Volume 4, No. 24: Writing is Pleasure

on the joy of making poems

Greetings, book and treat people! Last Saturday, I marched with a local group of organizers, Greenfield for Palestine, at Franklin County Pride. It was the first time I’d been to Pride since I moved, and while the actual festival was WAY too much for me (so many people! so much sun!) I was so happy to be out there with a bunch of queers waving signs and chanting Free Palestine. I didn’t take any pictures but local queer Palestinian activist and author Hannah Moushabeck got some great ones.

On Sunday, a friend and I went to the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. I live 40 minutes away from this magical place and, despite my newfound love of picture books, I had never been. I fell deeply and immediately in love. There are three exhibits on right now: one about Eric Carle’s bird art, one about the work of Brazilian artist and author Roger Mello, and one about metafiction in picture book art. They were all phenomenal. There is something so moving about seeing picture book art treated with such reverence and curiosity. I honestly wasn’t expecting to be so delighted and awed.

There is also an amazing picture book library there that I could have happily read in for hours.

I shared a few more pictures on Instagram if you’re curious. If you live anywhere nearby, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I’m still in a weird reading place, though I have been devouring audiobooks. I really enjoyed Curtis Chin’s memoir about growing up in his family’s Chinese restaurant in Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. I appreciated the solid, straightforward message in Sim Kern’s novel The Free People’s Village, which is basically about how to keep showing up to the work of liberation, even when the world gets worse every day. Now I’m listening to Carson McCullers: A Life by Mary V. Dearborn, and let me tell you: I am riveted. My friend

Rosamond

recommended it, and I’m so glad she did, because there is something weirdly, immensely comforting in the realization that artists have been doing what artists do—thinking about art and what it means and why it matters (and gossiping about each other)—forever.

Anyway, today’s newsletter is about poetry.

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Earlier this month the wonderful bookstagrammer Kristin Lee hosted a readalong of one of my favorite novels of all time, Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh. I didn’t actually manage to reread it, but I loved participating in the discussion. I dug up my notes from the amazing class I took on it last spring with Garth Greenwell. It was a four week online seminar, and I signed up for it partly because I love the book, and partly because I was looking for writing inspiration wherever I could find it. This was right in the middle of my long period of creative fallowness, and I was still fighting it. I was hoping talking and thinking about an incredible novel would jolt my brain and/or heart and/or hands back to writing. It did not.