best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination

“Jill” is the semi-anonymous writer—and illustrator—of Life Litter, a wide-ranging collection of essays on travel, people, marriage, nature, children, battles to save pubs, and what she might call “litter.” Hardly litter.

I discovered her work reading about her experience getting high in Williamsburg, an essay (travelogue?) that came with its own Venn diagram, not to mention a Substack Featured Publication medallion. After that, I was off and running.

She has a fierce intellect, suffers no fools, holds herself and others to high standards, and fights for what she believes in. She also happens to be very, very funny. Quite the mix.

Jill has a book on the way, and I suppose we’ll get her last name then, but if you can’t wait, consider these essays to tide you over. I’ve taken complete liberties with the essay titles: On Getting High, On Penis Terrariums, On Adultery, On Pubs and Enshitiffication, On Mortality.”

– Adam

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Ode to Oxford

A friend once teased me that wherever I lived I thought it the best place in the world.

We worked together and I often banged on at him about the amazing places I had lived in London. Wapping, with its potted histories of pirates, riverside hangings and sunken jetties. Rotherhithe’s foreshore, peppered with ancient beads, coins and clay pipes. West Norwood too, where I wanted to know everything about the hidden River Effra, the old Great North Woods and the brooding cemetery on my doorstep.

Writers mythologise our internal narratives: that’s what we do. We mythologise wherever we happen to be and whomever we happen to be there with.

I know I’ve done this everywhere. I also know I was wrong about everywhere but Oxford.

Marvellous as all those places were, nowhere tops Oxford.

It’s a funny thing: there’s a long tradition of having to pretend to be bored and unimpressed with the majesty of Oxford when you’re a student. Being awestruck is for the tourists, not for those who hurry unseeing to the library. We must keep shtum, not talk about how amazing it is to eat at high table or how endless are the corridors of journals in the Bodleian. For heaven’s sake, be cool. Take it in your stride.

Well, I’m not cool and never have been. I think Oxford is magic and I’m happy to share it. We’re not in the Middle Ages; I’m not some elite monk trying to keep literacy all to myself.

To Oxford: the city of books.

— Jill, Life Litter

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Rebecca Hooper

“Susannah’s poems are like fires in the hearth; they leap and flicker and dance, wild and free and sensuous, yet in their hearts they are quiet and still – soft embers holding light within them, gifting their wisdom to the world with a hushed whisper. For me, the dance of the fire comes with the first read; the quieter gift comes with the next (and the next, and the next – I find myself reading and reading Susannah’s poetry and each time, there is something new). The Violet Tiger was one of the first Substacks I read when I joined this platform, and I was instantly besotted. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Susannah’s visceral, embodied, brave and vulnerable work has quickly made her one of my favourite poets. I chose Plum Moon Sighs to nominate for Best Words, Best Order because it is the very first of Susannah’s poems that I read, and it was the perfect introduction to her work.”

– Rebecca Hooper

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Plum Moon Sighs

The tongues of mad iris 
lick me, slowly soften the day’s lacquer. 
I bed her immaculate purples. 

Why a woman buddha? 
Her body half flowers, 
sacrum, illium, and folded legs 
are like fields that have been left alone, 
gone to seed, like words in the dark.

Indian summer takes me like this.
Under the Red Oak, acorns 
are umbilical. 
I lie with the spiked leaves,
turning brown. 

If I wake deformed, I would not be surprised.

I bleed like the sun, haemorrhage light.
The moon presses her bare teeth
into my burnt shoulder,
falls into me.

An unexpected flick of new life, 
its tadpole-tail in my belly.
I conjure myself with this body-made-vial.

From liquorice and star-filled obscurity
I birth myself anemone. 
Leave the mist as afterbirth
Lie fresh in the sparkling dew.

— Susannah Violette, The Violet Tiger

The Violet Tiger

poetry and art

By Susannah Violette

best words, best order is an occasional feature of 100 Stories, celebrating brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive 100 Stories in your inbox.

The Nomination by Julie Gabrielli

“I’d been an avid reader of Ben’s essays before participating in his first community writing project, “Same Walk, Different Shoes,” in December 2023. I was so taken with the quality of writers that the project attracted—and more importantly, the depth of care and encouragement of one another—that I circled back to catch up with his fiction. His serial novel “Harmony House” was underway, so I binged all available chapters, then eagerly awaited each weekly installment.

The story of six strangers crammed into an uber-sustainable tiny house on an isolated field deep in the Smokies weaves together many themes of interest to me. But it was the well-drawn characters and Ben’s trademark empathy for each, no matter how flawed, that held me. Yes, his descriptions and place-setting are superb, but the real genius is how, even a year later, I can still conjure up in memory those characters and their dilemmas and emotions. And talk about a twist! Hooboy, that story needs to be streaming on Hulu, now. I volunteer to design the house (although Ben made all the right choices himself, yet another dimension of his many talents).

Ben’s care and respect for the hopes and suffering of his characters shines through every detail and gesture in his latest novel, “Departures.” The premise of this one is powerful: what if you knew upon meeting someone, the exact date of their death? This is the shadow hanging over the life of one Wild Thorne, and it makes for all manner of difficult situations for him—and the people in his orbit.”

