After a historic (?) week of televised ludicrousness, I turn instead to Hannah Gadsby’s offering of her one-woman show Nanette. It's the most responsive work of art (and performance and story-telling and summoned rage) I have witnessed since the election of our serial sexual-predator in chief. Have you seen this yet?
In other news, I started a summer journal to take my mind off submissions, queries, and pitches that are out of my hands and out in the world. It's been a fun distraction. Or maybe a mid-life crisis? Here is the one where my 6-year-old copied my work (although it's really her work I try to emulate) and here is the page that made my mind bend the most, in the best way possible. It's a homage to HOME, the introvert's paradise.
For the Discerning & Literary Child
Graphic novels and heavily illustrated chapter books are still rising to the top of our library picks. This month we read Rollergirl, Anne of Green Gables, and Ottoline.
I haven't really read Pooh from start to finish except for vague remembrances of my own Dad's evening readings, so I'm somewhat surprised to find myself enjoying Return to the Hundred Acre Wood. It's peppered with run on sentences and characters named Early and Late and the dated expressions that barely register as coherent. My three-year old calls it a grown-up book and my 6-year-old won't touch it. Yet I persist...
Greta Gerwig is set to remake my fave classic children's book with Timothée Chalamet as Laurie. I die.
Asides, Ideas, Miscellany
Tayari Jones’ op-ed on Nelson Mandela and the brutal legacy of state violence and family separation.
For my fellow Tiny House enthusiasts.
The latest addition to Overlooked is the story of the inventor of liquid paper, "the correction fluid that relieved secretaries and writers around the world from the pressure of perfection."
The complete guide to getting what you want by way of Jocelyn Glei's interesting and useful newsletter.
Talking about urban renewal, gentrification, and redlining with sixth graders: whose Renaissance is it, exactly?
Curb cuts and the history of the disability rights movement.
The quiet superhero, RBG, sparkles in the documentary by the same name. It's a fascinating look at her life's work, the very stitches that together have woven into the fabric of gender equality laws in this country as we know it.
From Beatrice Alemagna's A LION IN PARIS
"Paris reassures you that you are in a cycle of life that will end, and that everyone before you has felt just as important and just as crucial to the cycle, and yet, they ended, too. Paris is a good place to remind yourself that everything ends. In America, we think we'll find a cure for all of this. But Paris assures you that you are mortal, here for a blink of time, that the world will barely register your existence before you are gone. This is the existential dread of Paris, and this is also the way that Paris sets you free."
- Taffy Brodesser-Anker
Thoughts? Ideas? Recommendations? I love connecting with fellow readers, writers, parents, and humans. Please drop me a line!
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r.p.
