Read more

dear ones, wrote this in 2022 & got way too many “special rejections” for it to count (from the biggies might i add—god it’s like they just want to make out with my writing a little or at most feel it up but never go to 4th base) . There are still places I’ll submit it to. But, for now, I want it out in the world, and since there’s over 8000 of you subscribed to this newsletter i feel like more folks will read it here than in most literary magazines, though if any editor is subscribed and wants to publish it, lmk so I can send you a special rejection :)

Read more

Subscribe now

What is an MFA?

It’s a collection of letters. Okay, well, they represent the Master of Fine Arts. Which begs the question—I know we’re all thinking it—what are the unfine arts!

Would plumbing classify as an unfine art? I don’t know, friends, without indoor plumbing we’d all still be wandering the villages with our lanterns looking for reasonably snake-free pits to shit in. So, I’d probably label plumbing as the finest of the arts in that sense.1

Fine. MFA is a master of fine arts and let’s just decide together right now that in this scenario we mean to refer to the arts as writing, reading, scultping, drawing, painting, wooof…this is already getting too long. You know what, fuck the painters2, we just care about writing around here.

Okay, so the MFA in Writing, in, wait for it, creative writing (because ain’t nobody calling ad copy fine like that), is the name of the game here. And how does one master such a fine art as creative writing?3

(I hope you’re not reading the footnotes.4)

The apparently traditional way to acquire an MFA is to read a lot of books, write at least one of them, and talk about all your reading and writing in between5 to other people who are doing the same thing as you, apparently.

I have…some problems with this traditional way. One might even say I…take issues with the traditional way that run beyond the rational. And yet, I am also a creature of cultivated boredom, which is to say I try to actively feel bored with things that ought to not interest me so that I may feel excited by things that serve my life’s purpose.

At one point in my life, I used to think it served my life’s purpose to become a master of fine arts in creative writing. Indeed, it was my grandfather’s dying wish that I get a PhD in Literature.6

I would say I’m sad that this won’t be a reality, but then…it’s not the truth. Because I have felt spurred of late to become exactly the person I was always meant to be. I am now embracing my delusions running headlong into the waters of literary self-study and esotric mysticism while I work on my magnum opus.7

How am I doing this? I’ll tell you. But why should I tell you? Well, maybe there are things in your life that you’ve always wanted to do and be but those things were kept behind a certain cascade of checkpoints whereupon at each step you were required to qualify yourself in a certain way before proceeding onto the next one.

I used to think going to university would be a way to step into the world prepared with a deeper grasp of how to acquire true knowledge, instead I ended up realizing that a university experience can just as well be a way to keep entering concentric circles of nescience.

So, we’re going to stop spiralling, and the only way to stop spiralling is to spiral the other way, but this time, moving back out, up, and away, and truly the way out, up, and away is one that is within, through, and right here.

You might think I’m joking when I say that I’m on a path to confer upon myself a PhD in Literary Mysticism, but I promise you this is not the case. Why can’t I do it? Who has decided that only some institution which is nothing but a collection of papers on a wall can decide to add three letters after my name?

And I don’t want you to joke about it either. I mean, whatever it is you want to do and be8, just pick it up like a feral kitten and nurture it until it becomes your familiar.

How to do this? The easiest way is to give yourself homework. Let’s backtrack to my grandfather real quick. For much of his life, he was a schoolteacher and then a school principal. He loved all the kinds of poets and writers you might imagine a literary grandfather might love. He took me to the library almost every day. He helped me memorize poems. And…he gave me homework. Outside of what I got from school. He taught me cursive penmanship, taught me spelling, mental math, made me write little essays and then longer ones about books I read, assigned me presentations to give to him about things I was interested in but also things I thought I could never care about, and I suppose…I’m realizing now, he gave me a classic education to the best of his ability.9

Though this education was interrupted due to immigration and black magic,10 I do feel he laid the groundwork for me to become a fucking certified genius the kind of independent thinker I’m happy I am today, and also someone who feels confident in educating herself, beyond the confines of dusty institutions.

How do I give myself homework then, without my Whitman-bearded grandpa? It’s harder than just wanting to break apart old traditions and ways of learning and being. Homework has such a bad rep, but homework is a beautiful thing. Homework is the work that happens after the labour extended within an institution, it is in a way an extension of said institution but also its own secret thing, a time and place for you to draw conclusions and unearth findings that might never have arisen within the institution.

And living in society is a kind of institutional contract. As much as I’d like to think myself some wild rule-eschewing mystic, you probably won’t catch me wandering naked through the streets shouting some obscure Leonard Cohen lyric at the top of lungs.11

As we work and labor and raise our children and pay our mortgages and steal away specks of time for ourselves and buy our groceries and find the best ways to crack our eggs and bang out Substack bangers like this one that no one will probably read, we live and breathe this societal institutionalized contract.

But the homework we give ourselves is private, it is an investment in our inner life, an enrichment of every small thought we thought we’d lost in the day, a nourishing of our innermost selves, the part that lives beyond our bodies, beyond what we look like or where we’re from, what our names are, even, dare I say, what we think we’re interested in.

Here are, then, a few ways to give yourself homework & master any art (fine or unfine):

• Read starting from a place of desire but allow those roots to grow unwieldy, for it is then they yield the best results. Which is to say, let your mind wander within the controlled space of another’s thoughts. And see what springs within your own mind as you do so. I firmly believe all roads lead back to the Supreme (however you conceive of this is fine by me even if it’s a celestial leviathan turd in the sea), and so, all thoughts and branches of thoughts, and thoughts of others, lead back to the Self, and this is where true mastery lives and wishes to return to.

• Write to the ones who call for you. I mean, they may not literally be calling for you, indeed they likely aren’t. But through their words or just their mere being, there are people out in this vast world of ours, that speak to us like the voice of God in the morning waking us up with a kiss and a glass of water. Write to them, if they’re alive.12 Pray to them, if they’re dead.

• Make meaning where perhaps you thought once there was none. In the Bhagavad-gita, there comes a point— a little past the middle—whereupon, after having described the manifestation of reality in a myriad of ways, Krishna appears to indicate to a bewildered Arjuna that the world, as a matter of fact, simply arises by chance! Oh! How astounding. The Supreme Soul declaring that all of this creation is an act of happenstance. How is an already confused, overwhelmed, exhausted Arjuna to find reprieve in such a thing, and indeed a thing that seems to go against much of the logic of what’s been spoken thus far. But oh, look, isn’t there beauty inherent when things that never happen…happen? And why can’t a thing of chance be also, simultaneously, a thing of blistering, flustering beauty? Is your life destined to be lost to the abyss of time? ARE YOU NOBODY! I AM NOBODY TOO! We shall perish in oblivion, maybe no one will remember our names even a week after we die. HOW JOYFUL, HOW WONDERFUL. Dare to make meaning in a world that says there is none. Strive to see the beauty in…it could be, it might be, it is, and maybe it is also not.

• Practically speaking, that translates to, in my opinion, allowing some magic into your life everyday. For me, lately, this has looked as simple as lighting a St. Michael blessed candle and writing an affirmation. That is part of my homework.

• And lastly, how to give your homework to master almost any art: know in your deepest hearts that knowledge is endless, as is the journey to acquiring it, and while being endless, it is also inexplicably inherent within us already. Which is to say, give yourself the homework of stillness. If you’ve gone through a period of time where you’ve only been stuffing your senses with stimuli even if it is divine blissful stimuli, turn on a timer and see how still and quiet and dark you can sit, and every day, try to increase that number, or every week, or every month. It is in silence we might hope to hear from the universe what grades we have received on our homework. I’ll end on Rilke who says: “Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.”

• PSYCHE, I’LL END ON URSULA K. LE GUIN:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

  Only in silence the word,
  Only in dark the light,
  Only in dying life:
  Bright the hawk’s flight
  On the empty sky.

K,

Farewell travellers, journey on!13

Originally published here as one of the winners of the Palette Love & Eros Poetry Prize, selected by Carl Phillips

good morning you!

all lowercase lilting lyrics & lore today

not because of a trend or whatever…but because sometimes writing in all lowercase makes you feel like you’re somehow inexplicably stepping back into your childhood wardrobe & it fits in a way that’s not weird but is safe, hugging, soothing.1

anyhow, i’m told i should be focusing on my WRITING CAREER.

i am told i have TRACTION on my substack & thousands of subscribers & I should thus be focusing on my WRITING CAREER.

i am told it would be very strange & stupid to just keep going as i am, with no real plan for anything, & indeed being so random & oddball that even the randomsters & oddballers are kinda like, hey you’re not random & oddball in a consistent enough way byii

there is no unsubscribe button option on substack but if there was, it’d go here

i am thinking of fairy portals.

earlier this year i dropped out of my mfa & decided to become the presiding faculty dean of my own institution that is very much not-regulated & extremely exclusive.

i’m teaching myself literary mysticism.

so i’m doing this thing where i’m following the thread of my thoughts & trying to cultivate physical rituals to aid my literary practice.2

so, where was i? ah yes, not thinking about my WRITING CAREER but rather about fairy portals. if you’ve seen one, you know what it is, if you haven’t, it can look like this though not always:

indeed, sometimes it looks nothing like that. sometimes it’s just a scattering of mushrooms or a particularly enchanting pile of dog shit or a collection of pebbles or a gathering of leaves or an amalgamation of bird bones or a firefly lit pathway or or or

why am i thinking of fairy portal when i should be thinking about GROWING MY WRITING CAREER.3

the reason, the reason, the reason is that fairy portals are at once a thing of utter sublime natural fantastical beauty & at once a thing to be feared, even loathed, but certainly stayed the fuck away from.

how is it, why is it, that so much of what is alluring is also that which can ruin or lead to ruin? is it the way of the world, if i may speak grandly? are we put on earth to walk away from the paths that beckon us or to see the true path beyond the paths that lay out before us, enchanting & glaring & blindingly beautiful, but altogether illusory?4

but fairy portals are not the only kind of portal there is in the world of lore & wonder that sits just outside of your screen, & outside of the other screen (the one we impose upon ourselves).

there are portals to the world below & the world beyond. there are portals into ourselves, & portals outside of us. there are portals that will lead us to all our heart’s desires, & yet again portals that will take us to what we desire but do not yet know we desire. there are portals to places we want to be in, places we’d never want to visit even in our dreams, & places we need to be in, but do not yet want to.

how do we find the right portal? the true path? which map book will tell us? who is our guide? where must we go? how long shall we seek?

another kind of portal is the tower. the tower which is present in many a folktale & fairytale & folklore. the tower which is the most doomsday-ist scariest oh-shit-iest card in the tarot deck. the tower that leads often to a lonely, locked up princess with no recourse but perhaps sometimes her hair. the tower with no way in & no way out but one connived & contemplated & created with brute force & determination.

but there is another tower. there is a tower of song. there is MR. LEONARD COHEN’S TOWER OF SONG. stop reading this, go listen to this, then come back:

on every listen of the song or this recitation, i have a different favorite part, but today it is:

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song

what is the tower of song? is the tower of song a place of bliss or a place of bondage? could it be both? indeed, perhaps that is our secret to discover, our code to crack, our adventure to chart, & so on & so forth.

so how do we enter a the tower, the portal? is it as simple as walking right in? yes, oh yes so much is that simple, dear sillies. you knock, then you walk, & then you fall or you rise up. so a good question is not how to enter a portal, perhaps, but how to attract the correct one(s).

for this, i am finding handy the very ancient reality of ritual. ritualmaxxing if you will. all practices whether writing or the dreaded GROW YOUR WRITING CAREER are rooted in ritual in some way. even killing is a kind of ritual. birthing, certainly is. ritual can be a repetitive task performed again & again without understanding5 or it is a purely performative action or series of actions one takes outright to attract a certain kind of attention or it is a private thing, a practice in & of itself one does without too much fanfare & yet with deep intention whether for or without a desire for some grand thing.

i wonder, in these first forays into my self-adjudicated, self-proclaimed, self-governed journey towards a PhD IN LITERARY MYSTICISM, what is my grand thing?

why am i writing this, or this, or this next thing? why am i on substack talking to you? why am i posting on notes? why am i having conversations with people & recording them? why am i why’ing everything? are these small rituals? outside of the other small rituals that make up my life that is certainly not a systematic attempt at GROWING & MAXIMIZING MY WRITING CAREER?

they must be, indeed they are. & in some sense the desire is there to find a portal of my own, though not a fairy portal, not one that is enchanting in externality but ruinous internally, certainly not. not the flim-flam & glam-glam & shiny silver egg hollow inside kinda portal. not the weeping princess in the tower kind. what kind, then?

i don’t know is the answer. or rather, i do. the rituals are in service in some way to this:

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice

& indeed these are all our burdens to bear, for each of us has been given a “golden voice” or a golden whatever a GIFT of some special unique sort & in many ways we have no choice but to create rituals around it, or else they will be created for us & if the latter happens, then there’s no telling which portals are attracted or opened & which we fall into & or what we find on the other side.

oh, we won’t know even if we do it all with the best of intentions, but at least this way, we’re placing ourselves in a position of power. in many ways, literary mysticism is simply mysticism informed by the literary arts. & the literary arts are in many ways the most mystical arts of all. good stories, music, art, outlasts us all. good art is better than cockroaches.

so yes as of now i do not have a solid plan, that is a ritual of sorts, to BUILD MY WRITING CAREER but i do have a series of rituals that i am shaping & creating & growing to help me seek whatever must now be found by one that is me.

i will leave you with this thought from URSULA K. LE GUIN whose seminal work A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA i’ll soon be exploring in a slow read right here on Beautiful Losers hopefully with you & you & yes you too.

I pray it’ll open all the right portals for us.

Subscribe now

Add to Calendar →

Add to Calendar →

Good Readers: On reading, rereading, fantasy, & literary criticism with Jessie Lethaby & Shannan Mann

[This transcription below has been slightly condensed and edited for readability]

SHANNAN: Can you talk about the title of your Substack, The Unseen Review? I love it, but I want to hear from you what it means.

JESSIE: I was talking with a good friend about it, trying to think of a new name that would encompass a new era of my life, which is much more books-focused. The unseen part of it refers to two things.

I mostly look at backlist. When you’re in the BookTok space particularly... actually, that’s probably not fair to say. There probably are a lot of people talking about backlisted books on Instagram and TikTok. But it’s also very easy to get stuck in the trap of looking at a lot of new fiction. And I’ve always wanted to read widely, to read from my extensive bookshelf. I’ve collected so many books. So the unseen part is partly about wanting to find those gems people have forgotten about. Which isn’t to say I don’t look at a lot of well-known books as well.

The other part is a slight nod to speculative. It’s a big part of my reading — sci-fi and fantasy. I’ve gone through different phases in my life where I’m reading more literary, more speculative books. And because I went through the whole university English literature experience, I was definitely pushed in the realism, literary direction. Not to say there aren’t great courses if you’re doing a degree in fantasy or whatever. So it’s a coming back to that as well, finding great literature in those genres, and trying to get other readers into those genres who otherwise wouldn’t. So it’s those two things. And I liked the way it sounded.

The Unseen Review

The Unseen Review is dedicated to finding the very best in literature. Also helping readers get the most out of their reading through courses and slow reads.

By Jessie Lethaby

Has fantasy devolved, or just gotten harder to find?

SHANNAN: On this note of getting into fantasy — I don’t remember who wrote it, but I recently read an article on Substack that’s getting quite a bit of traction. It was about a reader who loved fantasy, loved all things fantasy, and suddenly had a change of heart. And now they — I don’t know if this is fair to say — now they hate fantasy. They got rid of all their fantasy books. I think they mentioned they still love Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, but they haven’t been able to find work like that.

They feel fantasy and speculative fiction has devolved into what they call a sandbox — a sandbox for the writer, where the writer is playing and just building whatever. And there’s no moral heart to it, no deeper themes. And specifically, they mentioned that Tolkien created his world because he felt there was no mythology for England.

I don’t know how much I agree with this. I thought it was interesting. I read it at the same time as I read this quote from Mark Twain: the man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who does not read.

But maybe you can talk about the first part. Do you think fantasy has devolved in some way?

JESSIE: I have those ranty thoughts I’d express to a friend or family member, where I’d say probably yes — something to the effect of yes. I don’t love going into a bookshop and, when you get to the fantasy section, everything looks the same. It doesn’t feel like it has the variety you maybe saw in the sixties, seventies, into the eighties.

Even writers themselves aren’t taking it as seriously — which is fair enough, a lot of the writers writing in the genre are writing for entertainment — rather than your Le Guins, who are writing from a place of necessity, to explore the world, all these kinds of things. So that’s my grumpy side.

However, I always want to counter it, because I do think there’s good stuff out there. One of the major problems in general is finding good books. There’s such a profusion of books being published now that it’s nigh on impossible to find the stuff. So I get it, because I feel that frustration too when I’m looking for fantasy written today that has that — the John Crowley of today, or something. It’s hard to find. But I think it’s there. It just requires a bit of digging. And most people don’t want to do that digging. That’s why it’s so important that we write about books on the internet and talk about books on the internet, so we can help people find them.

So I want to say yes, widely. But then a lot of pulp fiction was being released in the seventies as well, which was hardly the most highbrow literature. And it’s hard to know sometimes how popular those books were that we now think are classics, or that we think are really well written. Sometimes it takes a couple of decades to see which ones they were.