– Julie Gabrielli

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an excerpt from “departures”

“Her lips bent into a deep frown, and she nodded slowly. She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand. It was a tender gesture and Wild felt shame for enjoying the comfort of it. She kept it there.

“You see things, don’t you?” she asked, not allowing him to break eye contact. “You knew something was going to happen to my Marvin.”

Wild was too stunned to answer, much less come up with some believable denial. She squinted as if trying to look into him. Finally, she took her hand away and let out a sound that was something between a laugh and a sigh.

“Listen to me, talking nonsense. Now I sound like my grannie. Whatever it is you are, I’m grateful to you, Wild. If there’s ever anything I can do to repay your kindness…”

Wild’s face must have done something he couldn’t control, made some desperate plea like a kidnapped victim scribbling a message on a fogged car windshield. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped.”

— Ben Wakeman, Departures

Catch & Release

A free-ranging collection of creative work in the form of speculative short fiction and novels, songs, essays, and multimedia made with the intention of connecting and inspiring.

By Ben Wakeman

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination

“An abiding reverence for nature and a commitment to the wild comes through in everything Julie Gabrielli writes. So, too, in her dreamy, often ethereal watercolors—landscapes and animals and brushstrokes that love light and invite you in. I picked this passage from so many wonderful choices because, when I think of Julie, I think of the great blue heron and her deep fierce affinity for this bird and because it’s from one of my favorite of her stories, and because, not only does she paint the human characters and the scenes in the story perfectly, she also embodies the bird. That she opens with this embodiment captures the wonderful experimental aspect of her work. I gasped, yes, when I first read the heron passages and then again when I listened to the recording. Don’t miss all Julie has to offer—the stories, the responses to Walden, the intricate explorations of the Prayer of St. Francis, the Nature Stack compilations, and more.”

– Holly Starley

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an excerpt from “shapeshifting”

“Rowing training had begun with a video. “Your boat is your life raft. Never leave it. Worst case, haul up on the overturned hull and paddle to shore.” A guy rolled sideways in an indoor pool and turtled, popped to the surface, positioned the sculls, righted the boat, climbed in. “Free your feet first,” the voiceover said. Right then, Hank had vowed never to capsize.

Stronglegs stalk, stalk, stalk

Longneck turns waits watches

Wrigglemeals dart silver

Neckthrust beakplunge

Behind the island, he tries breathing in to a four-count and holding it before a slow exhale. But the aquatic reek nauseates him. He coughs out the breath. Too jacked from the exertion, his body greedy for oxygen.

In the pool for capsize training, the geometry of blue lane lines and clean grid of white tiles had done nothing to tame Hank’s dread. A girl in their group had executed the drill perfectly. Then an old guy. Then it was Hank’s turn.

There’s movement on the shore ten yards away. A great blue heron perches on a submerged branch, wriggling fish clamped in a razor beak. With a head-toss, the fish disappears down its long gullet.

The teardrop body floats above the log. Legs, spindly as an old woman’s finger, blend with shadows on the shore beyond. Front-on, the bird is barely there. A vertical sliver cut from water, shoreline, trees.

His mother had loved herons. Or was it pelicans?

The heron turns, shapeshifts into a pewter soup ladle. Steps into shallow water with the solitary coiled energy of an edge-dweller. Mesmerized, Hank’s pinned feet feel each step. His head swivels like the bird’s.

Its neck reaches snake-like from hunched shoulders, then retracts. Hank’s chin pushes forward and tucks. He swallows. The bird singles him out for a piercing stare. Its black eye rimmed with gold has him pinned.

Brotherbody boatbalances

Fearbreath heartskips

Eyepair watches

Heartmind thumps here

Hank can’t look away. He falls awestruck into the bird’s fierce strangeness, its pure wild belonging. His chest aches with a homesickness he doesn’t recognize.

He wrenches from its gaze to bend and stretch for his phone in the small drybag beyond his toes, one hand on the oars for balance. He manages a few shots and the start of a video when the heron croaks and leaps into the air.

Squawkhonk launch

Wingspread rows and rises

Six-foot wings deploy like the time-lapse of a blooming lily, tight bud to extravagance in an instant. The breeze-sound of flight disarrays Hank’s chest, pulls his gaze aloft, phone forgotten, until his mind floods with her trailing wing feathers, the delicate scribble of feet extending from her torpedo body, the neck tucked in a tight S, the beak slicing the air.

Necktuck legstretch

Bodybeing streaks and glides

An oar pokes Hank in the ribs. He recoils, off-balance, overcorrects and topples in slow, unsalvageable motion.”

— Julie Gabrielli, Shapeshifting

Homecoming

📖 Shapeshifting

Hello from very rainy Maryland. As I wrote that, our resident heron landed on our dock, stretched very tall, and stalked to the other edge before leaping and gliding to our neighbor’s dock. I could watch this bird all day. Seriously. I’ll go ahead and take it as a blessing to share this story that’s been in the works for five years. Hope you enjoy it…

Read more

2 years ago · 40 likes · 51 comments · Julie Gabrielli

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It’s a special treat to post the spoken word of kimberly warner this week. Shortly after she recorded this excerpt, Kimberly made a surprise announcement that her upcoming memoir will be published by Empress Editions (from which this excerpt is taken.)

