🗣️💥🔁 speak up, let it go, and then do it again!
+ personality quizzes, poems, and exotic tofu you'll devour
Dear Ones,
Is it just my algorithm, or have you noticed a slew of articles about women who refuse to be silent? About women who won’t stand by quietly when they’re cut off in traffic, or in line at a coffeehouse, or find themselves once again making dinner for kiddos who won’t eat the roast chicken? Women whose creative work is considered secondary, or women who are seated in the back of the restaurant because gray hair marks them as low status? (Quick sidebar: have you seen this CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM, The Ugly Section, in which a restaurant’s policy is to seat the unattractive diners in the back? Hilarious! ✔️ the link!)
In my inbox I find copious quotes like this one, about women wasting their one wild and precious life “telling grown men where to find the ketchup.” (Lyz Lenz) It’s a good line, right? Glib and funny and reminds me of my husband’s refrigerator blindness and Mary Oliver’s (childfree) copious free time to bask in the stillness of the natural world. Or lines like the following from
who talks about writing women characters and showing, “their doubt, their moments of coldness, their ambition, their blindness, their states of confusion ….all or anything that is true about how women exist in their lives,” and, Stone continues to say, these women are considered unsympathetic, unlikeable, as if we must not shock readers (i.e. the world) into “awareness of what women really are—” ahem… amazing? interesting? smart? jerks? kind? complicated? loving? lonely? creative?From Dorianne Laux’s poem, Singer:
SIN. My mother was what some called
a sinful woman: divorced, pregnant
without a husband, a baby boy given up
for adoption, remarried, another baby
born of another man, a one night stand,
while her husband was away at war.
She drank too much, thought too much,
laughed with her head thrown back, danced
with anyone. too pretty, too brainy,
too tall, her black hair a snare
that hooked men in. But right now
she’s fully visible, stretching the fabric
for a kitchen curtain, a child’s dress…
In Laux’s poem, the eponymous SINGER is a sewing machine, and it seems the mother, a complicated woman, is “fully visible” when in service of home and family. We are meant to create ease for others. We are meant to toast a second waffle, and cut this one into triangles not squares so the demanding toddler will eat it. We are meant to take it on the chin when the grown child says with 💯 sincerity, “Thanks, Mom, for not saying hello to me when you walked by.” In other words, thanks for erasing yourself. We are meant to quietly let the restaurant host seat us in the dark corner. I don’t know about you but I’m not down with any of that!
Which brings me to a new favorite essayist I’ve been reading, Helen Garner. Here’s what she has to say about the joy of another erasure:
I had known for years, of course, that beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces. The famous erotic gaze is withdrawn. You are no longer, in the eyes of the world, a sexual being. In my experience, though, this forlornness is a passing phase. The sadness of the loss fades and fades. You pass through loneliness and out into the balmy freedom from the heavy labor of self-presentation. Oh, the relief! You have nothing to prove. You can saunter about the world in overalls. Because a lifetime as a woman has taught you to listen, you know how to strike up long, meaty conversations with strangers on trams and trains.
We do know how to listen. We do know how to ask questions. We have good coffee! We have Joni Mitchell! We have kind and loving men in our lives! We have a good cocktail if we want it! We know how to forgive. We have books, and art that urges us to remain curious, and we have each other. ❌⭕️
read:
As I mentioned above, I’m currently reading Helen Garner’s, EVERYWHERE I LOOK, and thus far, I want to be her when I grow up! The Guardian describes her writing as, “pickled in a brine of intense self-reflection and self-doubt.” In an essay called, Whisper and Hum, she describes falling in love with the ukulele while falling out of love with a series of men. She discovers that the ukulele:
… has in fact a simple and benevolent purpose: to create a bed of sound for the human voice; to enrich the single line of melody that a human voice is capable of.
Somewhere in the background, my marriage crashed and my daughter grew up and left home. Next time I looked around I was living in Sydney with a severe modernist to whom the presence of a ukulele in the house would have been an outrage. With him it was Wagner or nothing.
Another essay, The Insults of Age, is delightful and powerful. She writes with brio and brawn, as if she’s just butchered a cow! She’s funny and smart and ultimately interested in connecting. Yes, she says the world ‘bristles’ with opportunities to take a stand. And she also says it’s best to outlive your grievances. Speak up, let it go. And if you're sharp and funny when you speak up, all the better.
I’m delighted to be digging in to Dorianne Laux’s newest poetry collection, LIFE ON EARTH. Her poems are tender and fierce. They embrace the quotidian—sewing machines, waitressing, bisquick, WD-40—and open up into the vast. I am forever grateful for her work. Here, and here, and here, are poems you can read right now. Yay!