A bad book can still be the one someone needed

SHANNAN: It can take even generations to really know what’s going to survive. And it’s impossible to tell how a book can influence somebody. A quote-unquote really bad book might meet someone at a time when they really need it. I’ve never read this book, but I know The Alchemist — sorry, I’m laughing as I say it. But that book helped people think more deeply about things. It was like a gateway drug.

JESSIE: It makes me think of the Barbie movie, which people had a lot of discourse about — obviously the feminist speech in that. But for some people, they haven’t heard it yet. So books as a gateway drug is good.

I do feel like people are getting a bit more stuck. I don’t know if it’s the feeling that you like your own tropes, that there are things you particularly like. And again, this is anecdotal, it’s hard to know if there’s any truth to it — but whether readers are as willing to read a book they’re less sure about, less sure they’ll like. Because if you want it to be that gateway drug, you need people to take the next step out of it.

SHANNAN: Exactly. That’s a really good point, because that’s the problem with drugs also. I think people vote with their dollar. You see a lot of the same stuff that sells. It sells for a while, and then you get a lot of — dare I say — copycats, and it becomes about tropes and trends.

And I wonder how much one can write something that’s truly free thought, truly thinking about the time we’re in, our place in the world, our place in the universe, when you’re also trying to cater to certain tropes and trends. Maybe you can. I don’t think I’ve seen it. Have you?

JESSIE: Some authors are. I’ve just started China Miéville’s The Rouse, I suppose you’d call it. He’s obviously a huge name in speculative fiction — he’s written both sci-fi and fantasy. And this book is experimental, it’s clever, it’s what we’d call highbrow, in quotes. But he’s an established author. So it’s the tricky thing with new authors particularly. It must be hard.

And publishers, from what I hear from people inside the industry, are variously more or less risk-averse. So it depends when you submit your manuscript: does it reach the right person at the exact right time? I do think a lot of them are more risk-averse than they used to be. I feel like we can just say that.

Why a serious reader should read “backwards”

SHANNAN: I don’t know if “should” is the best way to start this question, forgive me. But I want this to be a reason why a serious reader — and there’s a lot to unpack in that label, a serious reader — might want to explore classics, or the backlist, more than just thumbing through the latest reads and the next bestseller list. Is there more there for the soul, for the heart?

JESSIE: I think so. Just statistically as well. Whatever’s published today, whatever’s really good of it is going to be a much smaller percentage than if you look at everything that’s come before.

And reading in the backlist extensively — just reading loads, reading stuff you don’t know if you’re going to like. I’ve acquired lots of people’s libraries. My dad moved to America, they gave me loads of books, and I read through them all. It was really interesting, because these are random books from somebody else’s shelf. But doing that gives you a sense of the breadth and variety in fiction writing. A lot of times when readers really don’t like something, or react really badly to something, it’s just not being used to what a novel can do and what a novel can be.

There’s also a lot less book coverage these days in traditional outlets. And there’d be TV shows, radio programmes that people would have watched or listened to a lot more twenty, thirty, forty years ago. That would have steered you towards the books being released today that work best. So it’s a tricky one.

And there’s been a lot of chat recently amongst critic circles that books are getting an easier ride in reviews, apart from the occasional pan. Critics aren’t being as critical. But it’s hard. We’re all battling against people’s phones and TV. So to get that book coverage back, and then to make sure it’s pushing the books that really should be seen — it’s tricky.

What criticism is for, or beyond verdicts and easy opinions

SHANNAN: And I think we’ve perhaps forgotten that critique doesn’t necessarily mean “this sucks, and here’s ten reasons why.” Critique is inherently entering deeper into a text — whatever form that text takes. Within media studies, a text isn’t just something written down. It’s something you engage with, that you’re in conversation with.

One thing you mentioned to me on the call we had before this — and correct me if I phrase this differently — is that you’re stepping away from thinking of a book you’ve read as a bad book or a good book and why, and more towards thinking about what it is and what makes that book what it is. Could you talk about that? Because I don’t see this in reviews. Even a very good review will give a verdict, will give a star or the equivalent of one.

JESSIE: I’ve become a lot more open to a book as I’ve got older. When you read as a child, you read voraciously — and we all wish we could read like children again. You either end up putting the book on your favourite shelf, or you feel nothing about it and discard it. There’s no deeper evaluation then. It’s such a wonderful thing. I wonder whether that’s missing, especially for teens these days, because of Goodreads and the star ratings. Everyone’s thinking more about rating the books they read.

Then I went to university, and we weren’t really looking at “is the book good or bad?” — it was “how will I write the essay about it?” And then I did all these reviews on YouTube and in writing, and I was very much “this book is good or bad, and I liked it or didn’t like it.”

And then I started the book club, and I talked to people from around the world about books, and we analysed them, and we were doing both modes at once. We were doing the sort of thing you’d do in an English lit seminar — looking at themes, looking at language, what’s the book saying. And we were also doing: do we like it? Do you like it? Do I like it? The whole group feeding back on that.

So now it’s a melding of the two. When I look at a book now, I’m really looking at — and of course you can’t really answer this — what did the author envision this book to be? And does it achieve those goals? I’m still happy to say a book isn’t successful, perhaps I’d say, rather than bad. It isn’t successful. It doesn’t achieve those goals. And I’d still evaluate it on that basis when I’m reviewing. I want people to read good books. If I think it’s not worth your time, I’m still happy to say that.

But I’m much more open to books as — well, first of all, as a human document. Obviously at university you have to study Roland Barthes, you have to do the death of the author, you have to do post-structuralism. And for a time every student is like, oh, the author doesn’t matter. Just text, a slippery, slippery text. And I’ve come away from that, thankfully, because everything comes out of a human brain — maybe multiple; you have an editor you work really closely with. And it’s made in a very specific time. Bringing some of that context back in is important to me now: seeing it as a production of a human mind and treating it as such.

It also helps me be a bit nicer to it. I’m more open to the flaws of the book as well. Sometimes the flaws make a book, for me. There are lots of books where I think, oh, this is rambly, a really good editor would cut this. But I like it. It gives it something. It doesn’t work with every book, but with some of them it gives it a personality, almost. It’s not some perfect thing.

So I’ve definitely softened as I’ve got older, but I still want to provide that guidance for people. If you do align with my taste, I want to be helpful — make sure you’re reading the things I really think are worth your time, because it’s such a time-consuming book. It’s such a specific kind of art form, one that requires so much time of you.

But Shannan, when you read, are you evaluating as you read?

On DNFing

SHANNAN: If I wanted to sound really erudite and scholarly, I’d say no, of course not — the liking and disliking just helps me learn about myself. Which it does. But being a mom of a five-year-old, working full-time, running two magazines, I’m often like: if I don’t like it by page three, I’m out. Which — obviously it’s not page three always. I’ll often return to the book at different times, especially if it’s something I really want to like. There are books I really want to like. They’re not necessarily classics — or maybe they are sometimes, or they’re by an author I admire. But if I’m not feeling it, I’ll put it on hold and come back to it.

For me it doesn’t come down to being entertained — although I don’t think one can divorce the sense of being entertained from any media we take part in, because it’s so natural for the human soul, the human being, to want to enjoy something, to have that sense of relishing the taste. But there’s something about: does it feel like a voice I want to listen to?

What I can immediately tell annoys me is when I’m reading a book, especially when I’m in there, and it’s just suffering. There’s not a ray of hope here. I have no hope that there will be a ray of hope. This is just so sad. It’s so sad. And there was a time when I loved that so much. That was my thing.

Now I need levity. I need some lightness. And lightness doesn’t necessarily come from humour, or from being a funny book. But I need some kind of capital-R romance — not lowercase-r, capital-R romance — in my literature. That makes it feel charming. It might just be the place I’m in.

So yes, I’m for sure evaluating. I’m more forgiving with audiobooks. If I’m cleaning the house — an average audiobook’s what, eight and a half to eleven hours long? — and I’m having a big, long cleaning day listening to an audiobook that’s not so great, that’s actually helpful, because if I miss something, it’s okay.

But a physical book — because, like you mentioned, it’s work you put in for yourself, but it’s still work, it’s still your time — I’m more critical of it in that form. I’m quicker to say, let me pause this. Very rarely does a book make me want to throw it across the wall. I don’t buy those books. I don’t acquire them if I know they’ll make me want to chuck them.

Joy in literature and Joy of literature

JESSIE: I’ve also got better at putting books down, which is perhaps part of this — because I’m putting down the ones I know just aren’t for me, that I wouldn’t get on well with.

As you were talking about levity, we talk about that a lot in book club — having a sense of warmth, which I generally need. I don’t love books where I don’t feel any warmth at all. And it can be a tiny thing. One character, one scene.

But there’s an element to humour as well. I often find, when you’re dealing with tragic circumstances in a book, that the books which incorporate some small amount of humour aren’t only more enjoyable to read, they’re elevated somehow. We’ve moved out of a trauma-porn place into something where — does it add an extra layer of commentary? I’m not sure. But I think about that quite a lot when I’m reading.

Because a lot of work these days is quite self-serious — a lot of literary stuff particularly. If you go back and read literary fiction from the eighties, a lot of it has humour in it, a bit of levity, or at the very least quite a lot of warmth. Whereas a lot of it now is very serious, in ways which don’t reflect life, for me.

In defense of escapism & charm

SHANNAN: No. It makes me think — I don’t remember the exact quote, but Tolkien said, what’s wrong with the term escapism? You’re labelling fantasy as escapism, but if one is in a prison and one wants to escape, why is that a bad concept?

I think fantasy has now drifted from this sense of escapism. Before, when fantasy was relegated to the edges, escapism was used in a negative way. But I resonate with that, and with that sense of warmth — I felt that recently with Susanna Clarke more than anything.

When I first read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, I read it over the course of a year. And the reason I took so long wasn’t because it’s such a long book, which it is, but because I didn’t want it to end. I’d microdose myself with that book. Around page fifty I knew this was going to be one of the best books I’ve ever read. I thought, okay, we’re going to slow this down. Because I’m never going to get this experience again of reading this book for the first time. So I need to experience it slowly.

And obviously there’s a lot of dread in that story. There are a lot of scary situations. There’s even a sense of horror and mystery. But there’s a lot of, again, capital-R romance, levity, lightness. There’s a lot of what you see later in Piranesi. You can see how Susanna Clarke’s writing of this massive tome helped inform that.

One thing Susanna Clarke said about Piranesi was that she was thinking about the idea of dystopia, and how end-of-the-world narratives tend to be quite sad, and we think about what horrible things we might put the character through. But what if a book was just about the fact that the world is beautiful and the character is wonderful? Could that sustain people’s attention? Could that make for a good book? And it certainly did. I’ve seldom come across a recent text like that story — like both of her books.

JESSIE: When you were talking about charm — she has it in spades. There’s such an art to charm, to capturing the reader with a particular kind of magic, a particular kind of voice. And it would be nice to see more contemporary fantasy that has that charm — or really any literature. If literary fiction could recapture some of that charming feel, that would be good.

The moment you realize writing can do that

SHANNAN: I remember feeling that too when I first read One Hundred Years of Solitude, at sixteen. I remember getting to the part where Remedios — sorry if I’m spoiling this for everyone, I don’t think you can really spoil García Márquez, but I apologise if I am — where Remedios the Beauty ascends to the clouds. And I felt like I was ascending to the cloud. I thought, you can do this. You can write literature like this.

And a few years later I found out that the reason García Márquez started writing was that he loved reading, he loved literature, but he hadn’t picked up a pen. He hadn’t thought to do it, because he didn’t think the kind of stories in his head would translate. But then he read Franz Kafka, he read Metamorphosis. And when he read this book where Gregor Samsa wakes up as an insect in bed, he thought, wait, what? You can do this? I was like, you had the same reaction to him as I had to you. It felt like such a connection through history and time.