If you enjoy her words, and you will, take a moment to pre-order her memoir:

unfixed: a memoir of family, mystery, and the currents that carry you home)

🤫 And, pssst: take a sneak peek at the book jacket below ⬇️ with a blurb from Alisa Kennedy Jones.

The Nomination

“She works hard to set the stage and then she quietly slips behind the curtain and takes a seat next to the rest of us. Kimberly also wrote her memoir. Riveting, heart wrenching and warming. She lays bare her soul, raw. For all of us to feel. A true story of cinematic capability. I do not need to spend time searching her memoir for the excerpt I will highlight. Though I read this last year, I will never forget the number 43. Often, we read, or have left a comment for an author’s wonderful writing ; “ I felt like I was there with you”. This excerpt goes well beyond any reasonable depth of that meaning. We, the reader, on our knees, with a hand over our mouth.”

– Lor

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an excerpt from “4/3 on Highway 43 @ 5:43”

“There was an anesthesiologist from Appleton Medical Center driving behind dad. He recognized dad’s car and vanity plate. He said moments before the collision, dad reached his hand through the sun roof and waved to the rising sun. Was he waving hello?

Or was he waving goodbye?

Does his spirit exit stubbornly

clinging to ribcage and bone

or was he squeezed out like toothpaste

from a phantom umbilicus?

Maybe some rise easily, like the yeasty force of leavened bread,

warmed to meet a new infinite ceiling.

Maybe others catch on spinning fans and ride out eternity

on a dizzy blade.

Or is it simpler than all of this — 

after car crushes

heart ceases,

breath escapes,

we mistake a vacant body and

it’s yawning void

for a soul.

We name it, we animate it, we call for it

but it’s only

so our own void has a place to go.

The strange and complicated relationship mom and dad shared is irreparably broken when he doesn’t return from a hospital staff party. He and his surgical partners had dressed as famous musicians and sang farewell tunes to a retiring nurse. Luis Suarez was Julio Eglesias. Trevor Rattray was Harry Belafonte. Dad, already halfway there with his pony tail dressed up as Willie Nelson. Twelve hours earlier he had bypassed a cheese-encrusted artery and saved a life. Twelve hours later he drove head on into a truck.

He dies on Highway 43, right before the two-lane road splits into four. The insignificant little town of Fredonia cradles his crushed ribs that morning as his spirit unfurls its tireless wings. Or maybe they were tired. I don’t know. Highway 43. At 5:43. On April 3. 4/3. He was also born in 1943. This number will haunt, comfort and deceive me for the rest of my life.”

— Kimberly Warner, 4/3 on Highway 43 @ 5:43

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination by Jill

“Kate is what to read when you don't know what you need. When you're flinching and the world's on fire. She's brought the warm breeze, the Jameson—and the smoke? It's already curling. This poem is on fire. Kate’s writing will always send you somewhere else. Might be to an all-girls construction crew in Provincetown in 1987. This time, it’s to a fire escape, floating above a troubled world. Sit there with her for a moment, to escape the fire, and let this poem grab you by the ears, lift you swinging ten stories up, and hand you the bottle. It's a corker. Enjoy.’’

– Jill, Life Litter

“Prescription” by Kate Mapother

I need something. Something strong. 
A diagnosis that doesn’t involve self-care or cutting sugar or gluten. 

I need a professional. Someone with some gravitas to say:
You know what you need, Kate— you need a fire escape on the 10th floor. 

A perfect breeze and a bottle of amber liquor between your legs. 
I’ll write you a script for something that burns going down. 

Something that throws you like a lead anchor into that lovely dappled 
place where you sink to the bottom of it all but feel like 

you’re in a penthouse at the top of the world. 
The instructions are to sit there quietly. High above the traffic. 

Tune into the TAP TAP of a pack of Marlboro Red’s against your thigh 
like a cigarette fidget spinner. Lose yourself in the click and snap 

of the heavy Zippo lid warming in your hand. 
Click-snap. Open-shut. Like your heart lately. 

Then, open. 
Thumb the flint wheel and light it up, love. 

It’s okay. None of it will kill you. Not tonight. 
Not the alcohol or the nicotine or even the fall from grace. 

Just, let it go. It’ll get you out of your head so you can sleep. 
Tonight, it’s all about magic.  


In the morning, I promise, the wars will be over and the peaceniks 
will have moved in next door. Overnight, your friend will no longer 

say ‘survivor’ when they ask her who she is. 
She’ll be a king, an angel, a merriment. 

She’ll change her name and live on Easy Street. 
She’ll always leave a light on for you. 

Her eyes will be so bright, you’ll stop worshiping the moon. 
You’ll fall hopeful at each other’s feet

in love with how easy it is to be happy. 
Free. And filthy fuckin rich.  

You’ll ceasefire and heal. You’ll be healed and you’ll matriarch. 
You’ll be queerer than you were before your diagnosis. How glorious.

