“Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Maybe life is nothing more than singing love songs into the deep as Orcas ever circle in the gloom. Maybe that fine balance between sanctuary and danger, that safe haven in the firelight as hands are held and the dark is repelled, as death circles in the gloom, maybe that is where dignity and true love reside. So rave on, rave on and sing your song, till your lost and bursting, then sing some more, then sing some more.”
This paragraph, this entire essay sings the echos of pain and love throughout all of existence, throughout all of time, held in the hand of life refusing to surrender under this great tension of opposites.
"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."
Susie, something that's really important here is YOUR take on the writing. Can you write a few sentences that capture what you find so appealing here. The recommendations should be half of the joy of this project. (Anyone else reading this, please note!)
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, in which 'she' is a hare, for its humbling honesty and realisation of how human beings are only ever tolerated in the places we call wild.
It goes without saying, this entire story was a masterpiece.
Listening to “Belle Nuit, o nuit d’amour”
“ἀγάπη – In infinite beauty there is infinite sadness.”
I could see it all play out in words, and boy, I could feel it all. Strength, joy, sorrow, infinite and eternal beauty . I chose the final scene;
“In his mind, he paddled through paper canals, past the first-year students on the fondamenta. He paddled through black balloons. The moon danced up and over him.He paddled out from San Marco and into the rippling black sheets of the watery lagoon. Stars bobbed in his eyes.
He paddled into nothing, and he paddled into everything. He let memories of his wife and daughter sweep through him like starlight.
He thought of infinite beauty and infinite sadness.
Then, together with his father and his daughter, the gondolier paddled into the stars, pulling the Earth behind him in his wake.”
Adam, what a great idea. Thanks so much for this generosity to other writers.
It isn’t because @<Mary L. Tabor> nominated me that I offer her name seemingly in return; it’s that her nomination is how I learned of this project –- and Mary has already recorded these words, the opening of her fabulously titled novel "Who by Fire," in a reading of them that scorches.
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.
Nominating Gunnar’s @subtlesparks piece on masculinity, since the topic is particularly poignant and important right now.
“But then, at last, when you retrieve the pieces of yourself, you do the same with masculinity; you deconstruct it. You understand that it is a flexible constellation of traits, some physical (size, upper body strength, distribution of facial and body hair), some cultural (outgoing6, confident, assertive), and many a bit of both. No one trait is necessary and no one trait is sufficient. You start building your own constellation. Strength? Persistence? Sure, useful and on many traditional checklists. No one is going to hold those against you. Good. Your constellation isn’t finished, though. Introspection? Emotional maturity? Kindness? Intelligence? Humor? Oh, those are trickier. They’re on some masculinity checklists, but only on a minority. They’re on many femininity checklists too (not opposites, remember). What to do?
Here’s the beauty and the challenge. You decide. Become the ‘man’ you choose to be. Even better, even harder, become a person; an individual who has the strength and kindness to see others that way too, as individuals, regardless of their sex and gender.
You carefully pick up the shards of your self-destructed heart and reassemble them into a vessel that overflows. Something cracks. Not your shoulders; the chains binding you.”
“I love this brief existence. I love it with a ferocity that I hope, in some way, makes up for the years I spent taking it entirely for granted. This attention of mine is a most precious gift, one I’ll only possess for another four or five decades at most. Turning it towards frustrations when there is birdsong to be heard is an act of madness, and the blessing of my mortality offers a moment of sanity. Death stands on the horizon of my life, ready to guide me to whatever might lie on the other side—reminding myself of its presence only ever deepens my own.
When I was younger, I would have felt as though I were tempting fate by so often bringing to mind that I am going to die. But all the reminder does is pull me into the true and miraculous nature of the moment—of each moment. Of this one. And this.”
Ryan, can you share a few sentences on why this jumped out for you? Your appreciation can be as meaningful for someone reading this as the works themselves – the reader and the writer are both key here. (And thanks for being part of this.)
Absolutely! Sorry I forgot to add that part in my comment. I love this text, in particular, because my father just passed away, and Chloe’s words offered a sort of resolution to all the visceral regret that flooded me upon hearing what was such devastating news. Not just because she demonstrated that to regret what I felt were shortcomings in my relationship with my father was a futile effort, but because my father was the sort of person to not take for granted even the most minute beauties of life—like a birdsong—and would not want me to hold on to such insignificant trifles (since he never did). And so, in a way, it reminded me of one of his most profound qualities: appreciating each and every little moment, and letting go of the problems of the past.
