I want to keep this short, although this month has felt extremely long—blame the continuous 100-degree days without rain, or my currently ending-the-month typing this with a gnarly head cold and cough, and wanting to get back to cuddling my kitten on the couch. Of course, I will include tons of images and a bit of my thoughts about each book

Here are the books I read in August, in the order I read them.

Beginning Middle End by Valeria Luiselli. I’ve been a fan of Luiselli for a very long time. Lost Children Archive is an all-time favorite novel of mine and one I constantly recommend as the best American road trip novel. Beginning Middle End picks up with the mother and daughter from LCA, but you can read it completely on its own. This was a magnificent novel that I never wanted to end. Luiselli captures the relationship between mothers and daughters through generations in the most tender way through memory, history, and the mythology of both. Her books feel like precious objects, an archive of a story that goes beyond the pages and the characters within.

Milkweed Smithereens by Bernadette Mayer, a poetry collection I picked up in tandem with another Bernadette Mayer book I read throughout the month (more on that later). I enjoyed my time with this collection! Mayer’s style of poetry reminds me a lot of Claire-Louise Bennett’s novels. Both are inventive with language and play with words while capturing the everydayness of life and its happenings. Milkweed Smithereens collects poems spanning her career, mingling sonnets, poems on nature, and The Covid Diary, which was one of my favorite sections of the collection.

The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein was an experience, a very humbling one. I spent the first fifty pages determined to understand the “physics talk” of this book and eventually realized that not understanding is part of the beauty of the reading experience, similar to our experience of the vastness of the universe. Prescod-Weinstein, a cosmologist and particle physicist, uses metaphor to connect poetry and popular culture to explain abstract concepts such as dark matter, black holes, and quantum gravity. Where our ideas of “classic science” are rooted in rules and facts, Prescod-Weinstein uses theory and imagination to ask questions and explore the cosmos.

Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton was my second Sarton journal, and again I was not disappointed. I even ordered four more of her journals, as I find they are perfect for when I don't know what to read. Sarton’s writing is perfect for when I want to feel like I am living life alongside a writer focused on their vocation and the inspiration and peace they find in their work, home, and nature. This journal focuses on Sarton moving to the town of Nelson, New Hampshire, its inhabitants, and her time establishing and making the home and land she inhabits her own.

Piece of Cake by Bernadette Mayer and Lewis Warsh is a collaboration between Mayer and Warsh, each writing on alternate days during August 1976. I wanted to read this specifically during August to celebrate fifty years since it was written. Mayer and Warsh document their life as they settle in Lenox, Massachusetts, with their infant daughter, Marie. Once again, following the daily occurrences of two writers balancing living, family, and a quiet life in a new town. What I enjoyed most about this book was how Mayer and Warsh wrote separately about a family experience and how each rendered it uniquely.

Thank you for being here! Tell me about your August in reading!

July was a month of slow reading, as well as picking up and putting down multiple titles that weren’t working for me in the season I find myself in. Blame the multiple record-breaking days of heat in Houston or the attention deficiency I’ve found myself in since adding a kitten to our family. Hermes is constantly finding something new to get himself into, and our home isn’t exactly kitten-proof. I read the same sentences over and over, stopping halfway to scoop him up, only to lose my place and start the page over again. While endeavoring in a very new part of life, I also returned. I returned to a book I had put down two years ago, finding my footing and an overall more appreciative experience through its interconnected figures, which I had not encountered during my first attempt.

The three books I read this month had a very clear theme, each handled quite differently: a poetry collection, a book of nonfiction, and a novel. All three were connected by roots, yes literal tree roots but also the intermingling and life below the soil the connections of figures through time, science, poetry, and discovery, like the illuminating figures in Figuring by Maria Popova, or the removal and subsequent haunting of a eucalyptus tree for poet Victoria Chang in Tree of Knowledge, and the epic life of a plot of land, it’s home, trees, and people who inhabit and discover its Edenic qualities like the many voices in North Woods by Daniel Mason.

Now onto my month in reading!

Here are the books I read in July, in the order I read them.

Tree of Knowledge by Victoria Chang was the highly anticipated new collection by the author of With My Back to the World. As always, I appreciate Chang’s poetry and their revolution around specific artists and their artwork. I enjoyed WMBTTW's focus on the art and life of Agnes Martin more than this collection, which focused on a broader array of artists. Chang’s focus in this collection is on the removal of a eucalyptus tree on her street, and its continuous haunting after its removal, leaving Chang to reflect on new forms her life and body are taking as she ages and ponders death alongside her teenage daughter's independence.

Figuring by Maria Popova. I’m a huge fan of Maria Popova and have been reading and following her blog The Marginialian for years. I picked up Figuring two years ago as a buddy read, which we both got about halfway through and decided wasn’t for us. Over two years, I have read more, explored more, and furthered my interests in art, literary figures, and the sciences, and returned to this feeling of clarity and appreciation I had not before. Sometimes you just need to take a step back and return to something in a new time. I love how Popova weaves figures through science, history, and literature to form an entirely new interconnected biography. Two of my favorite sections were obviously about Emily Dickinson and Rachel Carson. I especially loved reading the intimate letters between Emily and Susan, as well as Rachel and Dorothy.

North Woods by Daniel Mason, what a novel! An Edenic book with a biblical genesis about place, an apple tree, murder, salvation, mystery, hauntings, and the land and home upon it. I loved the various styles Mason used to tell a generational story, like my favorite sections following a landscape painter and his love letters. I read a large portion of this novel while an old home near our house was very loudly being demolished, which added to both the pain and beauty of place, and its constant witnessing to life and death, and possibly, one day, its own tearing down.

Thank you for being here! Tell me about your July in reading and the books you have returned to?

I want to build an altar to all the nature around me.

Even the snippets of summer glanced through my screen, and those of you posting the simplest joys to be found in the abundance of June entering July remind me why I find peace in nature and the poetry within it. My June in reading seems to have reflected these feelings and moods perfectly!

Tomorrow (July 1st) is my 36th birthday, and I plan to celebrate it with a visit to the Natural Science Museum. Perhaps a separate post will come with photos from the day and my yearly tarot card pull. I’m curious to see what this new year will bring.

Now, onto the books I read in June, my most remarkably heart-opening month in reading so far this year.

Here are the books I read in June, in the order I read them.

Canon by Paige Lewis. I quite enjoyed my time with this novel, and its attempt at a literary genre-bending epic. I would have enjoyed a bit more depth in some areas, however, as a whole, I found a lot to connect with as someone who has struggled with religion and obsession their entire life. I found Yara's character and her struggles to be all too relatable. It’s rare to find a novel with an accurate representation of the real lived experience of OCD, so thank you, Paige Lewis! Good vs evil, one person challenging God and reconceptualizing them within their own lives… sign me up!

Foxglovewise by Ange Mlinko, a collection of poetry inspired by Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, more specifically the foxglove flower. Mlinko uses the foxgloves' inconsistent behavior, traveling about the garden and popping up in new places, as she questions place, movement, migration, geography, and memory. Poems take place in a Scottish cemetery, Los Angeles, and Florida, with a focus on the flora and fauna of their vast ecological landscapes and on Mlinko’s own familial landscape. This was a stunning collection, but one I will have to return to a few times as the language and style were a bit of a challenge.

The Wild Iris by Louise Glück. I lost a handful of subscribers after posting a photo stating this was “my Bible” shortly after reading it, the two may not be linked, who knows?! Either way I stand by my statement, this is the singular most incredible work of poetry I have read and I fear I’ll never reach that peak with anything else ever again besides perhaps Emily Dickinson. As a collection The Wild Iris is a masterpiece. My copy is annotated to the high heavens on only my first read. I know this is one I will consistently return to in all seasons of life.

Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science by Renée Bergland. I didn’t know much about Charles Darwin entering this book and found his scientific contributions and personal life well researched and written and far more interesting to read than I had anticipated. Although Dickinson and Darwin never met or corresponded their lives seem to have a cosmic overlap where Darwin abandoned poetry in his pursuits of science, and Dickinson could only write her poetry from a place of discovery and wonder at the natural world. Both questioned religions place in their lives and where their ideas of god could be found in the lives and work they intertwined and dedicated themselves to. I did find parts of this a bit repetitive however the depth and tempo at which the Darwin chapters and Dickinson chapters effortlessly began to blend and overlap towards the middle and through until the end made for a great reading experience.

Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disability and Vulnerability by Therese Estacion is a short memoir in essays and hybrid poetics following Estacion as she confronts her belief that hardening herself to the world and ableism is the only way to protect and live in her disabled body. Full of self-loathing, Etacion struggles to find worth and become vulnerable with herself in order to accept a life of disability, trauma, and rage.

Accidental Devotions by Kelli Russell Agodon is another enjoyable poetry collection, one I picked up for its focus on devotion, religion, queer grief, and joy, along with its love of Emily Dickinson. A deeply personal collection revolving around technology’s inescapability in our lives and its close proximity to a type of religious experience, met with ecstatic devotion, simultaneously weary in its abundance in our daily lives.

The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow. I’m nearly finished with this novel after binge-watching the TV series. It’s light and fun and has placed me back into the world of Jane Austen, which I’m never upset about. Mary Bennet is written with flaws and isn’t only “not that type of girl," but actually unsure of herself in a way that feels real and touching to read.

Thank you for being here! Tell me about your June in reading and your moments of joy in nature so far this summer!

Hello, it’s been two months since my last post. I skipped my April reading Archive and, unfortunately, have stepped away from the Reading The Body book club. After the loss of our beloved dog Hero at the end of April, I had no desire to be online, choosing instead to spend my time caring for and supporting Hero through his final days. Thank you to those of you who reached out, it meant to the world to us.

During those two months, I’ve thought a lot about how I want to spend my time, and being online writing “perfect” wrap-ups hasn’t been one of them. Through grief, I have read more, spent time rescuing snails in the yard, been on a trip to the Hill Country, hiking, visiting dinosaur tracks, reading on a balcony (without being bitten by mosquitoes), and completed a puzzle with my partner, and overall have felt happier despite a heaviness that I know will never go away.

All of this to say, I still enjoy creating in this space, but I want it to take up way less of my brain and energy. For now, I am saying goodbye to Reading The Body book club and writing shorter, more expoloratory end of the month archives (no long paragraphs, more simple personal thoughts, and other media/images). I hope to post other fun things throughout, but I am not holding myself to any standard of productivity. I hope you will stick around!

Here are the books I read in May, in the order I read them.

Offseason by Avigayl Sharp, I didn’t love this novel, unfortnately characters were flat, and while intentionally written to be unlikable, I found myself unable to connect enough to enjoy their unlikability.

Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal is an exceptional memoir about “ugliness” and the history and cultural standards for who is considered beautiful and whose bodies warrant worth in the world. What role does our physical appearance play in our body’s rights?

Transcription by Ben Lerner, an extremely buzzy book that I enjoyed but wasn’t wowed by. I did find it to be the best “Covid-19” novel written thus far. Touching at moments and at times too clever as though Lerner was winking at me the entire time, asking, “Did you see that?”

Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, Loved! May gets it, this is for anyone who wants to take life slowly, observes the sky a lot, and all the small things living under it.

On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle, translated by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. Volumes I and II are still my favorites in the series thus far. However, I breezed through this volume while sitting outside on a balcony overlooking the Hill Country, listening to birds chirping, bugs buzzing, and the occasional pitter-patter of rain on leaves. Just when you think Balle has hit a wall, the last ten pages throw you for a loop, and I’m eagerly anticipating where Volume V will go.

Fancy Work by Alice Hattrick (digital ARC), I loved Ill Feelings by Alice Hattrick when I first read it, and look forward to a reread someday. I want to recommend this book to anyone in love with craft, especially the fiber arts, and exploring its queer history as well as illness through making.

Thank you for being here! I hope you will stick around for these changes! Tell about your May in reading and any other small moments of solitude or observation you would like to share!

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March has felt like a nesting doll—one challenging week nestled into the next. This month’s reading felt similar, but in a much more enjoyable way—March is typically the month when my reading really flourishes, and I find a few “five-star” reads—this month, that was definitely the case. Each book had a surface, with something else happening within or below the main text. A play within a play, a medical experiment at the narrator’s unknown expense, an autobiography in the voice of a partner written by the subject, pain’s entry and expansion in the body, and ghosts entering and exiting life’s physical and metaphorical stage.

Here are the books I read in March, in the order I read them.

Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin was the Reading The Body book club pick for February. Here is information about the book club if you would like to join us for quarter two! Sea, Poison is a slim novel about a woman named Cumin Baleen, a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia who works at an upscale grocery store, Sea & Poison. Cumin is navigating the start of an autoimmune condition, which requires her to start a medication, which leads to a terrible laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, causing gaps and loss in her language, setting off a fractured narrative of medical malpractice and the dramas of love and everyday life. Cumin perceives that something has been stolen from her sense of self by the loss of her ability to write. This change in her perception of language also shapes the book’s imaginative, all-over-the-place syntax and its play with the OuLiPo or Olipian style.

The first half of Sea, Poison read as I had hoped, a medical malpractice novel, following a writer losing herself to medical time and the unfortunate fallout of a surgery gone wrong. We later find out the “failed surgery” has a more sinister importance in her life. I found much of the romantic entanglements to be tiresome, and while these relationships did supply a deeper connection and importance to our main character’s story after the failed surgery, I couldn’t fully appreciate this strange little novel as much as I had hoped. Many references to other books were new to me. While you don’t necessarily need background context to enjoy the book, it would have made some sections a little easier to stick with and follow had those references been more deeply understood. Again, this could just be personal.

If you would like a longer review, I would recommend checking out that post!

And after that, I began having some cognitive problems. The best way to describe them is something between aphasia and writer’s block. I could speak, and write, but I had become very spare somehow, unable to elaborate or more importantly to me, to use language—namely, sentences—elaborately, I mean with multiple clauses, which had always meant so much to me, to do that, to keep going.

This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith by Darcey Steinke left me feeling similar to how I felt reading Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin last spring, a book I deeply connected with on a similar subject. This Is the Door is another book I wish I had written—Steinke got into my brain and seamlessly plucked and arranged a history, an experience, and a vastness of pain that connected closely with my own experiences and reading tastes. Steinke explores pain, the most universal of human experiences, no matter how it appears or disappears throughout an individual’s life. We all experience pain to some degree. Some of us experience it at higher, more relentless levels, as is the case for many with chronic illness or injuries that suddenly bring it upon a body, such is the case for Steinke. I found Steinke’s own investigation of pain around spirituality and our perceptions of pain relatable, as I have written about and explored in my own writing and experiences of growing up with chronic pain.

Steinke has done an excellent job of taking the reader through the body and the habitation of pain within it through personal experience and the interconnectedness of pain between our ancestors and ourselves. This Is the Door expresses pain as knowable and shareable, especially when that pain cannot be healed, and simultaneously, pain does not take away from the one experiencing it. Often, pain can be an alienating experience, but it also offers a direct line and way to communicate and create with the world around us. Steinke pulls from multiple sources, writers, artists, and mystics such as Catholic nun Hildegard of Bingen, the art and life of Frida Kahlo, Simon Weil, Audre Lorde, Kurt Cobain, and Franz Kafka.

Pain is claustrophobic, not only because we are trapped in our damaged bodies, but also because our spiritual ideas are shaken, possibly even obliterated.

One way to understand life is to accept duality. Sickness and health, suffering and the release from suffering, pain and pleasure, life and death. People are destroyed not by suffering but by suffering that is devoid of meaning. Meaning is bigger than a diagnosis or a cure.