When you wake in the morning— clear-headed, sure-footed, feeling like 
it's all too good to be true but my-god-it’s-so-fucking-true— 

The One’s dress will be on the floor at the foot of your bed. 
The room will smell like mingled skin. 

You will roll to her side and whisper good morning into spaces that 
were once so silent in you, they stung. 

There will be rainbow glitter on your best wool sweater, and you 
will never have been happier about anything.  


You’ve been wound too tight, babe. Been too goddam precise. 
Trying too fucking hard. 

Try less. Try less than less. Try not at all. 
Go ahead it’s alright. 

Tear yourself apart a little. Push your fingers into the cracks. 
Rip at the seams. 

Inhale that good smoke through your mouth. 
Exhale through the nose. 

Watch the smoke float on the surface of that medicine. 
Then drink up— it’ll do you good. 

You’ll see. 
Tomorrow’s a new day.

— Kate Mapother, Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Life at the Bottom of the Canyon

Thoughts, free-writes, a poem or two, an essay here and there, upcoming book chapter previews. Live, from my little adobe at the bottom of the canyon.

By Kate Mapother

Life Litter

No brand, no message. What’s left

By Jill

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A selection from Philadelphia Freedom, a story from the 100 Stories collection.

“I know she thought he’d call her back, but he didn’t, and I told her he wouldn’t if she was always such a bitch, and she called me a bitch back and smacked me. I heard her crying in her room, and I made sure she heard me, too, so she wasn’t the only one. I thought she might knock later, but she didn’t. It was a really bad night.

That night definitely stuff happened. I remember crying so hard I threw up.”

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. Subscribe at bottom to receive best words, best order in your inbox.

The Nomination by Anna Schott

“Deirdre’s writing has it all: it’s got the rhythm and the melody and the pathos and the fun — doesn’t matter what it’s about, could just be a quiet encounter with one neighbor while she’s out looking for another neighbor’s cat. The writing is incredibly observant; of people, of feelings, of place. Something about the cadence just pulls me along and at the end of every piece I think the same thing: “damn, that was good.”

– Anna Schott, She’s Gone Chilaquiles

waving not drowning – an excerpt

“I walked past an old dusty Plymouth with a shattered windshield and when I looked up I was startled by a man with tubes up his nose wheeling a tank of oxygen behind him. He might have been more frightening if he hadn’t looked so frail and old. But still. He wasn’t that frail and old. And he was not the least bit concerned or surprised to see someone on his property.

“Hello,” he said.

I explained that I was looking for my neighbor’s cat and I thought he might have run into his yard.

“Oh,” he said, “a cat will never make it out here.”

“Oh!” I said.

“The coyotes will tear him apart.”

“I mean—"

“You won’t see any cats around here. No.”

He was silent for a spell. He was a sweet guy, despite the brutal honesty.

“Well,” I said, “he’s very smart, he used to live on the streets.”

“Nope, not here, he’ll never make it”.

I let out a laugh, what else could I do? “I don’t like to think that way,” I said.

“Good for you,” he said. He was touching his nostrils where the hose was blowing oxygen into his nose. “It’s very strange getting old,” he said. “Nothing lives forever.”

I wasn’t sure where he was going with this line of thinking.

“Me, I’m on my way out,” he said.

“Do you mean to the--”

“Three months.”

“Ah,” I crossed my arms, “Is your family staying with--”

“Let me tell you something,” his voice trailed off for a second and it seemed like he was going to get sad. He cleared his throat, “Let me tell you the three things I’ve learned so far.”

“Okay,” I said. I noticed his hand shaking by his side. I thought I saw Percy’s tail under a hedge and I pointed and then walked towards it. The man turned to follow me.

“Whenever you’re stuck at an impasse, when you’re fighting with someone or you’re not getting along, try saying, Thank you, or I’m sorry.”

“Okay,” I said. It wasn’t the cat. I turned back towards him.

“It’ll get you out of any bind. Trust me.”

“Okay,” I said again.

“The second is: be with people who light up when they see you.”

Something about the way he said it made me smile, “I like that one.”

He closed his eyes for a second like he was searching for the right words, and then he said, “Be with people who turn your lights on.” He paused and whispered the word yeah and it sounded like eeeyah.

“Always,” I said. We walked a little further on the path. I was going his pace now.

“And the last is,” he waited for me to stand and look at him, “The last one is, listen to what a person does, not to what he says.”

“Listen to what he does,” I repeated, “I like the way you put that.”

“I think that’s right. It’s Iyanla Van Sant. Do you watch her?”

“I don’t.”

“She’s sensational.”

Across the yard a middle-aged woman walked out of the house in her bathing-suit. I watched her walk down another path and straight to a huge swimming pool. I looked back at the man.

“You should check her out,” he said. “She’s on you-tube.”

Full essay here

Snaps

sketches, flash fiction, musings and observations

By Deirdre Lewis

She's Gone Chilaquiles

Chips and salsa, essays, memoir, food analogies

By Anna Schott

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A selection from The Gondolier, a story from the 100 Stories collection.

“But nobody was coming for Mikhail. He wouldn’t have allowed it. Houston wouldn’t have allowed it. There was no Hail Mary plan.

'“This is it,” an ancient inner voice observed indifferently.