From Mary Beth Rew Hicks: "The one she’s been watching for five days now is tattered on every edge, the purple florets visible through windows cut into her forewing, whose tissue-thin membranes seem stretched across thin wire like an antique parasol, as though it would crumple if opened, yet she lifts her wings in flight even still. Backlit by the sun, her branching wing veins shine like molten gold threads still powering her across the blue pane of sky. She has laid her eggs, tiny green marbles, under a leaf in a good feeding tree by now."
Lovely: "purple florets visible through windows cut into her forewing, whose tissue-thin membranes seem stretched across thin wire like an antique parasol"
I'm with you 100%. I've been thinking about pulling this together for some time.
No deadline. This will be rolling. I'm going to do this at some (sustainable) regular or semi-regular cadence. While many (eventually, probably most) submissions can't necessarily be featured, I will try to bundle them up, time allowing so that there is some post with the broader collection of talent.
Bottom line, this is an open thread. If you see something spectacular, please add it. I run across amazing stuff fairly frequently, but I haven't had any place to put those things and, unfortunately, they kind of slip away. I'm hoping to solve for that a bit.
Btw: thank you for your recent reads. it's very appreciated and noticed.
This was my first choice, then I remembered how I felt after reading The Gondelier.
“It was there she found this alternate expression of her being. It was there the vast expanse and torque of the outer storm wound down to its core, the energy focusing steadily into the center, the eye opening, the soul awakening. And in that calm center the kaleidoscope of her heart would begin to stir in its opposite direction, lovely jewels and colored pebbles falling delicately across each other, shifting in her blue-green waters, casting pattern after pattern against the mirrors of her heart, effortless thought after effortless thought, one lovely, unexpected treasure after the next.”
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.
The Excerpt
"And five years later, I still remember waking up that morning, wedged between the freezer and the garden loungers that I’d hauled down the basement stairs only months before, the damp thinness of a mattress that’s not supposed to be slept on, the bruises on my face when I touched them, the scratches on my arm and so close to my eye you nearly gouged it, the yellow purple already beginning on my ribcage where your fist had landed. Were they easier than the five years we had coming? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I didn’t want to leave you to die in that house, but I didn’t want to die either. It was me or you, Maisie. I told Heather I was leaving before I told you. The kids said you stayed there until the plants stopped growing.
And you never told me it’s what your dad used to say. You never told me when we wrote our marriage vows that you were repeating something horrific. Because I love you. And in the city hall that was cold because we wanted to marry in a hurry and wouldn’t wait till summer, Because I love you I will give you my life. Because I love you I will give you my faith. And we used to say, jokingly, in those early days when we still lived in the apartment with the kitchen tiles the perfect red, because I love you I will drink my tea. Because I love you I will waggle my toes. Because I loved you. I don’t know where you went when the plants died in that house. The kids won’t tell me."
I nominate A.Jay Adler--ask him to read something from _Waiting for Word_ -- his amazing poetry collection --or anything he chooses, Adam! You won't sorry. He's a find. And Jeffrey Streeter writes elegant essays that touch the heart on travel and literature. xx ~ Mary
Can you pick out one of Jay’s pieces and share that? Your words and tribute to what you find there is a HUGE part of this. Acknowledgment, writing and, in its way, performance. My vision for this is having eloquent tributes to eloquent writing.
Will send you a section from Waiting for Word tomorrow. Tonight is Rosh Hashana eve and I am detained. But will send you a piece via direct message or email. ♥️ @Adam Nathan @A. Jay Adler
Questions: When is the deadline and do we need to ask the author's permission? Also, wouldn't it be fun if we got to read the submission? (just a thought).
Thanks for becoming a part of this! There is no hard deadline because this is on an open rolling schedule, but, let's face it, the sooner you go ahead and get something in there the more likely it is to happen (for me anyway.) Don't worry about the author's permission. At this point you're simply linking to and acknowledging their work. But....
1. Definitely share your note tagging the author so that he/she knows they have been recommended. I will amplify this as will authors with restacks and the like.
2. If you know the author, please reach out. I will reach out either way to see if we can enlist them in the project. It really doesn't require much on their side.
3. Obviously, if you nominate Patti Smith we have less likelihood of pulling this off, but, you know what, life is short, go ahead an nominate someone big. it will improve their day even if we never hear from them.
4. The most important thing in the format I have now is that your words about why you pick and love this piece or the writer more broadly are crafted with care and feeling. In a way, they are a chance for us to see it through another's eyes before even hitting play. It also helps me figure out what to pick, too.
Kimberly Warner, Unfixed Media. 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.
“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 …”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.”
E.T. Allen , because, in this particular excerpt, he wears his heart on his sleeve . My heart follows after him as he runs towards the pain.
“So I’ll start there. At the beginning.
In the woods.
The screaming wail of a banshee flew out of the deep woods, first puncturing my ears then boring down into the pit of my stomach. It was as if nature Herself had been pierced through her Heart.
I’d never heard my wife sound like that.
Sprinting across fields of trampled wildflowers and into the tree line towards the sound, I already knew what I would find. But I ran straight there anyway.
Into the woods.
Crashing through a thicket and hurdling a small creek, the trees opened to a small clearing. There was my wife, collapsed on a blanket of brittle fallen leaves, sobbing on the ground next to the remains of her beloved calico cat.”
She had named her Heidi, after her favorite book from early childhood, about a little girl who lived freely in the mountains and tended to all the plants and animals. Heidi was my wife’s inner child, brought to life by a book. And, by the sweet gentle soul of this calico cat who absolutely adored her.”
"The screaming wail of a banshee flew out of the deep woods, first puncturing my ears then boring down into the pit of my stomach. It was as if nature Herself had been pierced through her Heart.
I’d never heard my wife sound like that."
Lor! You must, must, must include your wonderful takes on the submissions you put in. I can't tell you how important they are to me – and, I imagine, to the person being nominated.
Thanks!! I am including them!? ( first paragraph is mine on each of my submissions) Do you mean on Notes? Is there another place I should be including them? Let me know…
"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."
There's context missing, here, of course, but I love it just as much and in a way even more for how gloriously poetic this snippet becomes when removed from its mother. If I had to live inside a paragraph, it might well be this one. From 'the sky is not blue' but Rebecca Hooper.
Of course, Chloe, you would surface something exceptional. This piece is both wise and jarring, although I think that's the point: learn, unlearn...
"She was a housewife and a mother and she was not unhappy, not really, but she yearned for the water." The "not really" here jumped off the page for me.
The hairbrush, the marmite, the big moon eyes of the seals... Lovely.
“Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Maybe that’s the beauty of it. Maybe life is nothing more than singing love songs into the deep as Orcas ever circle in the gloom. Maybe that fine balance between sanctuary and danger, that safe haven in the firelight as hands are held and the dark is repelled, as death circles in the gloom, maybe that is where dignity and true love reside. So rave on, rave on and sing your song, till your lost and bursting, then sing some more, then sing some more.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-147971305?r=3lmmp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
@jonathanfoster
This paragraph, this entire essay sings the echos of pain and love throughout all of existence, throughout all of time, held in the hand of life refusing to surrender under this great tension of opposites.
I love the Orcas circling and the hands held, dark repelled.
I love this glitch, now I get to float along for a second day! Thanks Kimberly I really appreciate you :)
"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."
Elvers by Moonlight - written by David Knowles
https://open.substack.com/pub/davidknowles/p/up-the-back-on-a-calm-moonless-night?r=1mrn9s&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is beautiful.
Agreed.
Susie, something that's really important here is YOUR take on the writing. Can you write a few sentences that capture what you find so appealing here. The recommendations should be half of the joy of this project. (Anyone else reading this, please note!)
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, in which 'she' is a hare, for its humbling honesty and realisation of how human beings are only ever tolerated in the places we call wild.
Can we nominate more than one Adam?
sadly, 😔, no Adams will be celebrated, but... if you have something you love, you can post it in the comments here as a compromise. 😀
Underrated ⬆️
STRONG dad humor here
Adam Nathan( yes, you)
The Gondelier;
It goes without saying, this entire story was a masterpiece.
