Hello fellow strange pilgrims, below we share a flash nonfiction piece that could well be a prose poem or a series of handwritten letters torn at seemingly random places and yet it binds together into a delicate, cohesive whole full of longing and love. Enjoy!

Subscribe now

Adele had a small waist, a blue Chevy pickup and a laugh that would fry an egg. She was studying Chinese and landscape architecture and finished with a law degree. Which was about the last I heard of her except for a single Internet post: “I am a dedicated commitment-phobic,” it read. “I dare call it freedom.”

She bought the truck with the last of the insurance money, which also paid her tuition at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her father was a “hot-shit driver” passing on a double yellow line, top down on the Sunliner after a night out in Rolla, Missouri. “If you want to imagine that. I sure don’t. Killed them both.”

She was living in a tent when I met her. At twenty-eight she had four years on me. I had a black-cat tattoo and was a sucker for a bleach blonde with a soft southern drawl. I bought her a gun rack for the truck and we drank Genny Cream Ale and laughed until she peed herself and laughed some more, parked out by Rick’s Sunoco on a hot summer night.

“Dear Addie, Thank you for the newspaper article. Rider and I are so proud of you in New York. The days are longer now, and the pecans are green as lemons. We say that every spring now since you left. Rider’s got his postal pension. He spends his time at home now and is good company. We miss your Momma, and I know you do too. Here’s a little money. The bus still stops at the depot. Your loving Aunt Inez”

Adele and her cousin would shake the trees at her grandmother’s pecan ranch, where she went to live after Aunt Lu got too nervous to mind her. She took the bus from Little Rock to Okemah on her own and stayed in the house in back with Inez and Rider until she finished high school and got on a Greyhound to New York, where she lived with a jewelry maker whose name you’d know on the Lower East Side and saw Lee Morgan at Slug’s the night before his wife shot him between sets. He was thirty-three. It was the same year, ’72, that the Times mentioned her in a review of Moonchildren, and she moved to Vermont and bought the truck.

“Dear Pie,” she wrote me in Jamaica Plain, “I’m rather worried right now. How am I going to survive? You know what I mean? Nervous, nervous, nervousnervousnervous. Strung out. Crazy. Scared. Slippery. Cranial winds. Etc. etc. etc. Oh, I want to be light-hearted about it all, but I’m overwhelmed. I’m POOR. I’m TOO BUSY. I’ve got BUGS. I want to cry. I want my Momma. I long to see you. I would come down to Boston but I can’t afford it. I guess I’ll have to wait for you to come back up here. All my love, Pie.” I was still in love with her, so I did.

She planted a garden in the beds in front of the house, basil, thyme, garlic, and green onions that sprouted every spring after she left me. She could really cook. She made drop biscuits, brown gravy and fried chicken that was perfect, with ease, and talked about her brother who was in prison in Kansas for something he didn’t do or almost didn’t do and threw the plates at me after I washed them and the cups too when I called her a sad cliché.

I paid off all her debts before she left. She gave me a Leica camera to hold. Dinah and Bix, her cats, stayed on to love me on those long dark nights. Or when the stars were out, I would whistle and hear a rustle in the brush on Sunset Hill and whistle again and sit on the front steps until they came back to me.

I found a letter from her Aunt Inez in a file marked “Okemah,” tucked in with a faded studio photograph of her father in his army uniform, thin as a rail with a full-body smirk, lit cigarette and those same sharp cheekbones, “1944” penciled on the back; two snapshots of her mother, left hand on her elbow, ring on her finger, younger than Adele was when we met, prettier; and a two-dollar bill, still crisp, sealed in brown envelope marked “Good Luck” on the front.

Share

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

FLEMING MEEKS: I began in fits and starts, in high school, in college. I wanted to find out what was in my head. I wrote like a photographer. I took snap shots. I discovered I could do that by writing and rewriting and rewriting. My first work was very short. I went from there to longer narratives. Word by word. Figuring it out, writing it. Trial and error and patience.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

FM: Voice, image, unease. That's all of a piece for me. I don't have a routine. I sit down when I can and where I can and write and think. And boil it down. Compress, And I go where it takes me. I look for ideas and things I could note resolve. Time, time and time helps me figure it out. Many things I couldn't figure out a year or five years or ten years ago start to make sense. I figure it out by stripping the work down and building it back.