There were no more tasks, no more missions, no more men, nothing to focus on but the hopelessness of his situation and the black expanse that awaited him.”

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination

“The only thing more mysterious than the dark pull of drug and alcohol addiction is finding your way out of it. It's a war, and never has the war been written about with the clarity, tenderness, soul, and no bullshit reality that it is in the Substack "Notes From Treatment." The writer may be "Anonymous" by name, but their humanity, heart, wisdom (the wisdom of no wisdom), and most of all their experience is radically personal. "Anonymous" never draws attention to themself, yet they are present everywhere. These are not stories, these are downloads from the source. It's the best writing on addiction and recovery I've read, and I've read a lot.

For "best words, best order" I've chosen the piece "A Phone Call," but I could have chosen any of them.”

– Tommy Swerdlow, Feel the Rhythm

“a phone call” – an excerpt

“The other day I let a patient make a phone call to his wife on speaker phone
This patient is a large ugly proud partially deaf man who talks in a low dumb voice
His wife answered and they both began crying
She said how much she missed him
She said how hard it was for her to be without him
He remained silent and cried

She kept asking,
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me?
He would gather all his strength and in a low dumb voice say,
Yes I can

She told him about the factory where they both worked
And how they were both getting two dollar raises at the end of the year
She told him how hopeful she was about their future
She told him how well she had cleaned her station the other day and how no one had noticed and how she knew if he was there that he would have noticed
and he would have appreciated it

He cried
She said
Can you hear me?

He eventually stopped crying and told her he might have to stay an extra thirty days
She told him that was alright and how she can’t imagine being away from him for another thirty days but that everything was going to be okay
Because they loved each other
And they were getting raises
And they were going to make it

She told him she drives around at night because she doesn’t know what to do without him
She doesn’t want to be in their apartment alone
So she just drives and drives
Sometimes she goes through the drive through at McDonald’s but can’t eat the food she buys and just drinks the soda

she asks,
Can you hear me?

He tells her he’s sorry and when he gets home he’ll never leave her side again
He promises
She tells him not to apologize
Just get better
They’re both crying again
She says
I love you so much

He eventually gathers all his strength
And in a low dumb voice says
I love you so much too

The man hangs up, thanks me, and leaves the office

After a moment I run to the door
He’s halfway down the hall
No, I call after him…
Thank you!
Thank you for letting me hear that!
She’s amazing!
And you’re amazing!
What you have is amazing!
I feel so bad for you you guys!
And I’m so jealous of you guys!
I’m so sad!
And I’m so happy!
To be alive!
In a world full of pain and love!
So much pain!
And so much love!

He just keeps walking
I shout after him…

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me?.”

Full essay here.

Notes from Treatment

For the past 8 years I’ve managed a drug and alcohol treatment center. Names and locations have been changed…

By Anonymous

Feel The Rhythm

"The Rhythm" is a piggy bank to hold my pennies. The phrase comes from Cool Runnings a movie I wrote thirty years ago.

By Tommy Swerdlow

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination

“Chloe is a soul surgeon. Each essay cuts us open, laying bare the sinewy tension of our opposites. And with gentle, skilled hands (or are they wings?), she excises any need for certainty.”

– Kimberly Warner, unfixed

nesting – an excerpt

“When I die, I hope to do so having stretched my heart to it’s very limit. I want my heart to drag itself over the finish line bloodied and battle-worn from having refused nothing—and with its final beat to say, “Yes, Death. I will love you, too”.

We are promised nothing.

We are owed nothing.”

Full essay here.

Death & Birds

They're both coming for you! (Just kidding, birds aren't coming for you)

By Chloe Hope

Unfixed

When broken is the fix.

By Kimberly Warner

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: Mary Tabor

Mary L. Tabor was among the first other creative writers I connected with after joining Substack. I began reading her memoir (Re)Making Love, about the interior and exterior journeys of her life after her husband left her with the announcement, “I need to live alone.” I purposely write of “interior and exterior journeys” separately because of how Mary, recounting both in the memoir, is always uniting them. I’ve heard her say that much of her narrative prose has been published by editors who were also poets, and the memoir, like Mary’s other writing, shows clearly why. She is a narrator with the perceptions and meaning making mind of a poet. The connections she discovers and draws about the things of our internal and external worlds – that’s Mary’s phrase, from E. M. Forster, and her Substack name, “Only Connect” – form a kind of mysterious channel through the ether of our emotional and active lives.

In Mary’s award-winning novel Who by Fire, excerpted here, readers find all the same qualities but in the novel also riveted to a most compelling narrative conceit: a widower, having discovered after her death his wife’s adultery with a colleague he knows, tells his imagined story of their affair. I chose the opening of the novel to share because it delivers from the outset, in addition to all else in Mary’s marvelous writing, what I value in prose or poetry above all else: a distinct voice you want to keep hearing. From the very first words I read of the novel and received through the airwaves, I heard it. I wanted others to hear it too.

– Jay Adler, Homo Vitruvius

The Fire – Chapter 1 of “Who by Fire”

“I would have told Lena about the fire I saw in Iowa, but it is regret that writes this, that longs for said things unsaid.

