round-up: 12/28
recommendations, quotations, and poetry prompts!
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
What I’m listening to
What I’m reading
Quotations
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
In 2024, I wrote a fair amount of fiction but very little poetry because fiction is a matter of consistency (if you sit down and start writing, something will eventually happen) whereas poetry requires actual vision. I was too tired to have any vision (if you sit down and start writing without any ~inspiration~, it will usually be an awful poem).
In 2025, I aspire to write more poetry again, and I’m referring back to the 30 prompts I shared back in 2022 to get me started. If you’re wanting to get back into your writing, too, maybe one of these can bring a poem out of you.
What I’m listening to:
What I’m reading:
What I Want and What I Want, Chelsea Martin
Light Blue Desire, Magali Duzant
Lying, Lauren Slater (5/5 stars)
“Blake Lively Files Sexual Harassment Complaint Against ‘It Ends With Us’ Costar Justin Baldoni”
Quotations:
I’m at a point in my life where I’ve just said “I’m not even sure most of the time if you like me or if you’re just here,” but had meant to say something more like, “I want you to comfort me instead of sitting across the room like I told you to,” and afterwards, because my bodyfriend looked at me in a way that said this conversation has no basis in reality but I guess that’s because relatiosnhips are only interesting in concept, I felt like I had said something more like, “I think neither of us could do any better but that’s not really a reason to stay.”
-Chelsea Martin
What I look for in a relationship is feeling good all the time. But I’ll settle for feeling bad all the time.
-Chelsea Martin
How unfair it was the time he sat there smiling at a text message from someone else after I had asked him a somewhat emotionally-important question and was waiting for a response, and how he was always doing that kind of thing, like making me walk from room to room with him just to finish a conversation.
-Chelsea Martin
I want to mention how beautiful the sky is and how beautiful and complicated each person on Earth is and how I’m so very afraid to ever die. But I will definitely die and Earth will not support life forever and all evidence of everything we knew and felt will be gone.
-Chelsea Martin
Having no phone calls is not the same as having no friends, even though if there are no incoming phone calls and no friends, there is an absence of both things, and both absences take up absolutely no space because they are complete voids.
-Chelsea Martin
Language is what we make of it. It is a field fit for play.
-Magali Duzant
It’s important to do things that you are scared of doing. For me this has to do with my relationship with swimming and water. When I was little, I could only feel my fear. At a certain point I realized that, actually, I love water. It’s just that there are things about it that make my stomach do jumping jacks. What is that feeling? And why do I have it? It’s been an important thing for me to do, to not let my fear stop me from experiencing the joys and the pleasures of things.
-Mirah (musician)
I promise that you will, within the work you’re doing, find the rhythm that works for you. But until you do, just keep pushing. Just keep moving, and I promise it will happen.
-Yassir Lester
I think that the goal for any artist is ultimately just to express yourself as honestly as possible. What is my true expression?
-Alia Shawkat
I’m so frequently unhappy with my own output and what I make of that failure is a really crucial part of my creative process.
-Mitra Jouhari
Good writing, or any good kind of art, has to come from the self in all its unanswerable weirdness and awkwardness and vulnerability—rather than from any kind of notion of what other people might want your stuff to be, or what your work “should” be.
-Hermione Hoby
I’m a fan of the fan letter: by which I mean, it can just be a good spiritual practice to let people know when their work meant something to you.
-Hermione Hoby
Sometimes I talk to a student and I get the sense that they just aren’t really curious about the world. There’s no teaching that. Without curiosity about the world, what are you going to make next? Curiosity is the one requirement.
-Ryan McNamara
I gathered secrets like little pieces of survival.
-Chelsea Hodson
I think that collectively, we need to be doing less. (Maybe this doesn’t apply to you if you’re lazy—I really can’t speak for everyone—but I personally need to be doing less.) There’s a lot of pressure to be “on” 24/7: to progress in your career, to stay literarily sharp and tapped into prominent media, to explore your city, to see the world, to stay in shape, to know pop culture references, to listen to every new album and every talked-about podcast, to dress well, to present yourself well, to attend every party. To be consistent in general.
What children say and do can only be said and done with the approval, tacit or otherwise, of adults.