Hamlet by William Shakespeare…I did it! I read Hamlet! I created my Hamlet reading project at the start of the year and plan to continue it by reading more plays and finding more books and other media inspired by Shakespeare’s plays… if you have any recommendations, please let me know! I went into Hamlet knowing the basic beats and the main well-known soliloquies, but I was completely enthralled by this tragedy. I appreciated the complexities of our young prince, Hamlet, whose motivations seem clear to those around him. Yet, he is perceived as mentally unstable, having visions of his dead father and desperately trying to root out the evil within his deceased father’s kingdom at the hands of his uncle Claudius. Still, Shakespeare has written a character much more vast and dare I use the term timeless here, but Hamlet is a character that can be the placeholder for anyone, any place, and any people. I dug further into the play’s history, including its bans and inability to be performed on stage in countries such as Israel, Palestine, and Russia, which I will get into later when I review Enter Ghost.

I’m gearing up for the release of Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet in April and found this video of him mentoring youth theater groups in London. In it, he explains his experiences with the play’s significance then and now as a collective call to action that breaks boundaries of accessibility and the significance of the most famous soliloquy in the English language, “to be, or not to be?” Hamlet is a play for everyone—Hamlet speaks directly to us and will continue to do so. My one complaint is poor Ophelia—she is such a flat character, used as Hamlet’s love interest and bartered around and controlled by the men in her life until her tragic death. Overall, I have found her more modern interpretations to be much better than the treatment she got from Shakespeare.

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin is modeled on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, in which Stein narrates her own story from the perspective of her longtime partner, Alice B. Toklas. Artist Lana Lin, inspired by Stein, has taken on the same project from the perspective of her artist-filmmaker partner, H. Lan Thao Lam. A collaboration of queer love and artistic collaboration as well as South Vietnamese refugee experience and the experiences of a Taiwanese American against the backdrop of artistic and gendered embodiment, illness, 9/11, pandemics, and the racial and gendered violence of American life. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with this book. However, I found myself questioning whose voice I was reading at various points, as Lan and Lana so closely mirror each other, a fact acknowledged throughout the text.

As I write this autobiography, I isolate moments that I can remember, divorcing them from the other moments, and my life changes, its meanings change as I remember and misremember.

I have not read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but I have done some research and have background knowledge of Toklas and Stein. They appear quite the opposites of one another, and Stein does not shy away from making it clear this is written about herself, where Lan and Lana share a more enmeshed coupling and creative collaboration. Both create art collaboratively, and I have to wonder how much of this book was treated as an art project, another collaboration within their individual and joint bodies of work. Enmeshment is a word that came to mind often while reading: the enmeshment of two writerly voices but four bodies, as well as the “we” of Lana and Lan, and even the chapter headings of both books mirroring each other to represent each couple’s time and their countries’ events.

Some of the more striking sections focused on Lana’s experience with breast cancer, drawing connections to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Audre Lorde. Lana undergoes a mastectomy while Lan is administering testosterone, likening the experiences of trans medical needs and its connections to breast cancer care and treatment, how breasts represent femininity, and both experiences often require breast surgery to save lives. Lana’s writing is lovely throughout, both touching, funny, and deeply personal.

LitHub Article about the two covers.

It may be that a great love is shown through listening to another’s story. It may be that a greater love still is shown through telling another’s story. A different kind of love arises when merging another’s story with one’s own.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. I picked up Enter Ghost with the highest of expectations, and I’m incredibly pleased that this is my favorite novel of the year thus far! I’m finding it difficult to write about it or to explain its plot; it’s one to experience. The basics: set in 2017, Sonia, a London-based actress, returns to her homeland of Haifa to visit her older sister, Haneen, and becomes involved in a West Bank production of Hamlet. Sonia is haunted by her life in London and an abandoned affair as she portrays Gertrude amongst a group of actors from across Palestine. “Enter Ghost”, a stage direction in Shakespeare’s play to represent the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, the former King takes on a much broader meaning in the conext of Palestinian people under occupation and Sonia’s own ghosts, from her family’s past, an experience she remembers as a child that haunts her everday life, and her ancestral home in present-day Palestine. Throughout the play’s production is the constant simmering fear and oppression of Israeli soldiers, surveillance, violence, speaking further to the history of Hamlet as a production within occupied territories and the power of language and artistic expression in a country determined to keep defiance in check.

The rest of the show ran fast and taut. The audience sat uncannily still. They were clearly aware that they now had an audience, too, and this was binding them to us. Together we were a team, determined to continue, spurred on by a blend of fear and defiance.

I completed this book a few days ago and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, especially amid ongoing political uncertainties. It’s not a cliche to believe that art will save us and is necessary as a means of defiance, revolution, and protest, and Hamlet seems to do it best.

LitHub article about Palestine’s Freedom Theater.

Shakespeare Unlimited with Isabella Hammad on her novel Enter Ghost.

My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream and my perspective had been breached I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situated fragilely in time and place, this summer, this side of the wall. Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway, everything had been decided in advance, we were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out in the audience, dismantle our illusions, and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State.

Thank you for being here! Please tell me about your March reading! Did you read a new favorite book?

Quarter Two reading selections for Reading The Body book club⬇️

I can’t wait! If you would like to join us for April, we will be reading Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin.

You can support Reading the Body if you choose by subscribing for as little as $5 a month or $35 for an entire year, which allows you access to an archive of personal essays and helps to fund the care and time I put into all of my posts, especially our book club!

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Reading The Body book club is free! However, you can support me if you choose by subscribing for as little as $5 a month or $35 for an entire year, which allows you access to an archive of personal essays and helps to fund the care and time I put into all of my posts, especially our book club!

This month, we read Sea, Poison, a novel by Caren Beilin. Sea, Poison is a slim novel about a woman named Cumin Baleen, a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia who works at an upscale grocery store, Sea & Poison. Cumin is navigating the start of an autoimmune condition, which requires her to start a medication, which leads to a terrible laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, causing gaps and loss in her language, setting off a fractured narrative of medical malpractice and the dramas of love and everyday life.

Thoughts and Moments I Connected To

The first half of Sea, Poison read as I had hoped, a medical malpractice novel, following a writer losing herself to medical time and the unfortunate fallout of a surgery gone wrong. We later find out the “failed surgery” has a more sinister importance in her life. I found much of the romantic entanglements to be tiresome, and while these relationships did supply a deeper connection and importance to our main character’s story after the failed surgery, I couldn’t fully appreciate this strange little novel as much as I had hoped. Many references to other books were new to me, and while you don’t necessarily need background context to enjoy the book, it would have made some sections a little easier to stick with and follow had those references been more deeply understood. Again, this could just be personal.

While short, Sea, Poison is doing a lot and saying a lot. You can tell Beilin has taken the time and has a personal connection and understanding of the experiences she is writing about. The book is also an homage to an early 90s Japanese novel by a similar title, The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo, which, along with Beilin’s novel of intentional malpractice, Endo’s is about POWs and doctors performing human vivisection on them to experiment and further their own careers.

The character Cumin Baleen, similarly to the author Caren Beilin, has an autoimmune disease. In an interview with Beilin, she says she has rheumatoid arthritis, the cause of which I will get into later. In order for our novel’s character Cumin to begin treatment, Plaqenil is prescribed. However, because the side effects could damage Cumin’s ability to see color, an eye exam is required prior to treatment. This is where things set off our “story” of intentional medical malpractice and an unnecessary eye surgery in which the laser shoots into Cumin’s brain. As a result, Cumin believes the laser has touched her brain, changing how she perceives language and blaming her writer’s block on it.

And after that, I began having some cognitive problems. The best way to describe them is something between aphasia and writer’s block. I could speak, and write, but I had become very spare somehow, unable to elaborate or more importantly to me, to use language—namely, sentences—elaborately, I mean with multiple clauses, which had always meant so much to me, to do that, to keep going.

Cumin perceives that something has been stolen from her sense of self by the loss of her ability to write. This change in her perception of language also shapes the book’s imaginative, all-over-the-place syntax and its play with the OuLiPo or Olipian style. Oulipo writing, which formed in the 60s, was a French literary and mathematical group that practiced constraints on their writing and language to spur creativity. Often, these constraints were nearly impossible, like removing any use of the “I”, or in the case of Georges Pérec’s book, A Void, written without using the letter “e”, making the process of writing difficult, but opening new pathways for experiencing something new through self-restriction. These constraints can also be applied to the medical world, which operates under its own limiting rules. The term “medical time” in the illness world is the stretches of hours, even full days, to medical bureaucracy like insurance phone calls, minor exams, waiting rooms, blood draws, etc. Cumin, like many who live in the world of the unwell, is at the mercy of a new type of Oulipo—for Cumin, this also means the loss of her time to write and work.

Cumin seeks a second opinion, almost appearing to want someone to say yes, something bad did happen, in order to confirm her inability to write and her own body’s disobedience. The second opinion doctor agrees with her, stating, “You were in no way—I’m looking now— a candidate for this surgery.” But how can you know the second opinion is correct?

How does medical intervention often take something from you, either to help or through malpractice or a mistake in the medical field, at your expense? What is often taken from you in these instances is thought, language, the self—things become fuzzy, your edges of self blurred slightly.

Towards the second half of the novel, we, along with Cumin, are informed of the larger plot unfolding behind the medical curtain. Her roommates have scripted and planned all the misfortune for Cumin’s eyes and brain. Intentionally working towards their own experiments and hypothesis of making a writer better by removing writer’s block permanently, lazering through to the brain. Cumin is the “patient/writer” being experimented on, leaving her unaware and instead believing the incident has caused a loss.

While medical malpractice can feel far away to some, its harm is found everywhere in many medical fields, causing long-term medical gaslighting and further medical complications. Often, we, as the patients, are left to choose between treating something and the potential side effects, repercussions, or other long-term conditions. We have little choice between treating something and not, and have to face whatever comes our way.

I thought a lot about gaps when reading this book, and upon reflection, I often blame my medications for many mental side effects, like gaps in memory, lack of recall, and forgetfulness. My brain is left blank many days when it would normally be full. I have found it harder to identify if this was always the case or if it’s my medication. While it makes many other aspects of my life and mental health better, what if it also causes another group of issues I didn’t necessarily struggle with before? Are we all being experimented on to some extent, like Cumin? Have the chronically ill all fallen under our own Oulipian world? I’d like to believe the medical world is not nearly as intentionally harmful or diabolical as the one Beilin has created for Baleen, but I’ve also been told by many medical professionals that they don’t know what is wrong with me or prescribe me something as a test on my body. Perhaps this is its own form of what has happened to Baleen?

The novel, at times grotesque in its descriptions, felt incredibly visceral and uncomfortable for me to read. I wanted out or to complete the novel as quickly as possible, a feeling I don’t often experience, but was that Beilins’ intentions? Blackfishing the IUD, another book by Beilin, is her own experience of having a copper IUD implanted and the belief that the onset of her rheumatoid arthritis is directly related. The stories gathered from others only reinforce her in this belief, as this form of medical miracle is actually dangerous to many. This personal experience creates another way for Beilin to bring up well-known names of doctors who committed OBGYN crimes, such as performing unnecessary hysterectomies and other gynecological crimes. Much of these sections of the book, while necessary and very real, were extremely difficult to read.

…my health has in recent years put my beauty on an unexpected chopping block. It’s less linear than getting old. There are certain drugs—drugs beyond Plaquenil—I’ve taken that changed the texture of my hair, changed the image, a beautiful image, scratched the image. This was unexpected, that’s all. These drugs have knocked something off center, have scratched at my face and hair. They have helped me enormously.

Questions!

Now for some questions! Please feel free to respond to as many questions as you would like. I tried my best to begin with a general question and build towards deeper, possibly more personal responses. Please respond in a way that is most accessible and comfortable for you. Please keep in mind that comments will be public—be kind (any comments with hateful speech, etc., will be deleted). I will also post questions in our chat for anyone who prefers that method of discussion. I have done my best to answer questions throughout this post, but I would love to discuss with you further in the comments.

1. Did you have a favorite chapter, page, or line you would like to share? What was it that stood out to you? Why did you connect with it?

2. Beilin is known for writing autofiction, which many in and around the literary world have strong opinions about. Do you think a story of medical malpractice benefits more from traditional memoir or a form of autofiction? What can be the purpose of choosing one over the other?

3. Writing under forced constraints and living under constraints imposed by external forces or by our own bodies shapes much of this novel. What are some constraints, self-imposed or not, in your life? Do these constraints help or hinder your creativity? What are some ways those constraints could reshape how you approach creativity, etc., in your life?

4. I think this novel is a great one to discuss with others in the comments, and I encourage you to explore your own questions about the novel and what Beilin is doing in Sea, Poison. Please feel free to post your own questions!

Thank you again for reading Sea, Poison! Please feel free to give any feedback. I want to make this book group the best it can be!

Our April book is Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin.

Lauren Elkin is a French and American writer and translator who has written personal memoirs such as Flâneuse and the diary No.91/92, art criticism, and the novel Scaffolding. Art Monsters is about feminist artists who were pushing the boundaries of what art can be and who can make it. The artists in this book are confronting the long-standing challenge of how to tell the truth of their lived experiences from sick, queer, racialized, and female bodies. What is an “art monster,” and what does the art world and culture do with bodies and art seen as unruly?

February feels like purgatory...? Too dramatic? Nothing feels as if it’s on solid ground, no longer the end of a year and beginning of a new one. Life is emerging, still slightly unsure if another burst of cold is on the horizon or if we have made it out unscathed by winter. All species of birds are chirping early in the cool mornings, and the squirrels are out foraging in the sunny afternoons. Red leaves are peeking through the thorny branches of rose bushes that will soon turn vibrant green and bud. Every tree appears to be releasing drifts of pollen, which swirls down onto sidewalks and parked cars, leaving a yellow mist that makes me sneeze. This strange middle place is one I feel stuck in, eager for spring and summer but already mourning its end and how quickly it seems we will be back to December. For now, I’m going to practice living in the present, finding joy in the cool breezes and warm, bright days, walking a bit more slowly to destinations instead of racing to beat the heat. I’m embracing a slower pace of reading and striving to be okay with the fact that I haven’t read a favorite novel yet (a year feels in limbo until I find a novel I love!).

Here are the books I read in February!

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, the hype got to me with this one, which was perfectly timed with from Closely Reading, choosing it as her first novel of the year to closely read. I felt intimidated by this classic—however, we tackled a few chapters each week, discussing themes and other stylistic aspects through thoughtful annotation and close reading. Many people have written about the novel and the movie in recent weeks, and many have a deep understanding and have studied the novel. I recommend checking those out! Note: I have yet to see the movie. Without rehashing the plot, I would say the book is worth reading, although if you are looking for a companion to Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, this is not that! This novel is gothic in every way—everything is dreadful, and any light from any one character is disastrously tormented out of them through the bleakest depravity of our titular characters, Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Two people who, even in death, continue to haunt one another and their poor ancestors. What I found most intriguing about the novel was the second half. Having only seen the 1939 movie adaptation growing up, I never knew the story continued with the children of our characters, which made me appreciate the novel as a whole so much more.

Wuthering Heights is a stunningly written and structured novel, with themes of opposites across place, gender, and morality, the struggles of class, and nature vs. nurture. Still, it is relentless in its tortures and violence. A big question I had for myself going into Wuthering Heights was... is this book a romance? It didn’t take me long to realize it’s clearly not. Yes, I underlined moments that sound like love between Heathcliff and Cathy, but ultimately this novel is a story of control, possession, and mutual destruction. (Anyone else get Chuck Bass and Blair Waldorf vibes?) Sound off in the comments! I need to discuss this with a GG fan!

What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff’s miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger.

How I Bend Into More: A long poem by Tea Gerbeza was the Reading The Body book club pick for February. Here is information about the book club if you would like to join for the remainder of quarter one! I also wrote a full review along with questions and other resources, for anyone interested. If you would like a longer review, I would recommend checking out that post!

This is Gerbeza’s debut collection of poems about living with scoliosis and documenting her experience through surgery and selfhood using self-portraits and the art of paper quilling to depict pain and the body’s visual mapping. Gerbeza’s long poem takes shape through pain, desire, friendship, surgery, death, and being a first-generation child of Yugoslavian immigrants who escaped the Bosnian/Yugoslavian Civil War.

