Edification – Newsletter #108 – November 4, 2022
Dear Friend,
I am here. I am still on Twitter, teetering on what is being described as a large sinkhole. But I built a house there and filled it will a lot of my personal junk, and I’m nailing up plywood to keep the animals out.
I know about collapse. The house I grew up in is caving in, too. The dining room floor is a hole over a basement full of sludge. The staircase slid out in one big piece and toppled into the front hallway. The rock chimney toppled into my parents’ bedroom. Not that anyone has lived there for a long time. My dad’s dead; my mom just wants to have the place demolished with all the rest of their stuff inside. She hasn’t been back to even look at it in months. We have to tear it down before some teenager crawls in and gets crushed, she says. Grief is paralyzing. Anomie is a killer.
Social media is a time suck. I’ve been trying to read more books lately. How about you? What are you reading? Currently I’m reading Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison, which is liberating, since, if you know me, I have been bucking against the Aristotelian narrative arc since I could buck. Not sure the liberation of this bronco is going to get me any closer to a book deal, though. I feel the publishing industry is not keen on deliberately “meandering” in lieu of saving cats.
However, I also just read On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, a novel by poet Ocean Vuong along with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which not only do not follow the traditional arc form but were also greatly lauded for their surprising departures and dazzling line-level writing. Thus hope for my own poetically inclined prose springs eternal! (Hope and denial have so much in common. I am nothing if not stubborn.)
Let me not belabor this. I wanted to send out a message here to let you know I’m here, I want to communicate. I do not enjoy feeling like a hostage to social media billionaires. But this is the world we live in. Tell me something good.
Talk soon,
Edie
P.S.
I’ve had two American sentence poems nominated for Best Of The Net!
“Truck Stops of America” in LEON Literary Review, June 2022
“American Wisdom” in Atlas & Alice, May 2022
Meander all you want. I think it’s lovely.
Thanks for your post! I've just joined substack and am hoping to connect with more writers here so I subscribed to Edification. It is so sad what's happening on Twitter, but I believe our community will survive. We just need to do a little work to find each other out here in the wild.