A poem + some recs
No newsletter this week. Just like everyone else, I’m scrambling to get everything done by the end of the year. I’m also working on two longer pieces that will be published before the end of the year: a round up of my favourite things from 2021 (tv, movies, podcasts, random things) and an essay about the books I’ve read this year. Instead of my writing, please enjoy this beautiful poem from Sarah Freligh + our usual smattering of links.
Wondrous
by Sarah Freligh
I’m driving home from school when the radio talk
turns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exit
the here and now of the freeway at rush hour,
travel back into the past, where my mother is reading
to my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggs
and dying, and though this is the fifth time Charlotte
has died, my mother is crying again, and we’re laughing
at her because we know nothing of loss and its sad math,
how every subtraction is exponential, how each grief
multiplies the one preceding it, how the author tried
seventeen times to record the words She died alone
without crying, seventeen takes and a short walk during
which he called himself ridiculous, a grown man crying
for a spider he’d spun out of the silk thread of invention —
wondrous how those words would come back and make
him cry, and, yes, wondrous to hear my mother’s voice
ten years after the day she died — the catch, the rasp,
the gathering up before she could say to us, I’m OK.
Recommendations:
Excellent life advice: remember, you're annoying too.
I have been using this annual reflection workbook since 2012! It’s free and a very enjoyable way to reflect on the year that’s been and set some goals for the year to come.
Alison Roman Just Can’t Help Herself.
I’ve been loving this podcast. Each episode is a recording of an anonymised therapy session. For me, it’s less about voyeurism and more about hearing how the dynamic between two people can play out. I always learn something.
The influencers who stole Christmas: “the growing belief that every aspect of our lives should be lived with public consumption in mind”
Thanksgiving for one.