I’m not an expert in the technicalities of poetry—my dabbling in poetry has been all about following no rules, which I think is part of the beauty of it as a form. Gerbeza, however, is clearly a master of her craft. I was drawn to this collection for its delicate visual representation of disability through the art of paper quilling. Weaving language, symbols, shapes, and forms to illustrate and communicate a personal story of the body’s narrative with pain. Our pain does and does not make us who we are—the two can never be fully unwound from one another. That is something Gerbeza has perfectly rendered in this collection.

Is A River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane was our book club book for work (I work at a local independent bookstore). This specific book club is called WEB CLUB, not for its online quality (we meet in person) but because we read across genres and our books tend to extend (like a web) from one another. For instance, we read The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin and subsequently chose Is A River Alive? It often mentions Le Guin and her novels. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory is the idea that fiction’s narrative structure should emulate a “carrier bag” rather than a weapon or hero’s journey. That storytelling’s basis was not founded on weapons or killing tools, but on the invention of baskets that held medicine and food woven from hair and plant materials. A carrier bag emulates storytelling, something carried and shared for generations as a source of community, connection, and creativity. Similarly, Robert Macfarlane has written a travelogue-meets-naturalist exploration of three rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada, and their history and impact on the past, present, and future of the people living near them, and a river’s sovereignty as a person with legal rights. Rivers are most impacted by industry, corporations, and people profiting from the resources and energy these rivers provide. Going into this book, I was eager for a bit of nature writing, as I already believed that a river is alive! Book club attendees also held the same belief going into the book. We questioned who exactly this book was written for. Who needs to read this, and who will pick this book up on a whim? I know who I would like to read this book, but will they? To make things interesting, a few people began questioning the phrase “personhood” as being the correct term in the instance of a river—would that then mean a stick is a person with rights? Things got sticky (no pun intended).

Beyond all the questions it posed, I enjoyed this book—it didn’t necessarily change my mind or help me realize anything I wasn’t already aware of or believed. However, I did learn about places and people whose lives are a daily part of these rivers and how they affect the work they do and the lives, health, and livelihood of those around them. The first two chapters were the strongest, as the other people Macfarlane meets and works alongside are characters in their own right and a delight! The third section felt a bit more like a “man against nature” trope—it was long and lacked a bit of the charm of the first two chapters. I did, however, enjoy Macfarlan’s subtle focus on grief, which ultimately leads him to conclude that all three rivers, chapters, and the people he journeys with are connected, along with our willingness to feel grief, which is ultimately what we must feel for our rivers as well.

One of my favorite podcasts is Between the Covers, hosted by David Naimon. This is a thoughtful, emotional two-hour interview with Macfarlane and is worth your time!

...you, the viewer, are no longer the looker; you are being looked at and listened to. The natural world is watching and hearing: not just the owl, but the trees and the vegetation too. I find Bosch’s image both unsettling and comforting. It reminds me that we are companioned in the world.

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Kathryn Davis, I feel in between with this book. Well, I guess let’s start with this: this is my first Kathryn Davis novel. I have been interested in her writing for a while now, and after reading the first chapter of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, I was sold! Following the death and life of larger-than-life Helle Ten Brix, an elderly Danish composer of operas, who falls into the lives of Frances Thorn, a diner waitress, and her two twin daughters. Upon her death, Helle leaves an unfinished Opera inspired by The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf by Hans Christian Andersen, the tale of a girl who, to spare her shoes, uses a loaf of bread meant as a gift for her parents as a stepping-stone and sinks to the bottom of a bog for her pride. I was intrigued by the mystery of the unfinished opera and the box of clues and other materials left for Frances to decipher the life and mysteries of Helle. There is a lot of opera name-dropping in this, along with music theory, which I am not an aficionado of in any way. I did, however, love the references to the stage in the language and direction Davis imbued her characters with. We get a lot of Helle’s childhood and her creation of herself, moving back and forth between her past and Frances putting Helle's life together. It didn’t have enough of Frances in it for my liking…I wanted a bit more discovery on her part, rather than what felt like a retelling of Helle’s life. Kathryn Davis’s writing is on another level, and I am compelled to read more of her work. I already have her memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia, on my TBR shelf.

Our greatest illusion, Helle thought. As if we ever live anywhere but under a bog. As if there’s any reason to think that breathing should be easy.

Swans and muses, gods and angels! Everywhere you looked in an opera house, Helle said, you would be confronted by the sight of creatures whose proper element was the heavenly ether, reminding you that your purpose in being there was not routine entertainment but transport. Opera houses should be designed with the sole intention of transforming you—to transform your sense of scale, to reduce you, finally, to nothing more than a pair of eyes, a pair of ears, a wildly beating heart.

Thank you for being here! Please tell me about your February reading!

I’ll be announcing our Quarter Two Reading The Body book club selections in early March! I can’t wait! If you would like to join us for March, we will be reading Sea, Poison by Caren Belilin.

In case you missed this essay!

Quarter Two book selections will be announced in early March!

Hello! And welcome to the Reading The Body book club. This month we read How I Bend Into More a long poem by Tea Gerbeza. This is Gerbeza’s debut collection of poems about living with scoliosis and documenting her experience through surgery and selfhood using self-portraits and the art of paper quilling to depict pain and the body’s visual mapping. Gerbeza’s long poem takes shape through pain, desire, friendship, surgery, death, and being a first-generation child of Yugoslavian immigrants who escaped the Bosnian/Yugoslavian Civil War.

Thoughts and Moments I Connected To

I’m not an expert in the technicalities of poetry—my dabbling in poetry has been all about following no rules, which I think is part of the beauty of it as a form. Gerbeza, however, is clearly a master of her craft. I was drawn to this collection for its delicate visual representation of disability through the art of paper quilling. Weaving language, symbols, shapes, and forms to illustrate and communicate a personal story of the body’s narrative with pain. Everything was connected through the form of the long poem, where traditional poetry is linear. I felt this collection took on a more bodily feel with each poem, like a vertebra building upon the previous page.

The body for Gerbeza has its own architecture—the architecture of scoliosis is one familiar to many. However, the degree of pain and its precise location within the body inform much of how that pain moves throughout the body. Scoliosis has two defining shapes: the “s” and “c” shapes. Gerbeza is diagnosed with a severe 80-degree “s” curve, “s” being the more complex as it affects more muscle and surrounding organs—her lungs were severely impacted, as well as her heart. She begins her intervention with a back brace that further compresses her breathing capacity, leading to more pain.

For many living with constant pain, it can be easier to separate the self into body and brain, cutting a connecting wire between the two in order to function in an ableist world. Gerbeza employs multiple forms of grammatical structures, punctuation, self-portraiture, and paper to express her body’s persistent pain, achieving a connection through grammar as a stand-in for the body. The “I” stands in for a body’s shape—for Gerbeza, the “I” stands in for the titanium rods fusing her spine, keeping it from compressing lungs and damaging her heart. In the poem ‘Pain,’ periods move across the page in rhythmic, consistent staccatos and fade off in areas, leaving the white of the page for moments of reprise before bracing for another slew of periods. Gerbeza ends the poem “punctuate my movement…my body’s speech…the grammar of self.” She uses open and closed parentheses as visual devices for a back brace ( ), constraining and forcing the poem’s words to stay within bounds and to take shape. “Bone does what it wants.”

Those of us living with pain often find language for our pain through various forms of creativity or storytelling. Finding art forms that represent our lived experiences, or by engaging with our body’s language and adopting it as our own.

Throughout, How I Bend Into More Gerbeza uses the art of paper quilling to give a visual representation of her spine’s curve, using “s”- and “c”- shape coils to create a “spinal self-portrait.”

I have a lesser degree “s” curve with a stronger left curve in my mid thoracic region. As it gets closer to my cervical spine, the curve shifts back to the right, pressing my right shoulder blade and multiple ribs out of place regularly, causing widespread ribcage pain and shortness of breath even while sitting. My lumbar spine has a slight left shift, which attempts to straighten itself for a moment before entering the thoracic region. Within my lumbar spine are two fused vertebrae, a gestational fusion that never formed a disc to separate and create a cushion, causing hip and other rotational pain, often leading to issues with walking or standing, and requiring a comfortable lean to my body. One, I have slightly romanticized.

Scoliosis is the oldest known deformity in the human body—the Greek word scolios means “crookedness of body, a winding white column.” I often describe my own stance as being contrapposto, an italian term meaning “counterpose” and a term from the Renaissance used to describe an ancient Greek scultural technique in which an asymmetrical pose where a figure stands with most of their weight on one leg creating an S-curve, shoulders and hips tilt in opposite directions, the ideal in sculpture of the time, stepping away from Egyptian poses of rigidity and symmetry. Although the body with scoliosis feels like hardened marble, stiff and unmoving, the term contrapposto gives it a more sculptural appeal and aesthetic beauty.

Gerbeza uses fragile paper strips to create the architecture of her body, rather than a sturdy central column that upholds all our other bodily structures and systems. Using black-and-white photographs and xerox scans, Gerbeza resists medicalization, reframing her body by controlling the paper quills with which she illustrates it with her own hands and artistry. This approach mirrors X-Rays, MRIs, and other medical imaging that contrast the body’s structures against black backgrounds or the body’s empty spaces. As a medium, paper is unruly—it unfolds, loosens, and unravels much like Gerbeza’s spine.

I reached out to Tea and asked her a question about the act of paper quilling, the literal physicality it takes to sit for hours at a time working on this art form, and the effects it has on her body.

Me: As someone who also has scoliosis along with fibromyalgia and a connective tissue disorder, I live with pain as a constant in my life, and although I have hobbies such as art and writing that allow my brain a moment to be absorbed in something that brings me joy and a creative purpose, I almost always do it while in pain. Often, the thing that brings me joy causes more discomfort in my joints or back, or I’m unable to feel parts of my body, leaving me immobile for hours at a time. I was wondering if you find the same thing with your body when you are paper quilling?

Tea: Yes, I’m always in pain while creating, too, and for me, paper quilling is such a slow art form that for parts of it I can be lying down, and for others I have to be in discomfort to finish a project (eg, sitting or standing to put something together). I’ve never even thought about this because my chronic pain is so chronic that I’m just so used to being in pain all the time. I always have to do a post-art care routine, like stretching or lying down, or having days that I can’t do anything, and then go back to it.

I’m always interested in how pain informs our artistic ventures, since they often require even more of our already depleted bodies. I 100% understand having days where it’s just not possible, or you have to recover from the day prior, when you were able to create.

I was curious to learn a bit more about the historical background of paper quilling. Catholicism and the religious art of the Renaissance go hand in hand, enabling the spread of their faith through artwork made with expensive materials. However, churches with fewer funds would repurpose the gold edges of Bible pages, coiling and spiraling the paper, molding it into shapes to add to panels or crucifixes. The history of paper quilling can be traced back to the Egyptians using metal, but once paper was used instead, it became a more modest and accessible art form for the masses, especially women in the 18th century, who learned it in school. Now you can find paper-quilled greeting cards, and although it is a precise, detailed, oriented art form, it is something anyone can try with basic materials found at home.

In the poem titled ‘Clearing Up the Question about ‘My Suffering,’’ the poem begins with Gerbeza asking…

The middle of the poem curves and follows Gerbeza from her spine, “unearthed misfit garden,” to her lower back, and further down the page begins to state that if all her problems stem from her spine, then the spine is the root of her suffering, and therefore, to fix the problem, pieces must be removed. If those pieces are removed, then it can be fixed and replaced, and she will be rid of her suffering. The poem ends with a question that struck me as the fear many face with disability, pain, and the possibility of “healing.” “If I am rid of my suffering, then will I still be me?” The closer Gerbeza gets to her major surgery, the more often this fear arises.

When all your body knows is constant pain, it can begin to feel like an unwanted but familiar companion to your everyday existence. I’ve had varying experiences throughout my life with this same feeling. Where does your pain end, and where do you begin? Or what happens when you begin taking a medication to modify chemicals in your brain (something I have experienced)? That fear, unfortunately, has led me to ignore my body’s needs out of my brain’s fear, wondering how much of myself is intertwined with what I know to be a problematic, damaging state of being. And if I treat it, what will be left of me? Our pain does and does not make us who we are—the two can never be fully unwound from one another. That is something Gerbeza has perfectly rendered in this collection.

I loved this collection—it’s a piece of artwork and a form of poetry I have never seen interpreted in a book, and I hope publishers begin opening up to mixed media formats of writing because it allows the writer to interpret and represent the body on their terms outside of medicalization.🌀

Questions!

Now for some questions! Please feel free to respond to as many questions as you would like. I tried my best to begin with a general question and build towards deeper, possibly more personal responses. Please respond in a way that is most accessible and comfortable for you. Please keep in mind that comments will be public—be kind (any comments with hateful speech, etc., will be deleted). I will also post questions in our chat for anyone who prefers that method of discussion. I have done my best to answer questions throughout this post, but I would love to discuss with you further in the comments.

1. Did you have a favorite section, poem, or piece of art you would like to share? What was it that stood out to you? Why did you connect with it?

2. How did the forms of certain poems affect your reading and experience? Did you find this style of poetry easier to enter or more difficult to enter compared to more traditional books of poetry? Did having visual elements help you better understand or connect with the author?

3. Have you ever researched the history of a craft, hobby, or artistic medium that is close to you and discovered something interesting about it that helped you understand the art a bit more, or did it create a new perspective in its significance to your practice?

4. Thanks again to Tea for answering my question about pain and our artistic practices, how we have to tend to our bodies in order to create, when the act of creation is often done through pain or causes more pain. Was this something you could relate to? If you would like to discuss your hobby and how it affects your body or how you care for it, please feel free to share.

5. This collection is Gerbezas's way of talking to her younger self and of working through the ableism that defined much of her youth and shaped how she viewed and valued her younger self. Have you had a moment with your own body, disabled or not, where you had to extend grace and accept what you could not know at a certain moment?

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Thank you again for reading How My Body Bends Into More! Please feel free to give any feedback. I want to make this book group the best it can be!

Quarter Two book selections will be announced in early March!

Our book for March is Sea, Poison by Caren Beilin.

Caren Beilin is the author of the novel Revenge of the Scapegoat and the experimental memoir Blackfishing the IUD. Sea, Poison is a novel about Cumin Baleen, a forty-one-year-old writer living in Philadelphia who works at an upscale grocery store, Sea & Poison. Cumin is navigating the start of an autoimmune condition, which requires her to start a medication, which leads to a terrible laser eye surgery. The laser shoots into her brain, causing gaps and loss in her language, setting off a fractured narrative of medical malpractice and the dramas of love and everyday life.

Trauma is an incredibly nuanced experience, and I don’t even begin to touch on its complications on an individual’s future, nor do I comment on continuous trauma experiences or a singular traumatic event and its effects on an individual. Emily LaBarge recounts this experience in her memoir Dog Days, which details a specific trauma narrative. The film Sorry, Baby also presents a character’s story of sexual trauma, drawing from elements of Eva Victor’s life. I also make connections to art in this piece, as LaBarge writes about and as alluded to in the cinematography of Sorry, Baby.

Trauma is a narrative problem because it fragments a life, disorders it, and disrupts an individual’s sense of self. Not only the self, but trauma’s narrative allows others the ability to respond to your experience.

Trauma stays with you. It’s a singular event that stops time, but continues to live with you.

Six masked men armed with machetes, knives, and guns held Emily LaBarge and her family hostage for hours while she was on vacation during Christmas of 2009. Thankfully, no one in LaBarge’s family endured any physical harm. However, “The Event,” mentioned only briefly and with limited details in LaBarge’s debut memoir, Dog Days, is traumatic—it simultaneously negates the event itself—this is not “trauma porn.” There is no “good story” of trauma, although LaBarge attempts to create one, a palatable, easy version to give to others. A story that won’t make them too uneasy at the expense of a traumatic experience. Although people still comment that the event “sounds like a movie,” or say “you should write about it,” or “I could never imagine something like that happening to me!”