I don't have a routine. I don't have a writers room. I can write anywhere. I find stories in what I see all around me. Sometimes things I see and hear touch things I want to know more about, things I want to understand. Snippets of conversation, body language, frustration. When I was a journalist, an editor said he could put me in an empty room for an hour and I would find a story.

The magic is to do it. To fail and fail again. To never give up. much more about failure than success. She published a book of photos of her family. There are something like 60 photos in the book. Or 62 or 64. She and assistant went back and looked at all of the photographs she took for this book, all of glass plates that are her negatives. She uses large format cameras. There were 6,000 plates. Only one in a hundred was acceptable to her. One good photograph out of a hundred, It's very gratifying. I saw her show at the National Gallery of Art in 2018. Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings. I have not gotten over it.

It's not about that 10,000 hours crap. It's about working every fucking day and believing in yourself no matter how difficult it is. Sally Mann inspires me more than any other artist. Off the top of my head I can't name a writer who inspires me at that level. Who inspires me day in and day out. No, I can. Philip Roth, Bob Dylan. Yes, they inspire me day in and day out and have for decades.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

FM: I think about it like this. Put two people in a room and create a stituation. A problem. A conflict. Emotional, yes. Intellectual, yes. Spiritual, not so much. Conflicts between people, misunderstandings, arguments, longing and desire. I try to land in the middle of it. In media res. To create problems and try to solve them. Resolve them. Often there is not satisfaction, no real resolution. But understanding. These conflicts are also with the self. All of these "people" are parts of the self. Life is tough.

If not a writer, who would you be?

FM: A photographer. Photography for me is always learning. I would love to have done that full time.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

FM: Keep working back into a piece. Build it stitch by stitch. Don't be in a hurry.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

FM: I am combing photography and text. I have something like 35,000 photographs, and I've probably lost another 30,000. I think about my pictures and what I am writing. There is a commonality to it. There is often a connection between what I have written and what I have photographed. I put them together in my head and then on paper.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

FM: Bob Dylan. Sally Mann. They are people of my generation or almost of my generation. I marvel about how they figure it out again and again. I constanly learn from them. And learn about persistence.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

FM: Any photograph by Saul Leiter. The late interiors of Pierre Bonnard. In the Mood for Love directed by Wong Kar-wai. Every second of it is brilliant.

Leave a comment

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World1 (1948) — a woman in a pink dress turned away from us, seemingly dragging herself across a field of dry grass toward a gray house on a distant hill. We never see her face. This piece has a similar aesthetic and heart I feel. Adele is rendered down to the cheekbones, the laugh, the bleach blonde, and yet she keeps slipping out of frame so to speak — to New York, to Vermont, to law school, to a single internet post years later while the narrator stays in the field and the pecans go green as lemons every spring.

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, below we have a propulsive genre-bendy and beautiful new flash piece from the wildly talented JoAnna Novak. Read it one go and then read it many times again, each re-read is more rewarding than the last.

Subscribe now

She devised the system without telling anyone, and so when she shared it with the man, she knew that she had forsaken herself and that she had forsaken the system, too, since the system functioned only when she honored it with commitment and privacy, as though the system were not merely a system but a secret, one that’s survival depended on the fat energy of concealment, an energy which—if she were honest with herself—she had long been forsaking, in microcaloric offerings to the man, so month upon year upon month upon year she had sustained fewer secrets, though perhaps she would’ve sustained other systems, had she not been so impinged; she had devised few programs—pneumonic, schedule, diet—but systems? This one involved a mirroring of metal, knives and spoons and forks, objects she touched constantly, gladly, without reprobation throughout a day, and because she had not as yet encountered criticism for her contact with the knives and spoons and forks, and because she was proud of the mirror trick, which really might save her hours over the course of her life, many hours and even days, if she lived a long life, and though she had gone from believing she wouldn’t see sixteen to believing she’d easily see one hundred to believing any day now could be her last, she kept this worry over her longevity a secret because the man had steps, he had optimism, he had a life untarnished by resentment, and he had an unafflicted mother, a mother who, the man told her, had already devised the system with the mirror trick, though knowing the man’s mother, her system would not have been devised but innocuously offered, hatched, devising itself being a dark art, and what could be dark about the man’s mother, with her knives and spoons and forks? Yes, the woman expressed delight, voice mylar with joy, delight and joy at sharing this system with the man’s mother, thinking perhaps this common ground would encourage the man to bestow upon her some respect, even equilibrizing the energy lost with revealing this secret—but, no, the man, apprised of the system, ignored it, flouting the mirror trick, mixing knives and spoons and forks, and his ignoring and flouting and mixing so injured her that without doing anything the woman lost five pounds in a weekend and for once in her shambolic, overt life did not celebrate and shop.