And when writing does that, something happens that’s almost religious. It’s a religious ecstatic experience — you read something and it’s like: you can do this in writing. You can do this in words. You can create a whole world, or make a character ascend to the sky and then just move right on in your story. That sense I often find is missing from literature. But I also don’t want to complain about it, because it’s something difficult to capture and difficult to do. And that makes it more special.

And I do love literary fiction, don’t get me wrong. I love my realism, and I still read a lot of it. I read mostly it, to be honest. But there’s something very special about fantasy elements or magical realism or speculative elements. There’s something — I don’t know if it captures some ancient ecstatic thing in our human selves — about stepping over the boundary of what feels possible.

JESSIE: I had a similar experience when I came back to speculative fiction in my young adulthood. I thought, oh, hang on — you can do this. You can write really well. You can have good, strong character work and be talking to some really important political themes, or talking to our world in an interesting way. But you can also provide this sheer delight, and create something entirely new.

It must stimulate — we need to do an MRI scan of someone’s brain reading that kind of moment, because it must light up the brain in a very particular way. That’s why I’m so passionate about people reading good fantasy, or finding fantasy that has that complexity to it — the stuff many of us enjoy in our serious fiction, whatever that might be, but with the fantasy element too. It brings something out in us. And a childlike element too.

Wonder is not the same thing as childishness

SHANNAN: What’s that quote — is it C.S. Lewis, where he says something about reading literature being a way to be a child in adulthood? I’m totally butchering it. If somebody knows what I’m talking about, please post it in the chat. But I feel that quite often — that it’s a returning to your childlike state of wonder. Not childish.

That’s perhaps where the dissonance comes. When I read certain books I don’t finish, which I feel are very childish — this very childish fantasy. And I don’t think children are actually childish. They’re very intelligent beings who are learning and taking in so much information, and it’s wonderful to see. So when it becomes juvenile — and I don’t mean what’s classified as juvenile fiction, I love juvenile or middle-grade fiction — but that kind of childishness where it’s like... I’m going to sound terrible saying this, but it’s like: you really think readers are dumb, don’t you? That tone pisses me off within writing.

JESSIE: I agree. Is it that sense of wonder? Is it a sense of curiosity? That’s maybe also what I mean when I talk about how I’m approaching books: it’s coming from a place of curiosity, rather than immediately, hmm, is this a good book?

But finding books that do that is really hard — finding those books that really capture something. Little, Big is a great example. There’s something totally wondrous about that book. The two slow reads I’ve done have been fantasy, and I’m wondering how I’m going to do a couple of pieces of realism. I’m wondering whether it’ll have quite the same effect. We also did Gormenghast, which if you haven’t read, you definitely should. It’s incredible.

But having that openness — wonder is really important. And I read a lot of children’s literature now with my daughter, and even picture books have inspired me so much as I’ve been reading them with her — and also irritated me, again, about how hard it is to find the good ones.

SHANNAN: I wonder if this recent trend of cosy fantasy is people trying to get back to that wonder element, but doing it in a way that’s very contrived. Which isn’t to say there aren’t fantasy or speculative books that give you those feelings of cosiness and aren’t like that — that aren’t quote-unquote bad.

But when you try to commodify something as expansive as the human experience of wonder, our experience of joy — when you try to commodify it, to mark down the things that might work from it, to make it into this capitalist product — that’s where the childishness comes in. Because a good reader can see through that. They see: okay, this is a collection of elements. This is a collection of things that should work to evoke something, but it’s not working. It’s a body without a soul.

Is any reading “good” reading?

JESSIE: I’m thinking about that Mark Twain quote you mentioned earlier, about how if you’re not reading good books you have no advantage over the non-reader. It’s such a hard one, isn’t it? I’m not sure I entirely agree.

And obviously, trying to raise a reader as well — when we think about the state of reading in the world, whether people are or aren’t reading anymore, I try to think, okay, what can I control? And I think, okay, I need to raise a reader myself. That’s important. And I’m always giving books to people.

But it’s hard, because: is any reading good reading? To a degree, yes. What I was getting at a little earlier is that people are getting stuck in a certain phase of reading. We all go through these phases, and I’ve ended up at a point where I love books that are smooth reads, that are entertaining and enjoyable. But I also love thorny books.

And that jump — how do you get people from cosy fantasy, or whatever it might be, to something a bit more thorny? And is it worth doing that? Is it important to do that? Or can we just allow people to like what they like? I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I want to get people over into thornier works, because there’s something so rewarding about it. It makes you think.

Book clubs can be helpful there. If you haven’t got experience studying literature extensively, finding somewhere you can start digging. Because perhaps that’s where my love for thornier books comes from: I was made to study them, made to dig into them. And once you do, and you unlock their secrets — it’s such a satisfying thing, like doing anything difficult. So perhaps in the contemporary age, the book club is the place to do that.

But how important is it that we get people to literary fiction? Or do we just allow the full breadth of readers to read whatever they like? It’s a tricky one. What do you think?

Two bookstores, two ideas of a reader

SHANNAN: I was just at a bookstore the other day. I went first to a used bookstore, then to a chain bookstore. And the difference in the experience was such a contrast.

The used bookstore — I’m going to sound like such a purist, I don’t mean to. I actually like both bookstores; they’re both lovely in different ways. But the experience was tangibly different. You walk into the used bookstore and there are walls of dusty classics. My eyes and nose flared up from all the allergies. I had to keep getting out my — probably very gross to the people around me — but it smelled like literature. It smelled like time. Being in there, thumbing through papers that felt like you need to be very gentle as you turn them. And seeing their categories: they had their fantasy, they had their science fiction.

And then I go into the chain bookstore and the first thing I see is candles. Again, I’m sounding like a purist, forgive me. But candles and tote bags and t-shirts and pyjama sets and bears. And then, on the corners, there are books. The best section of that store was the kids’ books, the kids’ place. It was very colourful and there were a lot of books there, although there were toys too.

