October Newsletter!

Hello hello!! If you’re new to the newsletter, welcome! Below, you’ll find some updates, some recommendations, and some insight into my writing life. Always feel free to reach out on Instagram if you have any questions for me about writing or reading or translation or anything else!

These are snippets from my blog posts on Patreon. Feel free to explore those memberships at the link below:

Writing Life Updates

The Novel. I truly cannot express how much just how 'in the home stretch' I am of this thing. The novel should be finished by the end of November (maybe before???) then I'll take the month of December off from it. January, I can start in on revising, which I have never done before on such a large scale. Wish me luck, etc.

Recommendations

Books

• The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein is the first Ferrante I read, and while I know that everyone is obsessed with the tetraology, I think this is such an excellent book! Coming of age books can feel so unoriginal, but this one really captures something about what it's like to grow up as a girl. It's a great book.

• My Heart Hemmed In by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump is a very strange, weirdly visceral book. It almost has a speculative quality to it, even though it's so grounded. I definitely recommend this if you're looking for something a little disturbing.

Song

• "H.O.O.D" by Kneecap is a song I found because of the movie Kneecap, a fictionalized account of how this rap group from Northern Ireland came to be and how they're aggressively anti-British messages and rapping in Gaelic made them infamous. If you're in to hip-hop/rap this is definitely worth checking out, and if you're not, you should track down the movie (probably streaming on MUBI soon). It's excellent.

In Depth Review

Keeping with last months theme, I'm doing another book that's had a huge influence on my writing, which is Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. The influence has been mostly indirect, as far as what I'm aware of consciously, but who knows if its seeped its way into my writing subconsciously.

The premise of this book is pretty simple--Marco Polo is sitting down with the Khan, head of the Mongolian empire, and telling him about his travels. But these moments of discussion are only small snippets. The majority of the book is taken up by the descriptions of the cities, all with female names, and all categorized by odd descriptors: memory, desire, signs, eyes, just to name a few.

Behind the Scenes

If this thing had a title (instead of just the dates) I'd call it 'How I stole my outline from Italo Calvino.' Specifically, I 'stole' it from Invisible Cities.

Calvino was part of a tradition of combinatory literature, which borrowed from other disciplines in order to create literature. As far as I've understood, Calvino borrowed from math a lot. Invisible Cities, apparently, was written as a polyhedron, which is a three dimensional shape. I'm not sure what he means by that? But I suppose my book is also, technically, a polyhedron, since I've adopted his structure.

Forgotten Holler, my current work in progress, is going to be a non-linear novel.

Want to see snippets from my work-in-progress? Subscribe to my Patreon for free below!

Love and gratitude, friends. See you next month.