This fire would have amazed her. The heat was so incredibly hot it reminded me of something I learned in physics: the fact that the air around a lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the sun. It was a barn burning—not with any political or racial overtones, but a necessary burn of an old wooden grain bin in the center of town in Whiting, Iowa, where I grew up. She was a Baltimore-grown city girl who wouldn’t be able to imagine this story of the burning though I suppose it’s a common enough event in rural parts of our country.

That I know something Lena couldn’t imagine amazes me.

I go home to Iowa—rarely—and, as it turns out, after Lena died, fortuitously: the controlled fire.

I grew up in Whiting, the son of a farmer—three hundred and thirty acres of soy beans and corn. When the burn took place, I watched it with my father. It scored me like a knife on wood. It hit me like the Schubert in G Flat, like that score, the staffs of music that I can hear by looking.

Leonard Bernstein said about music, “It doesn’t have to pass through the censor of the brain before it can reach the heart … An F-sharp doesn’t have to be considered in the mind; it is a direct hit.” The fire was like that for me. It made me see how few times in my life I’ve experienced that: a direct hit, the strike to the heart—despite my perfect pitch.

My father and I watched the burn from beginning to end.

The firemen were mostly older and younger men I knew, had grown up with—perhaps a few out-of-towners, sure—but mostly guys I could tilt a howdy finger off the steering wheel of my father’s pick-up—the old blue one I like to drive around when I’m in town, rare as that is now.

My father didn’t see fight-fire in the War, the second big war when he flight tested P-51 Mustangs, the fighter plane, but didn’t shoot its guns.

These guys, the firemen, let me get closer to the fire than most other onlookers—although I was surprised by how they trusted the oglers. They trust their neighbors to have good judgment. That too amazes me because I now live in downtown Washington—the center of politics and corruption.

My mother didn’t come to watch the fire.

My mother’s mouth turns down at the corners. She says she doesn’t smile because there are gaps between her teeth, and indeed there are, but she doesn’t smile because she has accepted what she views as her lot: That my father will rise early and make coffee, that he’ll scramble an egg in the microwave while she sleeps, that she will always make him his peanut butter sandwich for lunch, that she’ll eat her Hershey bar alone in the kitchen while he listens to the evening news, that these will be the things they’ll do and that each time they occur, the daily moments of her life with him, they remind her that she doesn’t love him.”

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

The arts, books, movies, all things literary, a course: Write it! How to get started, The Writing Life, Write it! course, (Re)Making Love: a memoir in serial chapters, Who by Fire: a novel in serial chapters

By <Mary L. Tabor>

Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler

Essays on literature, culture, society, and all things human. Poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. A writer's renascent light against the darkness. "Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress."

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: A. Jay Adler

“A Stone in Water” and Jay’s reading touch on the ineffable nature of our existence on this earth—how the unfeeling stone will outlast us while our memory of that moment we may hold as long as we live. I own his book Waiting for Word in which this poem appears. In this poem and so many others, Jay catches the elusive with words that fly on air and hope and loss.

I touch here only on the essence of his work that soars with the use of unusual punctuation, used with such care, particularly in another poem I think is magical “weightless” so much so that one must think of the originality of Emily Dickinson, though the similarity ends there. His syntax and punctuation in that poem and in “A Stone in Water” mirror the disconnection of loss. The fact that Jay can take the quotidian, a small detail as in the case of the stone in the water and bring to the fore questions of existence, the fact that his words ring like bells softly heard, the fact that his poetry brings me home to my thoughts of life and death to observe with such acute insight make him a poet for all ages and all time.

– Mary L. Tabor

The Poem – A Stone in Water

A Stone in Water

This stone.
This water flowing.
This flow of water
streaming over the stone.
You could look at it
all day
and never stop.
How the water
endlessly courses
liquid and bright.
How the stone lies
still below.
If only every day
could be this way
in stillness at the bottom
of motion
with substance at the center
of light.
You will try to hold it
in the palm you stretch
between the sediment and sun
just to believe you live
in the same transparent world;
you will hope to preserve
in the gladness of your senses
(like the blood running through you)
the same arresting motion.
But the instant
you always knew
was coming
arrives
succeeding like all the rest.
Now upon now upon now
the water flows
the stone stays still
and you offer your attention
knowing this moment, too
will last forever.

Homo Vitruvius by A. Jay Adler

Poem: A Stone in Water

Hi. I'm A. Jay Adler. I write the Substack Homo Vitruvius. I publish in a variety of genres, including poetry, and I so appreciate Tara Penry for organizing this celebration of poetry through her own Substack Quiet Reading. It's the kind of inventive, generous thing Tara does…

Listen now

2 years ago · 18 likes · 7 comments · A. Jay Adler and Tara Penry

Mary Tabor "Only connect ..."