But the experience there is geared towards a consumer. A reader has to make it an experience for themselves, with some effort. In a used bookstore, in a place like that, the experience is there for the reader. And I was thinking, how important is it where you live, where you stay, what’s around you? Do you live in a place where there’s a lot of living, breathing literary culture?

JESSIE: To be fair, in London, and really around the UK, we have some great literary festivals. But you have to seek that stuff out, and you have to be a reader to seek it out.

And I’ve started doing an in-person thing as well — it’s called Books on Film, where we read the book and then watch the film, which is a lot of fun. So I’m trying to create it as much as possible. But it’s tricky.

It’s true, isn’t it, that the majority of people who buy lots of books are established readers, and other people are only buying one or two books a year. And it’s probably true that there was more of a culture of reading twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago, when people weren’t so attached to their phones. It does upset me. And I’m thinking, how do we get — it’s just hard, because you get so tunnelled into your niches, and readers will find you, but non-readers won’t necessarily find you. How do you create that?

Films can be good. God bless Christopher Nolan. Whatever you may think of the film — I haven’t actually seen it yet, so I can’t give my verdict — but it can be good to have film adaptations. More people will read Wuthering Heights than probably have for ages, more just normal people. I don’t know that everybody loved it. Wuthering Heights is a crazy book. But some of those cultural moments can be helpful.

What about you? Is there a kind of reading culture or community?

Reading online takes more discipline than reading off it

SHANNAN: Where I directly am, the place I’m in, there really isn’t much at all. But just outside — Toronto is huge. People are really into reading.

I’m so excited. I don’t know if anybody else is in Toronto or based there, but there are going to be four university book sales — the University of Toronto will be holding four or five book sales where you get really good books for between a dollar and five dollars. So I’ll be hitting all of those up. And it’s such a great time to just be with other nerds like yourself, who’d rather spend a Friday evening in an old college building looking through stacks of novels and vinyls.

That feeling is quite special. It’s a blessing. When a lot of people talk about the negativity of the online space, I try to think about the other element: that there are certain things that just wouldn’t be possible for me where I’m based, for all these reasons — being able to hear other people’s opinions and thoughts and art.

So it does take more discipline. It takes a lot more discipline to curate your online experience with perhaps the same respect as you might your offline experience. Being in the world, being around people, gives you more — you’re beholden to more, as part of the social contract we’re in with each other. If you’re an introvert, or somebody who likes to read, maybe you’d feel out of place hitting up the clubs. But if you’re on social media, nobody’s really seeing you. You could be watching anything and not doing what’s actually close to you. There’s not a lot of accountability to others. So it takes building a more disciplined self to have a good literary experience online.

And it takes a deeper understanding of what entertainment ought to be, what relaxation is. A lot of people give the excuse that they’re tired from a day of work, so they’re going to scroll, going to watch reels. I used to be like that for a blip, but then it caught me — no, this actually isn’t relaxing to me. What has always been relaxing for me is reading a book. And I’d love to engage with literature and think more about it, but this isn’t it, even if the algorithm’s curating it for me.

So for now, with Substack, it’s been helpful to find people like you, people like ’s Footnotes and Tangents, and just to know that folks like you are out there. It’s heartwarming, what to speak of engaging with it. It takes discipline, it takes time, it takes privilege as well. But it also just takes some first steps.

Footnotes and Tangents

Slow reads of great books. Book guides and a reading community to help you get more from the best stories.

By Simon Haisell

JESSIE: I’m glad you mentioned discipline. One of the things I was thinking before this was that I don’t always want to read myself. I sometimes really want to scroll. It’s really easy when you see people who read a lot to think, okay, they must really love doing that. And I don’t get that when I sit down for the first ten pages of a book. There is an element of discipline to it.

It’s good to know that it involves that — that sometimes it feels physically a bit uncomfortable to put the phone down, move away from the screen, and say, okay, I’m going to sit and read. Of course, sometimes I really want to, especially if I’m reading something really good — don’t get me wrong. But especially as a mum, I’m so often just tired. There’s a lot going on. And I try to read in front of my daughter a lot. Do I focus the best I possibly can in those moments? No, but I’m modelling it.

So I’m reading at times when I don’t necessarily want to — and that’s not to say you should push it, that you should go, I must read every minute of the day — but it doesn’t always feel very comfortable, because it engages our brains in a different way. And that’s another nice thing about book clubs and slow reads: they give you a bit of that structure, a bit of that discipline, and a bit of that online community boost to do the reading. And that’s when the rewards come.

Against fiction that explains itself

JESSIE: I discovered recently that one of the things I really don’t like in fiction is when everything’s spelled out to me. And this can occur in any genre. I read a really good piece here on Substack, which I’ll try to remember and maybe repost, where someone was talking about how, because we’re psychologised so much these days and therapy-speak has come into our everyday everything, when writers come to write they have this — maybe they have this childhood event, which leads to this, which leads to this, which leads to this. And in lots of cases that does work, but there’s also an element of the unknowable with the human. And there’s an element of weirdness and darkness. Why do some people have a traumatising event and go one way, and why do some go the other? These are the things I find important in fiction: that unknowable factor, the opaque.

So I want to do a bit of work. I’ve discovered of myself as a reader, at this point, having read what I’ve read, that I actually want to engage. And that feels exciting to me. That’s why I’ve always liked studying English literature. Lots of readers don’t necessarily like studying it, which is fair. They don’t want to rip it apart. But for me it’s always been enjoyable, because I’m coming to a closer understanding of the book, the author, the world, myself. Myself probably being one of the — often I find myself reacting to something these days and thinking, okay, why am I reacting like that? I ask that first, before I say this is the flaw of the author. Why does this bother me?

Anyway, doing a little bit of work makes the whole process more memorable as well.

SHANNAN: And it can almost feel like — if as a reader I’ve caught on to something, or as an experiencer of any kind of media, and then the person, the director or the author, just states it out, I’m like, oh yeah, I knew it. Just trust me. I’m not stupid.