Our read.write.eat. book group is a once (sometimes 2x) a month Sunday morning gabfest over coffee with smart and terrific people about smart and terrific books. Sound like your jam? Let me know by leaving a comment!
For March, we’ll read Zadie Smith’s, ON BEAUTY, which is a loose riff on HOWARDS END. The publisher says:
ON BEAUTY is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars-on both sides of the Atlantic-serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this is a tour de force by Zadie Smith.
The r.w.e. book group is a perk of being a paid subscriber. Come on in - the water is fine!
Check my read.write.eat. Bookshop Store, where you will find many of the books I've recommended in the newsletter. Buying books from my shop is a way you can be a friend to the newsletter.
write:
Last week I was invited by my very inspiring friend
to join an online session aiming to rekindle your love of writing. Jen’s a great writer and energetic and knowledgeable about all the ways we get in our own way. She’s the best friend you don’t even know you have! As I planned what I wanted to say, I got to thinking about my own resistance. I don’t write because I love writing. It’s hard to sit at my desk and write poorly, to struggle, as we all do. I love writing because I write. Because I spend time doing it.Care + time = love.
So, how do you get yourself to the writing desk if you are feeling resistant? I offer up the idea that you begin by writing about something you love. Write an homage, a love letter to a person, a place, a thing. Jen suggested you write a fan letter to yourself from your ‘perfect’ reader. Here’s a little love letter to a tomato plant, and another to a radio personality that has died. Perhaps use these as incentives.
You are not alone when you feel distant from your work. I want to double down and say it’s the commitment and the care that will make you re-kindle love. The love is in the doing.
a prompt:
Do you remember magazine quizzes? I poured over Teen Magazine and Cosmo quizzes! Me—sixteen, on a lounge chair in our tiny backyard, slathered in baby oil, lemon juice spritzed in my hair, turning it orange in the sun, desperate for insights into mysteries of womanhood.
What if we use quizzes now as prompts? Maybe to discover something we want to write about in an essay. Maybe to learn something about our characters by putting him/her/them through the questions. I offer up these fluffy examples:
Does your crush like you?
Are you really best friends
The Big 5 Personality Test
Of course my tongue is lodged in my cheek! These multiple choice questions are frothy. But just maybe they spur a thought…about the world, about you, about your characters.
For deeper/better questions, I recommend looking at your favorite interviews. What questions does the interviewer ask that could be expressways into character, or set you off an essay of your own? I offer you this list of Terry Gross’s 10 best interviews. See if any of her questions spur you to answer for yourself.
eat:
Roasted Tofu w/Chickpeas, Tomatoes and Lemony Tahini (adapted from NYTs cooking)
14-oz package firm tofu, drained and patted dry
2c cooked chickpeas (or 1-15oz can drained, rinsed, patted dry)
1 basket cherry tomatoes
Salt and pepper
3 cloves garlic
2 lemons
½c olive oil
1t dried oregano
½c chopped flat-leaf parsley
2T soy sauce
¼c tahini
1T honey
Leafy greens, such as baby kale or mixed greens
Heat oven to 425 degrees. Cut the tofu into ½-inch-thick slices. Place on a kitchen towel to dry.
Combine chickpeas and tomatoes on a sheet pan and sprinkle with salt and black pepper.
Using a fine grater, grate the garlic cloves and zest 1 lemon into a bowl.
Squeeze the lemon + another if necessary to make 1/3c lemon juice, reserve to the side.
Add the oil, za’atar, oregano and ¼ c chopped parsley to the garlic mixture and stir to combine. Pour half of the marinade over the chickpeas and tomatoes, toss to combine and spread in an even layer. Roast until the tomatoes are just bursting open, about 15 minutes.
While the tomatoes & chickpeas roast, add the soy sauce to the remaining marinade. Stir. Layer the tofu slices on a plate or in a shallow bowl and cover with the marinade, turning carefully to coat both sides.
After 15 minutes, nestle the tofu slicesin the sheet pan with the chickpeas and tomatoes. Drizzle any leftover marinade over all.
Roast until tofu begins to brown, the tomatoes have fully burst open, and the chickpeas are golden brown and crunchy, about 15 - 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, whisk together the tahini, honey, reserved lemon juice, and 2 tablespoons of water. Season to taste with salt and black pepper.
Divide the greens among 4 bowls. Arrange the tofu, chickpeas and tomatoes on top of the greens. Sprinkle with the remaining ¼ c parsley and spoon on the Tahini dressing on to taste.
Stanley!
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Tell your people you love them, and take good care of your skin.
xN
Oh my gosh, off to lose most of my day to Helen Garner. Thanking you
oh that Curb Your Enthusiasm clip! as you know, Grief is my "thing," so the "when my turtle died...i know just how you feel." ha! and so much more. thank for sharing and being YOU.