Hello fellow strange pilgrims, I’m excited to share that we’re going to do our first Substack live next week on Tuesday, August 25th at 12 PM ET. Shannan will be speaking to literary agent who helped set up our partnership with one of the best literary agencies in the world, Curtis Brown!!

It’s totally free to attend live and we’ll be discussing what literary agents are looking for, the publishing world today as it relates to and affects folks trying to enter that space professionally, as well as how literary magazines like ours fit into this space. And a lot more, I imagine!

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If you’d like to be reminded about the event, then please add it to your calendar. This will be free for all our subscribers to tune into live, but the recording will be paywalled and shared with paid subscribers later in the week.

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The summer of 2023 when smoke from the wildfires started blowing into the big cities down South is when I found out that woodsmoke is bad for you. Every year the northern Boreal lights on fire. It’s part of the regenerative cycle of the forest, and absolutely natural.

When I was growing up we had two woodstoves in the cabin, one for cooking that dated from around 1900, and for heat a pot-bellied stove that went back to the 1950s. In the summers we’d barbecue outside on a wood fire set in a sectioned forty-five-gallon drum left over from some mining operation. We thought woodsmoke was good for you, because it’s natural.

We thought the lead in the water was natural because lead is on the periodic table of the elements. Asbestos is natural, and radon. A little bit just toughens you up. At school they took away our white glue because it was unnatural, although I’d heard that glue is made from horses, but sniffing it was unnatural. Of course every kid that learned about the glue sniffing epidemic tried sniffing glue first chance they got, so that seems pretty natural as a behaviour. We were given mucilage for all our adhesive requirements, The rubber nipple was suggestive, and our paper cutouts, too thickly slimed, curled upwards away from the cardstock underlay. Exceptionally good work got a gold star or a Scratch-and-Sniff from the teacher. There was a grape Scratch-and-Sniff with a purple grape cluster pictured in its white circular frame, and a gasoline-flavoured Scratch-and-Sniff showing a gas pump with the nozzle lifted out of the cradle. Gasoline is made from dinosaurs and ferns, but not flowering plants or mammals because those are too new. Some of us had mammals confused with vertebrates and lizards confused with snakes. We made dioramas to illustrate the Cretaceous period, but they fell apart on account of the inadequacies of mucilage. It was the 1980s. We were warned about eating baloney because of the nitrates. We spelled it “baloney” which is the natural way, and not “bologna” which is weird.

We played in the woods after class and ate blueberries we found growing at the old minesite, which were way better than the ones from the store. “More concentrated,” we repeated, “and no pesticides.” We ate grayling from the lake by the quarry. We learned what to do if anyone swallowed a fishbone, or fell out of the canoe, or went swimming within thirty minutes of eating and got a cramp. We had excellent physical fitness. We rode our bicycles home along the shoulder of the highway, swerving in the gusts from the passing ore trucks. “Those kids sure are healthy,” said the teachers and parents and ore truck drivers. We got multiple sclerosis and colitis and head-and-neck cancers. We got tuberculosis and intestinal parasites. Whenever we went into remission we’d get right back out there, skiing, hiking up mountains, backcountry camping, living off the land. “Sure tastes better than store bought,” we said, and, gnawing dandelion roots with dirt still on, “a bit of minerals in your diet is good for you. It’s natural.”

Any big birthday was marked with a bonfire, and any memorial service just the same. Woodsmoke is good for you, its fragrance, its resin, its very nature.

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1.

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?

DAWN MACDONALD: I started young but took my sweet time. The librarian at my elementary school very kindly photocopied some stories I had written (and illustrated), bound them in cerlox, and placed them on the shelves. However, I did not start to publish seriously until my forties. There was a long diversion in which I was “living life” and getting heavily conscripted into providing administrative support to other people’s artistic and entrepreneurial endeavours, mainly my boyfriends, so I have a cautionary tale in that regard. Your own art matters! Don’t forget to do your own stuff!

2.

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?

DM: Yeah, there is no routine. I carry a paper notebook and pen with me at all times, to catch stuff on the wing. I’m mostly a poet, so it’s sometimes possible to catch the whole thing in one go (with minimal subsequent revisions). My attention span is really short, but also really sticky -- like I will keep returning to the same thought in 15-minute increments until it’s eventually gotten somewhere -- and short forms work well for that style. As a mostly-poet, it’s often turns of phrase that kick something off for me. But there are persistent themes that come back in new guises, which leads to the next question below...