For me personally, everything I do, I’m doing it because I love it—desperately, wholeheartedly love it. That is where that motivation comes from. I think a lot of people sometimes are chasing a career, a path, or a creative platform because they see everyone is doing it, not because they’re actually interested in the good, the bad, and the ugly that comes with it.
I stay motivated because it’s the only thing I love. I make time for it. I make time to learn and I make time to grow and to get better at this thing that I say I love so much.
I think the only way I can get inspired is just by seeing the world.
It’s asking myself at the end of the day, if I am just me separate from my job, do I feel happy? Do I feel loved? Do I have community? Are the people in my life supporting me a hundred percent? Are the co-workers and the colleagues that I keep in my inner circle, are they speaking highly of me? Are they fighting for me in the rooms that I’m not in?
You can be healthy and doing OK in America but you’re always just one bad accident away from bankruptcy, one denial of service away from dying from a totally preventable illness. That is an injustice that has been metabolized to a violent end result. You cannot reason away rage. It finds a way out of you.
I have an amazing career. I have a wonderful group of friends. I have a beautiful home, family, and sense of self worth. But I do not have it all. And I do not feel fulfilled, because, I want, so badly, to meet my person and start a family. I sometimes worry that it won’t happen for me “in time.”
Like so many things in life, love is all about timing. When it finally happens, you can look back and see why it unfolded at that moment and not years earlier when you wanted it so desperately. In the end, it’s not something we control.
From my mother I learned that truth is bendable, that what you wish is every bit as real as what you are.
-Lauren Slater
I went into the woods a lot that summer. The woods were cool, and I could close my eyes, and if colors came when the birds cooed or the oak trees creaked, I didn’t have to worry; I could drift. And if the colors didn’t come, and the world smelled only of itself, then I could play. I found toads in those woods, and Indian arrowheads. I cut a worm in half and made two words. I got blood beneath my fingernails and bird dirt on my palms.
-Lauren Slater
Even before the smells and sights and, later, the terrible slamming seizures, even before all this, my mother thought I was doomed, which, in her scheme of things, was much better than being mediocre. I was disobedient and careless, I climbed with boys, I ran with boys, and where, she wanted to know, where would this end?
-Lauren Slater
Filthy, she would say like a hungry person pronounces chocolate, brothel she would say, like, well, like someone longing for and scared of sex.
-Lauren Slater
This is what I remember best about Barbados. The sugarcane. Everywhere we drove there were fields and fields of it, stalks harvested under hot sun by men with small machetes. Chop chop. Castles of sugar and sweat. The sun always shone, except for the squalls that scrabbled across the sky, opened up on us, and then departed, leaving the sugar mounds damp and pooled in places. I loved those hills of sugar. There, the fear went away. Wet from the ocean, wet from sweat, I rolled in the mounds and came to her like candy.
-Lauren Slater
I hate to say it, it’s so politically incorrect, but I think if he’d been brutish, my father, she may have learned to love him.
-Lauren Slater
Slowly, my mother turned, opened her eyes. She seemed to be entirely awake, as though she’d been waiting for me. She seemed monstrous. She did not say a word. Just saw me standing there and stared, and stared, as if to say, “So now you see,” and I, well, I stepped back.
-Lauren Slater
I cannot help but think the smells have significance; we smell what we want, or cannot allow ourselves to want; we smell our own stink, we smell our sin, we smell the tang of an unspoken hope.
-Lauren Slater
I was not a girl at all, but a marionette, and some huge hand—my mother’s hand?—held me up, and for a reason I absolutely could not predict, that hand might let the strings go slack, oh, God.
-Lauren Slater
Sometimes I wanted to go and live in a place apart forever, a place where I could roll around in the dirt and lick things.
-Lauren Slater
I felt everything turn to dust in me.
-Lauren Slater
I became the body to be seen. Understand? I was ashamed.
-Lauren Slater
Those days, I cried easily and a lot. My skin felt tender to the touch.
-Lauren Slater
I did everything I could to be good.
-Lauren Slater
For me, adolescent years were not about ripening. Instead, I felt used up and dependent. If others did not admire me, I thought I would disappear.