Share

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

JoAnna Novak: In sixth grade, I wrote a very long short story about a glamorous ballerina who's being stalked and, ultimately, uses a stiletto heel to end her assailant. My life did not involve being stalked, attending rigorous ballet practices, or dressing up in skyscraper pumps, so writing was like a pastiche of what I read--Harper's Bazaar and Mary Higgins Clark thrillers--a way to catapult myself into what seemed like adulthood, with all its accoutrements. But really, it was two years later, writing a poem about anorexia that placed in a state writing contest, when I realized I could do exactly what you've said--ask questions that couldn't be asked another way. Ask questions that, thankfully, didn't come with easy answers. Or any answers. Ask questions to flout their unanswerability. Ask questions to take pleasure in the cadence of the interrogative. Ask questions to enact a voice or strike a pose.

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JN: I've grown less fixated on routines, the longer I've written. Being a parent also helps with that. The days of 4am wake-ups, not talking to my husband until the clock struck 7am, are gone, and I'm fine with that. Now my writing routine varies based on the project I'm working on. Last year, drafting a novel, I wrote every day, in my office at home. Wifi switched off, phone in another room (specifically, on a shelf in the kitchen, in an empty ceramic pot that was supposed to house a succulent). Right now, I'm working on shorter, stand-alone work, and so my routine is even less routine. I'll write for several hours (3-4) and then repeat that the next day or a couple days later.

A voice clearly articulating an especially inevitable-sounding sentence or first line usually compels me to begin.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JN: Death and appetite. The desire to create and transform, the desire to annihilate and disappear. Tensions between visibility and invisibility. Love and cruelty as two sides of the relational coin.

I come to writing and art to hang out with these obsessions. I'm grateful to the big questions and obsessions that impel my work. I don't try to abandon them.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JN: My first take on this is in the occupational sense––pastry chef or counselor/therapist working with folks with eating disorders or a visual artist working in colored pencil. But maybe you mean in a broader sense? Like what kind of person would I be if I weren't a writer? That's impossible for me to say because being a writer is completely intrinsic to my identity, to how I move through and make sense of the world, to how I relate to other people and beings, to how I understand or try to understand the paradox of existence.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JN: In grad school, my professor Kathryn Davis explained her method for revision: After marking up a first draft manuscript, retype it in a new document. This lets you reenter the expansive, generative headspace of drafting, rather than getting trapped in the rote task-work of cutting paragraphs or tweaking verbs. I still do this, whether I'm rewriting a 70-word poem or a 70,000 word novel. This semester, I've been talking with my creative writing students about drafting by hand. The lovely freedom it affords you. The gift of getting to type that handwritten draft before workshop, thus building in a preliminary revision.

Advice? Approach life with the curiosity you had during the happiest, wildest periods of your childhood. Practice "free and easy wandering," what Agnes Martin called the ideal state of the artist, whether that's in how you experience nature or how you browse the library stacks or how you lose yourself in a museum. Read more than you think is possible. Get off social media; don't dignify AI with your energy or time.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JN: I'm writing essays about the intersection of culture and parenting. Writing never tries to ruin my life, and this writing certainly hasn't!

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JN: Agnes Martin, Andy Kaufman, David Lynch, Leonora Carrington, Spike Lee, Garielle Lutz, Nicholson Baker, Anaïs Nin, Hervé Guibert, John Cage, John Waters, Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Jordan, Claude Monet, Eileen Myles, Bernadette Mayer, Richard Pryor, Larry David, Caroline Knapp, Roger Ebert, Anna Banti, MFK Fisher––

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JN: Everyone should watch Věra Chytilová's 1967 film Daisies––think of it as the insouciant, anarchistic love child of Jean Luc Goddard's Pierrot Le Fou and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette.

