As you can see, I’m still in Capture Mode from my end of year reflections. Hope you love lists of brilliance as much as I do. And if you don’t, then ALAS, this is where we are. I do have more lettery letters coming your way.
When I was young, Xanga was THE THING amongst my age group. Not livejournal. Not tumblr. Not myspace. XANGA. It was blogging before blogging moved to Blogger and before facebook took over our online lives.
I don’t remember if I was not allowed a Xanga or if I knew that I wouldn’t be allowed if I asked—I didn’t ask and kept a secret one. But even more secret was how devotedly I read the posts of my friends (and people I admired but wasn’t friends with and people I had crushes on but couldn’t bear to speak to and people I hated and used their writing to keep hating). We learned to share our lives in narrative form, innovating genres from the personal essay to the listicle to the bulletin board post (that became facebook’s “Dana Ray is up to…”). There are moments from peoples lives that live in me like little treasures—people who have no idea that their story or observation took up residence in me with such precision.
Trespassing on private property to go swimming; being arrested arrested, the bold risk of that summer evening vivid to me, the ring she wore to court to plead guilty.
Smoking a cigarette for the first time, his nicotine high on a bench, the way it felt to wobble in time.
Insomnia, the way the mind and body would “fill with bees” the closer to dawn it became.
These intimacies in all likelihood influenced my writing as much if not more than my book reading.
So it has become in the (news)letters I read today. I am gifted the intimacies of strangers, walks down the shelves and hallways of their minds and lives, taking glittering precise details that will stay with me. The writing and writers shared below make up a living constellation of meaning and experience in my own mind and body. It is as if they have hand written a letter and passed it to me in the hallway. I keep the treasure of their stories and language alongside those of my nearest and dearest.
A Pocket Observatory by Meg Conley
Meg is an image-maker and myth-turner. She weaves pictures into language that turn into meaning-making lexicons. She feels like a prophet, or more correctly a seer. She sees in metaphors and explains it to us just enough that we feel the gash of feeling with her.
That Seems Important by Margo Aaron
I needed a Margo years ago when I felt embarrassed by my anger. She knows how to wield anger, wield language as a weapon to stare down harm. Just try something, I dare you, each essay says. And make something you care about, damn it!
by Amanda Montei
Always moving, always provoking. These essays over the last year got me writing and thinking about my body and parenting in a richer, critical lens. You already saw me call out her book in my top books of the year; Amanda’s letters pull threads on culture and embodiment and gender in magnificent ways.
by Anne Helen Peterson
I always hear about things I wouldn’t know existed otherwise. I learn things in the comments that surprise and alter. The generalist adoration for all things culture and human behavior. I find books, ideas, practices, people, brikabrak that’s worth having. I feel like I can feel the world through these interviews, essays, podcast episodes, comment threads, far more than if I read the news every day.
by Rachel Kess
From the way these essays move me, especially the last six or so during her maternity leave, you’d think I took worked as a woman in tech in Silicon Valley. But this last one Dealing With the Body had me weeping.
by Lisa Olivera
I used to not understand the word “compassion”; no image or feeling or metaphor or example would come to mind. These letters have textured the blank space of that word. Lisa is all compassion because BECAUSE she struggles to have it for herself in the day to day. The writing is itself the compassionate gaze, the compassionate practice, rather than her putting compassion on as a costume instructing us in its ways. The voice of an Elder Self, the soul that sees from far down the road of life, looking back at the present struggle with knowledge and love, because these things made that Elder Gaze in the first place. +my favorite link roundups; always experiences I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
by Tara McMullin
Tara does logic in a way that makes sense to me. Every piece reveals a detail of work and creativity that I can’t believe I didn’t see before. I don’t think like this (likely cannot). But reading this has freed me of old assumptions that were overdue for the rubbish bin.
by Jess Pan
A newsletter about the life of a bookshop in London. Dreamy, romantic, quirky, character sketches. Also just finished reading her book Sorry I’m Late; I Didn’t Want to Come. I’m glad I found it post pandemic as opposed to pre-pandemic when it was originally published. A treat to stay with her voice for a whole book! And necessary reminder for how to make friends: by risking failure and facing adrenaline and talking to strangers. It’s the only way we’ve ever done it as a species. And I need to get back into the flow.