READ ALL ABOUT IT
Since 2012, I’ve been writing about books. And the act of reading. And the importance of story and narrative. But, mostly, the underlying theme of all I write is how taking a moment to stop and digest some longform text — instead of scrolling, instead of watching a video, instead of multitasking — can be one of the most grounding things we can do for ourselves. Here’s the one-stop online home for all this writing.
You can read more about me and my work by moseying over here. Want to peruse periodic “essay drops” — excerpts from my work-in-progress essay collection about Homesickness? Here ya go.
We Need Some Wendell Berry About Now
Lordy, I feel like we all need some Wendell Berry about now.
Modern Maisons and Old Address Books
I came across this Carson McCullers gem today:
“There’s nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.”
Sentimental Value and Buildings as Archives
When I tell you that I truly did gasp when this scene appeared as we were watching Sentimental Value…
A Luxurious Desk in Dalkey
Oh, this ol’ thang? I’m sitting at this desk that we bought at the Dublin IKEA after moving from NYC.
Building Thoreau’s Cabin
Front page of Sunday’s NYT: “They’re Not Alone in Copying Thoreau’s Cabin in the Woods.” Henry David Thoreau and his Walden cabin are as American as it gets. Rugged individualism? Check. Pioneering spirit? Check. Having to tell everyone about it? Check. (Just kidding…maybe?)
The Debut of a New Little Free Library
Stick Season is the worst. (Apologies to Noah Kahan, but it’s true.) But thanks to Matt, something cheery popped up in our sparse-looking yard today.
Snowy Day Book Club for 1
Snowy Sunday Book Club: “En Sueño” by Sandra Dooley, featuring a pensive + relaxed woman looking up from her book and staring right back at me as I do the same.
ee cummings + visual poetry
E.E Cummings (or e e cummings if you wish) + his visual poetry, the formatting of which Instagram can *almost* handle:
[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
State of Wonder: A Posture for a New Year
When you scan the books scattered among the shelves for something
— you haven’t yet read
— isn’t anything like this collection of autofiction* that all at once became ready to pick up at the library and is now accumulating on your side of the bed
January Justification
“January needed some justification for its existence, didn’t it?”
A New Office
December 22 seems like a terrible, set-yourself-up-for-disappointment kind of day to try to pound out something worthwhile, but cheers to a space that is truly m*i*n*e* (and finally somewhat organized).
Reading Got Matt a Job
Here’s a little story about how a book played a part in my husband’s career trajectory. Yes, my husband MATT who doesn’t read books. (Except for RAWTS and btw, we have a new selection but it’s gonna have to wait until 2026: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.)
The House Shelters Daydreaming
Here’s a text I received from my dad the other day. My parents are in the middle of a road trip to Northern California — a bit of a John Steinbeck pilgrimage. But they first travelled due west and stopped in Los Angeles, they city they moved to after they were married and also the city where I was born. They lived in a few rentals here and there before purchasing their first home, pictured. Yet I imagine each of the homes leading up to this house on stilts held daydreams…because daydreams don’t require ownership, just an imagination.
“I want to find a book that will give me hope.”
I’m rounding out my bi-monthly volunteer shift at my local Habitat ReStore, where I shelve books in the adjacent used bookstore/cafe. Those words stream quietly — and maybe even apologetically — from someone who, I could tell, has been treated very unkindly by this world.
Past the Present
I keep a 65-pages-and-counting Word doc where I jot down notable quotes from books I’m reading. It’s only for library books — otherwise, I’m a write (right?)-in-the-book annotator. (Sorry, not interested in apps that claim to make this process easier, esp if there’s a “social”/sharing component.)
The Ease I Feel
“And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end.” These are the words that Claire Keegan gives to the narrator — a young Irish girl sent to live with distant relatives — in Foster. The girl is in the middle of a gaggle of siblings, and the reader guesses that it is the imminent arrival of yet another baby that prompts the girl’s migration from a chaotic home with hints of trouble to the tidy, childfree Kinsella home where she is told to “make [herself] at home.”
Obsessed With Home
Obsessions go hard, I guess. It’s not a shocker that I’m obsessed with the idea of home — and, specifically, that complex feeling of homesickness, which is its flipside I suppose. Matt and I are just about done emptying the house that will be undergoing a big ol’ renovation, and today I came across a box of all my old clips from the Tufts Observer. Here’s the first thing I ever wrote for the publication where I eventually creeped my way up to Editor-in-Chief. Color me surprised. (Not at all.) I didn’t know what I was writing, really; I just knew that my background and points of reference were a little different from the throngs of students mostly from NJ, NY, MA, and sometimes CT, so I guess I needed to get pen to paper to make sense of that somehow. The specter hanging over all this wondering via simplistic writing was my parents’ cross-country move to Washington, DC right before I wrote this. (ie Where is home?!?!)
Who’s a Critic?
Latest pet interest = criticism. As in literary criticism, not me rolling my eyes at that weird thing you said. (Am I projecting on myself??) It started with me re-discovering the work of Stanley Fish, whose book Is There a Text in this Class? helped provide the framework for my masters thesis so long ago. I then read Claire Dederer’s much-lauded Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, an exploration of how to reconcile liking good art created by people who have done really not-good things (i.e. Woody Allen) that partly — and perceptively — shifts into how Dederer approaches her career as a critic. (In a nutshell, “…a never-ending flow of judgement, which nestles together with subjectivity.”)
A State of Becoming
“We carry around ideas of people in our heads, fixed ideas of their character and firm predictions of how they’ll behave, what they’ll say before the hour is up and the facial expressions they’ll make that will unaccountably get under our skin. We tell stories about them that never vary, never improve, then confirm that our ideas are accurate every time we get reacquainted.” – from A Calling for Charlie Barnes, by Joshua Ferris. (I read this book at the very end of 2021 and I think I’d add it to my “gobble up” list too. I’ll share my wayback post about it in stories..)
Truro Dune Shacks
See that little speck? It’s one of the famous dune shacks in Truro on Cape Cod; this one, I learned, is where Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire.
