Hi Friends,
I thought I’d try recording this as audio also, lmk what you think. (Bonus: you’ll get to hear my cat chirping in the background lol.)
Come say hi! I’ll be at the MassPoetry Fest on Saturday, May 31, working a table for Nine Syllables Press and teaching a class on chapbook manuscripts. Or come say hello any other Saturday morning from 10:30-12 during our open writing time at Looky Here. One of my co-hosts shared the poem below this week, and I thought you’d like it, too.
Tomorrow by Bernadette Mayer for: max and alyssa malyyssax worelish tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady, go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns, then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum, on to northampton to see the smith college art museum & greenhouse where we'll see a green heron it would be nice to be able to walk today so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn where we're able to buy riccotta cheese which means twice-baked, with which we're able to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm war what is it good for? absolutely nothing
(bear mama and cub video taken by my neighbor this week, while staying a respectful distance away!)
After a long, long time looking for a good home for it, my review of the terrific book Girl Work by Zefyr Lisowski is finally out, thanks to Cleaver Magazine! This is one of my fave books that I read last year, and writing the review was a lot of fun, too. “When I first saw the title Girl Work, it brought to mind ideas of emotional labor, domestic work so often not seen as actual work, and also, the exhortation “girl, work.” Zefyr Lisowski’s Girl Work tangles its sharp fingernails in all of these ideas of work and so much more—body horror, the jumbles and fragments of traumatic memory, sex work, transness, and the ways a person can be haunted and exploited by all of these…”
I have a personal essay coming out soon in Write or Die, so more soon about that. And I’ve been re-reading and loving the chapbook And Yet Held by T. De Los Reyes, including this gem, “The Shape of Rapture.”
I’ve been cooking this scrumptious kale-leek galette from Feasting at Home. I love this recipe because it’s very flexible. Want to add shitaake mushrooms to the filling? Go ahead. Hate kale and want to use spinach instead? Knock yourself out. My only change is that I use a regular pie crust instead of making the rough puff pastry she calls for. Again, do what you like.
I’m taking an online class with the writer Eula Biss, where she’s doing close readings of essays. It’s been a very helpful class, and inspired me to do close readings of some of my own favorites, namely James Baldwin and Joan Didion. Didion’s The White Album happened to come from the library first, so that’s where I’ve begun. A lot of that collection is short pieces, clearly written for journalism assignments, that are pithy and detailed and very Didion, but it’s the titular essay that, for me, is iconic and the most moving. Not only that, it’s very instructive for, say, a human living in the US in 2025, wondering what the hell is all of this and how do I possibly say anything about it.
I may end up writing a longer piece about this (lmk if this interests you!), but here are a couple of my main takeaways from doing a very granular examination of “The White Album.”
Point of View (POV)—Didion begins this essay with an encompassing “we,” which is an unusual move for an essay.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she begins, and continues this way for the entire first paragraph, fusing reader and narrator/speaker together, until this potentially all-inclusive “we” narrows at the end of the paragraph to “we live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images…” (now the “we” only includes “writers”). Then she shifts to the first person in the second sentence of the next paragraph, saying, “I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself,” not only contracting the voice of the essay but also refining the focus. Here I am, and here is what I am saying to you.
The essay stays in first person until nearly the end, when it briefly shifts in section ten back to the third person again: “We put ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on the record player, and ‘Suzanne.’ We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the house on Franklin Street…”
To me, Didion is exploring in this essay her inability to impose sense-making narratives upon these years of her life (the late 1960s) and part of that is not trusting reality, not knowing where the boundaries of her own life end, where they are blurred with others, and we feel that in these dips into third person.
Flash cuts—Didion regularly uses what she calls “flash cuts” in this essay, suddenly introducing an italicized block of text which turns out to be an excerpt from a psychiatric report, or a transcript of a courtroom testimony. These excerpts are mostly only explained/defined after they are introduced, not beforehand.
These interruptions of the essay enact the confusion and swirling experience she is describing, acting as a mimetic for her experience. The psychiatric report is not just any report, Didion clarifies in the next paragraph, “The patient to whom this psychiatric report refers is me.” The courtroom testimony is from two brothers in a famous murder case… of someone who lived in Didion’s neighborhood. This is related to the shifts in POV I described above, bringing other voices and perspectives into the essay, usually without first clarifying that they are someone else’s, building the sense of individual realities and experiences being melded and jumbled.
“It will perhaps suggest the mood of those years…” Didion writes towards the end, and indeed, this essay does not eventually seek to make definitive ‘sense’ of this period, but to chronicle the mood of this era, as Didion perceived it.
There’s so much more I could say, but it’s time for me to go have lunch with a friend, so I’ll stop there! Hoping you have moments of nourishment and joy in your week.
xoxo
Adrie
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