I remember one of my mother’s friends on the phone telling me something about how it was an amazing story, something about how she knew of a writer who something awful had happened to and the writer wrote about it and it made the writer famous. I remember thinking that’s crazy. No way will I ever write this story.

Throughout Dog Days, LaBarge attempts to give her narrative a shape, but on her own terms. It’s not tidy—it’s missing sections, leaving parts unreadable, switching between narrative voices and structures, and adopting a description, similar to a clinical retelling of events to authorities. LaBarge employs media to give meaning and structure to her trauma’s narrative, recalling movies, books, and art to frame herself as a character or subject. Trauma and narrative LaBarge discovers are not linear or neat. “Trauma is a narrative problem — you can only ever turn the page in two directions.”

What happens when we control the narrative? Some might say we take the “monster’s” power away—others might say we are living in the past, and we need to move forward, push it behind us. What’s happened has happened—there is no use crying over spilled milk. Some of us simply can’t, so what do we do?

Similar to Dog Days, Sorry, Baby, a debut film written and directed by Eva Victor, is inspired by Victor’s own experience of trauma. Agnes (played by Victor) is assaulted by her university professor, a man who appears to value Agnes’s literary work. He is someone she admires for his interest and dedication to his own writing as well as hers. Agnes arrives at his office on campus for scheduled feedback, only to find a note to meet at his home. The viewer is immediately on alert. Victor then does not permit us entry into the house, instead leaving us with a wide shot directly facing the exterior for what feels like an excruciating long take. They elongate time even further by playing with our perception of time passing through three lapses: daylight, evening, and the darkness of night. The few lights on in the house, like eyes to the interior, are closed by curtains which gradually illuminate the dark that surrounds everything else, and we fear the worst is happening. Similar to LaBarge, Victor refrains from providing the audience with “trauma porn.” Instead, a wide shot of the professor’s house keeps us on the outside, away from the violence happening within. We know something has happened that will change Agnes’s life forever. It’s never called by its name, and when Agnes later arrives at her and Lydie’s home (her best friend and fellow literature student), Agnes sits in the bath, gently being attended to by Lydie. At the same time, she confusedly tells her what happened at the professor’s house. Lydie merely comforts her and says, “Yes, that sounds like the thing.”

In an interview with Eva Victor from Sundance Interviews, they say…

I wrote this film because there’s a part of my experience of trauma that I haven’t seen on-screen often: the part where you’re confused,” she says. “Where you wonder, ‘Did that really happen to me?’ I spent years floating, just trying to accept that I went through something bad. Sorry, Baby honors those years lost — the years where everyone goes back to their lives, but you are stunted, forced to reckon with a body that is suddenly divorced from your spirit. The quiet years where you still have to go to work surrounded by constant reminders, reminders that are invisible to others, that you’re not like everyone else. The years where your friend’s support can save your life, and where strangers can often make you feel safer than the people you’re told to trust.

Dog Days doesn’t give us many details about “the event,” just whatever the mind can hold on to after an unbelievable moment happens. Where LaBarge is interested in viewing it from multiple angles, Victor is more interested in showing the loss of time. The event’s weight keeps Agnes trapped in amber, unable to move through life. Everyone and everything moves on beyond her, but she remains stuck in a single moment.

How do you continue to move in a world where traumatic things can happen to your body?

It can feel easier to live inside your own trauma. And LaBarge doesn’t seem to move past it as easily as her parents do. Instead, she seeks justice where she can and therapy to exorcise the physical experience from her body. Agnes locks herself within a cage, her graduate school home, where she continues to live five years after the event. Lydie moves away and starts a family of her own. Agnes even takes the pages her professor reviewed and tapes them to her bedroom window, plastering out anyone from seeing in but also plastering her cage with the past.

After the event, Agnes returns to school to find that the professor is gone, his office is empty, and he has left the city. Later in the film, they offer Agnes his position and his same office, and she also discovers that the school knows what happened. It’s never said, but we know she is wondering if she got the job because of what has happened.

Similarly, LaBarge worries about profiting from “the event” but mostly others consuming her trauma as entertainment or a way to experience it at a comfortable narrative distance. Dog Days is a refusal of the good story, the good story as in sellable capital-T trauma, which she knows could make her career.

I remember going to bed every night rehearsing what had happened, trying to hold it all down, keep it in place, control it, have it, make it mine.—LaBarge.

Agnes does not seek legal action against her professor—her reasoning is that the professor has a child, but also, does she want to drag herself and her trauma through judicial scrutiny? Who historically benefits from that experience, and is justice always received? What moral objections would LaBarge and Anges hear? “Why did your family go to a foreign country for vacation, or why did you go to your professor’s home? You had to know you crossed a boundary?” “You were just asking for something bad to happen.”

With Dog Days and Sorry, Baby, both protagonists are female. Unfortunately, as is often the case with trauma for women (or the survivor regardless of gender), there is the insistence on its rehashing at the expense of the self. Reversing this onto the survivor, they believe anything good that subsequently happens to them is because of the traumatic experience, and they also believe everyone knows this to be true.

Recently, I overheard a conversation between three women. One of them asked, “What’s the big deal with Frida Kahlo? Is it okay for me to say I don’t get why she’s so popular? Is it just because of the train accident, the mystic trauma that surrounds it?” She then asked the other women, “Is it the same for Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta? Are they simply tragic female artists?”

Eva Hesse, a German-born American sculptor, fled Nazi Germany as a young girl and died from a brain tumor at the age of 34. Ana Mendieta, a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, and painter known for her earth-body Silueta series, was murdered at the age of 36 by her famous artist husband, Carl Andre. Ana, like Eva, fled her homeland of Cuba during the Cuban Revolution as a young girl.

Would these artists be who they are if not for their traumatic experiences? It’s hard to say—neither Hesse nor Mendieta had much control over the trajectory their tragedies would take their art. However, they both brought childhood trauma into their artistic practices. Frida Kahlo, on the other hand, created her self-portraits directly from her pain—it’s something I wrote about in this essay a few months ago. Frida controlled her narrative and what she gave of herself and her traumatic accidents’ lasting effects on her body, and the losses she would experience because of it.

Am I inspired by these artists? Absolutely! Is it because I’m around the same age as Hesse and Mendieta when they died, and think about all the work they had yet to create? What would they have done with more time? What can I do with the time I hopefully have? What would it mean if it all ended tomorrow? Like Frida, my body has experienced physical trauma, leading to a lifetime of pain and disability. So why are we drawn to these artists? Is it always bad that we are drawn to trauma narratives? For some, the ability for an artist to create something from an experience means they hope it can touch someone. We are all looking for someone else to say yes, me too. I understand this, I’m not alone. Art isn’t created inside an insular vacuum—what would be the purpose?

LaBarge writes of Eva Hesse and her sculpture Hang Up (1966). Hesse deemed it her first “significant work of art” because it achieved “the absurdity of extreme feeling.” LaBarge says the piece’s importance to her is its form within space. It’s the literal hanging of the frame that she finds a hang-up with language. It curves out of the frame and re-enters it, unable to commit to one narrative point of view. The line extends beyond its frame to communicate and connect with the viewer, encroaching on their space.

Eva Hesse says of her work…

Art and work and art and life are very connected and my whole life has been absurd. There isn’t a thing in my life that has happened that hasn’t been extreme—personal health, family, economic situations. My art, my school, my personal friends were the best things I ever had. And now back to extreme sickness—all extreme—all absurd. Now art being the most important thing for me, other than existing and staying alive, became connected to this, now closer meshed than ever…

LaBarge says…

The frame is shared by everyone, but it is different for everyone and it is never an abstraction, though it is often internalised and therefore invisible. For some, it is a legal framework—the justice system with its frequent absence of justice and its punishing, impossible narrative expectations.

LaBarge seems to believe you can’t separate the art from the artist. Victor, through their portrayal of Agnes, on the other hand, does try to challenge this. In one scene, she is teaching the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and she has a student, Thomas, read an excerpt aloud, when he suddenly stops and screws his face in disgust. Thomas can’t get past the disturbing relationship between the older Humbert Humbert and his sexual fixation on his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores. Agnes is partly relieved and asks how he felt about the writing. Thomas is angry with himself for liking Nabokov’s writing but hating the content. Agnes asks the class, “Was anyone else feeling that way, caught between the form, the presentation itself, and the content that presentation?”—before the students can respond, she is interrupted by someone at the classroom door. Perhaps in this instance, after her assault, Agnes doesn’t have a definitive answer either, and as the audience, maybe we don’t as well. Does not having a clear answer shift the focus to the abuser taking control away from the survivor? Can a bad man (artist) do good things or make good art? Is that the point Eva Victor is trying to make with Sorry, Baby? Or is she instead trying to show us how one bad thing can mean nothing to one person and everything to the other? I believe the latter to be true.

Many artists like LaBarge and Victor are creating art about traumatic experiences. They can hold back and control what they tell their audience, even if they couldn’t control the trauma that happened to them. Art doesn’t come from trauma. How many people experience trauma and don’t make art? However, for a few, artistic expression is the medium through which they process it. Neither book nor movie aims to shock the reader with gratuitous violence against the body. The aftereffects, with their lingering presence on each, are the more difficult impact to witness—it’s the after where the trauma narrative lies and where the story begins for the creator.

Eva Victor for the LA Times…

I think the act of writing is, in many ways, the love of my life. I see it as a deeply intimate, devastating, life-affirming, life-depleting, psychotic, meditative, euphoric, addictive struggle of building something where before there was nothing. To write is to make something exist in what was before a blank space, and that is a miracle!

I’m always fascinated by writers who frame their experiences through visual art, whether in painting, sculpture, film, or on the stage. It goes back to our inherent need to give our trauma a form. Tryptichs are a stylistically significant artistic method that both Emily LaBarge and Eva Victor use to tell a story.

A little art history for you: in the Middle Ages, triptych altarpieces in churches served as a way to visually tell the stories of the bible. Depicting moral narratives and a middle piece as an altarpiece for devotion. Exploring a story from its various angles. There is a coherence in the three pieces, a whole, but each can also act alone as an individual piece. The triptych exists as three linked, but separate pieces—they constantly overreach their frames’ edges to press the story forward.

The cinematography of Sorry, Baby employs the triptych in its visual storytelling, especially in the house scene and in the character Lydie’s progression through time. Agnes stays in her trauma, and Lydie lives in the past, present, and future over the five years of the film, experiencing graduating and moving to New York, marriage, and having a baby.

In Dog Days, LaBarge writes about the painter Joan Mitchell, prominent in the 1950s, specifically her large triptychs Girolata from 1963 and Girolata from 1964. What makes someone return to the same subject again and again? What reframing or recontextualizing can occur? For Mitchell, she wasn’t painting a traumatic experience but re-experiencing a place in nature she found beautiful, revisiting it to see its changes over time, capturing it in a new form based on circumstance. She was trying to remember how she felt about the specific place.

One attempt is never enough, you see, other compositional possibilities arise—slightly larger and with more diverse shapes, gestural energy, and brighter colours.—Joan Mitchell

A tryptych, much like trauma or memories of trauma, acts as part of a whole that we can’t always see. With pieces of trauma or what we can glean between the edges of its shape, we constantly grapple with it, twist it, and look at it from different angles, and often we need the whole picture, the entire painting, to see clearly how to begin processing the narrative. A tryptych invites the idea of progression, an elapse, a prism, but each segment is also simultaneously occurring: we see the whole and its parts at once.

How do you make a life in the aftermath of something that alters your body’s chemistry, your sense of security, and your understanding of the future?

LaBarge attempts to progress forward but is always pulled back to the moment, which sits within her daily existence. Merely a moment is just that a moment, although it continues to consume LaBarge’s thoughts and fears for years. It’s not a constant trauma or one with any direct physical violence experienced by LaBarge, but one that plants a seed. A trauma, no matter if it’s “big” or “small,” if it’s even measurable, stays with you, or at least for Labarge, it does. As a writer, she creates a kaleidoscope of memory. She continues to dissect her narrative, and she still wonders how to make a life amongst the trauma. She doesn’t have the answer, and so she sits to keep writing. A singular event can stop time and stay with you forever, but writing is a way to move forward alongside it.

I’d argue that Sorry, Baby has a bit more of a cathartic, hopeful end than Dog Days. Agnes is seen holding Lydie’s baby, speaking to them as if it were herself being held and protected by a fierce love that would kill if anyone harmed them, promising to protect them as much as they can from terrible things that could happen and will likely happen to them, no matter what, because that is often the way of life.

For me, even the experience of writing this was traumatic, not because I was having flashbacks or struggling through a deeply lodged memory, but because I wondered where the line was. The line between writing a review of a book and a movie, where I never say either way if I enjoyed them, but more so, I couldn’t stop myself from placing them side by side. I read one and happened to watch the other, which was not planned, more an incident of time. We can’t control what happens to us, only that it does, and it’s up to us to decide what to do with it, if anything.

What both these works do is depict trauma not for the viewer or for the victim to flay themselves for an audience to consume. Choosing instead to write about a person’s narrative approach to living alongside trauma through language, both written and visual, of storytelling’s ability to say everything and not doing it at the expense of the self. I live somewhere in the middle of these two places. I’ve been told I put up walls, I run right up to the edge of saying the thing, the “capital T trauma,” and then I freeze, stop, look down at the drop below, see the bright shining faces, the salivating teeth. I could say it all and likely gain more readers, more followers, more people to witness. Or I could make the art I want narrate the experience and control my catharsis. There is no correct answer. Sorry, baby.

I’m not going to lie, I can’t wait for this month to be over! In general, I always become a bit antsy in January and February, the holidays are over, a new reading year has started, and we are being teased with slightly longer daylight hours. I’m ready for spring and with it all the joys of more sunshine and budding trees. The next few days will also be quite chilly, and I plan to curl up with some books while I care for my mom after her surgery and we watch the Grammys!

Also, this month has been full of heartache for so many. No one is illegal. ICE must be defunded. No one should live in fear of being separated from their family or murdered. No one and no one’s body should ever again be treated with violence by ICE, end of story. If you are able, I recommend supporting the ACLU of Minnesota for direct assistance.

In Solidarity, Read a Book From a Minnesota Press by Laurie Muchnick

Ok, now for books! January was a great start to my reading year!

*Books are in the order I read them*

Dog Days by Emily LaBarge (Releases on May 19, 2026, with Transit Books). Being held hostage for hours at gunpoint with her mother, father, and sister on vacation in 2009, “The Event” is mentioned only briefly and with limited details. LaBarge has written a memoir on trauma that negates the event itself—this is not “trauma porn.” There is no “good story” of trauma, although LaBarge attempts to create one, a palatable, easy version to give to others. A story that won’t make them too uneasy at the expense of a traumatic experience, although she is still met with comments like “that sounds like a movie, you should write about it,” or “I could never imagine something like that happening to me!” Trauma and narrative LaBarge discovers are not linear or neat. “Trauma is a narrative problem — you can only ever turn the page in two directions.”

How to make a life in the aftermath of something that alters your body’s chemistry, your sense of security, and your understanding of how to move forward. Merely a moment is just that a moment, although it continues to consume LaBarge’s thoughts and fears for years. It’s not a constant trauma or one with any direct physical violence experienced by LaBarge, but one that plants a seed. A trauma, no matter if it’s “big” or “small,” if it’s even measurable, stays with you, or at least for Labarge, it does. As a writer, she creates a kaleidoscope of memory, psychology, theory, film, and writing to survive. A singular event can stop time and stay with you forever, but writing is a way to move forward alongside it. (I’m working on a review of Dog Days and the film Sorry, Baby, written and directed by Eva Victor)

In Dog Days, LaBarge writes about the painter Joan Mitchell, prominent in the 1950s, specifically her large triptych Girolata from 1963.

