round-up: 9/03
reading recs, quotations, opportunities, tweets, & more
Happy Saturday, all!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
Reading recs
Quotations
Opportunities
Tweets
Housekeeping:
Once again, my heat press is still at my parents’ house, so I’m selling some silly little shirts etc. online now to, uh, pay my rent. T-shirts are just $15!
And, as always, you can buy zines right here.
To read:
Quotations:
cline looked at the possibility of a woman being sexually interested in another woman and flinched. a lot of cline’s fiction seems to be about flinching.
I think of novel writing as almost like surgery—the stakes are very high—and I think of stories more like acupuncture. It’s working with smaller currents of energy. It’s more subtle, it’s more ambient, at least for me. Stories often come for me out of a single image, or a dynamic, or a setting. I find that their origin is much more of a singular image. With novels, you’re just juggling an entire world and it can sometimes feel more like a math problem, or keeping all these balls in the air and trying to figure out how this world is going to be braided together, and how to manage large swaths of time—years, decades. Stories are so much more circumscribed, which for me has been really a pleasure, just to dwell in these granular moments.
What to disclose. What to keep to myself. And I’m trying to learn that some secrets are good to keep, some vulnerabilities my own, but also that just because I feel shame doesn’t mean its mine. I’m too good at attuning to other people’s emotions, mirroring them, managing them, taking them on as mine to solve. It was how I survived childhood, but it is not something I am trying to keep as an adult.
Care—the act of it, beauty as a method of it—it is my foundation. It is the spine of me.
We could not bring ourselves to touch for weeks. To not be able to get comfort from each other. Another ugliness I don’t have the words for.
I am not a content creator. I am a writer.
Growth isn’t pleasant all the time and it is often an unfamiliar, alienating event. There is mourning to do.
Your desires, whether or not you achieve them, will determine who you become.
-Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
Life is short. / But desire, desire is long.
-Jane Hirshfield, “Heat”
Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know that our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.
-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven
That which is holy and sacred is not some other thing apart from us, but is made through us: the breath of the living.
I read the words slowly, as if each syllable effectuated a gravitational pull of the tide, bringing me out to sea and back to lap at the shore.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
Sometimes I get bored and cold. The forest doesn’t care.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
I am always crumbling and reemerging from the sediment.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
At the very moment itself your pulse is keeping your body time, making its vibrations in the blood vessels, the fibers and neurons, your very own chemical biology. Even now as you sleep my fingers pulse and I am reassured. Your body is breathing. Your animal flesh is warm and I don’t wish to leave you.
-Vanessa Holyoak, I See More Clearly in the Dark
Opportunities:
This is not the best-paying job, but it could be fun for someone in undergrad:
EastOver Press, “an independent literary press with an online journal named Cutleaf,” is advertising for a Social Media Coordinator. “We offer $20 per hour for up to 6 hours of work per week, to a max of $480 per month.” No deadline indicated.
Also (with thanks to Erika Dreifus):
THE FORGE FLASH PROSE COMPETITIONS
Submissions: September 1-14 (or once they reach a cap). Note: “The fee-free entries are capped at 100 pieces per category. If you are comfortably able to afford the fee, please leave the free submission slots for those who are not.” Prizes: “In 2023, the first-place winners [flash fiction and flash nonfiction] will be awarded $1,000.00 (writers who reside outside the United States must be able to receive payment via PayPal) and publication.”
Tweets:
Have a great week—
& look at this gorgeous cat:
