A short offering, because I’m needing to retrieve a cake out of the oven, and I’ve only just read down to the part of the recipe that says ‘allow to cool in the pan set on a wire rack for one hour’ which is unfortunate in that this is an hour I did not allow for when arranging to meet friends with the aforementioned cake. Likely, I will walk with it on the wire rack, in its tin, through town and along the river and across the bridge and up the hill, and receive some odd looks along the way—or looks of longing as I anticipate it smelling particularly appealing.
I’m thinking about how it is a perpetual strangeness that you can look at something, or someone, believing you know what it, or they, look(s) like, but to return half a day or even half an hour later means it, or they, can be not at all how you remembered.
The spring 2024 issue of Orion Magazine will soon be with us, which means another edition of my ‘Root Catalog’ column, and in the meantime there are some beautiful pieces from the winter issue available to read online.
This upcoming column is about birds within Finnic mythology, and the habits we somehow hold on to. While I often post excerpts, sometimes the entire piece, in this newsletter, subscribing to the print edition of Orion is where they are best read—you’ll find me on p.96.
“The stretch of birds in Finnic mythology is long, their feathery roles as messengers, harbingers, and soul-carriers running backwards like sinew to the first person who suspected that a goldfinch knew better. It reassures me that all birds were thought to migrate every winter to a place where the earth and sky met, the lintukoto, literally “bird-home,” a place of bliss where bird souls were reinvigorated before they brought back the warmth and sun to the world in spring.”
Birds aside, my latest book proposal (loosely related is the fact that this year will be 10 years since Lost in Translation was first published) is out and about with potential editors, and I’m hoping for good news on that front in the next while.
At some stage soon I’ve also got a sizeable work update involving Orion Magazine, an update that is now happening much more quickly than expected—more on this in coming weeks.
THIS WEEK I FELL IN LOVE WITH:
Images by the singular Mexican photographer Lola Álvarez Bravo (1907–1993).
“I had a strange need for something and I didn’t know what it was. I was in intense rebellion against certain things that they thought I should do… They thought I would respond to a predetermined social plan. But I felt a strange rebelliousness. I wanted to be something…”
(Álvarez Bravo speaking to Olivier Debroise in 1979)
“The Greeks have a word, parapono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labors, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through in the moonlight.”
— Maggie Anderson, Heart Labor
“They called the screaming devastation
that they created the rubble.
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?”
— June Jordan, Apologies to All the People in Lebanon
“A body is a slow time machine.”
— Hazel Jane Plante, Any Other City
Paid supporters receive several additional posts each month, including things like short stories, longer illustrated essays, and more detailed looks into creative processes. Companion Piece for No.225 is the latest of these paid posts:
