Briana Wall

Hyde might call a Maiden Funeral a form of “active forgetting”—an intentional and respectful loosening of one’s grip on the past in favor of embracing the present. In this light, I wonder if the anxiety I experienced on my final day in London was my subconscious reckoning with the fact that I was trying to move forward by going back, by refusing to... See more

I’m often asked how I organize my days and I wish I had a great answer to offer, where I demonstrated writerly discipline and a well-organized day. Alas. Most weeks, I look at my calendar and I want to vomit at all the pastel shades filling up the blank canvas of each day. On Monday afternoons, I teach. Sometimes, I am in back-to-back meetings for ... See more

I think there were eight or ten approved and scheduled at the time of the cancellations. Communities rallied and I did a couple things for free and they all happened. Moving forward I think there will be challenges but I’m fortunate to have a newsletter audience who is very generous and seem committed to keeping me on the road doing what I do. That... See more

The inexplicability of the gut is probably why some people talk about it as if it’s mystical. But I think what we experience as a “gut feeling” is simply us at our most honest—proof that some tucked-away part of our brain remembers everything, not just what we want to remember, knows what’s true instead of what we want to be true, and understands w... See more

A CLOSER READ

Taking Offense

Reading through bad feeling

Garth Greenwell

Louisa Clement, Skin Interlacion 18, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Eigen + Art Gallery

I CAME TO ALL of Jane Austen’s novels late, and to Persuasion particularly so, finally discovering it in a graduate seminar on the long eighteenth century. By that time, I had fallen in love with... See more