Hello, all and happy spring to those who celebrate! Here in Wisconsin we’re experiencing a second bout of winter with more than one snowy day over the past week (and hearty snowflakes falling from the sky as I type this), but I’m taking the fact that Lake Monona is fully melted as a good sign. I’ve just eased back into Madison life after spending a week at home in New York. Being able to be away from everything has made me realize how intense of a pace I was going at prior to going home. Upon my return on Tuesday, I’ve been the complete picture of Exhaustion: after getting home from work on Wednesday, I promised myself that I’d lay down for 20 minutes before going to the grocery store… Dear reader, I woke up 2.5 hours later and still haven’t gotten around to this one errand. I’m down to my last can of soup from wisdom tooth surgery and one bag of Goldfish I packed for the plane ride back.
That being said, this week’s newsletter is going to be pretty short. Instead of including an essay, I’m going to share the top 5 essays I consumed over the past two weeks and encourage you to check them out! I contemplated trying to crank something out for the sake of meeting my self-imposed newsletter deadline, but in honor of the classes I taught this week on Audre Lorde’s idea of revolutionary self care and for my own self preservation (graduation is officially a month and a half away!), I want to use this time of rest as an opportunity to amplify others’ work and give y’all some recs!
THE WEEK IN GRATITUDE
I spent the last week at home with friends and family and let me tell ya: teaching from your childhood bedroom is a weird experience. I’m lucky that my teaching team decided to do the week after spring break virtually—instead of 80 college-aged kids up my butt, I had one very energetic and car-obsessed four year old to keep me busy. It’s equal parts heartbreaking and the most wonderful gift to see how fast and complexly Rei is growing up, and I treasure each day I get to witness all of the inner workings of his silly beautiful mind. I was almost surprised by how pleasant my stay was—between spending time with Rei, my brother, and reconnecting with my other cousin—and grew kind of nostalgic for home in a way that I don’t usually get. Home and coming back to it is always shifting and I feel like I leave learning something new every time.
The girlbossification of Rodlyn-mae Banting has been an exhausting endeavor but I must say that doing really well on interviews is a really rewarding feeling. Do I dream of labor? Absolutely not, but it’ll be nice once I know what my next steps forward post-graduation look like and I’m not floating in the fretting abyss of The Total Unknown. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what kinds of jobs will also protect the creative energies I need to pursue my own work, and that’s been a huge factor in making those decisions. Hopefully I’ll have a fun and exciting announcement soon enough!
Going to social events IRL is still taking some getting used to, especially if said event is being attended by every writer ever to grace the small lake town that is Madison, WI. Two weeks ago I was able to cheer on my dear friend Mishka Ligot at the very first post-lockdown Monsters of Poetry event where he read his poetry along with four other local writers. Besides the extreme social anxiety and starstruck-ness, it was a really fun and energizing night filled with great talent.
A Mad Pwets reunion at the Monsters of Poetry reading
POEM OF THE WEEK
Over the past few months, I’ve been equally daunted and excited by the Very Big Adult Steps that I’ll be taking in a few months. After the small and grueling detour that was grad school, I’m back to working a full-time big girl job and my boyfriend and I just recently signed a lease for the apartment we’re going to move into together this summer. While I’m looking forward to both of these things, I can’t help but feel like they are the beginning of the rest of my life, which feels both irreversible and restricting (even though in my moments of clarity, I know this isn’t true). I’m scared to fall into various “ruts” that plague adulthood and stability and hope that I can hold onto the passion and dynamism of youth. I think Linda Gregg captures the other side of the threshold with peace and subdued anxiety perfectly in the poem below, titled “Adult.”
TOP FIVE ESSAYS FROM THE LAST TWO WEEKS
“What White Men Say in Our Absence” by Elaine Hsieh Chou was published right around the first anniversary of the Atlanta Spa Shootings. It was a hard read, especially because of how much time I’ve spent both studying the phenomenon of and actually loving white men. Chou points to fresh ideas of the power and hatred that broods in the wake of absence and what it means to bear witness to your own verbal annihilation.
“The Anxiety of Influencers” by Barrett Swanson is equal parts tantalizing, hilarious, and horrifying. I was lucky enough to hear him read excerpts of it on stage at the Monsters of Poetry reading and let me tell you that the crowd was roaring with laughter. Swanson does an impeccable job of capturing the horror and wonder that is the TikTok house phenomenon out in LA with searing wit and a gift for capturing others’ essence. I’d carve out some time to read this one because while long, it is 1000% worth it.
“A Savanna Winter: Where the Future Becomes the Past” by Sam Harrington possesses a sense of place that I greatly admire and don’t know that I’ve ever successfully delivered in my own writing. Writing about the oak trees native to southern Wisconsin, Harrington practices both the acts of listening to and honoring nature. By tapping into Indigenous ways of knowing that are rooting in eradicating the divide between human and non-human, Harrington illuminates the ways in which oak trees possess history and wisdom. Read the essay to learn more about the centuries-long stories of our local nature and the urgency of oak savanna restoration.
“Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex,” by Melissa Febos, and the book that it comes from, Body Work, came to me at a time where I was terrified that I am only good at writing the same thing over and over. As many of you may know, I feel most comfortable and excited by writing love poetry, which for many reasons (all gendered and externally imposed), hinders me from taking myself seriously as a writer. I don’t know if I came to this book of craft wanting to be assuaged or challenged, but I can say that this essay was successful in doing both. Taking up the topic of the “sex scene,” this essay is both a defense of a cliché and an insistence on the many ways it can be made anew.
A Burst of Light by Audre Lorde is a collection of essays that was written after she learned that her breast cancer had metastasized. Lorde writes about how she navigated a medical industrial complex that has historically treated Black women very poorly, as well as her hopes for the future. Rethinking how self-care can go beyond the individual, Lorde writes about the great revolutionary potential that it holds—not only in helping one another survive, but in how we might be able to build better futures if we employ self-care for non-capitalist ends.
That poem was just what was needed!