Listening to “Belle Nuit, o nuit d’amour”
“ἀγάπη – In infinite beauty there is infinite sadness.”
I could see it all play out in words, and boy, I could feel it all. Strength, joy, sorrow, infinite and eternal beauty . I chose the final scene;
“In his mind, he paddled through paper canals, past the first-year students on the fondamenta. He paddled through black balloons. The moon danced up and over him.He paddled out from San Marco and into the rippling black sheets of the watery lagoon. Stars bobbed in his eyes.
He paddled into nothing, and he paddled into everything. He let memories of his wife and daughter sweep through him like starlight.
He thought of infinite beauty and infinite sadness.
Then, together with his father and his daughter, the gondolier paddled into the stars, pulling the Earth behind him in his wake.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/adambnathan/p/the-gondolier-may-2024-part-2?r=2vg1j&utm_medium=ios.
For my 100 story collection to date, I would have picked the same thing. ❤️
Adam, what a great idea. Thanks so much for this generosity to other writers.
It isn’t because @<Mary L. Tabor> nominated me that I offer her name seemingly in return; it’s that her nomination is how I learned of this project –- and Mary has already recorded these words, the opening of her fabulously titled novel "Who by Fire," in a reading of them that scorches.
https://marytabor.substack.com/p/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.
Love this chapter.
Nominating Gunnar’s @subtlesparks piece on masculinity, since the topic is particularly poignant and important right now.
“But then, at last, when you retrieve the pieces of yourself, you do the same with masculinity; you deconstruct it. You understand that it is a flexible constellation of traits, some physical (size, upper body strength, distribution of facial and body hair), some cultural (outgoing6, confident, assertive), and many a bit of both. No one trait is necessary and no one trait is sufficient. You start building your own constellation. Strength? Persistence? Sure, useful and on many traditional checklists. No one is going to hold those against you. Good. Your constellation isn’t finished, though. Introspection? Emotional maturity? Kindness? Intelligence? Humor? Oh, those are trickier. They’re on some masculinity checklists, but only on a minority. They’re on many femininity checklists too (not opposites, remember). What to do?
Here’s the beauty and the challenge. You decide. Become the ‘man’ you choose to be. Even better, even harder, become a person; an individual who has the strength and kindness to see others that way too, as individuals, regardless of their sex and gender.
You carefully pick up the shards of your self-destructed heart and reassemble them into a vessel that overflows. Something cracks. Not your shoulders; the chains binding you.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/subtlesparks/p/i-robot-or-a-story-of-broken-masculinity?r=c3765&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for sharing this, Danielle. 🙏 And thanks for participating in this project.
"No one trait is necessary and no one trait is sufficient. You start building your own constellation."
“I love this brief existence. I love it with a ferocity that I hope, in some way, makes up for the years I spent taking it entirely for granted. This attention of mine is a most precious gift, one I’ll only possess for another four or five decades at most. Turning it towards frustrations when there is birdsong to be heard is an act of madness, and the blessing of my mortality offers a moment of sanity. Death stands on the horizon of my life, ready to guide me to whatever might lie on the other side—reminding myself of its presence only ever deepens my own.
When I was younger, I would have felt as though I were tempting fate by so often bringing to mind that I am going to die. But all the reminder does is pull me into the true and miraculous nature of the moment—of each moment. Of this one. And this.”
@deathandbirds
Ryan, can you share a few sentences on why this jumped out for you? Your appreciation can be as meaningful for someone reading this as the works themselves – the reader and the writer are both key here. (And thanks for being part of this.)
Absolutely! Sorry I forgot to add that part in my comment. I love this text, in particular, because my father just passed away, and Chloe’s words offered a sort of resolution to all the visceral regret that flooded me upon hearing what was such devastating news. Not just because she demonstrated that to regret what I felt were shortcomings in my relationship with my father was a futile effort, but because my father was the sort of person to not take for granted even the most minute beauties of life—like a birdsong—and would not want me to hold on to such insignificant trifles (since he never did). And so, in a way, it reminded me of one of his most profound qualities: appreciating each and every little moment, and letting go of the problems of the past.