Leave a comment

JOANNA NOVAK is the author of seven books, most recently, DOMESTIREXIA: Poems (Soft Skull 2024) and the memoir Contradiction Days: An Artist on the Verge of Motherhood (Catapult 2023). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, Conjunctions, and other publications. She writes a weekly newsletter about culture and parenting, How To Watch TV With Your Kid.

How To Watch TV With Your Kid

A parent's guide to exploring, and delighting in, arts and culture

By JoAnna Novak

Notes on Art

We paired this piece with Janine Antoni’s Lick and Lather1 — 14 self-portrait busts: seven made of chocolate and seven out of soap. Antoni licked the chocolate ones and bathed with the soap ones until her own face’s likenesses wore down to almost nothing. I love how surreal and yet…real it is (aha, yes I did use our mag’s tagline here). Novak’s essay burns with that same tension — erosion so careful you could mistake it for a kind of maintenance.

Subscribe now

Miscarriage (n): 1580s, “mistake, error, a going wrong”

At the first ultrasound the heartbeat was low. The doctor said, “Do not panic!” But she wanted to see me the next week. I made a mistake. I listened to her.

Miscarriage (n): 1610s, “misbehavior, wrong or perverse code of conduct”

At the second ultrasound, the heart rate was even lower. And I could hear it, too: an error in the heartbeat, one extra thump, repeating. The doctor said, “It’s not good news.” Her voice was very quiet. She did not give me the ultrasound picture. She said, “You can have the room as long as you need.” I did need.

When I finally made my way out of the exam room, I had to pass through the waiting room to leave. There was a very pregnant woman there, I guessed 8 or 9 months along. She looked pale and scared. I hated her.

Miscarry (v): 1300, “go astray”; mid 1400s, “come to harm; come to naught, perish.”

We just have to wait for the baby to die. My body still thinks I’m pregnant. Am I still pregnant? My brain does not know what to think. I am in my body and not. I move myself like a video game, step forward, sit, smile. I am standing in front of two paths: pregnant, not pregnant, and both dissolve in front of me. There is nowhere safe to step.

Miscarry (v): 1520s, “deliver an unviable fetus.”

All of the earlier meanings of miscarriage include the idea of failure, either the word itself (“fail to reach the intended result”) or implied. Everyone keeps saying “it’s not your fault.” I know it’s not. But I think about the word miscarry. I failed to carry them. Like, I dropped the baby. Or, I “lost” the baby. As if I left them somewhere and forgot. As if I would ever, could ever, forget.

It’s not my fault. Okay. Hurricanes, tornadoes, are not our fault—and yet, we always look for why. It feels better to have someone to blame, somewhere to put down the wrongness, the violence, the unfairness. It might as well be me. This is my job, I think, as a mother. To help carry my child’s pain.

There is no word that does not blame me. This is okay with me.

Abortion (n.): 1540s, “the expulsion of the fetus before it is viable,” originally both deliberate and unintentional.

We have a family vacation already scheduled so, with my doctor’s okay, we go anyway while we wait for our baby to die.

Every second I wonder if the baby is dead yet. I didn’t know miscarriages could be like this. I always assumed it would be like a car accident—blood, and then it would be over, sudden. But even car accidents are not car accidents.

I feel like a leper, a monster, a hearse, until my therapist tells me I am sitting vigil. “Vigil” comes from the Latin vigilia, originally a word for a soldier’s night watch. “Vigil” also has roots in “awake,” watchfulness. I am not a very good watchman. I cannot warn anyone when death is coming; I know it’s coming but I don’t know when. So instead, I’m sitting with the knowledge. All I have is the certainty of death. It’s not peaceful, exactly. But it is somewhat better to know how the story will end.

During a vigil, you sit beside a dying person and wait, watching, keeping them company. I sit next to, around, outside, inside my baby, with them while they die. It is an honor to watch this short life we wanted, to know it was here for a little while. I stay awake, so they can let go.

If you only had a week to live, what would you do? I take my dying baby on an airplane. I say, these are clouds! I take my dying baby to meet my family. I say, This is love! I take my dying baby swimming in the lake, playing with my older daughter. I say, This is fun; this is a sister! Dying baby, this is a s’more! Campfire! I breathe with my dying baby the bad air quality from Canadian wildfires, then the next night, clear air and stars. This is the world, I tell my dying baby.