3.

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?

DM: Insider-outsider stuff: who gets to tell a story? Who gets to say how a story should be told? I really did not want to write about the Yukon, where I am from. I was bored by all that “northerny” stuff. Then I titled my first book “Northerny.” I was bored by the usual portrayals of the North because they were not for me; they’ve tended to highlight those aspects of the North that strike the attention of someone coming up from southern Canada or the US. These aspects (sled dogs, northern lights, minus forty) are not remarkable to me. I’ve wound up writing a lot about that stance. Whose experience of the North is reflected in culture? I’m in an awkward set of positions myself, as a White settler descendent whose family arrived in the last generation, and we’ve still not heard enough of the other stories of the North, the stories of Indigenous citizens of modern self-governing First Nations, of International students and temporary foreign workers who’ve come here for reasons unrelated to old myths of the Klondike. Do those stories have to position themselves in relation to the established ways of telling, or can they be understood on their own grounds?

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

DM: There have been lengthy periods where I was not a writer, but I always had creative pursuits. For a while I think I tried to express my creativity through expansive forms of living, and went a little hard. A creative practice can channel that perhaps more safely.

5.

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?

DM: Whatever is the thing you do in your writing that people keep telling you they hate, you should do that more, because it’s your one chance of originality. But as an additional piece of advice, I would say that you should quit drinking (if you ever started and haven’t already stopped). Either you don’t need to be drinking, in which case you might as well quit, or you do need to be drinking, in which case you really ought to quit. In any case, it isn’t helping your writing.

6.

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

DM: I don’t know if I see myself as working on things. I’m tinkering and jotting and seeing what comes of that. Lately I’ve been messing with forms that mix my words with found text. I’ve done a set of “fake translations” and a few centos and a series of 14-line poems in which the first word of each line comes from the title of a scientific article in the journal “Nature.” These pieces have tended to veer back around toward themes of organic life, and the messiness of the body. I’m edging my way around how to talk about things I can’t say directly: secrets, undefined qualities, places where my story impinges on others’ stories that I don’t have the right to simply tell. This is an acutely uncomfortable space to be in, so you could say it’s ruining my life in that way, but I’d say it’s more--how to speak from the position of a ruined life?

7.

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?

DM: My husband has pointed out that I’m a bit of a “bro” in my reading habits. I have a vast affection for a panoply of real “bro” writers: Charles Bukowski, Charles Portis, Ernest Hemingway in my youth, even the currently-unfashionable David Foster Wallace. I’m coming from a place that values macho presentation across genders, but also I’m obsessed by the ways in which people express themselves when their manner of expression is constrained. The cultural scripts of masculinity are one such form of constraint. Then for me, as being a woman with a heavy admixture of supposedly masculine qualities, what would be my “natural” form of expression, and what would be sayable or unsayable within that?

8.

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.

DM: Chantal Akerman’s 1975 film “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” is an experience I recommend having exactly once. I’ll probably never watch it again, but I’ll never stop thinking about the one time that I did. It’s boring in a way that makes you question what boredom is, how repetition structures a life, and what happens if that is punctured. I was somehow riveted the entire three hours and twenty minutes, shot mostly with fixed cameras in a handful of positions, often showing the character from the back while she does household chores. I don’t know how to explain this. When I’ve tried to explain it to someone else the usual response is “that sounds terrible” but it is a feminist classic, and entirely worth your time.

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Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap

Concise, idiosyncratic reviews of books I got for free or cheap, with an emphasis on Canadian poetry.

By Dawn Macdonald

Hello fellow strange pilgrims, this week has been one of many mini meltdowns due to what I sense is overwork, but might also just be…well, life, which is mostly work. And that’s alright. I’m happy that I can still find space to read beautiful writing like the short essay you’ll read below. Ailsa is the kind of writer whose voice feels at once calming and stirring which is to say I can bet you 10 birthday cakes you’re going to want to write after reading her piece.

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When I open the front door of my apartment, the darkness and airlessness of its windowless hallway seems to seep into me. I feel like I’m living in a puddle just looking at it. So I keep the lights off. I pretend it doesn’t exist. Of course this doesn’t work. I have to walk eleven steps along it to get to the bathroom, twelve to get to the bedroom. The hallway is visible from the sofa. It’s visible from the sink.

This place has bad bones, I said to my husband when we moved into the building three years ago. In those first weeks, I tried washing the hallway walls with soap. As I cleaned in the darkness, I imagined how much better life would be if we lived in a house by the sea where every surface was touched with light. In such a serene place, I would always feel clean. I thought about this as I went over beige carpet with an industrial cleaner. When I was done, the dark hallway still refused to sparkle, and those stains would not come out.

Now I think it’s better if I stop dreaming about seaside homes. Generational predictions suggest this rented one-bedroom apartment may be as good as it gets.

Albert Camus wrote that people often “refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.” I want to take away the conditions I consider pertinent to my happiness, until I have no conditions at all, until I love everything.

As a way of learning to love this hallway, and therefore my life, I was thinking I could bring more of what I love in. I could attach all of Jasper’s branches and twigs to my walls. I could drag whole conifer woods in until I’ve hidden every part of the rental that could be described in a paint catalogue as being magnolia or biscuit. But taking the outside in is against the “leave no trace” rules of the national park, so I cannot do that.

John Cage said “begin anywhere.” So the new plan is to gather bunches of clover from crown land. I can dry them out in bunches in the apartment. And they will love the hallway’s darkness, its airlessness. And they will make the hallway smell like a bee keeper’s kitchen. And I will love it.

This is not a grand or a well-thought-out plan. I’m making it up now, in a damp B.C. meadow on a Sunday morning while watching oxeye daisies wave like fried eggs beside a silver tongue of lake. Their shallow roots are creeping just under the earth. The twinflowers are out and the thimbleberries have petals soft as crepe paper.

These sweeps of mountains could be from Norway. I could be in Scotland. I could be home, if home contained the screams of dirtbikes and ATVs as well as rivers. If home was cut with logging roads and lakes formed by megadams. I don’t mind this noise and the artifice. The sky is a low wash of pink and everything is misting and rippling, the tall purple clovers especially.

I was only meant to pick one clover to press in a book, but somehow I ended up with fistfuls of flowers in my pockets and I can’t put them back. Now I’m as bad as the short-tongued bees that bite their way through the flower’s wings and keels without pollinating them.

I feel indifferent. This lake is the length of Wales and there’s clover in every direction. I could pick for ten thousand days and still I wouldn’t make a dent in the surface percentage of these weeds endemic to Eurasia and Africa. Clover now grows from the top of the earth to the bottom and all around, in nearly every location on the rotation. I wonder if these ones miss their original homes.

I get up off the warm pink stones I’m kneeling on and go over to the car. I place the flowers over the backseats, then wake my husband. It’s already eleven. The wind outside is picking up. I make coffee on the stove of the Boler. I bring the puppy up onto the bed and lie top-to-toe beside these two warm bodies. Sunday morning with the birch leaves swaying green against the windows, with the mountains rising over the lake like a fjord. I’m lying on a sky blue duvet. I’m covered in dirt and fur. I say to my husband when I was a teenager I imagined this age would involve cocktails and shoes. I say what happened? My husband looks up from his book and says you chose happiness. I see two tails wagging and think, yes.
Back at the apartment, once I’ve put the camping things away and cleaned the dishes, once I’ve messaged my mum for flower drying tips and she’s replied “hang in bunches upside down xx” from her house filled with glass and light, I snip some twine and place big bunches of clover in groups on the walls.

Broken stalks get cleared from the melamine table I’ve covered in gingham, and now the chipped linoleum resembles a florist’s shop floor. This mess I love. Using clothes pegs, I string more flowers along a line of twine above the putty-coloured light switches. This is so easy compared to pressing flowers, which requires, for tiny petals, a grace necessitating tweezers. This is such good work for a short-tongued bee.

I place another line of flowers over the grey fuse box where a previous tenant has sharpied the words ‘Car Battery Plus Here’. I am in love with all this clover, with their roundness and their scent.

I am such a good flower drier. For years already, I have been so good at making cheap plants wither in their pots. I turn to the internet and learn I have done everything wrong.

I should never have picked these flowers on a wet morning. It is a “must,” announces the author Elda Haring, that they “be picked on sunny days between noon and 3 P.M.” I should be microwaving the flowers with blue silica gel, says a New York Times article from 1981. I should be preserving them with hairspray. I should be peeling off their leaves to speed up the drying process. Otherwise I risk the potential of rot and mildew.

I should be sourcing palm spears and cotton stems from florists, says an interior designer in the Irish Independent. They would look “great in a kitchen full of raw wood, heritage paint and crumpled linens.”

I pull down my twine strings. The flowers look sad, like purple rags on a line. I strip their leaves then place the clover back up in smaller, less crowded bunches. Now they look delicate. Now they look elegant, like a keepsake of things I love: light and dew and sky. How beautiful it is, to stop time like this. Bees and fields and happiness, this is what I’ll think of now when I open the apartment door and see clover. Dragging driftwood over rocks to the fire,using a rock for a pillow and listening to mosquitoes burble in the aspen trees, I’ll remember that too.

I want more memories in the hallway. I could string honey mushroom mycelia to the wall like night lights. I could watch them bioluminesce. I could make this place magic. I could find all the fermenting, bubbling living things of the world that need the dark. They’ll love the hallway’s darkness and airlessness, and I will too.

What is this need to keep things, take things, hoard things? This taking of flowers to keep them forever feels so Victorian. But now I’m reading that people were buried with flowers in Egyptian tombs at least four-thousand years ago. I’m reading about the bones of a prehistoric man in the Middle East who was discovered among preserved posies. Maybe this desire to keep beautiful things through to the end is simply human.

I read that in the Middle Ages, when human waste flowed into the rivers and houses were dark with wattle and daub, when cleanliness was something few could afford and those in power did little to make things better, people carried nosegays, posies of flowers — violets and lavender and marjoram — to counteract the odours of everyday life. These nosegays (literally, something to make the nose gay) were viewed as a protection against disease in a time when people believed illnesses came from bad smells.

Sniffing a flower to withstand the horrors of walking through an unclean street seems absurd. If only these medieval people knew to stop throwing human waste from the windows out of chamber pots! If only the butchers had stopped casting entrails in the ditches. Then they would have no need for such things.

Covering a sad hallway in clover is absurd too. That I’m getting real joy from this superficial change in appearance seems so sad. Why don’t I really change my circumstances? I don’t know how in a town where trailers go for half a million. I’m burned out by a landlord who raises rents in a pandemic, who ignores my messages about the mould in the bathroom.

My husband’s heading out with the dog for a walk. He’s switched on the hallway lights to get his raincoat. I’m pleading turn it off before he’s even done in the closet. Your thing with the lights, he says, I can’t keep doing this.

But these lights are a sad white. They’re as bright as strip lights, as a fridge light. How could anyone stand them?

I could change them. Three years with this hallway and it’s taken this act of actually looking at it instead of hiding away to realise there are things I could change.

The next day I buy some low-wattage bulbs from the hardware store. I screw them in and switch them on. In one sense it’s glass and light. In another it’s a nosegay. It’s absurd, and it’s almost enough. This change in light, it’s making me feel something unnameable. Something hopeful. Imaginative, and bright.

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1.

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?

AILSA ROSS: I kept a diary from about the age of twelve, but I drew and painted much more than I wrote. I then spent much of my early twenties travelling, and stopped painting, as horsehair brushes and paints and paper are expensive and take up a lot of space in a rucksack. Then I began writing much more than I painted, a yellow legal pad and biro being both light and cheap.

Can it be that I started writing seriously because I was too cheap to continue expressing myself through painting? I think it is so.

2.

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?

AR: At the moment, I write while my baby sleeps – so for two to three hours in the middle of the day. Before the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I wrote everywhere and at all hours. I wrote outside on summer afternoons. I wrote in the bath on winter evenings. I wrote while I was meant to be doing the fact-checking and editing work that paid the bills. I wrote alone in bed, while drinking a French press. And then I would transcribe the words that I wrote onto my computer. I procrastinated a lot as I did so, because I truly hate transcribing and get distracted easily while doing such work.

I don't procrastinate so much anymore. Now that I only have a couple of hours in the middle of the day in which to work, I feel I have to utilise those hours effectively.

