Lately I often find myself feeling alert but unable to focus. This is a new vibe for me. If you’re a person who experiences this feeling regularly and has found a way to manage it, I’d love your advice. (I’m going to start by having a cup of coffee.)
Finished reading: 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write by Sarah Ruhl 📚
Read this because it’s on Austin Kleon’s list of books about motherhood & art. But it held extra delight for me because it’s also about the theater.
“Perhaps having children makes one increasingly distrust the symbolic world. Because suddenly nothing is as important as the very real particular.” Sara Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write
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This week’s Craft Talk from Jami Attenberg is another great one:
“Don’t ever talk yourself out of writing something because you don’t know how it fits in the world yet.”
Y’all ever think about how the worst moments in your life personally align with some of the most personally important cultural moments? 1989-1992 was a rough run personal but wow the movies of that time look large.
🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).
“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”
📝🎭🎨🧶🧵🎵💃🏿 This is a reminder that I write Genetrix, a very occasional newsletter curating stories of creative mothers. If those are the kind of stories you’d like to know about, please sign up!
🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.
I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.
🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).
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🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald
“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”