Abortion (n.): 1540s, “the expulsion of the fetus before it is viable,” from the original Latin stem aboriri, used for deaths, miscarriages, and sunsets.

One night my cousin offers to take my older daughter for ice cream with her kids. It’s the first time I’ve let someone who isn’t my husband do this—take my daughter somewhere in a car—that isn’t school or home. I say yes, go.

My daughter leaves to eat bright rainbow ice cream with her cousins. Everyone else goes for a sunset boat ride, and I stay behind. I sit on the dock, alone, and think This is orange, pink, blue, sunset. I wait for one child to come home, and wait for two suns to set. My heart breaks. The light is spectacular, while it lasts.

Share

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

JILL KOLONGOWSKI: I’ve been writing since I was a kid! That sounds made up but it’s true for me. I used to love pecking away on our typewriter, and my parents very kindly bought me many blank hardcover books so I could handwrite stories and illustrate them inside (first book: The Cat’s Birthday). I don’t remember ever consciously making a choice; it’s just always been the way I thought through the world. My interior voice is very loud, very busy, and writing has always given me a way to allow it some room. On the other hand, I’ve never been a great journaler, but I’ve always written down snippets of life that struck me as odd or memorable or something I didn’t understand yet, and the writing always helps me understand. I feel the same way as Joan Didion, that “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

JK: I have two young children who I care for at home who always wake up at 6 or often earlier, so I do not have a routine. I’m by nature a very organized person, but having children has forced me to learn to be flexible. I write anywhere, anytime I can grab a spare hour or two: on my phone, on the back of a piece of paper in my purse, in my writing notebook. I cannot write at night anymore—my brain is cooked by then. But I do love a routine. When my older kid got past toddler age, I joined a wonderful community and coworking space in San Francisco, and I love going there for half of a day to do some deep work. If I’m writing a long first draft, or doing intense editing, I can’t do it at home, even with a dedicated workspace and a babysitter. My children are just little engines of noise and joy and I can’t disconnect from them if I’m home.

I write from sticky images. Even at my most tired and busy, I keep an eye out for things that surprise me, delight me, unnerve me, scare me, or confuse me, and I write them in my notes app. Sometimes those are generative enough that I jot down a quick paragraph right away that I can come back to later, and sometimes it’s just a word or a sentence or two, some sensory details. These are seeds that become essays later. Often, as I look through my notes, I find connections between things that seemed entirely separate, and a future essay can help me think through those connections. I love writing messy first drafts and first edits by hand; all the rest in old school Microsoft Word.

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

JK: I’m always returning to the idea of what we do, and how we act when things go wrong. I love writing about disaster, large or small. But since having children, I discovered that my fascination with disaster was more of a form of anxiety, spinning tales of what could happen and how I might handle it. I am the primary caretaker for my children, and every month, I try to write something for my substack that is not focused on motherhood. Some kind of internalized misogyny makes me want to avoid even the word motherhood. I don’t even like writing it here. But that does my experience and my children’s lives a disservice. This is our life. It’s so much of my life right now. It’s worthy of telling.

If not a writer, who would you be?

JK: I’ve worn lots of hats, and I love so much about books that I think I could find a home in a lot of writing spaces. I also work as an English professor and as an editor, and I enjoy both of those things. I especially love introducing new writers to the magic of creative nonfiction. Outside of writing? I truly have no idea. A park ranger?

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

JK: I’ve had so many excellent mentors, but the best piece of craft advice I ever got was from a visiting professor in graduate school, Susan Griffin. She said, “The problem with the writing is part of the story.” So, if you having difficulty writing a scene, make that difficulty part of the story itself. Are you avoiding writing it? Why? Is it painful? Is your memory unclear? Why might that be? At the time, I was workshopping an essay about a beloved aunt who died young, and I kept getting the feedback that readers wanted to see more of her, more clear memories. I hated hearing that, because while she felt (and still feels) very clear in my head, I found I had trouble articulating clear, full-scene memories of her. But thanks to Susan’s advice, the story of the essay became a story of memory—how I felt my brain hadn’t committed her to memory because I wasn’t ready for her to die.