3.

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?

AR: Time, mystics, animals, plants. The way the past intertwines with our existence today. These themes prevail in my novel HOVEL, which was published by Strange Light/Penguin Random House in spring. They prevail in my thoughts. As does daydreaming.

The act of daydreaming is a skill downplayed in the modern world. I suppose it’s seen as unproductive. Yet according to Wouter Jacobus Hanegraaff, professor of History of Hermetic Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, the imaginative state engages a particular sense of being in the world, one that leads to a more transcendent understanding of the universe.

4.

If not a writer, who would you be?

AR: Since the baby, who is really a toddler, was born, I have been baking and cooking so much, because making food is something an infant can be involved in, and because it stops me from looking too much at the clock (looking too much at the clock slows time down, as anyone who has ever worked in retail knows).

Would I really like to be a baker or cook for money, though? It seems unlikely, on the days when the cardamom buns come out dry and underproofed. But to have used my law degree seems unthinkable too. If I was a lawyer, I would never sleep for worrying I had done wrong by my clients in some way. Honestly, I don't know what I would do. Become a nun?

5.

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?

AR: Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that readers have come to believe individual heroism is the point of a story, and proposes a different kind of storytelling in ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’ – where the author picks diverse things of meaning and value and gathers them together, like a forager rather than a hunter. I love that, and can think of books in that vein, such as ‘Flights’ by Olga Tokarczuk.

I'd recommend reading ‘Flights’ as a means of seeing new possibilities for how a novel can be.

6.

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

AR: I am writing about some artists whose physical bravado shaped their inner landscapes. For example, Marina Abramović lived for many years in a campervan. She walked half the length of the Great Wall of China in a red coat. And then there was Agnes Martin driving about America in a campervan for a couple of years while thinking about what to paint and where to lay roots. I'm trying to find out how those solitudinous experiences affected those artists.

My own story, of trying to embrace solitude while living on an isolated part of the prairie, runs through what I'm currently writing. I play the sincere clown as I attempt to emulate aspects of these women’s lives. This is not easy for me. I don't find it easy to eschew conventionality.

7.

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?

AR: When I think of literary books filled with historical research, I think of W.G. Sebald, Emmanuel Carrère, Geoff Dyer. This kind of book, which sits near the academic, gets associated with men. My voice is not like Sebald’s or Dyer’s. Maybe it is more like Marlen Haushofer’s? Her sentences seem simple. But striking images build up within the sentences. They create a particular atmosphere. This kind of writing, which has the feeling of a fable, gets associated with women.

To have the historical content of the former meet the sentence style of the latter, that’s what I’m most interested in achieving on the page.

8.

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.

AR: The 2000 film 'Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse' ('The Gleaners and I') by filmmaker Agnès Varda, which I wrote about in my novel HOVEL.

You don’t get the France of the movies in this documentary. This is a France where millions live in poverty. It’s where anti-consumer activists are fighting with supermarket managers who pour bleach on the bread they leave in skips at the end of the day, so no-one can eat it. Varda speaks to both sides. She opens people up. She opens up the doors to her home in Paris and films the mouldy ceiling. She films close-ups of her aging hands.

In a field of old potatoes, she looks for ones shaped like hearts. She holds them up to the camera, up to the light, and seems to say look, everyone, and everything, matters. She takes some potatoes home, where they grow arms.

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The Rituals

From Ailsa Ross, author of HOVEL, a novel, out with Strange Light/Penguin Random House // Scottish // In the Canadian Badlands

By Ailsa Ross

Notes on Art

We’ve paired this piece with Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Dust Motes Dancing in the Sunbeams (1900)1. It’s an empty room. Bare panelled walls, a wooden floor, a single window on the left, a door on the right. Nothing has been brought into it, not a trace of furniture in or out, not even flowers…no attempt made to un-dull, so to speak, the greyness. Light comes through the window and lies on the floor like something solid, falling diagonally across the door. Ross spends her essay trying to make a dark hallway lovable by hanging clover and imagining mycelia strung up like night lights, and then the thing that actually works is something she’d overlooked for three years: she changes the bulbs. Light elevates without a third thing, and I find such simplicity to be a cooling splash of water in our modern, often cluttered spaces (online and, let’s face it, offline too).

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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.