Reality was the theme of English class my junior year of high school. Organic reality versus manufactured reality versus hyperreality. Is something real because you’ve experienced it? Because it looks/feels/smells/tastes just like that other thing, the one you know is real? Is it real because the New York Times said so? Because Brietbart said so? […]
A few weeks ago, I finally made it to David Bowie Is, at the Brooklyn Museum (the first time I tried to go, the Saturday after it opened, there was a five! hour! wait! (not ideal when you’re carting around a baby)). The exhibit is a full-stop audio-visual spectacle, part documentary, part concert, part bohemian […]
I love Man Repeller‘s monthly Writers Club prompts — they’re a good exercise even when I don’t come up with anything worth sending in. Last month’s was a fan letter; I addressed mine to Shirley Jackson (whose ability to write in her head continues to amaze and inspire me). Dear Shirley Jackson, I first read the […]
I found out I was pregnant the day I got back from Portugal. As a result, the trip holds a special sort of poignancy, fine and silken and sun-bleached. While my pregnancy was its own sort of slow, that vacation was the last times in my life I was ever truly languid. It was also […]
Thoughts about space and work — specifically creative work — have been bounding in and out of my head since the fall, when I came across and plowed through Shirley Jackson’s two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Jackson is best known for her short story “The Lottery,” wherein Rockwellian pastoral cedes, with […]
I went to see the new Emily Dickinson exhibit at the Morgan this morning. I’ve liked Emily Dickinson since I was a child, without knowing more than the most famous of her poems. I read and reread Michael Bedard and Barbara Cooney’s picture book about her, and the little girl who spotted the train of […]
