Welcome to Saturday, friends. It's bluer and brighter here this morning than it has been, though a big storm is expected tonight so we'll be under snow again tomorrow morning. Perfect weather for reading and writing.
Here's what we've got for you this week on the website:
Shara Kronmal reviewed Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti for Archipelago Books. Shara has written several reviews for us in the past, and we're glad she has shared her work with us again.
And our featured story this week is "Trashlot" by Keegan Lawler, writing for us for the first time.
A few months ago in this newsletter I mentioned a story about the artist David Wojnarowicz, which Jeremy Millar had shared on Bluesky:
The artist Zoe Leonard remembered confessing to Wojnarowicz her anxiety that her aerial photographs of clouds didn’t reflect grim political reality. Wojnarowicz said to her: “Zoe, these are so beautiful, and that’s what we’re fighting for. We’re being angry and complaining because we have to, but where we want to go is back to beauty. If you let go of that, we don’t have anywhere to go.”
I was reminded of it this week while listening to Peter Rogers' new composition On the Life Cycle of the European Eel. Rogers provided music for a podcast that meant a lot to me during the lockdown stage of the covid pandemic, contributor Melissa Harrison's The Stubborn Light of Things. This new project of his made me think of Zoe Leonard's clouds because it lifted me to remember, in the face of such an overwhelming and confusing whiplash of a week out there in the world, that there's strength and grace and a whole lot of hope in making the art you want to have in the world.
Being reminded of that sent me back to the pages of a project of my own I've been circling but worrying doesn't "matter enough," and I wrote a few pages about a squirrel taking bites from a pumpkin until it leaned over so far it fell off. Will anyone ever read it? Will it go anywhere or be of interest to anybody but me? Who knows! But spending that time writing it made me better prepared to go back into the world and to be there for other people in the ways I want to be.
Until next time, thanks for reading.
Steve Himmer |