The arts, books, movies, all things literary, a course: Write it! How to get started, The Writing Life, Write it! course, (Re)Making Love: a memoir in serial chapters, Who by Fire: a novel in serial chapters

By <Mary L. Tabor>

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Subscribe to receive best words, best order, a bi-weekly feature of Adam Nathan’s 100 Stories, then visit our submission page to share exceptional writing from the Substack authors you love.

best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: Tommy Swerdlow

“What were the chances, I’d be writing this on The Day After, when voices like Tommy’s are needed more than ever. Whether it’s the Yankees or anchovies, his tour of celluloid duty in the Philippines or his regular walk through the streets of his hometown, Tommy’s grapple and stake out of language lays bare for us English, America in all her complex, entangled, ambitious glory, what she can be when she tries hard enough, when the sun shines on the pitcher’s mound (the color of a fresh dug grave), when she’s not overcast by the worst of what she can be.

I’m going to keep this short, and to the point. Tommy is a talent. It’s unbelievable to me that we have access to his words week after week, a direct shot arrow from his heart to ours, an irresistible tunnel of words, a river that will take you. In this excerpt it’s baseball, a uniquely American game that I understood through Charlie Brown until I saw it Swerdlow’s way, three men become a holy triptych as intimate as a jazz trio; he takes the ordinary and elevates, reveals the god in a nine man democracy, sees beauty where others won’t look. We need him now more than ever.”

– Eleanor Anstruther

The Excerpt – Grand Old Game

"First of all, they play 162 games. It's not a sport, it's a meditation practice. They play at least five times a week, this mostly stagnant game made up of isolated acts of skill repeated over and over and over. The pitcher stands on a mound of dirt (the color of a fresh dug grave), and holding a small orb assumes his Tai Chi pose. He confers with his partner via hand signal, then begins his “wind-up," (a piece of choreography personal to him) and lets fly the small hard ball at Autobahn speed toward a man with a tapered staff, also in a Tai Chi pose (his “stance,” which is personal to him). If orb and staff do not meet there are only two possible outcomes and the game is played by just three, a private little affair as intimate as a jazz trio. But if ball and bat do meet then men are set in motion and all kinds of shit can happen. This triptych of pitcher, catcher and batter is the beating heart of the game, but even a genius hitter can only enter the fray one out of every nine times, and only when it is his turn, the batting order a nine-man democracy and uniquely American."

Feel The Rhythm

"The Rhythm" is a piggy bank to hold my pennies. The phrase comes from Cool Runnings a movie I wrote thirty years ago.

By Tommy Swerdlow

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: Eleanor Anstruther

Dissertations could be written - maybe someday will be written - about Eleanor Anstruther's command of details. Nothing is purposeless. Nothing stands isolated. Everything is connected. Everything matters. An ashtray pushed to the edge of a coffee table is never merely an ashtray. But neither is it a token, a symbol for the clever to decode, a cipher to flatter the insider. Anstruther's details don't mean some thing. They don't tell. They show. They show you everything, holistic fractal gems that throw out worlds almost casually. That ashtray? It's a portal, the tip of a plate you feel moving beneath your feet as you read, a distribution of possibilities that each reader populates from the material in his own heart. My ashtray carries every time I tapped a burnt cigarette ash into a dish and watched the tip glow red and wondered what the hell I was going to do now. Your ashtray will be different, overlapping, maybe the same in some way. Whatever the way, we all dive in.

I picked the passage below because it illustrates this phenomenal mastery of detail with a pair of phrases that echo against one another so forcefully across two paragraphs that they can bring you to tears. I had to read the paragraphs out loud to test the "one to three minute" limit so I know this from experience. See if you don't find them yourselves.

But that's not even all of it. I also picked this passage because it demonstrates the essential power of timing - rhythm? cadence? meter? - something like that - in all great writing. The passage below, when you listen to it, beats like a deep drum. It's a song - or more accurately - a dirge. Unhappily - although it has enormous power all on its own - there is one piece of context which I have to supply because without it, the entire meaning of the piece will be upended by a wrong inference for anyone who has not read the earlier parts of the story first: the narrator is addressing his wife, Maisie, to whom he has always been faithful and devoted. Heather is their daughter. If you don't have that critical piece of information the passage seems to be saying something other than what it actually says. You just need to know: Heather is the daughter.

– Chris Nathan

The Excerpt – Because I Loved You

The Literary Obsessive

A show case for my work, I stream fiction before it goes to print, publish essays & interviews, and champion indie lit fiction by increasing visibility, challenging stigma, and proving quality.

By Eleanor Anstruther

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read aloud by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: Rebecca Hooper

“When I learned that Rebecca was a writer, poet and evolutionary biologist (specialising in bird and primate cognition, no less) I was naturally intrigued. Then, upon reading her work, I realised that she’s one of those rare beings who inhabits not only a body, but an entire landscape. The veil is gossamer thin on her small Scottish island, and her wide-angle field of vision takes in its many and varied layers. In her piece ‘The sky is not blue,’ an abandoned house, full of starlings and coincidence, beckons, seemingly wishing to be known; sparrows, folk tales, hauntings and all.”

– Chloe Hope

The Excerpt – “The sky is not blue”

"It is funny, isn’t it, how we create realities based on assumptions, and how we become attached to those realities. I had fallen in love with the house, but only with the version of it I had constructed. A place of love and laughter and light. Of a long-ago selkie, or at least a woman who had saltwater on her lips and wildness on her tongue. Knowing the truth, I had to abandon the reality I had constructed and add a darkness to the story, a layer of shadow and grief and horror.

