It's February and the world is a sheet of ice
Hello Friends of the Newsletter!
I don’t actually have any news. Just putting that right up front.
What I do have is:
Mysterious and intriguing advice column headlines
Novel progress report
Current enthusiasms
Favorites by Lucille Clifton and Toni Cade Bambara in honor of Black History Month
First up, advice column headlines. As an advice column devotee and regular Slate reader, I congratulate the person who writes these headlines. It’s often more fun to speculate what it could be about than to read the actual letter.
I Know The Truth About My Husband’s “Secret” Time in the Garage
My Husband Returned To His Sexual Wrestling Account When I Lost My Libido
Help! A Photo of My Butt Went Viral
Second! Novel progress report. I decided to start over from a blank page after multiple full manuscripts I wasn’t super happy with. It’s been fun doing essentially another first draft, but this time with a solid idea of my story and characters. Fun, but slow.
Here’s a draft excerpt that makes me laugh. Grad student Telly is having an emo moment, sitting in the hallway and despairing over her plummeting trajectory, when professor and future mentor AB trips over her and yells at her for being on the floor.
“I remember you,” AB says with her voice, but her facial expression and tone convey the message “I will kill you.”
I falter for a moment, and am about to resume my speech when she cuts me off again. “Why are you on the floor? I didn’t expect you to be there,” she says, her tone less hostile this time.
Why am I on the floor. It’s been a long journey to get here. I started grad school with so much hope. Mental montage set to “All By Myself”: white faculty members shaking their heads disapprovingly; the other grad students tripping off to happy hour while I hide around the corner; raw egg quivering on the office floor. The words “INSUFFICIENTLY SCHOLARLY” float by in block letters.
“Forget it,” says AB.
Agenda item number three. Current enthusiasms:
Grains! I have obtained wheat berries, millet, buckwheat flakes, and freshly milled einkorn flour, all of which make delicious bread and delicious-to-me breakfast mush that nobody else in my family will touch. (Which is perfect, because I can make a big batch and eat it all week without fear that it will disappear.)
The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai. Just finished this romance audiobook about a Black dating app CEO who overcomes her trust issues to find love with an ex-football player crusading for brain injury awareness. Funny, sweet, lots of interesting details about their jobs, and someone pops out of a cake. Highly recommended if you enjoy the genre.
Markets of Britain, a 70s-style video of a vibrant British market selling mini-emus and butter. My high schooler showed this to me; apparently it was featured on Boing Boing 12 years ago (how does he find these things?) and it’s from the series Look Around You by Popper and Serafinowicz.
Item the fourth! In honor of Black History Month, here are two of my favorite authors.
Lucille Clifton: Her hundreds of poems are powerful and even though this one is so often quoted, it always sticks with me.
why some people be mad at me sometimes
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.
Toni Cade Bambara: I can’t find legal copies of her work online, but check out Gorilla, My Love (1972) for short stories where every paragraph sings. Here’s the very first sentence of the book, from “A Sort of Preface.”
It does no good to write autobiographical fiction cause the minute the book hits the stand here comes your mama screamin how could you and sighin death where is thy sting and she snatches you up out your bed to grill you about what was going down back there in Brooklyn when she was working three jobs and trying to improve the quality of your life and come to find out on page 42 that you were messin around with that nasty boy up the block and breaks into sobs and quite naturally your family strolls in all sleepy-eyed to catch the floor show at 5:00 A.M. but as far as your mama is concerned, it is nineteen-forty-and-something and you ain’t too grown to have your ass whipped.
That is the end of this newsletter. Happy reading, my friends!
