thirty-Three-Year-Old Virgin” by Meghan Phillips, from her chapbook Abstinence Only. I have no idea which of the three vignettes is the lie. I loved this whole chapbook, and I highly recommend it. You can read it in an afternoon, and it is perverse and delightful.
I finally read The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami. This book had been on my shelf for years, waiting for when I finally had time and energy to read it because I sensed, when I previewed the first couple of pages, that it was special. It WAS special. A bit of a slow start, but once it got going I snuck opportunities to read as often as possible. I have now read two books about men—this and Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness—which is frankly unlike me. But in both books, I was not frustrated by the lack of women. I think it is because in both Cleanness and The Moor’s Account the lack of women is organic to the situation and the characters. So there is no sense of erasure, and women do appear in The Moor’s Account eventually, exactly where you would expect them to.
“Soft-Shelled Turtle” by Lucy Zhang is one of those stories I came across on the endless scroll and actually finished reading once I opened it because it kept surprising me:
I was twelve when my mom bought a soft-shelled turtle from the Chinatown seafood market. She carried it in layers of paper and plastic bags all the way back from New York City on the one-hour (occasionally longer) train ride. We found an empty row of seats and placed the bag on the ground. It didn’t take long for the turtle to tear through the first bag. When I pointed it out to my mom, she screamed ai-yah, and the man sitting across from us stared at the tiny, sharp black beak poking out from the plastic.
The two poems by Noor Hindi in the December issue of Poetry were fire (as my students of three years ago would have said). “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying” made the rounds on social media. But I liked—though “liked” is perhaps the wrong word—“Breaking [News]” perhaps even more:
In interviews, I frame my subject’s stories through a lens to make them digestible
to consumers.
I become a machine. A transfer of information. They become a plea for empathy,
an oversaturation of feelings we’ll fail at transforming into action.”
“Oh Kids” (last poem at link) by Rebecca Lehmann is so odd and sad and well captures the absurdity and repetition of books for small and tiny children:
Ann is a wild cat
she cuts the mud.
Watch me,says my son,
watch me lift the books.Now Muff and Ruff
have a rag rug.Matt sits on a hat.
Mag has a bag.
Look, there are few writers I stan as hard as Myriam Gurba. I read her essay about Hooters, “Experimental Chickena,” years ago and have avidly read everything she’s written since then. (You should definitely go read “Experimental Chickena” if you have never read it.) Here she is talking about underwear in “Lingerie Stanifesto: In Defense of Quotidian Hoetry”:
My mother brought me along during weekend bra and underwear buying excursions and I would park myself beneath the LINGERIE sign that someone had suspended from Gottschalk’s department store ceiling with fish wire. It was as if the sign itself was wearing lingerie, a pair of G-strings, and I had no idea that the word was French, just as I had no idea that déjà vu was too. In my head, I sorted out the phonics, pronouncing lingerie with a hard G akin to the G’s in gargle, giddy up, and gargantuan. My imagination mangled the three-syllable word, sounding it out as lean-grrr-eye. I knew and understood the word linger and I pondered what lingered about lingerie. Linger meant to hang around, to sort of lurk, and I lingered by a rack of red teddies, rubbing my feet together as my mother sought ropa interior in her size. I wondered if lingerie ever lingeried. Was it also a verb?
“Panels from a Courtly Spring” by Kelly Cressio-Moeller is the exact kind of spec-fic-fantasy-history poetry I want to do more of—if I could ever be so good at it as she is:
I listened to the Between the Covers podcast episode with Janice Lee and Leni Zumas about publishing and power. It was a great reminder that status is not the same thing as quality. The conversation took off from Lee’s essay “Books are not Products, They are Bridges: Challenging Linear Ideas of Success in Literary Publishing,” which was just as nourishing as the podcast:
As much as I believed that I didn’t need to be validated by external forces to know that my writing was “good” or “important,” or to secure the commendations of “the industry” in order to feel like a legitimate writer, it felt impossible to completely shed these ideas. Of course I wanted to be recognized and validated. Of course I silently compared myself to other writers who were getting big book deals, making TV appearances, and had thousands of followers on Twitter. Of course I wanted that too. I deserved that too. This is what I believed, and kept hidden from myself.
But my current healing practice asks me to look for those holes I am trying to fill inside of myself. And so I knew that the fulfillment of any of those desires would never fill the hole I sought to close up because the hole itself was an illusion. It could never be filled. I had to accept that I was already whole without any of those things, and not because of those things.