One of my other favorites, one that I love to give to my own students, was not advice exactly, but feedback from my beloved MFA professor, the late Wesley Gibson. He once wrote on a final paragraph of mine: “I love this! But I don’t really know what it means.”

For new writers, my favorite piece of advice is that the only thing that all successful writers have in common is that they didn’t give up.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

JK: God, I’ve been working on my second book for over ten years now. It started as my master’s thesis, and because I’ve changed so much since then, the book keeps having to change with me. The core of the book—how women survive the anxiety of living—hasn’t changed, but the focus of the book and my skills have changed so much that I keep having to rewrite it. My agent and I tried to sell it some years ago, and we got lovely feedback, but it didn’t sell. I’m not giving up on it yet, though, and hope you can read it someday. (This is a very calm, falsely measured response to what has been heartbreaking, heart-fixing work.) My Substack (including the piece featured here) has been key in forming my new perspective and path forward with the book.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

JK: I am a longtime Jo Ann Beard stan. To me, she is the master of specific detail. No one writes a scene like Jo Ann. Of the many things I’ve read, individual details from her work have lived rent-free in my head for years. I also love Lysley Tenorio’s and Ross Gay’s work—Lysley is a character-writing professional (again, his characters stay living in my mind), and Ross Gay is a sentence sculptor. Maybe it’s the season of life that I’m in, but I’m drawn to a lot of flash writing—to me it’s like looking at a fine still life, or a perfect miniature. Sarah Manguso and Beth Ann Fennelly are some of my most favorites. I work as an editor for YesYes Books and so I get to read so much fantastic poetry there that always rearranges my brain, and helps me think about the ways to break language to make what you want.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

JK: I’m obsessed with the TV show Alone. If you’re not familiar, it’s a reality-style show where contestants try to see who can survive alone the longest in really harsh environments. The difference is that they do not see another soul (except for periodic medical checks) and they are taught how to film themselves, so there is no production crew. I love thinking about what they choose to film and why, and at the same time think about what the producers must do with the hours and hours of footage they have. Most of it must be super boring, with moments of high-octane excitement (a storm, a predator, finally catching food, getting injured, finishing a project like a shelter or a fireplace, or lighting a fire altogether). To me it’s a beautiful insight into the ways we see ourselves, what we think is important, and how we like to tell our own stories. And I get to see lots of women being badasses with bows and arrows.

Leave a comment

JILL KOLONGOWSKI always said she would never be a professor or live in California, and now she happily does both. She is the author of Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017), and you can read more of her work in The Sun, Electric Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brevity, and in her Substack Tiny True Stories.

Tiny True Stories

5-minute reads about everyday magic + Little letters of recommendation

By Jill Kolongowski

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital (1932)1, painted after her own miscarriage at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. Kahlo lies on the bed, tiny against white sheets, holding six red threads that connect her to the things she lost and the things that failed her — the fetus, a fractured pelvis, a flower, a snail. She arranged her grief into objects and gave each one a line. Kolongowski does the same thing with definitions. Every entry is a red thread tied to the same loss, held taut, kept in order. Both women know that structure won’t save them. They use it anyway.

Subscribe now

The doorway to the last Ice Age is a roofless granite cave. My father often took me there in the unsettled Scottish summers, but I loved exploring it most when snow came swirling in from the North Sea. When I was a child, we’d walk the path that followed the infant River Dee, flanked by birches and rowans. The trail steepened, puzzled over stone blocks, then narrowed to a deep-cut notch. In spring, the gorge grew lush with prehistoric-looking ferns and mosses. In winter, its stone floor was treacherous with ice. A boulder-choked gap was just wide enough for us to squeeze through.

The passageway opened into an amphitheatre of rock. Vaulted walls, carved and smoothed by water, soared on either side. It was like standing in a chapel open to the sky. This chamber is called Burn o’Vat; the river sculpted it at the close of the long cold. A waterfall at the far end whispered rush-hush in summer, but it was locked in ice by the year’s waning.

The burn dwindles and thins in drought summers now. But the gorge bears witness to the ancient force of water. Torrents unleashed by melting icesheets whirled boulders round and round in a borehole, drilling down through bedrock. They have hulled out the hill, left it echoing and hollow.