From “in conversation” by Chloe Hope
From Mary Beth Rew Hicks: "The one she’s been watching for five days now is tattered on every edge, the purple florets visible through windows cut into her forewing, whose tissue-thin membranes seem stretched across thin wire like an antique parasol, as though it would crumple if opened, yet she lifts her wings in flight even still. Backlit by the sun, her branching wing veins shine like molten gold threads still powering her across the blue pane of sky. She has laid her eggs, tiny green marbles, under a leaf in a good feeding tree by now."
From "Swallowtail Vigil," Aug. 6, 2024
Lovely: "purple florets visible through windows cut into her forewing, whose tissue-thin membranes seem stretched across thin wire like an antique parasol"
I’m getting chills just thinking about how good this assortment will be—do you have a deadline for submissions?
I'm with you 100%. I've been thinking about pulling this together for some time.
No deadline. This will be rolling. I'm going to do this at some (sustainable) regular or semi-regular cadence. While many (eventually, probably most) submissions can't necessarily be featured, I will try to bundle them up, time allowing so that there is some post with the broader collection of talent.
Bottom line, this is an open thread. If you see something spectacular, please add it. I run across amazing stuff fairly frequently, but I haven't had any place to put those things and, unfortunately, they kind of slip away. I'm hoping to solve for that a bit.
Btw: thank you for your recent reads. it's very appreciated and noticed.
Excellent! I’ll be hunting.
And I’ve been enjoying those reads—your writing is enthralling.
This was my first choice, then I remembered how I felt after reading The Gondelier.
“It was there she found this alternate expression of her being. It was there the vast expanse and torque of the outer storm wound down to its core, the energy focusing steadily into the center, the eye opening, the soul awakening. And in that calm center the kaleidoscope of her heart would begin to stir in its opposite direction, lovely jewels and colored pebbles falling delicately across each other, shifting in her blue-green waters, casting pattern after pattern against the mirrors of her heart, effortless thought after effortless thought, one lovely, unexpected treasure after the next.”
Scheherazade XI - my mother.
❤️
The Nomination
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.
The Excerpt
"And five years later, I still remember waking up that morning, wedged between the freezer and the garden loungers that I’d hauled down the basement stairs only months before, the damp thinness of a mattress that’s not supposed to be slept on, the bruises on my face when I touched them, the scratches on my arm and so close to my eye you nearly gouged it, the yellow purple already beginning on my ribcage where your fist had landed. Were they easier than the five years we had coming? I don’t know. I don’t think so. I didn’t want to leave you to die in that house, but I didn’t want to die either. It was me or you, Maisie. I told Heather I was leaving before I told you. The kids said you stayed there until the plants stopped growing.
And you never told me it’s what your dad used to say. You never told me when we wrote our marriage vows that you were repeating something horrific. Because I love you. And in the city hall that was cold because we wanted to marry in a hurry and wouldn’t wait till summer, Because I love you I will give you my life. Because I love you I will give you my faith. And we used to say, jokingly, in those early days when we still lived in the apartment with the kitchen tiles the perfect red, because I love you I will drink my tea. Because I love you I will waggle my toes. Because I loved you. I don’t know where you went when the plants died in that house. The kids won’t tell me."
I nominate A.Jay Adler--ask him to read something from _Waiting for Word_ -- his amazing poetry collection --or anything he chooses, Adam! You won't sorry. He's a find. And Jeffrey Streeter writes elegant essays that touch the heart on travel and literature. xx ~ Mary
Can you pick out one of Jay’s pieces and share that? Your words and tribute to what you find there is a HUGE part of this. Acknowledgment, writing and, in its way, performance. My vision for this is having eloquent tributes to eloquent writing.
@Adam Nathan @A. Jay Adler catches the elusive with words that fly on air and hope and loss in this gorgeous poem “Weightless” from Waiting For Word
we would, in what passes, be light
as lifted burdens leave us when they go
we would that our greenhouse homes
glassy and round, cutlets of corner be
biospheres that ease us through
the hard vacuum
of all that outer space beyond
we would love
as if made to be here
our gardens grow
and that was last year in Provence
before Tuscany
when Lilith learned to fly
…………………………………..the boys
would be grown now …so tall
and full of promise if we’d had them
if we’d mad
that rock our thing
but all our particle charm……is not
massive enough, the dark matter
nothing
you can count on
the darker energy
a flight from what weighs us down
alas….poor Camus
we do not always find
our burden again
but sometimes are drawn
from what holds us together
expand forever in infinite drift
the cold dim death of the farthest lights
so far from their brilliant creation
invisible and cheerless and slow
❤️ Mary.