Dog Days is the form for LaBarge—the book in your hands is her medium for allowing the mess of “the event” to move and be constructed.

A tryptych invites the idea of progression, an elapse, a prism, but each segment is also simultaneously occurring: we see the whole and its parts at once.

A tryptych, much like trauma or memories of trauma, acts as part of a whole—we can’t always see. With pieces of trauma or what we can glean between the edges of its shape, we constantly grapple with it, twist it, and look at it from different angles, and often we need the whole picture, the entire painting, to see clearly how to begin processing the narrative.

Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Memoir by Alice Wong. This was our inaugural Reading The Body book club pick, and what a great way to start! Here is information about the book club if you would like to join for the remainder of quarter one! I also wrote a full review for Year of the Tiger, along with questions and other resources, for anyone interested. If you would like a longer review, I would recommend checking out that post!

Alice Wong was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a progressive neuromuscular condition that led her to use a wheelchair and a ventilator. Her work continues to be instrumental in disability justice and activism, as well as in her authorship and editing, known for the collections Disability Visibility and Disability Intimacy. Wong is the founder and director of The Disability Visibility Project, an online community dedicated to creating, sharing, and amplifying disability media and culture. Year of the Tiger is Wong’s debut memoir, which includes multiple essays, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more. Although the book is only three years old and discusses the early year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, Year of the Tiger remains an excellent memoir for anyone new to disability activism or to books about disability representation and activism. Wong’s approach to this memoir is a no-nonsense look at growing up with a visibly disabled body and the work she had to do to create a world more accessible to herself and those who will come after her. Something I found interesting was how many fucks (zero) Wong gives about appealing to the idea of how “good” or “behaved” a disabled person should be—she is not inspiration porn, she does not have to present as a mild, grateful individual, and instead is ferocious in her life and activism.

Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend by Steven W. Thrasher

How do disabled people take these instruments and make them ours by “cripping” them with our culture? When disabled people “crip” a space, they are transforming a space with their presence, culture, bodies, and thoughts.

Big Kiss, Bye-Bye by Claire-Louise Bennett. I’m trying to decide where to start with talking about the third novel from the one and only Claire-Louise Bennett. I guess we can start with a rough plot and go from there. This is the most “plot” heavy novel Bennett has written compared to Pond and Checkout 19 (both of which I adore). This novel, like her others, follows an unnamed female narrator as they meander through their memories and moments in relationships. Our narrator is also an author, and she maintains a relationship with an older man named Xavier for multiple years. The memories come to her during a move, leaving the city for the countryside, from one extreme to another, leaving her in a state of limbo. She treats small objects as talismans of her past, specifically her past with Xavier, whom she loves but is not in love with. Xavier is older and wiser than our narrator and claims he knows her better than anyone, including herself. Following her move and letting go of Xavier, a letter appears, unleashing forgotten memories, and an attempt to place herself within the lost moments.

Now, for my thoughts. This wasn’t my favorite of her three novels. However, Bennett’s style and use of language, its playfulness, is unmatched. I love how Bennett writes with whimsy, almost breaking the rules of traditionally “refined” writing styles. Her obsessive, repetitive style of writing continually intrigues me.

“Fingers press into the sabulous grooves.”
“superfluous foliage”
“garish gerberas”
“absorbed in black magic and erotic devilry!”

If you are unfamiliar with Pond or Checkout-19, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye would be an excellent book to start with. Following a narrative through a universally familiar experience of holding onto every conversation and significant moment in a relationship, no matter how it ends, replaying and repeating the moments, looking for something and some clue into its memory and moment in time.

Intimacy through memories, objects, a bouquet of flowers, a sudden, cruel voicemail. What makes one person in our lives easier to let go of than another?

I picked up the crystal bowl and shook all the rose heads out into a black sack, out they tumbled, already downcast, I’m not taking you with me, I’m not taking you with me, and some petals came loose and fell to the floor, and later, when I swept them up, I felt bad, I felt a pang, but there waws still so much to do that I didn’t dwell on it for very long.

Claire-Louise Bennett: ‘Mystery is an essential part of loving someone’

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. As part of my Hamlet reading project for 2026 (see my 2026 reading outlook and goals post), I decided to read a prequel to the original Shakespeare play, which I plan to read in February. I wanted to have a basis for the fictional reason Hamlet was written. I knew inaccuracies would abound, as this was rooted in some little-known history, but it would still serve as a basis for understanding.

Hamnet is the story of Agnes, a healer and woman of the woods living at a farm on the edge of a forest. Agnes is born to the woods, to a mother full of legend herself, with a deeply rooted love and understanding of nature’s ability to cure the ill and to be in communion with. Agnes loses her mother young and is forced, along with her beloved brother, to be raised by her stepmother, Joan, who despises and fears the girl who can see futures and plays with animals and weeds. “The son” or “the husband,” as William is only ever called throughout the novel, lives in the town as a Latin tutor and works for his abusive father, a glovemaker, amongst a family of siblings. While tutoring Agnes’s siblings, he sees her appear from the woods with a falcon on her shoulder, beginning a romance and marriage. They have three children, Susanna, the oldest, and the twins Judith and Hamnet, so alike they are as one body cleaved in two. We know what will befall Hamnet—we know it will happen the entire time we are reading. However, what I did not expect was how little of this story is about Shakespeare and his most famous play, Hamlet.

This is a story of motherhood and grief. It’s about the loss of Hamnet to the plague. This book made me simultaneously desire a child of my own to love as deeply as Agnes, to nurture and care for, to never place a harmful hand on them, and to also never want to experience a love that can remove your heart from your own body, to bury your own child, and only hold a memory of their face. It’s brutal and had me sobbing.

The closer I got to the end, with only a few pages remaining, I kept waiting for the play, the moment I’ve seen over and over in previews for the movie (which I have yet to see), and they did come, but it’s not what the story is about. How did Shakespeare grieve the loss? We never see him leave his family for London, living a life on his own, leaving his family directly after he buries his only son. The reader never witnesses his grief until the final five pages.

He is watching the trees. Their collective presence, lined up as they are, fringing the edge of the farm, brings to his mind the backdrop of a theater, the kind of painted trickery that is unrolled, quickly, into place to let the audience know they are now in a sylvan setting, that the city or streets of the previous scene are gone, that they are now on wooded, uncultivated, perhaps unstable ground.

Thanks for being here! In case you missed it, I had the honor of being interviewed by from A Reading Life! Truly a dream come true!

A reading life

The Reading Life of... Katie Vasquez

I’m so happy to return to this interview series with one of my favorite readers — Katie Vasquez. Based in Houston, Texas, Katie writes Reading The Body, a newsletter where books, writing, and the body cohabitate in all their complexity…

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7 months ago · 90 likes · 27 comments

Lastly, how was your month? Read anything amazing?! Please share with us in the comments!

Hello! And welcome to the Reading The Body book club and our first discussion of the year/inaugural book! We read the memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong. This is Wong’s debut memoir, which includes multiple essays, conversations, graphics, photos, commissioned art by disabled and Asian American artists, and more.

I knew Year of the Tiger would be our inaugural title, and the more I read, the more confident I became that this text would remain an excellent foundation for our year of book club selections. (Which will venture to some interesting places concerning the body.) Although the book is only three years old and discusses the early year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic (a lot has changed in that time). Year of the Tiger remains an excellent memoir for anyone new to disability activism or to books about disability representation and activism. (While it’s likely we will read more books along these themes, we will use this text as a building block of disability language, culture, and justice to push further into books written about the body.)

My Thoughts

Wong’s approach to this memoir is a no-nonsense look at growing up with a visibly disabled body and the work she had to do to create a world more accessible to herself and those who will come after her. Something I found interesting was how many fucks (zero) Wong gives about appealing to the idea of how “good” or “behaved” a disabled person should be—she is not inspiration porn, she does not have to present as a mild, grateful individual, and instead is ferocious in her life and activism.

Anger is often seen as a negative emotion. It's a corrected emotion from an early age—it's frowned upon in general, even in media, viewed as wrong, and almost always seen as violent. Anger is rarely seen as positive, or, as it's referred to throughout the memoir, "productive anger." Disabled bodies absorb economic violence, ableist violence, and physical violence daily. We are often fearful of our own anger and push it away, but what happens when anger is fuel for the revolution? When we see protests in the streets, non-violent anger at the hands of violence, anger, and hate. What about the quiet internal anger of what is lost through chronic illness and disability?

I never allowed myself to access anger externally because I was taught it was “unladylike” and ugly. I even policed my internal anger. As an individual with lifelong chronic illness, creativity became a way to express anger through language. I recently expressed anger at my body and a “god” through a poem. After sharing the poem in a writing class and expressing that anger for the first time, I was met with a response to not let anger take over or cloud my perspective. Like, there was a productive limit on the anger I felt. Reading Wong made me understand the possibilities of anger, and how it’s often productive. Perhaps anger needs to happen to move beyond that emotion, to see what else is after.

Many disabled and chronically ill people deal with loss and the sadness, Anger, and misery that comes with it. Having a loving relationship with a radical body is not easy, but it generates an appreciation of what I have right now and what I had in the past. 

This also reminds me of the terms “medical needs” and “access needs.” Medical needs are what are required for physical or mental health, such as medications, mobility aids, doctors, etc. Access needs include accommodations and the removal of financial, social, cultural, and other barriers, working towards equity for all within healthcare. Access needs are the things that should be as normal as able-bodied ways of navigating and being in the world. Still, often they are secondary or not even addressed until someone within the disability community says they need an accommodation. Even then, it’s not always guaranteed or is full of loopholes.

Disabled people have to plan out so many things so far in advance. They don’t always work out, but also the emotional consequences of that, the psychological effect.

Productive Anger can look like a lot of different things when you are disabled. For Alice, it means non-disabled people often take the ordinary things for granted, like going to the grocery store, visiting new places, receiving care, and going to the doctor.

We can have the best intentions, and prepare our bodies and minds the best we can, but that doesn’t always guarantee we will get out the door, out of bed, or off the couch. I relate to this on an almost daily basis, especially during pain flares.

A section I especially enjoyed was Disabled Faces, a discussion with the artist and author Riva Lehrer.

Lehrer’s focus on time and its impact on and shaping of the body was especially striking. She describes how the longer we occupy our bodies through time, the more poetic they become, and how who we are on the inside shows on the outside more. I think this can apply to all of us, but then she goes on to say:

And disability, it’s got such a…You know, it’s like something that’s been—that has a patina. Like something you’ve touched and touched and rubbed and worked and—There’s just these things that are not really verbal. But it’s just something I see of, like, this lustrous presence, and that’s what I love.

Lehrer’s portraiture continues to work toward helping the viewer see beyond her subjects in wheelchairs, crutches, or their scars, what she calls “pain reading.” Some viewers can’t even notice anything other than what they perceive as bodily suffering and misery. Lehrer works towards showing her disabled subjects as joyous and often sexual, which is again viewed as inauthentic by an ableist society. Even Alice’s portrait by Riva is immediately remarked by someone on Facebook as, “Oh, [Alice] looks so tired!” Drawn over multiple video call sessions, on a laptop screen with Alice not physically in front of her, Riva is attempting to convey more with the drawing than a traditional portrait. Leher admits this process is a new way of working and one she hadn’t considered for other disabled sitters. Herself, as a disabled individual, had to learn and challenge her ideas about the spatial relationship between artist and subject for future projects.

While I missed the studio experience, I am grateful to know that I have another option for getting to know someone, for intimate exchange, no matter where we are. — Riva Lehrer’s website

I also highly recommend Riva Lehrer’s memoir Golem Girl.

Wong, like others in the disability community, consistently pushes up against society’s ideals of a “good life.” In a future that is barreling towards genetic alterations to remove genes for deafness and other disabilities, the disabled body is viewed as one not worth living, one that can only experience suffering while simultaneously taking more than it gives. (All false beliefs.) This was made even clearer by Wong by explaining that during the COVID-19 pandemic, when prioritization of vaccines was limited and unavailable to those with serious medical conditions and disabilities that would have made them more susceptible to hospitalization and serious long-term conditions. Although medical establishments have long been underprepared for an event such as COVID (and still are, we rarely learn our lessons), the disabled community was even further deemed less than by society, deserving of suffering and hopeless to medical intervention, compared to a previously healthy individual who could resume “normal” societal expectations after illness.

Further Reading and Resources

Read more about Alice’s work.

Books edited by Alice Wong, Disability Visibility & Disability Intimacy.

No matter how you entered your reading of Year of the Tiger—as a disabled individual, a non-disabled individual, someone with lifelong disabilities, or someone new to disability—I hope you learned something new or found common ground and understanding with Alice's words. May she forever be a Disabled Ancestor who is proud of the efforts we make toward a better world for us and everyone.

Remembering Alice Wong: Writer, Advocate, Friend by Steven W. Thrasher

That’s the kind of care Alice gave: she wanted to help the people she loved experience maximum pleasure—even pleasure she herself could not experience. Just giving someone else such pleasure gave Alice pleasure.

And that, amongst many lessons my friend taught me over a decade of conversation, was maybe the most important lesson of all: that giving pleasure, joy, affirmation and care to people you only meet once—or who you might never meet all, such as all the Palestinians Alice cared for these last two years—is the very meaning of love.

Questions!

Now for some questions! Please feel free to respond to as many questions as you would like. I tried my best to begin with a general question and build towards deeper, possibly more personal responses. Please respond in a way that is most accessible and comfortable for you. Please keep in mind that comments will be public—be kind (any comments with hateful speech, etc., will be deleted). I will also post questions in our chat for anyone who prefers that method of discussion. I have done my best to answer questions throughout this post, but I would love to discuss with you further in the comments.

1. Did you have a favorite chapter, paragraph, page, or line you would like to share? What was it that stood out to you? Why did you connect with it?

2. Why do you think memoirs of disabled people are published more than cookbooks or works of fiction by a disabled person? What does this say about the publishing industry?

3. While Wong often writes about joy in this memoir, she includes an interview with her mom, Bobby, about the Lunar New Year and the family tradition of making dumplings. It’s a joyful interview full of memories and traditions. Do you have a family tradition or anything joyful you would like to share? It’s good to remind ourselves of these moments when times are tough.

4. There is a theme of “productive anger” throughout the memoir. Do you think Anger can be productive? What about outside of activism?

5. As a daughter of immigrants and a disabled Asian American, Alice receives care from her family and autonomy often not given to many in similar situations, especially in the 80s and 90s when Alice was growing up. Think about this in the context of disability, care, and family, considering culture, heritage, religion, and socioeconomic factors. Have you experienced this type of care? If you had to give or receive this type of care, how would your life experiences differ?

6. The internet is often vilified (for good reason), but it’s always a valuable resource for building/finding community (disabled and non-disabled). What is your relationship to the internet? How does the internet impact your ability to participate in the world? Do you Hopescroll (the intentional practice of seeking out positive, uplifting, or inspiring content online)?

7. Alice lived side by side with her disability since childhood and knew that death was always near, not only due to Spinal Muscular Atrophy, but also because of the choices made by governments and medical institutions. She received a COVID vaccine as a high-risk individual and stayed under a specific income to receive in-home care. Did anything about these scenarios shock or surprise you? What was your reaction, or what did you learn as a disabled or non-disabled reader?

8. After reading this, does it recontextualize a piece of media that you have recently consumed? How can you use this foundational text to help you consume and examine media through a more inclusive and holistic perspective?

Thank you again for reading Year of the Tiger! Please feel free to give any feedback. I want to make this book group the best it can be!

Ok, one maybe two more things. When would you like the book selections for April, May, and June to be released? Early to mid-February or early March?

Our book for February is How I Bend Into More: A Long Poem by Tea Gerbeza.

