Volume 3, No. 17: The Words and the Words and the Words

On reveling in moments of beauty

May 03, 2023

Greetings, book and treat people! If you’re new here, welcome! I appreciate you subscribing so much.

It’s been a hard year. I’ve written about this in past newsletters, because it’s nice to know you’re not alone when you’re struggling. I’ve also been trying—with mixed success—to be gentle with myself. I have so many words I want to share with all of you. I just took a look at my planning spreadsheet, and I have four separate essays lined up for the next few weeks. I want to write about Olivia and the messy tangle of queer teenage desire and my first crushes. I’ve been mulling over an essay about the beauty of untranslated language in books, and the space it can open up for different kinds of readers. Something Alexander Chee said when he answered questions during the class I recently took about his novel Edinburgh has burrowed its way into my heart and so there’s an essay brewing about monsters and morality and queer fallibility.

All of these essays are yet unwritten, because it’s just been one thing after another this year, and sometimes it’s all I can do to get out of bed and meet the deadlines for the work that pays my bills. Creativity feels awfully far away. When I got up this morning, intending to settle in at my desk to tackle one of the many as-yet-unwritten essays, I found myself staring at the empty page, exhausted.

Instead of berating myself for waking up late (I love the early morning more than any other time of day, but I’ve been struggling to get up at my usual time recently), for my inability to produce, for my lack of follow-through (as in, you’re all paying me for this work, and I want to give you something beautiful), I stopped and took a breath. I mixed up a marzipan scone loaf and put it in the oven. I made myself a nice breakfast. I thought about what I actually wanted to write today.

Yesterday on Instagram I posted a reflection about the books I read in April, and it stunned me into silence for a minute. I cannot believe how many incredible books I read last month, despite everything. That’s what I was thinking about this morning—all the moments of beauty I’ve experienced this year. All the beautiful words I’ve read. All the little delights

I don’t want—and don’t have the capacity—to be smart today. I do have the capacity to share some of those wordy delights. I do have the capacity to remind myself—and maybe some of you, if you also need the reminder—that it’s okay to take breaks for beauty.

The dates are when I finished the book the quote is taken from. The pictures are also from that day, or the day closest to it with a moment of joy or beauty I remember distinctly.

January 1

View of a winter field at sunrise; the sky is full of deep blue and purple clouds.

Despite every single lie to the contrary, despite every single action born of that lie—we are in the midst of rhizomatic care that extends in every direction, spatially, temporally, spiritually, you name it. It’s certainly not the only thing we’re in the midst of, but it’s the truest thing. By far.

from Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

January 5

I think about the world on fire & the music we choose to play anyway.

from Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen

January 22

View of the woods, looking up toward the sky. The many snow-covered branches are intertwined.

Some days it feels like everything around him—Janice’s store that sits like a fat blue bead on the main road, the familiar faces that nod hello as they pass by, the cracked siding of the band office, the bleached silver planks of the powwow grounds—all of it is part of his skin. The people, the buildings, the gravel, and the trees have all lived together for so long they are indistinguishable from one another. His heart beats under this ground and the roots of the trees spread through his lungs. He is home.

from Fire Song by Adam Garnett Jones

January 29

View looking up at a cloudy, slate-grey sky, with hints of blue and silver, and the tops of a few trees on the horizon.

We pretend lots of things that are only sort of true when we are the sky and time and memory and the center of the earth and destiny and gods and gravity and salted oceans and children of the gods who ate their mothers and birthed the constellations and nebulas and death are a myth because everything goes into itself to begin again.

from How to Wrestle a Girl by Venita Blackburn

February 7

Dark trees silhouetted against a blue and gold sky at sunset; the sun is golden on the horizon, and the trees cast shadows across the snowy ground.

My body is, and always will be part mechanical machine. This fact is a burden, a gift, a risk, and a reality that can be projected and shifted in ways that I can control and not control. Like all of us who live and breathe and function in our bodies, composed of so many disparate parts and processes, so many conundrums and solutions: we are all hybrid beings. We are all part of the chaos and unpredictability that is creation, reinvention, and change.

from Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black

February 11

My shadow and Nessa’s shadow on a road between two fields. There is a row of large trees, golden in the last afternoon light, on one side of the road.

We didn’t have all the answers; we gave ourselves grace anyway.

from We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds

February 20

A misty forest; black trees partially muted by an eerie fog bank.

I grew up thinking of immortality as something won with a drink or a bite or a pill, a static and irreversible state of being. But the immortal jellyfish has no notion of these tepid forevers. Its immortality is active. It is constantly aging in both directions, always reinventing itself, bell shrinking and expanding, tentacles retreating into flesh and wriggling out again. It is not living forever but reliving forever. When the immortal jellyfish ages in reverse, its body is not choosing eternity but rejecting death, which seem to be entirely different things.

from How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler

February 25

View of a snowy field, dark snow-covered trees along the horizon, and a wide blue sky, full of clouds.

And to extrapolate wildly, isn’t that what queerness is to the broader human community—an asymmetry, a bit of chaos to nurse the beauty of life into its tallest flowering?

from Uranians by Theodore McCoombs

March 4

My legs stretched out on a chaise, with a pile of books in my lap. Nessa is curled up next to me.

As you will see, I no longer arrange my books alphabetically or arrange them by color of spine, which was what I used to do. Now the books are arranged according to which characters I believe ought to be talking to each other.

from Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

March 15

Nessa’s paws resting on my stretched-out leg. Her face is just visible.

Sometimes I think it would be nice to remember not just narratives and images, but also touches. To carry an archive within yourself that has saved all the touches your skin has felt, and that can be recalled at any moment.

from 1,000 Coils of Fear by Olivia Wenzel, translated by Priscilla Layne

March 26

Six halved cara cara oranges arranged on a wooden cutting board.

Our recipes are not party tricks. I’m trying to share something rich, and old, and long-simmered. Something beyond the names for things. Something about comfort and tenderness, something familiar, save for perhaps in another language.

from What About the Rest of Your Life by Sung

March 30

A mostly brown field under a bright blue sky. Snow lingers on the field edges. Nessa stands in the foreground, her face toward the horizon.

Without the waiting, who can know when spring will come, or snow?

Heading south, the geese all beat

the waiting with their wings.

from Standing in the Forest of Being Alive by Katie Farris

April 1

My booted feet on a patch of snowy ground, covered in beech leaves and the blue shadows cast by trees.

I can pull the stars, their bright aching,

from the sky—but I can’t dream all

the leaves back onto the trees.

from Burning Like Her Own Planet by Vandana Khanna

April 9

Nessa lying on the porch, her paws out in front of her, ears perked.

insert cut-scene, rescind the fairy

tale: we all know there are no true villains—we're just a bunch of hungry animals.

from Buffalo Girl by Jessica Q. Stark

April 13

Closeup of a small stream full of leaves, with several skunk cabbages growing along the bank.

I like gaps. I like things that wobble. I wanted my memoir to have gaps, to have a little wobble. I didn’t want to dust my life with powdered sugar. Aging has changed me. Relationships have changed me. Hormones have changed me. Trauma has changed me. A body is a mobile home. A body is a slow time machine.

from Any Other City by Hazel Jane Plante

April 21

The beach at sunset. The water is pale blue and still; the sky a mix of blue, orange, pink and purple. The sand is covered in footprints.

“Now we inscribe that you are here to help, to grow, to fight, to plant, to agitate, to assemble in the spirit of queer abundance now and forever,” they all chanted.

from Future Feeling by Joss Lake

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