inlooking #009: Essays from the future
20220818: a lighthouse, junk, great bad songs
It’s summer. We are holidaying once more at the lake. So this one may very well be short. Although I need to tell you about a great bad 80s song, so do read on.
Wilderness once again
Woolf once again
Junk journeys
Essay futures
Outlines
VT
I write you having recently returned from the Adirondacks, where, it has been said, people used to eat trees.
Also again, I’ll be running my book club on a book I love, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. (Register here. Class runs Sept. 6 thru Oct. 4.) This slim novel is so incredibly rich, I am looking forward to moving through it again in community with a group of interested readers. When I taught this a year ago, we had such a great range of people, from a teenager who’d never read Woolf before to people with far deeper knowledge than my own, and everything in between. It made for a really rewarding conversation, and I am looking forward to gathering another such multifarious group for this year’s read. Registration starts at $75 (or contact me if you’re in need of a discount). Join us!
Sailing along
The latest in our You Are Here series for Alta Journal is up. This month it’s Rita Chang-Eppig with a moving piece about family, home, Chinese junk ships, and the Cultural Revolution. It’s been a great privilege to get to edit these pieces (previous numbers have appeared here, here, and here), in which writers reflect on ideas of place and stories of places in and around the western U.S. There are some great pieces lined up for the rest of the summer as well, and beyond, so stay tuned.
Bracketing
In more essay news from the future, I’m particularly excited (stoked would be the technical term) to be participating in the 2023 marchxness tournament. If you’re not familiar with marchxness, it can be summed up as a March Madness-style essay competition featuring writing about pop songs. Each year has a different theme. Recent themes have included March Sadness (sad songs), March Badness (bad songs), March Shredness (metal), and March Vladness (goth).
The competition works like the NCAA tournament: Each of 64 writers chooses a different song and writes an essay about it. Songs and essays are paired against each other in a tournament-style bracket (like the one below from March Plaidness—grunge, natch), and each week, readers vote on which song+essay combo should advance to the next round. It’s a lot of fun, and a great way to read some great essays on some great songs (or not-so-great songs, depending on the theme).
For 2023, the theme is March Fadness—one-hit wonders from the 1980s—so there are sure to be some fantastic entries, many of which will be especially meaningful to you if you, like me, have achieved A Certain Age. I’m really excited about the song I’ll be writing about: Talk Talk’s It’s My Life. While this is certainly not anywhere near one of the best songs of the 80s, it did open the door on Talk Talk and Mark Hollis’s journey to a couple of the most interesting and idiosyncratic albums of the period, which I am hoping to be able to bring into the piece. So get your voting fingers ready—although you won’t need them for another six or seven months, to be sure.
Lakeside reading
On our summer sojourn last year, I read Rachel Cusk’s book of essays, Coventry. I really loved this book. I love that Cusk writes at length, and wanders as lyrically as she likes around her topics. Books like this help provide a model for my own work, which is one of the most important reasons we read, as writers. This year I picked up the first of her trilogy of novels, Outline, and I am happy to report I was just as pleased and impressed with her fiction as with her nonfiction. There is something about the way Cusk works that is both spare and lush at the same time. We get these deep impressions of the people and places from which the text is woven, but in terms of both plot and subtext or theme, we are led only very lightly along our journey. It strikes me that this kind of writing honors the reader and doesn’t so much ask a lot of them as it does credit them with the ability to make meaning for themselves. I read the book in a day, and the only reason I didn’t immediately pick up Transit was that I couldn’t find it at the bookstore near where we were staying in Vermont that week.
Speaking of Vermont, I leave you with this thread (click below) of songs about the state. Enjoy!
Til next time,
Wallace