Tea Gerbeza is a neuroqueer, disabled poet, writer, editor, and multimedia artist creating in oskana kâ-asastêki in Treaty 4 territory (Regina, SK) and on the Homeland of the Métis. Gerbeza works primarily with paper in her visual art. How I Bend Into More chronicles Gerbeza’s experience with scoliosis and uses paper-quilled shapes to build a body visually and linguistically. This poem is a multimedia experience of selfhood in the face of abelism and trauma.

These are just a few goals I’ve created for myself, and I hope they might help you build or continue a reading habit that works for you in 2026 (no pressure!). Just some things that might reignite or offer a different way of engaging with your reading material in an accessible and flexible way!

It’s Not About The Numbers!

Yes, I do set a number reading goal for myself each year. For me, the number is achievable and keeps me on a steady reading flow. My goal each year is to have a healthy relationship with the books I read. I’ve worked in independent bookstores for over five years now and have read enough to know what I will enjoy (following my unique tastes) and what I’m coveting based on what’s buzzy. I do keep up with new releases as part of my job, but I try to be a bit more judicious by preordering books from authors I have loved in the past or from smaller presses, rather than every book that seems the slightest bit new and shiny!

Reading More Of…

I would like to read more classics (Jane Austen, Charlotte & Emily Brontë, Marilynne Robinson, etc.) and reread a few books. I’m not placing a number on either of these, just the goal to try for more and make some progress with each. I’m more likely to follow through with this goal because I won’t feel beholden or forced to follow through on a specific, arbitrary number.

The goal is to avoid an all-or-nothing mentality, which is not how I want to go about my reading life!

Fiction vs. Nonfiction (it’s not a competition)

In 2025, my split between fiction and nonfiction was about 30% fiction to 70% nonfiction. I, of course, love nonfiction, but am going to make it a point to read more fiction in 2026, especially focusing on fiction from my shelves and classics. I’m starting with a close reading of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë with from Closely Reading!

Closely Reading

🕯️Wuthering Heights: schedule + getting started

Happy New Year and welcome to the Closely Reading book club, where we closely read classic literature together and discuss assigned chapters each week. Our first read of 2026 is Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, Wuthering Heights…

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8 months ago · 137 likes · 42 comments · haley larsen, phd

Reading&Writing… Yes, together!

I used to be diligent about journaling my thoughts upon completing a book. In 2025, I fell off this habit quite a bit and ended up scrambling at the end of each month to recall my thoughts and feelings, often only remembering surface-level information. For 2026, I plan on journaling as I read, stopping every once in a while when an idea, connection, or something important stands out to me from the text. This often includes works of art mentioned or other books! I’ve already started doing this with Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong in the hopes that this will make book club posts easier to write and be well-thought-out and engaging. I’ve also been doing this with Dog Days by Emily LaBarge, an ARC I’m reading for work.

A few days ago, I watched the movie Sorry, Baby and am seeing a lot of connections between it and Dog Days. It’s been helpful writing about and connecting the two while the movie is fresh in my mind instead of waiting.

Find what works best for you!

Moving Away from “Brain Rot” or Short Form Content

I don’t have TikTok—however, the last few months of 2025, I noticed myself gravitating more and more towards my phone, especially when avoiding life tasks or in-between moments like waiting in a doctor’s office (even though I had a book in my bag!). I’ve been sucked into short-form scrollable content on other apps, and after ten minutes of consuming “content” from people I don’t even know or follow, I would close my phone feeling worse and less motivated than I did before.

*The science behind short-form content and attention. (Worth a watch!)

Ways I’m hoping to combat mindless scrolling beyond just stopping (easier said than done). Instead, I want to reach for my journal, write, take note of my surroundings, or find an object in the room and draw it. Easy! Two other options are to grab a book from my 2026 project books (I have two).

First, How To Live an Artful Life by Katy Hessel, a daily creativity and artist devotional, accompanied by a prompt. Second, The Other Almanac, written by various writers and artistic contributors, is an out-of-the-box Almanac focused on a progressive, environmentally friendly outlook for each month of the new year! Grabbing one of these will hopefully jumpstart my brain and keep me from scrolling.

Reading Project

I purchased Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad a few months ago. After listening to a podcast with Hammad, I realized reading Hamlet would enrich my reading experience. I’m also planning on reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. It just makes sense to read these three and see how they are in conversation with one another. I am also planning to watch a few adaptations!

Substack Goals

Reading The Body Book Club

I launched a book club, Reading The Body, and our first book for January is Year of the Tiger by Alice Wong. I’m already planning out the rest of our reading year and have a lot of ideas to branch off of and explore bodies in very exciting texts, along with themes for each quarter.

I’m excited to build a community within this book club and hope everyone finds value in the time they spend reading and discussing the books with others!

Writing

I hope to write more consistently about books and life in and amongst them as a disabled individual who works in the book industry and has found community and solace within books.

I would appreciate your feedback on what kinds of posts about books and reading you would be interested in seeing.

Numbers

Numbers… the unimportant stuff, but I do hope to see this space grow in 2026.

Reach 1,000 subscribers. I’ve been writing here for two years and would love to hit 1k.

Reach 20 paid subscribers. I work part-time for health reasons and would like to subsidize my time writing and running a book club through paid subscribers.

Something Extra… Toward and Away More and Less

For the last four years, instead of resolutions, I have spent the first day of the new year writing a Toward/More and Away/Less page in my notebook. The language I use (Toward/Away and More/Less) isn’t about 100% removal of a habit or addition in order to be “successful.” Instead, the gentler choice of words moves towards progress, not perfection.

It’s not about eliminating habits as a measure of success, but a more realistic approach to changing your thinking and being ok with imperfection. I’m less likely to treat things as all or nothing (which I am prone to do).

Lastly, a few questions for you!

• What are your reading goals for 2026?

• What are some things you would like to change in order to make more time for reading?

• Any 2026 book projects?

• What kind of posts would you like to see from me in 2026?

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I look forward to reading with you in 2026! Thank you for being here!

December and the holiday season came and went this year, and along with it, my ability to focus. I kept myself busy with work and reading slowly, if at times distractedly, something I’ve noticed myself falling into more as the days have grown darker and the winter season has brought a typically busier season. Blah blah, excuses, life, scrolling, etc. I read two books, though, and that’s still something!

On The Calculation of Volume III by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell. What can I say? I adore this series. It’s ended up on multiple end-of-the-year lists, and those who love it don’t seem to be changing their minds as each book is released. I can’t say much about this, as it is the third volume, but you can find my reviews of the first two volumes here. The third book felt like an in-between moment, building towards something bigger in Volume 4, which is being released in April 2026.

(Read on with caution)

Tara Selter is still living through the same day, November 18th, and although much has changed for her, much is still the same. However, this sameness begins to be challenged by newcomers. Where Tara has sought companionship from people outside her loop in volumes I and II, she now shares the loop with other loopers, two specifically, who do not share her sentiments about the repetitive days. Balle is bringing more ideas of consumerism and what characters owe the world outside the loop. Does companionship place you even further from a community, leaving you once again alienated and outside time? Tara is an interior character, which is why the first two volumes worked incredibly well for me. Things are getting a bit stickier in this newest volume, and I can’t wait to see where it goes and how Tara fits into it all.

I like tracking Tara’s obsessions with each volume.

Volume I—Tara is obsessed with love, memory, and artifacts

Volume II—Tara is obsessed with creating seasons

Volume III—Tara is obsessed with sounds turning into empty sounds

An absolute favorite quote from Volume III—“And Tara, she said, she just gazes out of windows, thinking about love.”

A lot of arguing happens in this volume about how to “properly” use the “gift” of the time loop.

He wanted to treat symptoms, she said. She wanted to expose the causes. She wanted to change the system, the structures. He didn’t think that life and death were mere symptoms. They were real events in the midst of the eighteenth of November.

Mourning A Breast by Xi Xi translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley. This book was written in 1989 by the acclaimed Hong Kong writer Xi Xi after being diagnosed in her early fifties with breast cancer, initially published in 1992, with a translation published by NYRB in 2024.

Xi Xi describes her body before diagnosis as one that carried her through life, and gave little thought to because it didn’t cause problems. Diagnosis leaves the relationship with her body flipped. I can see the impact this book would have had in 1992, when it was published.

Cancer, especially breast cancer, still carries a diseased, contagious association with it, and Xi Xi, in writing this, documents her experiences within the hospital’s oncology unit. She takes us through the process of an initial self-exam in the shower, her diagnosis, surgery, proceeding radiology, and multiple conversations with women she knows and meets who had or have breast cancer. Through these conversations, Xi Xi is demystifying aspects of cancer for herself and the reader. Many of the women she speaks with are Xi Xi’s age or younger, and they continue to live their lives, raising their children and working—it isn’t a death sentence for many. I imagine, in the 90s, reading this and maybe even today, as cancer is happening to young individuals, that you can be sick and still survive.

Mourning A Breast is not a story about “getting better,” although Xi Xi’s ultimate goal is to rid herself of cancer, which she does, and goes on to live well into her 80s. This book advocates understanding your body, self-examination, and the medical system. She hopes readers will take themselves and their bodies seriously and, hopefully, save them from being too late.

Xi Xi writes of her experience with a mastectomy, where mourning her breast opens up to activism through writing and documenting her experience. The book reads like a diary. Xi Xi’s level of detail about “medical time” and various treatments she undergoes is written with the tedium of waiting rooms, uncomfortable hospital gowns, and familiar faces. It’s one a patient undergoing treatment will understand deeply, and one I think not many people know exists within the walls of an oncology unit, unless they or someone they love is living through it. Where Xi Xi lost me was toward the end, with her detailed list of foods she considered beneficial for treating cancer. It was interesting to read and consider how, even today, nutrition and lifestyle choices are often used against people who have cancer or perhaps don’t survive. If you are looking for an honest discussion and experience of breast cancer and its treatment, I highly recommend this, as it’s not overly flowery in its language and exact in its communication of a disease that continues to present itself in everyone, young and old.

This year, I also read The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, which would make a great pairing with Mourning A Breast.

It turned out that disease could also be an opportunity to learn, a mechanism for creation. It was as though I had another body, as though I were detached, having become an observer of myself. I’d also come to practice getting to know myself.

As we say goodbye to 2025, I am going to take the first week of the month to do some deep thinking and reading. I’ll be back with my first post of the year, which will include my reading observations, outlook, and goals for 2026, as well as my goals for this space!

In case you missed my favorite books of 2025!

Reading The Body book club!

Lastly, a few questions for you!

• How was your December?

• Did you have a favorite book of the month?

Have a Happy New Year, and don’t put any pressure on yourself. Remember, as the clock rolls from 11:59 to midnight, time keeps moving forward—you keep moving forward. You have plenty of time!

At the start of 2025, I predicted my reading theme would be time travel. I had just inhaled the first two volumes of On The Calculation of Volume, and I began thinking about the body and memories surrounding illness as a narrative around time travel. Fast forward to the end of 2025, and while I still feel that part of this idea is accurate, it’s also taken on a far more different shape than I had realized. That is, until I found myself sitting with my favorite seven books of the year.

Stillness, sitting, resting, care, and deep listening carried me through this year’s reading. From a memoir about bodies and borders, to another memoir about chronic illness, nature, and not getting better. A poetry collection as an accessibility museum. To a classic feminist thinker on breast cancer. Into fiction that sat with discomfort, allowing both narrators and the reader to question and seek answers from within. Where repetition, death, and obsession hold us back while trying to pull us forward. Writers play with fantastical narrative structures, revealing themselves through their creative projects.

Here are a few short sentences about each book. You can find my full thoughts and longer reviews of each book in my monthly archives! *I have not placed books in order of favorites.*

The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza bears witness to Palestinian heritage, the current genocide, bodies, and their borders. Focusing on Aziza’s near-death experience with an eating disorder in 2019, being hospitalized, and entering the pandemic shortly after, where she struggles to survive and begins excavating her family history in Palestine.

To Some of Us Just Fall: On Nature and Not Getting Better by Polly Atkin. A personally insightful and eye-opening memoir, I began reading it the day after my official diagnosis of hEDS (hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), the same condition as Atkin. I read this memoir while adjusting to medication, feeling my mind slip as my joints reconfigured, feeling soothed by the dog-eared pages and underlined lines where our bodies intertwined in a shared understanding. A memoir that beautifully melds the body in pain and the body in conversation and a part of the natural world, not through the toxicity of the “nature cure,” but nature as an enrichment to our lives.

The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, the feminist writer, poet, and thinker, whose book reads as a manifesto through cancer’s silencing to transform language into action. Reshaping its silence into profound, piercing language and a rally to action.

Hardly Creatures by Rob Macaisa Colgate, a poetry collection in which accessibility is envisioned through poems as an accessible museum, where Colgate has created his own “Access Legend”—these symbols are included with each poem throughout the nine sections of the book, which serve as a visual museum. Where metaphorical benches of rest exist within its many accessible galleries.

On The Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated from Danish by Barbara Haveland. A book where our narrator, Tara Selter, wakes up and repeats the same day, November 18th, on an endless loop. Where repetition allows the mind to think, but also deteriorates our ability and desire to break our loops. (As of writing this, I have read Volume III and can say these books go places and continue to propel the narrative forward while also questioning our current culture and society’s many ills.)

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, a novel of deep sadness and obsession with the past. Following Cyrus Shamas, an orphaned and recovering addict, and the son of Iranian immigrants, who finds it difficult to want to stay alive, becomes obsessed with the idea of having a meaningful death. Leading him to sit in the company of another as an art performance, but with nowhere else to be but in each other’s company, and in that stillness, truly listening. (I’m intentionally being vague.)

My Lesbian Novel by Renee Gladman, a book that plays with genre—an interview with the author about the book you are currently reading about her working on, a conversation with the self as writer and creator. It’s about the conversations between an artist and her drawings, and a writer and her own discussions with writing a lesbian romance that breaks all the cliches, tropes, and pitfalls of other lesbian novels. A true delight of a book.

Coming soon!

• December 2025 Archive

• 2026 Reading Outlook/Substack Goals

A few questions for you!

• How was your 2025 in reading?

• Favorite book(s)?

• What book left the biggest impact on you?

• Any theme or idea(s) you carried throughout your year of books?

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Beginning in 2026! Reading The Body, a book club that will focus on the body through disability, mental illness, chronic illness, disability justice, and more, since the body can never be contained. We will explore genres from memoir to poetry, fiction, and beyond.

Beginning in 2026! Reading The Body, a book club that will focus on the body through disability, mental illness, chronic illness, disability justice, and more, since the body can never be contained. We will explore genres from memoir to poetry, fiction, and beyond.

I always feel overwhelmed this time of year. This year in particular has me feeling even more engulfed by the swirling of the world around me. It’s as though time is running out, x number of days until Christmas, and family meet-ups. End-of-year lists have been coming out since December 1st, and I haven’t even begun to collect my thoughts into a meaningful post yet…does it even matter when I do, or if I do? December 31st feels like this looming day when everything you started or thought about all your goals and hopes you had in 2025, somehow must be accomplished and brought to fruition, or else they may never happen. As the clock rolls from 11:59 to midnight, time keeps moving forward—you keep moving forward. 

We are on no schedule but our own.

This year has been marked by slowness and a deep desire to move in opposition to the speed around me. Embrace quiet, calm, and gentle living. I’ve been feeling less of a desire to open myself and my wounds up to the world as I have in the past. I’m protective of my soft body in a way I have never quite felt before, and I’m choosing to embrace it.

My 2025 has been bookended by twin chrysalises. Both took form on the same plant in the yard, in nearly the same exact spot, ten months apart. The first was towards the end of winter, coming out of a two-month-long pain flare and depression, which coincided with adjusting to medication, which was its own kind of metamorphosis, each day visiting the silent cocoon. The second appeared when winter began to find its way through the golden foliage, and again when my dog’s health was in a precarious position, I’d gently carry him outside to see his chrysalis. At the same time, I was undergoing and continue to go through my own new health problems, living in an unknown once again. 