-Lauren Slater
A home has many purposes, but it should primarily be a place where you can cry and run a good fever.
-Lauren Slater
Things become addictions for no good reason except that you started them.
-Lauren Slater
The rest of the world began to feel far away, a land I no longer knew how to live in. I felt bad for everyone in this land, and I looked at them with scorn.
-Lauren Slater
The sun was a gem in the sky. The trees were all emerald that afternoon.
-Lauren Slater
That night, I dreamt of his hands.
-Lauren Slater
We fucked the whole time. I brought him my new stories, all ten of them. He read one, we fucked, he read another, we fucked again, until we’d fucked ten times over the course of the weekend. It was hard, therefore, not to make the Pavlovian association between words and love.
-Lauren Slater
Having known the completeness of connection, how horrid and bright we were, I wanted nothing less.
-Lauren Slater
What, I wondered, would fill the silence, the space in me? What would make me real? I had tried stealing, sickness, the lovely links of language, none of it worked. I needed something more direct, like life support. Hook me up, please. Put me on a breathing machine, pump me full of fresh oxygen, fresh bags of blood, dialysis, cardiac cuffs, my heart has stopped. I need resuscitation.
-Lauren Slater
Everyone knows that a lot of memoirs have made-up scenes; it’s obvious. And everyone knows that half the time at least fictions contain literal autobiographical truths. So how do we decide what’s what, and does it even matter?
-Lauren Slater
Sometimes, my confusions tire and depress me so much, I want to sleep forever.
-Lauren Slater
Sometimes your body just took over, your body told the truth, unalterable, essential, clenched.
-Lauren Slater
How odd that we are at once tethered to the truth of our bodies and yet, at the same time, utterly free to sculpt ourselves.
-Lauren Slater
Is metaphor in memoir, in life, an alternate form of honesty or simply an evasion? This is what I want to know.
-Lauren Slater
Depression came back. I filled my mouth with butter cookies.
-Lauren Slater
Inside of me, my heart crashed off a cliff again and again; girl gone, Gomorrah.
-Lauren Slater
My whole life has been a seizure, I have a fitful, restless brain, I feel I have several selves.
-Lauren Slater
I went outside. I walked far, far into a field. I had anger in me. I had no facts, only fictions.
-Lauren Slater
What matters in knowing and telling yourself is not the historical truth, which fades as our neurons decay and stutter, but the narrative truth, which is delightfully bendable and politically powerful.
-Lauren Slater
We seem to be rapidly tipping toward a much dumber culture, a culture that both rewards ignorance and has no idea of its ignorance.
What’s new in these weird giggling void-days after Trump’s second victory is the absolute happy ignorance, and the ignorance of ignorance. I don’t think shame is an ideal motivator, especially when it comes to education: but it’s weird that there’s no shame here. In fact, the shame is getting directed the other way: aren’t you the asshole for bringing it up? Aren’t you just making normal (a.k.a. stupid but it’s rude to say it) people feel bad?
A desire to make art for the sake of art has become a foreign concept. Obviously in 2024 and beyond, the point of making things is solely to be rich and famous; and the point of being rich and famous is to be richer and more famous. This country has a fatal case of winner psychosis. It has no idea it’s even sick.
Arguments in favor of of “useless” cultural knowledge—or at least the kind of knowledge that isn’t instantly transferrable into direct marketable skills—usually end up grounding themselves in usefulness anyway: i.e., you need to know the basics of what the Odyssey is about or what Orion looks like in case you’re in an important social situation and it comes up, and you don’t want to be embarrassed. But these arguments are as dead as higher education and the concept of shame itself. It’s no longer an advantage to know these things, or rather, it’s a disadvantage to know them as anything other than widgets you could maybe use someday. The point of education has become, at best, networking and management training.
I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything.
I think we’re all just collections of previous selves, each version containing traces of who we used to be, but fundamentally changed by every encounter, every tragedy, and every moment of joy. The people we choose to love leave their marks on us and change us, until we wake up one day and realize we don’t recognize the voices we’re speaking with, at least not fully.
The way I know I truly care about and love someone is when I choose to love them over and over again, throughout all the different versions of themselves they become, without a second thought.
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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