I am fascinated with this; the way memory and history and language and perception interact and intersect and weave in and out of one another. Of the way we must abandon versions of the reality we have built for ourselves over and over again.

Learn, unlearn, learn.

There is something beautiful in it, isn’t there? In abandonment. In letting go. Nettles growing around the aga. Starlings swirling through the roof. A woman going back to the wild. Light becoming fringed with darkness. Looking to the sky and thinking: I wonder what shade of violet you are today."

between two seas

from an island tucked between the north sea and the atlantic, writing about life, death, oceans, animals, poetry and finding joy.

By rebecca hooper

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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The Nomination: David Knowles

“Every essay of David's is a love affair with his subject(s), he dissects every minute living and decaying detail, entwining knowledge and prose with the sensitivity only a profound perception of nature can achieve. I chose this paragraph for its humbling honesty and realisation of how human beings are only ever tolerated in the places we call wild.”

–

The Excerpt – “Up the back on a calm moonless night”

"For all her delicacy the night is rarely alone. She has her favourites. The horseshoe bat has always been welcome at her court, face like a battered rose but witty and well-informed. The badger, bluff and dependable. The polecat with his clown’s make-up hiding stiletto teeth. She has the Great Bear and the Dog Star to carry her insignia. Though nobody understood what she saw in him, she once took a blunt-headed comet as a lover. The Tawny Owls are the offspring of the union. So we must be thankful for her occasional indiscretions.

She rarely bothers to open her eyes. Sight, the judge and jury of the daylight hours, is a trickster after sundown. For the night, it is her nose which fills the few gaps which hearing has left unpainted. By smell alone she can follow the stoat through his labyrinth, footfall by footfall, even though he went to ground an hour ago. The slightest breeze is a watercolour of leaf mould, rabbit piss, otter spraint. Hedgehog is spicy, eel smells of sex in the grass. The scent-shades of life and death and decay are rich and long since in harmony. Mine is the only smell which offends her, uninvited as I am, out here in the black velvet lands where I have no business, no grace, no senses worth the name.

She has her footmen trip me up and laugh when I fall. They steal my hat and place it high, unseeable on a hawthorn branch. For now I must accept that I am not fit for this place, not worthy of being in her presence. To one day go unnoticed and ignored is the high honour I hope for. I’ll study hard to reach it."

Elvers by Moonlight

A journal of everyday auguries and under-reported miracles

By David Knowles

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best words, best order celebrates brief excerpts of exceptional writing read by their authors. To learn more about best words, best order, and to nominate exceptional writing from the authors you admire on Substack, visit our information page here.

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Subscribe now

The Nomination

I’m kicking off the inaugural voyage of best words, best order with my own nomination. I discovered Nina Schuyler through her Substack Stunning Sentences, an addictive weekly deep-dive on a single sentence. Her personal writing is equally captivating. Recently, I had the pleasure of reading her short story collection In This Ravishing World, and I could have thrown a dart at it blindfolded to find something valuable to share.

My dart landed on this excerpt from “Belonging,” in a scene where two estranged sisters meet after years apart.

The Excerpt

About Nina Schuyler

Nina Schuyler is author of the site Stunning Sentences, a Substack dedicated to “Admiring, mooning over, loving, and learning to write stunning sentences.” She teaches creative writing for Stanford Continuing Studies. Her short story collection In This Ravishing World won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024.

In This Ravishing World is available on Amazon here.

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best words, best order

Coleridge wrote that writing is "the best words in the best order." I would like to celebrate some of Substack's "best words in the best order” as part of an ongoing series.

We have all had moments when we are stunned by the quality of someone's writing here on Substack. I am creating an opportunity to both read and hear a writer share their work.

👉🏻 I need your help to pull this off and find wonderful work.

Some Basics

• I'm looking for short excerpts of spectacular prose or poetry from a Substack writer to share with my readers.

• The writer will need to read their work out loud and record it

• Reading time must be no more than 3 minutes

• best words, best order will of course link back to the content itself

• The words of the nominator will be included. See below.

How to Participate

• You must nominate another writer from Substack.

• Within a comment below,

  • Include a link to the piece

  • Provide the text of the specific excerpt you have selected (not the whole piece.)

  • Include the name of the writer (please tag them so they have context here and to honor their work even if it is not selected for best words, best order)

• Finally, and of utmost importance:

Please share why you think the chosen excerpt is exceptional, ideally from a "feel something" point of view. Your recommendation text is a critical element, so take a quiet moment to get your best words in the best order. You may write up to 200 words. Consider your appreciation of them as of equal importance to the writer’s work. You are honoring them!

Who Can Participate

• This is open to anyone to submit

• You may not nominate yourself

What Does the Writer Need to Do?

• The writer will need to record themselves reading the selected excerpt

• They will save the recording as a WAV file and reviewing the post prior to its publication. I will provide a path to upload the file.

I really look forward to what you share and I can’t wait to hear writer’s read the best of their own work. I think there’s community value in sharing little nuggets so that others can explore on their own.

Let’s do it!

And, of course, please share this note as well! This could be wonderful.