At New Year, icicles bristled from the Vat’s overhangs, fangs sprouting from walls of stone. Dad would take me to collect them, breaking their brittle stems. Snow creaked underfoot as we walked back through January dusk, the icicles nestling in our gloved palms. The cold sharpened the starlight. I longed to take the icicles home and hoard their crystalline beauty in our kitchen freezer, to see them glittering on drizzly days as I waited for the snow to return. I’d climb into the back seat of Dad’s Britoil company car; the ignition coughed and the heaters whirred. The icicles began to weep.

Share

Tell us your origin story as a writer. When did you begin? What first drew you to writing as an instrument for asking questions that can’t be explored any other way?

YVONNE REDDICK: I started writing rhymes when I was a small child!

What does your writing routine look like? Do you thrive in structure or wildness? And when you begin a piece of writing, what tends to announce itself first: a voice, an image, an unease, a philosophical conundrum?

YR: My process for poetry is very different from my process with prose. I write poems the way I'd dash to the shops or sprint to meet a deadline! Writing prose, for me, is more like a long-distance trek, or trying to scale a mountain where the air is thin. My view is that my best work comes from tensions and dilemmas: can we connect with nature without damaging it? Can we stand up for our rights and the rights of others, without causing additional harm in the process? Can writing solve any practical problems, or is its role simply to help us to see, and think, differently?

Most artists are preoccupied by certain obsessions: lust, longing, death, the self. What persistent preoccupation—emotional, intellectual, or spiritual—threads through your work? Are there motifs, themes, or impulses you’ve tried to abandon but that keep returning, insisting on their relevance?

YR: Nature is an obsession for me! I don't view human beings as set apart from other living creatures. Some people don't like hearing that, but I think it's intrinsic to ecological thinking. I'm also interested in women's place in the outdoors, and how different genders may be treated differently when we head outside.

If not a writer, who would you be?

YR: I'd be a hiking guide, or an ecologist.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received? Alternatively/additionally, what’s something you’d like to offer as advice to emerging writers trying to make a mark?

YR: Write about what you've been avoiding. Write until you feel like you're handling a live coal. The very topics you've been apprehensive about confronting, may yield your most distinctive and original work.

What are you working on now and how is it trying to ruin your life (in a good, necessary way, of course)?

YR: I'm working on a nonfiction book called Fire on Winter Hill, about my life in the hills with my Dad, and his work in the oil industry. I'm exploring the tensions between his love of nature and the pollution caused by the industry he worked in. I see the impacts of climate change all around me when I'm out in the mountains, and I'm complicit in climate change too. “The Burn” is the opening movement of my work in progress, and I'm really pleased that it's found such a good home.

Who are the artists—writers, filmmakers, thinkers, internet oddities—that have shaped your sense of narrative? How have they rearranged the way you see the world on the page?

YR: I keep returning to the work of Sudeep Sen, Helen Macdonald, Chloe Dalton and Robert Macfarlane. They have ways of relating to climate, nature and other creatures that I've found unique and illuminating.

Please recommend a piece of art (a painting, a film, an album, anything that's not a piece of creative writing, really) that you love and would like everyone to experience.

YR: I'd love everyone to read Helen Mort’s Substack, “A Time and a Place.”

A Time and a Place

....there's a time and a place for That Sort of Thing (and it's definitely not here and it's definitely not now!). Creative provocations on poetry, place writing, the inappropriate, the out-of-context, the bizarre, the beautiful, the lost-and-found.

By Helen Mort

Also, please read Jayant Kashyap's poetry pamphlet Notes on Burials. It's wonderful.

Leave a comment

YVONNE REDDICK is a writer, film producer and ecopoetry scholar. Her latest books include Burning Season (Bloodaxe, 2023) which won the Laurel Prize for Best First Collection of Ecopeotry and was shorlisted for the Saltire and ASLE book awards. Her latest documentary is Searching for Snow Hares, directed and filmed by Aleks Domanski.

Note on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Andy Goldsworthy’s Reconstructed Icicles (2010)1. Goldsworthy works in the Scottish countryside, making sculptures from ice and stone that last only hours. He says2:

It’s not about art. It’s just about life and the need to understand that a lot of things in life do not last. And to understand the nature of things, I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.

This flash essay works with the same materials, evoking something transcendent and delicately painful in the process.