Will send you a section from Waiting for Word tomorrow. Tonight is Rosh Hashana eve and I am detained. But will send you a piece via direct message or email. ♥️ @Adam Nathan @A. Jay Adler
Enjoy the holiday. No hurry.
Questions: When is the deadline and do we need to ask the author's permission? Also, wouldn't it be fun if we got to read the submission? (just a thought).
Thanks for becoming a part of this! There is no hard deadline because this is on an open rolling schedule, but, let's face it, the sooner you go ahead and get something in there the more likely it is to happen (for me anyway.) Don't worry about the author's permission. At this point you're simply linking to and acknowledging their work. But....
1. Definitely share your note tagging the author so that he/she knows they have been recommended. I will amplify this as will authors with restacks and the like.
2. If you know the author, please reach out. I will reach out either way to see if we can enlist them in the project. It really doesn't require much on their side.
3. Obviously, if you nominate Patti Smith we have less likelihood of pulling this off, but, you know what, life is short, go ahead an nominate someone big. it will improve their day even if we never hear from them.
4. The most important thing in the format I have now is that your words about why you pick and love this piece or the writer more broadly are crafted with care and feeling. In a way, they are a chance for us to see it through another's eyes before even hitting play. It also helps me figure out what to pick, too.
I look forward to seeing your nomination(s).
🙏
Kimberly Warner, Unfixed Media. 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.
“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 …”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.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/unfixed/p/43-on-highway-43-543?r=2vg1j&utm_medium=ios.
E.T. Allen , because, in this particular excerpt, he wears his heart on his sleeve . My heart follows after him as he runs towards the pain.
“So I’ll start there. At the beginning.
In the woods.
The screaming wail of a banshee flew out of the deep woods, first puncturing my ears then boring down into the pit of my stomach. It was as if nature Herself had been pierced through her Heart.
I’d never heard my wife sound like that.
Sprinting across fields of trampled wildflowers and into the tree line towards the sound, I already knew what I would find. But I ran straight there anyway.
Into the woods.
Crashing through a thicket and hurdling a small creek, the trees opened to a small clearing. There was my wife, collapsed on a blanket of brittle fallen leaves, sobbing on the ground next to the remains of her beloved calico cat.”
She had named her Heidi, after her favorite book from early childhood, about a little girl who lived freely in the mountains and tended to all the plants and animals. Heidi was my wife’s inner child, brought to life by a book. And, by the sweet gentle soul of this calico cat who absolutely adored her.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/etallen/p/how-the-heart-tells-time?r=2vg1j&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
"The screaming wail of a banshee flew out of the deep woods, first puncturing my ears then boring down into the pit of my stomach. It was as if nature Herself had been pierced through her Heart.
I’d never heard my wife sound like that."
Lor! You must, must, must include your wonderful takes on the submissions you put in. I can't tell you how important they are to me – and, I imagine, to the person being nominated.
Thanks!! I am including them!? ( first paragraph is mine on each of my submissions) Do you mean on Notes? Is there another place I should be including them? Let me know…
Ignore me. Please return to your regular programming.
Wait , what! You are my program at the moment. You mean I’m doing it right, or you didn’t notice my personal intro?
Sorry! Missed this! Problem with me not you!
He means you’re doing it right.
Thank you so much for nominating my work, Lor. How the Heart Tells Time is one of my favorite pieces
Me again, just to clarify, only one entry per person?
I think this is resolved, but yes, multiples are okay. There's no hurry though!
"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."
There's context missing, here, of course, but I love it just as much and in a way even more for how gloriously poetic this snippet becomes when removed from its mother. If I had to live inside a paragraph, it might well be this one. From 'the sky is not blue' but Rebecca Hooper.
https://substack.com/@betweentwoseas/p-148342048
Of course, Chloe, you would surface something exceptional. This piece is both wise and jarring, although I think that's the point: learn, unlearn...
"She was a housewife and a mother and she was not unhappy, not really, but she yearned for the water." The "not really" here jumped off the page for me.
The hairbrush, the marmite, the big moon eyes of the seals... Lovely.