235. READ. LOOK. THINK.

Brief, brief, but inside me now. Imaginative play. Being too much, a mind reflecting on the page, do you have any photos from 2004?

Caroline Walker Imaginative Play I, 2024

READ.

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow envel-
oped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette.
In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would
see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars? I stood a while in the
dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently de-
stroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now,
which the stars could never be.

— ‘A Work of Fiction’ by Louise Glück.

‘… what afflicts literature, more than book banning, is this rapid loss of the ability to read for deeper meanings, to grasp subtlety, and to understand ambiguity. If conviction—instead of clarity, the kind of clarity that arrives via muddled thinking, repeated questioning, and a tolerance for not knowing and not understanding—is the goal of reading and writing, then much is already lost.’

‘…“I want to write,” I ventured. “What do you have to write about?” he replied. It was hard to tell if he was being cutting or genuinely curious. There were times when I could laugh off a casual pronouncement like that, and then there were times when I would be overcome by a helpless rage.’ I loved this piece about (among other things) growing up with a writer father.

I searched the author of the piece afterwards and loved this from her NYT ‘Vows’ wedding coverage: ‘A few days later, he e-mailed her and asked, “Do you want to have dinner Monday or Tuesday?” She wrote back, “Both!” Then, she worried he might think she was too enthusiastic or intense. “I always thought I’d be too much for someone, and with Michael, nothing I said or wrote was ever too much,” she said.’

‘Intimacy doesn’t arrive from exposition in which you tell the reader something about yourself, but in the places where you enact a mind reflecting and processing on the page and allow [the] reader to live within it.’

‘Such novels purport to disturb us, but what they really do is objectify possible negative futures such that we feel superior to and safe from them.’ On dystopian fiction.

‘Writing anything is an exercise in vulnerability but the fear of writing Australia and getting it wrong, feeling it ring false or hollow, losing that sense of deep intimacy with character and place that the best writing offers, is also embarrassing and invalidating. If I can’t write Australia, can I call myself Australian at all?’ Mikaella Clements (I am reading the new novel she wrote with her wife, Feast While You Can — what a dream to be a wife and wife author team?! Like a job people could have in a movie.)

Who gets shipped and why?

LOOK.

‘The names of these bags reveal some kind of alienation and othering of their carriers. They always locate someone within a geographical area or remind someone that their existence in space is impermanent.’ Photographer Nobukho Nqaba.

I’m so touchy about consuming body content because I am hyper-alert to fascism (thank you to Naomi Klein for solving this mystery for me about why I hate most fitness talk). But I loved this Q and A with J Wortham. (Another great resource is She’s a Beast. I think comments are now open on my Substack, if you know any more?)

It is a dream of mine to write a realistic social novel for the relatively under-served (in my opinion?!) fantasy-averse chapter book-consuming 9-12yo! Rightly, this audio series by Katherine Rundell is warning me: that’s very hard.

On Instagram I raved about Will Hunter’s novel Sunstruck. I met them in person at the Hutchinson Heinemann and Merky books showcase and thought: this person looks very familiar. Some light stalking of their feed later and the mystery is solved 🎀

I was influenced so hard by Ella Risbridger to get these 6 ingredient Waitrose Christmas biscuits — SO nice!

So sweet and stylish third trimester outfits.

I just finished the third episode of Rivals on Disney+! Is it great?! I think it’s great!

THINK.

Where did our 2004 photos go?

Just a quick one today. This week and next, I’m really conscious of everyone in the US with your election — I hope it all goes okay.

Jess x