NYC folks! Now is the time for solidarity and community! I’ll be reading with Emily J. Smith and Jen Lue at the Rally Reading Series on Thursday, February 6 at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg. This series combines art and activism — “the heart of a march in the body of a reading series” — and we’ll be taking donations to support local mutual aid efforts. Would love to see you there!
Hi friends,
Let’s start with books this week, shall we?
This week in reading
I finished Horse Girl Fever by Kevin Maloney. I’m still gathering my thoughts about it, but generally I really enjoyed it. Frenetic in style, poignant in content. It reminded me of the best stories in my favorite online lit mags from the late 2010s, like Paper Darts. Remember Paper Darts?
Then I started an ARC of Erica Stern’s Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story, which is coming out from Barrelhouse in June. I love this book already. It starts with a long, gorgeously written birth story. I think I might need to write about this one…
I’m also listening to Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I don’t do a lot of “business books” and this one is definitely dated, but now is a wild time to be managing human beings at work and I’m trying to do a better job with that massive responsibility.
And I resumed reading In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm. It slipped between the bed and the wall a few weeks ago and I honestly forgot about it for a while but it’s back in rotation now.
This week in writing
It’s the last week of A Write at the Museum. This class has flown by and I’m going to miss it. (David is also running a virtual version starting February 16 if writing prompts based on art sound fun to you but you are not in NYC!)
I’ve continued using the prompts to work on the glass house novel, and I am loving the direction it’s going. I think the piece I wrote this week will actually make it into the manuscript, as opposed to remaining an exercise to get to know the character. This book is also morphing in interesting ways, showing me what it is and what it’s not. More on that in the coming weeks.
This week in Leave news
It was my HONOR to be interviewed by
for The Brooklyn Rail. This conversation was intimate and open and true to the spirit of my work, and I’m incredibly grateful for the care and thought Rachel put into it.My dear friend Heather has been working so hard for years on a documentary project about death, and her team just found out that their feature-length documentary Other Side was accepted to the South by Southwest Film Festival. She and I agreed this week that this time right before a big project goes public is exciting, exhausting, all of the emotions all at once, and generally A LOT, but the thing keeping us both grounded is gratitude. Gratitude for all the people who have helped and supported along the way, and also gratitude for the chance to do it at all. This is the fun part.
Postcards drop tomorrow for all my snail mail subscribers. (Also, I have a ton of postcards, so if you want a stack, let me know! Drop them at your local bookstore or coffee shop, send them to your friends, revive an old pen pal relationship…)
Take care of yourself and each other.
Sending love from Brooklyn,
Shayne