My motto this year became “May all your transitions be joyful.” Even through the pain, stress, fears, and unknowns of where those transitions may lead, go into them with hope and joy that life still allows you to experience them.

I catch myself at work alphabetizing and shelving books, singing my ABC’s silently in my head, and I realize how content this simple act of work and labor makes me. In these small moments, I feel fulfilled to merely hold another world in my hands. Maybe you also want a small, quiet piece of the world in your hands. Below are a few softer media recommendations, primarily books, and a reality tv show creative competition.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is a book I have read twice, both times during December, and am contemplating a third read. It’s one of those books that gets better with each read of its rich, lovely sentences and the inner thoughts of an unnamed narrator. An internet favorite for a reason.

Checkout 19, also by Claire-Louise Bennett, will have you lost in the magic and wildness of Bennett’s mind and her masterful handling of how literature, stories, and physical books have influenced the narrator’s entire life. Examining the value placed on written and unwritten stories.

Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri follows our narrator in an unnamed city over the span of a year. We follow her from place to place in coffee shops, museums, piazzas, and her apartment as she navigates and questions her place in the world. Our narrator never fully allows herself to occupy any space outside her apartment. Keeping a distance from others, living outside others’ lives and spaces. This novel feels subtle, like the shifting of light on a warm wood floor.

A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa follows our narrator, a mother of four children who is enthralled by an Irish poem from the 18th century that she first read as a child. It’s about the connection between two women across time, who never meet but form a deeper connection through words and the oral tradition of storytelling. 

On The Calculation of Volume I-III by Solvej Balle, translated from the Danish by Barbara Haveland (I, II), Sophia Hersi Smith, and Jennifer Russell (III, IV). I will never stop hyping this series! Tara Selter is a character I could spend countless November 18ths with, and each book has effortlessly propelled her story forward in interesting ways. Something about this series feels perfect for the winter and those in between Christmas and New Year’s days, where you feel a bit adrift.

Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose is an essential essay collection from a writer who thinks a lot. The writing is sincere and playful, a writer in love with life’s small moments. Full of detailed language that you can’t help but underline and etch onto your heart. Perfect for when you are feeling too much during a busy season and want to feel human.

Little Weirds by Jenny Slate, if you are losing it this time of year, feeling dizzy with the frenzy and bright lights, I recommend comedian Jenny Slate’s equally amusing and wild essay collection. Funny and heartfelt, it might strike the perfect balance!

A Horse at Night by Amina Cain is a slim collection of meditations on writers and their work. Incorporating questions about female friendship, landscape painting, ecological and societal collapse, and the books that can sustain us. You will be adding even more books to your TBR.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Illustrations by John Burgoyne, is short and makes a great gift — it’s a book you could read during family time at the holidays and pass around for everyone to read. Teaching reciprocity and abundance through what we already have and the community around us. It’s one I am adding to my list for this season.

Lastly, a reality tv show we can’t get enough of! The Great Pottery Throw Down is my go-to when I’m feeling soft, like clay in the hands of each contestant, through challenges in which they triumph and learn or falter and still learn. Through hand-building and throwing on the wheel, building bird baths, porcelain chandeliers, and Greek amphoras, all while constantly being rooted on by their fellow contestants and one man, Keith Brymer Jones, who is single-handedly getting me through with his deep emotional well and beautiful tears. A man who sees a contestant struggling and gently tells them, “It’s just clay, step away, make a cup of tea, and come back.” In every episode, I turn to my husband and say, “We must protect this man.” Both judges and host Siobhán McSweeney, who is well known from the TV show Derry Girls, are hilarious and genuinely adore the potters.

That’s all for now! Please let us know in the comments what some of your favorite cozy recommendations are. Also, I will be posting an end-of-the-year reading wrap-up/favorites sometime soon, but I’m not in a rush.

Last thing for real! What are some things you would like to see in this space for 2026? I’m brainstorming ideas and would love to know what you might enjoy!

November was…. a whirlwind to put it mildly. Our senior dog Hero had an unexpected surgery for what began as a routine teeth cleaning, but quickly turned into two weeks of tests and the removal of a softball-sized tumor on his liver and another tumor on his lung. I’ve cried countless tears over him, and we have spent most of the month caring for him and giving him a lot of love. (He is recovering very well!) If that wasn’t enough, it’s also the holidays and about a week before Thanksgiving and two days before Hero’s surgery, a doctor found a lump on my breast during a routine yearly well-woman’s exam. I was quickly scheduled for a mammogram and ultrasound at MD Anderson. Thankfully, I have experience in the cancer hospital due to my mom’s ongoing breast cancer diagnosis. Everything turned out to be ok for now. I return in six months and am not entirely in the clear yet… are we ever, though? (something I’m thinking about even more since reading Body Weather this month… more in the reviews below). Lastly, PSA! Please check your body regularly for any lumps, bumps, or visual abnormalities. You know your body best! I’m grateful to the doctor who took the time to assess my body, found something I hadn’t even noticed, and has taken it very seriously.

Ok, onto the good parts of this month… the books I read!

From a queer runaway on the drag stages of Montrose, Houston, in Little F to the phrase “body weather,” in the memoir Body Weather, where the author’s chronic conditions are related to climate crises. Two tiny books, one about Reading Together in book clubs and classrooms, and what can be brought into discussion when no one is the “expert.” A classic essay on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, and lastly, my two-month slow read of Jane Eyre that may have gotten me through the thick of things and made me realize I need to read more classics and less contemporary fiction.

Little F by Michelle Tea. I picked up this book in preparation for Michelle Tea’s visit to the bookstore I work at for a reading—however, that also coincided with the government shutdown and countless flights being cancelled. Michelle Tea will be coming back for a reading early in 2026, thankfully! I sped through this short novel in about two days, following a sheltered queer thirteen-year-old, Spencer, living an agonizingly boring life in Arizona with his mother and father. After a brutal attack at school and a family lie, Spencer takes the blame for, he is forced to run away on a road trip journey through Texas, where he meets another runaway boy named Velvet, and they venture to New Orleans and settle in the steamy romantic streets of the French Quarter, where life’s complications don’t end. Spencer joins a ragtag, complicated group of queer teens all trying to live their truths and create their own family. I don’t want to give much away, as this book is plot-focused. It was easy to read and enjoyable, but hasn’t quite stuck with me as much as the settings of Montrose, Houston, where I live and work, and the streets of New Orleans, which are a character unto themselves. I could not for the life of me get past the fact that Spencer is thirteen years old, a runaway, who has been missing for months, and gets into some perilous situations that not even an adult could likely get out of, much less a child. My only critique would be to have made Spencer a few years older. Overall, a fun read full of heart!

It’s not that I wanted flowers or attention—I actually don’t like attention, though I do like flowers. Bascially the only thing i like about Phoenix is how the cacti bloom in the deseart each winter, the blossoms popping out to form a little crown. While I welcome all flowers, even cliche; blooms like rose, the cacti seem more special becuase you don’t really see those flowers coming. Then suddenly, they’re there, just for a moment, until the brutal sun shrivels them up and beats them down.

Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene by Lorraine Boissoneault (Releases on April 21, 2026) A memoir about a lifetime chronic illness from a science writer, connecting the human body to Earth’s meteorology. Invisible illness leaves little for Boissoneault to easily receive a diagnosis from within medical establishments. Living with the daily unknowing of expected symptoms and pain, Boissoneault adopts the phrase “body weather” to describe pain’s ebb and flow, something I know many with chronic illness experience, especially during this transitional time of year. Boissoneault relates her dysregulated thyroid to fluctuations in global temperature—her retroverted uterus and frequent UTIs to catastrophic floods—her inflamed joints to wildfires beyond control. I breezed through this memoir, even when the scientific aspects didn’t make complete sense. I still found myself able to connect with Boissoneault’s ability to incorporate memoir and her body’s pain history, hypothesizing when and how illness began in her life. Was it due to the poisonous Great Lakes waters she played in as a child? How much of our health comes down to our genetics when we live in a world that has progressed industrially in such a short time in comparison to the Earth’s beginning? Can we accept and justify growing cancer rates amongst younger individuals because of our ability to screen earlier and better? Why does chronic illness often have no clear bodily beginning and is instead widespread and more prominent than ever in our population? Body Weather comes to inhabit the physical body and the world around us, the fragility lying within both, and the interconnectedness of our climate and illness. I clearly haven’t been able to stop thinking about these questions and likely never will, and it seems the same can be said for Boissoneault.

If a storm is nothing more than moisture, instability, and the clashing of hot and cold molecules, it’s hardly a metaphor to say that our bodies are microclimates of controlled thunderstorms.

Recommended articles on subjects discussed in Body Weather:

Axolotl: Endangered Species Spotlight by Clara Steel Miguelez

An Ode to an Anatomical Venus: Waxing Poetic on the Uncanny Allure of 18th Century Dissectible Women by Joanna Ebenstein

One more article about roses growing amongst the ashes of the Eaton Fires:

From the Ashes of the Eaton Fire, Roses Bloom by Jill Cowan

Reading Together by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska was an extended essay in the form of a memoir about the way book clubs change the way we read. College professor Bartoszyńska writes about the various book clubs she has participated in and led throughout her life, and the books, for better or for worse, that had the biggest impact on her and other readers in the group. The style is chatty, almost like sitting in on a book club meeting or a classroom discussion. I didn’t find the book groundbreaking—however, it has helped me to better understand my own reasoning for starting my own online book club and what I hope it brings to this space, while also acknowledging and respecting that, while I am the host, I don’t necessarily want to be the expert or leader. Book clubs can be much more than a place of empathy- (”I liked or disliked this book for xy and z reasons”) and can flourish into deeper conversations about experiences you don’t have direct understanding of, unlike someone else in the group who might. While I am the developer of the book club, I think it’s helpful to take the I out once the reading begins.

…the book club is the rare space where people come together to discuss shared readings in a totally voluntary way, drieven by a desire for community and shared learning. It is grounded in the idealistic assumption that everyone’s ideas are worthwhile, that everyone has something to teach and to contribute.

But I’m not coming to book clubs to hear myself talk. I want to know what everyone else has to say. I want to know what they know about the book that I don’t.

Why Everyone—Yes, Everyone—Should Join a Book Club by Linda-Marie Barrett on The Pleasures of Reading In Community

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, the famous science fiction and fantasy writer most well-known essay about fiction’s narrative structure, which should emulate a “carrier bag” instead of a weapon or hero’s journey. That storytelling’s basis was not founded on weapons or killing tools, but on the invention of baskets that held medicine and food woven from hair and plant materials. A carrier bag emulates storytelling, something carried and shared for generations as a source of community, connection, and creativity. The narrative style of the carrier bag challenges the traditional hero’s journey. It takes a gentler approach to explore different aspects of the human experience. I think this is one you could reread in a short sitting when you need to be reminded of the world’s possibilities and storytelling capabilities. This was excellent to read alongside Reading Together by Katarzyna Bartoszyńska.

…the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, or bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear mearnings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

An author who exemplifies the carrier bag theory has to be Lidia Yuknavitch!

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Brontë fall seeped itself into me, and I’m changed forever. I tried to recall if I’ve ever truly read Jane Eyre in my early teens. I have an old Barnes & Noble edition on my nightstand in my childhood bedroom, but was it ever read, or do I only remember Jane, the orphan, independent and intelligent girl who lives as a governess for a not-so-handsome master of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Rochester? Was I remembering the black-and-white movie adaptation I grew up watching with my mom whenever it was playing on Turner Classic Movies, starring the beautiful Joan Fontaine and Orson Welles? Who knows? Either way, I read this classic slowly, heavily inspired by the lovely Petya at , who spent months reading Anna Karenina. Was the book, at times, a bit of a long slog? Yes. Was I likely just tired from the exhausting month? Probably. Did I still find myself picking it up to read five pages in between tasks? Yes. Was I left on the turn of the final page feeling a sadness that these characters I had grown to love, and the descriptive gothic language Brontë wrote, have a richness I didn’t realize I had been missing while reading contemporary fiction? Absolutely! I don’t need to tell you the plot of Jane Eyre—you’ve either read it, are curious to read it, or, like me, know the plot through its various adaptations. Although some parts haven’t aged well, and Brontë has some troubling views, I still found myself deeply immersed in a story that took its time, and I’m going to be searching for that in the year 2026… I think I love classics!

A reading life

A long book gathers the pieces.

The final weeks of the year always carry a particular charge. Part holiday atmosphere, part logistical unraveling, part cultural insistence that we take stock of our lives whether we feel ready or not. In that atmosphere, even my reading life — which is usually the place where I feel most interior, most grounded — begins to take on an evaluative tone…

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10 months ago · 151 likes · 77 comments

My world had for some years been in Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systmes; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

In case you missed a few recent posts from Nonfiction November!

Lastly, a few questions!

• What were your favorite books of November?

• Have you learned anything about your reading habits in 2025?

• Any classics recommendations?

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As always, thank you for being here, I truly appreciate each and every one of you!

I thought I’d do one more installment of recommendations for Nonfiction November. You can read my first one here, about nature and the body. Nonfiction that explores and is informed by the body through chronic illness and nature are my favorite subjects in nonfiction. However, my gateway into nonfiction was through art. From reading art history textbooks in school to delving deeper into artists’ monographs and biographies, I discovered my path to writers who write about art and the artists they admire, often weaving their own lived experiences into the narrative.

Once again, I present an incomplete list of books that explore artists’ lives and the work they created, from the spiritual to the everyday makers, as well as the writers’ personal experiences and engagements with works of art and life. I hope you enjoy these recommendations, and I would love for you to add to the list in the comments!

Lastly, please read to the bottom of this post for an upcoming announcement!

Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art by Lauren Elkin

An exploration of feminist artists who were pushing the boundaries of what art can be and who can make it. Queer, sick, and marginalized bodies and voices come together in a book like no other! A book where the personal and political show no distinctions. Each artist and writer Elkin writes about is unique in their medium, approach, and background, but all were trying to take as much as possible to give themselves entirely to an artistic life. Elkins’s book, specifically her writing on the body and the body as it embodies art, captured something that goes beyond your typical writing about art.

The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World by Jennifer Higgie

A blend of memoir and art history, this is an excellent introduction to the world of women artists and thinkers inspired by the spirit world, as well as those creating art influenced by spiritualism, from the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen to the painter Hilma af Klint. This book showcases the many ways these artists communicated and depicted dimensions unseen.

The Last Supper by Rachel Cusk

These essays span three months of travel in Italy with her husband and two young daughters as they take in art and the lively locale of Italy. The collection reminisces about feeling lost and wanting life to change by being someplace else or experiencing a different type of life, but nothing really changes. Of course, Cusk’s writing about art in a beautiful country is exceptional. You can see her writing really shine through her sharp observations. How she writes about artwork as being the closest to humanity we can ever be, and the truest way to know ourselves and others, is simply superb!

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone by Olivia Laing

Explores the physical and mental effects of being alone and being lonely through the quiet personal life of Andy Warhol, paintings by Edward Hopper, photographs by David Wojnarowicz, the city of New York and its inhabitants, and the works of many other creatives. Delving into Laing’s personal feelings and depictions of loneliness via the self, society, and illness, a considerable discussion in their investigations and writing is the AIDS crisis as a recurring symptom of loneliness for individuals and the isolating effects on an entire group of people in the 80s and 90s, who were often denied a voice. As always, Laing draws hope from their subjects and reminds the reader that loneliness may only be a stop along the journey of art’s ability to resist and illuminate through paint, photographs, writing, performance, activism, and music.

The Light Room: On Art and Care by Kate Zambreno

When Zambreno’s family leaves the house during lockdown, they go to the park. They record the changing seasons through images taken with a phone and by the detritus her two children collect over time, leaves, rocks, etc. These treasures are placed in a space in the home that changes with each season, like an altar. While mothering and teaching during this unknown time, Zambrano feels depleted of her personhood— she is reading in the few moments she can capture for herself, exhausted at night in bed by the slight glow of her phone screen. Light is her beacon back to who she is, as well as the artists who inspire the moment she finds herself living in like millions of others.

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency by Olivia Laing

During turbulent times, when the world seems as though it will never come together, a political system that purposefully supports genocide and desires to eliminate anyone deemed not necessary enough to be protected, art can seem like the least essential avenue to healing. Can art change anything? Laing answers that question simply, yes, and this book presents all the ways art has spoken to a moment in our cultural history of pain and wreckage and has done something of importance for a group or community. Art can change minds, open dialogues, and express our deepest human desires. This book is a true balm.

The Agency of Access: Contemporary Disability Art and Institutional Critique by Amanda Cachia

Cachia is a wealth of experience and knowledge within disability arts and curatorial access. Cachia’s central question, or the genesis of this book and its research, was: What can we learn about the disabled body in art when no disabled body is physically present? Through five sections, “translation,” “sensory aesthetics,” “movement,” “please touch,” and “exhibition design,” Cachia dissects new ways artists of the past and present are creating works about disability that are not merely about the individual body’s lived experience, but allow for physical spaces to take on their lived experience. This forces non-disabled individuals to experience and maneuver through the various predicaments and discomforts of an artwork not created with them in mind, much like the world disabled individuals inhabit. Cachia showcases the broad scope of artists pushing the boundaries of what an exhibition space can be and how we interact with art, concluding that the practice of access and tactility can benefit us all and break access barriers inherent within artistic institutions.

Sharp Notions: Essays from the Stitching Life, Edited by Marita Dachsel and Nancy Lee

A varied anthology of personal essays from the world of fiber arts and the artists who create them. Discussing a range of textile and yarn work, including crochet, embroidery, and beading, the writers explore the practices, often repetitive movements, and how they quelled anxiety during lockdown, navigating long-term illness or other difficult life challenges. Showcasing a wide community of fiber artists, both novice and expert in their craft, claiming a space often focused on white women to embody queer, black, brown, and indigenous communities.

Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy by Larissa Pham

A collection of essays that perfectly captures the experience of youth. Pham is clearly writing as a woman in her late 20s and early 30s. However, she has perfectly rendered a still image of herself as a girl in her late teens and early 20s, exploring herself and the possibilities for her college life, as well as trying to discover who she is as a person of color and as a sexual being. It’s like listening to a playlist of songs from the memory of a moment you thought would never end, but also knew couldn’t last. Of developing your tastes via Tumblr and other DIY artistic expressions. Of pinning artwork on your dorm room wall. This collection is perfect for anyone who wants to be reminded of their past selves, knowing they are still that person, perhaps just a bit different, with the benefit of hindsight.

The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie

A roughly year-long photography and writing collaboration during Ernaux and Marie’s relationship. It’s about the simultaneity of a new relationship and the changing of its visual landscape while Ernaux was undergoing treatment for Breast Cancer. The everydayness of life, the newness of a relationship, and facing the reality of life and death. A theme throughout the collection of photographs taken by Ernaux and Marie was in the aftermath of sex, the immediacy of removing and throwing off items, and the following day, revealing those items through photographs, never moving or intentionally arranging these objects as a rule. Each was tasked with describing or writing a piece corresponding to each photo. Ernaux has a unique quality where she will describe something in her present and then finds the smallest entrance to the past, perfectly analyzing the self.

A few other posts you might enjoy…

📚I plan to start a book club in the new year, 2026. Be on the lookout for a post about it in the next few weeks!!📚 If you are interested in the book club, leave a little comment below. I look forward to sharing more information soon!

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In honor of Nonfiction November, I wanted to create at least two posts that represent my love of nonfiction. As the year stands currently, and my number of books read is nearing my personal reading goal for the year, I have read roughly 75% nonfiction. My love of nonfiction spans various subjects and themes—however, I have a particular fondness for nonfiction that explores and is informed by the body through chronic illness, disability, mental illness, and nature.

Nature can often feel impenetrable or too vast and unpredictable to someone living in a disabled body. It can feel inaccessible or only navigable by a specific agile group of people. Still, I have found my own pockets of nature, the places that feel hospitable to my life and needs. Sometimes it’s as simple as tending to and arranging a bouquet of flowers for my kitchen table or spotting a wilting plant in the backyard, filling a cup of cool water in the sink to take outside and water it. I have a bowl set out for the neighborhood cat, Fiona, and have seen two or three raccoons find nourishment during their nightly strolls. During my body’s transition to medication in February, I witnessed a monarch’s chrysalis transform while my body went through its own metamorphosis. 

This is an incomplete list of books that explore nature through all walks of life and lived experience. They are physically far-reaching—some are small and defined by the limits of home, and some live in between. I hope you enjoy these recommendations, and I would love for you to add to the list in the comments!

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Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene by Lorraine Boissoneault (Releases on April 21, 2026)

A memoir about a lifetime living with chronic illness from a science writer. Invisible illness makes it difficult for Boissoneault to receive a diagnosis within medical establishments. Living with the daily uncertainty of expected symptoms and pain, Boissoneault adopts the phrase “body weather” to describe the ebb and flow of pain. Body Weather comes to inhabit the physical body as well as the world around us, the fragility that lies within both, and the interconnectedness of our climate and illness.

Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming by Eli Clare

Blending poetry and creative nonfiction through queer disability, emotion, and activism. This book is an invitation from Clare to unfurl ourselves from gender binaries, bringing the earth’s movements, Clare’s own tremoring body, and the tremors of the earth together in experimental prose.

The Body Is a Doorway by Sophie Strand

A memoir that begins with Strand hoping for a cure to her various sudden chronic illnesses at sixteen. But, no matter how many doctors she visits and tests she has, her illnesses only get worse. When recovery is no longer Strand’s objective, she instead chooses to leave the medicalized world and return her body to nature. Choosing to live a life among the world of her own interconnectedness to ecology, from thanking black mold for its interjection into her relationship, causing physical illness to manifest in opening her to the end of a romantic relationship, and the writer as weaver of language, like a spider and a web.

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

From bowerbird nests, snakes, eels, cicadas, mushrooms, and cemetery crows, Kaishian takes the reader on an ecological and mycological adventure through her childhood in the Hudson Valley as a neurodiverse queer child preferring the company of the less revered inhabitants of the forests and swamps surrounding her home. She finds acceptance among intersex slugs and the lessons to be learned from ecology on the margins. Kaishian is writing more than a personal memoir in these pages, but a history of place and her connection to a colonized land and her family’s Irish and Armenian heritage. An enthralling reminder of how little we understand about the natural world and how quickly we and scientists try to fit organisms’ narratives neatly within a binary that best suits our cultural understanding.

Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown

An essay collection about Brown’s experience with living in and beyond the body’s limits. Born with cerebral palsy, Brown navigates her own body’s landscapes as she travels through the United States and Europe, from the rural American South of her childhood to the cobblestone streets of Bologna, Italy.

A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma by Noreen Masud

Part memoir, part nature book that explores the idea of “flatness.” Aesthetically, we typically seek rolling hills or great mountains, so why does flatness seem boring or undesirable? Masud seeks to understand and explore the British flatlands, reflecting on the history and mythology of place as well as her own traumatic childhood and subsequent complex post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that flattens her emotions and blanks parts of her memories.

A Still Life by Josie George

George lives a life with a disabling chronic illness with her son, inhabiting a small home in a primarily secluded life. Within what others view as small, she finds it to be a full dynamic life of deep observation. In January 2018, she decides to write the story of her still life over the course of a year. Upon examination, she recalls her early childhood and coming of age, her struggles with marriage and the joy of motherhood. This memoir is about the small victories to be found in quiet and still life, and the wonder that can be discovered even in the smallest places.

Some of Us Just Fall by Polly Atkin

Atkin’s writing and experience with hEDS and Fibromyalgia made me feel part of a history of disabled bodies, of being genetically descended from other creative people with the same disabilities as me. Atkins beautifully melds the body in pain and the body in conversation, and a part of the natural world, not through the toxicity of the “nature cure,” but rather nature as an enrichment to our lives. She finds peace and a world worth staying in and amongst, and has written a book for any reader to reach the last page and hopefully reach the same conclusion.

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing

The genesis of this book was the excavation and revitalization of Laing’s personal garden during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing it back to its original state after years of neglect. Through this process, Laing reflects on the biblical Garden of Eden, created utopias, and a green space’s impact on accessibility during a global lockdown, inevitably showing its many inequalities. An overarching question Laing asks is who has access to green spaces, and what does this access afford an individual’s well-being and a community?

Moving Mountains: Writing Nature through Illness and Disability, Edited by Louise Kenward

An anthology of nature writing from authors living with chronic illness and physical disability. A collection not about overcoming or finding “healing,” instead noticing and finding meaning with the natural world that often goes overlooked by those living in a nondisabled body. You are sure to find a new writer to love amongst these twenty-five unique essays.

A few posts you might enjoy…

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We’ve reached the end of October. This month was full of the chaos of life, with constant movement, barely giving my body rest, unless I fell asleep while reading in the afternoons, which happened quite a bit. I beat myself up over the lack of reading I accomplished. However, I continued to read while simultaneously dealing with the difficulties of life, health, and a trip to New Orleans, all of which disrupted my routines. I’ve been racking my brain to find the links connecting everything together this month (which I know isn’t necessary, but I’m craving some order amongst the chaos). Perhaps it’s death?...too obvious? Today (November 1st) is Dia de los Muertos, an occasion I celebrate by rearranging my everyday altar for the occasion. I’ll light some incense, many candles, arrange flowers, and visit the images of lost loved ones. Earlier this month, I visited New Orleans for the third time, and I fell even deeper in love with the city. It’s lively, the people are kind, it’s walkable, and most of all, it makes me less afraid of death (maybe an essay about that later).

The three books I read don’t seem to be related to death, except for one obvious title. The more I thought about it, the more death in its myriad forms began to show itself to me. Touch Me, I’m Sick grapples with trauma that manifests as chronic illness, labeling the sick as broken or untouchable by society, dead and walking. Zami is a classic memoir that follows a life of discovery and self-invention. Lastly, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, a memoir that spans continents, exploring cemeteries and the darker historical depths of what gets buried.

Touch Me, I’m Sick by Margeaux Feldman is a memoir in essays exploring Feldman’s experience with multiple childhood traumas after the death of her mother from cancer at age ten. This left her with a father and brother who could never come to terms with the death or reestablish the family unit, forcing Feldman to be the grown-up caring for her family through illness and poverty. Feldman explores how these traumas, as well as sexual violence, present through the body as various chronic illnesses. Feldman discusses sex and intimacy amongst romantic partners and friends as forms of care and deep love. They trace the history of chronic illness, a more modern term for what used to be labeled hysteria. Freud believed, “hysterics suffer for the most part from reminiscences.” In other words, Feldman states, “Hysterics are haunted by a certain trauma.” Following queer modes of care and what it means to be in queer sick community and “hysterical intimacies,” which rejects the idea that those labeled as sick are broken. This book is highly accessible. Feldman has woven their personal story, along with research from their Phd. It can be challenging to strike the right balance between memoir and deeply researched writing, but Feldman has done an exceptional job. I recommend reading Margeaux Feldman’s Substack for more personal essays on illness and humorous, highly relatable memes that explore chronic illness and trauma.

CARESCAPES

your hurt is a gift

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a year ago · 67 likes · 4 comments · Margeaux Feldman

I am, frankly, exhausted by the argument that trauma and sickness impede intimacy. What if the qualities that make the hysteric pathological—a love of ambivalence and excess—can open up other possibilities for care and interdependence that make life not just possible, but pleasurable? Intimacy is what happens when bodies come together in all of their messiness and ambivalence and are affirmed and cared for.

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde was the book club book for work. It wasn’t quite what I expected. At first, I thought we would be starting with Lorde’s childhood and eventually move through her life until she discovers writing. That it would be a memoir following her journey to becoming the famous writer and thinker Audre Lorde. Instead, this followed a much more traditional memoir style that traced the linearity of Lorde’s life. While the book didn’t meet my initial expectations after I completed it, I could see how Lorde was creating herself through her experiences in childhood and adulthood. She focuses on labor and the daily hardships of living. The anger she feels about it permeates the pages, as well as her longing and search for intimacy and love among the women she admires. Her writing is poetic and precise, yet maintains a timeless quality—her writing is haunted by her past relationship with her overbearing and strict West Indian mother. The youngest of three girls with the darkest skin, she experiences racism in her everyday life, even as a small child in school. Lorde takes the experiences and pushes against them, constantly challenging what her family does not question. She leaves her childhood home in Harlem at a young age to pursue being the person she could not be living under her family’s roof. The precision of her memories blew me away while reading. She rarely steps back to access a memory from childhood. She merely writes it as though it were happening in real time—conversations are not half-remembered but fully realized, with every detail impeccably rendered. Whether you believe anyone writing a memoir has a memory this exact does not matter—just enjoy the incredible gift that is Audre Lorde.

I used to love the evenness of AUDRELORDE at four years of age, but I remembered to put on the Y because it pleased my mother, and because, as she always insisted to me, that was the way it had to be because that was the way it was.

Somebody is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys by Mariana Enriquez, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell. Obviously, this was my favorite book of the month. I spent the entire month reading it slowly, and then I devoured it over the last few days of the month. I now have multiple tabs open to cemeteries around the world. I know it’s clichéd, but I love cemeteries—even as a kid, I found them comforting. Burying family members and visiting graves felt like a beautiful ritual. I loved doing the mental math of birth and death dates, finding worn stuffed animal offerings left for children, and bouquets of vibrant flowers. There was something uniquely artistic about death. It wasn’t until I was older that I discovered different traditions and types of cemeteries exist. No two are quite alike in their presentations or history. Enriquez journeys through cemeteries close to her home in Argentina, including famous haunted cemeteries, the Paris catacombs (and even steals a bone), as well as the lively above-ground mausoleums of our beloved New Orleans. Enriquez is enamored with the romance of death and cemeteries, but also investigates the dark history of those buried beneath the ground, often without a headstone, because of mass burials, genocides, and plagues. She seeks out the famous mausoleums, but also attributes the many wrongs that occurred to create the monuments to the dead residing underneath. With the holidays approaching, I think this would make an excellent gift for history lovers, travel enthusiasts, or fans of the macabre. It’s such a great book and one you can easily dip in and out of, discovering a new cemetery with each chapter.

A lot of people get scared when they hear they’re walking over dead people. Although we are all, more or less always, walking over a greater or lesser number of dead. There are many more dead people than living; it’s a simple truth: we all end up turned into earth.

A few spooky recommendations and videos about the artistically macabre.

I recommend checking out ’s Substack, , specifically, the series Sunday Pastries With the Dead, each post is spent on a lovely walk through a local cemetery with Katie, discussing its history and enjoying a sweet treat amongst the tombstones.

Dispatches From the Little Yellow Cottage

Sunday Pastries With the Dead 44

Albany Rural Cemetery is one of America’s most stunning examples of the mid-1800s rural cemetery movement, which marked a rise in consciously-designed park-like burial grounds featuring winding roads, grouped family plots, and monuments created by sought-after artists…

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2 years ago · 8 likes · 11 comments · Katie Calautti

I ventured into a jewelry store or two in New Orleans and fell in love with Victorian mourning jewelery, sepcifically an oval pendant with woven human hair inlaid among black jewels.

Two funny people chatting about the original Goth Girlie. Yes, I plan on watching the new Guillermo del Toro (my favorite director) adaptation once it’s on Netflix so I can pause as many times as I want and swoon over his genius.

In case you have missed a few recent posts…

Thank you for being here! I appreciate everyone who spends time with my writing and reviews!