This also happens to me — and this might sound a bit controversial, but I don’t like that word controversial, we’re just going to do away with it. I’m somebody who believes everything we do is political, in the sense that we all come from context. It’s something you can’t extricate from your experience. But when the politics of something is hammered into my head, I’m just like, you know what? I get it. I get what you’re saying. Still very annoying.

When I read Earthsea for the first time, the whole series — there’s so much to be unpacked there in terms of class, race, gender. I don’t think there’s any point at which I’m like, Ursula, please. It’s an experience you live through and feel through, and can feel a sense of brotherhood with, just by fact of it being something so beautiful and so well crafted.

So this happens to me too — it’s probably one reason I’m struggling right now to get into too much literary fiction, or even mainstream fantasy literature. Because, again, the whole tropey thing: there’s a lot of push to add the politics. But you don’t need to add it. It’s there. We as human beings are — it just is. It’s a fact of life. I don’t know what you’d say about that.

JESSIE: No, absolutely. That’s why I probably tend to prefer fantasy over science fiction, because those things tend to be a bit more hidden in fantasy — which allows you to come to unusual conclusions, rather than having it spelled out to you. Sci-fi can be a bit more on the nose with that. Not all of it. Some of it is great still. But I agree. It’s an unfortunate consequence of online discourse, to some degree, and of trying to get ahead of it.

I also find it interesting when an author doesn’t include much that is political, but it’s so revealing. It’s so revealing of their point of view, of the world they come from. So that’s what authors are probably worried about: that they’ve revealed something of their psyche. That reluctance to be vulnerable about things — getting ahead of things politically particularly, but all sorts of things — can feel more guarded.

And that’s probably because authors have to have a more public profile. They have to go out, do interviews, be so much more public-facing than they used to be. So I get it. I’d absolutely be fearful of the same thing. But writing is vulnerability. It exposes so much, because with long-form prose particularly there are just so many words there. There are so many hours the reader puts in with you. There’s nowhere to hide. So I understand the fear, but it is frustrating. And it’s frustrating that authors feel they can’t take risks. Because you can definitely see it. And I find it especially true of Gen Z authors, particularly affected by some of that.

One cannot read a book, only reread it

SHANNAN: We’re getting to our time, but I wanted to close with this quote, and talk about it a little. I’ll paste it into the chat. I don’t even know if it’ll paste fully, so I might have to paste it in chunks, but I’ll read it out loud first.

This is from Vladimir Nabokov: “Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book. One can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” What do you think about that?

FULL QUOTE:

“Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.”

JESSIE: I really like it. For many years — and I’m sure many voracious readers are the same — I didn’t reread. I thought, there’s always more books to read; why would I reread something I’ve already read? And I’ve definitely changed my mind on that. I’ve reread more books in the last few years than ever before.

And I agree, mostly. There are very few books that work the first time and don’t after — usually books with a reveal, or a particular kind of tension to them. But the very best books always work well for a reread.

And I can’t remember where it was, whether it was in a fiction book or an essay, but someone was talking about a particular reader’s habit of reading three or four books. Must have been someone not living in 2026. They just had three or four books and they reread them. And how much they got out of those books, how much they rediscovered every time — and probably about themselves. Rereading is really about a rediscovery of your own relationship with the book, as much as anything else. But of course, craft elements too.

And in the rest of the quote he’s talking about looking at the whole of a painting — which I’m sure a lot of art lovers would say, that you have to look at a painting for a long time to really know it. But I get what he’s saying: once you see the whole work, it’s a different beast. When you’re reading for the first time, you’re not seeing that whole thing yet. And certainly if you’re interested in craft, if you’re a writer, rereading is a must, just to see how they do it. Plotting is incredibly hard, so to see a good author do it is really instructive.

I’ve read Little, Big three times now over the last three years, and it’s been beautiful every time. And it makes me cry more every time I reread it. But what about you? Are you a big rereader?

SHANNAN: Absolutely. Because I’ll get to a point where I’m reading a bunch of things that are new to me, and I’ll get so viscerally annoyed sometimes. There’ll be a time where I’ve somehow picked the wrong books. And I’ll think, you know what, I’m going to go back to the books I know are going to heal me from this experience of the past week or so.

So I’m rereading Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell again, of course, and I’m doing it as a deeper study this time. But I love rereading the children’s books I read before.

Poetry is so wonderful for rereading. It’s easier to reread in some sense. It’s shorter, of course, but it’s also our modern form of sutras. In the Vedas, a sutra is a spiritual code. You say a couple of words or a couple of syllables, and it can mean thousands — literally thousands — of different things. So poetry is our literary sutra in the modern space. Especially good poetry: you can come back to it, and there’s so much there.

Short stories also. I love reading Kelly Link’s short stories. There are some I’ll read, then listen to the audiobook, find something new, and then read again. She’s another author who I feel has grasped some sense of that innate, strange, ephemeral wonder and pure joy of good writing.

But I resonate with that a lot. I think the true test of whether a book was — if we’re going to grade it good or bad, five stars or whatever — is if you want to return to it. I think often of that movie About Time. Have you seen it?

JESSIE: Yeah, one of my favourite films.

SHANNAN: The main character has the ability to time travel. And his dad — and I don’t think I’m spoiling this for anybody — his father uses that ability to keep going back in time, and he just sits in his library and reads his books. I thought, there is the meaning of life right there for me.

So I value rereading a lot. If I can come back to a book, if I can return to it, then it becomes a living thing for me. It becomes something I have a relationship with. It becomes a person.

JESSIE: Absolutely. And I might be paraphrasing from whatever it was I read about this person who only had four books, but it’s a world you swim in, that you live and breathe in. And great books will do that for you and to you.

So I recommend to anybody who doesn’t reread their books, please do. Sometimes you’ll have a disappointment. That has happened to me. But that’s okay. You learn a lot from those moments too, when you think, okay, actually, this isn’t as good as I thought it was. And maybe it was really relying on me not knowing what was coming in order for it to work. Maybe it doesn’t actually work at a paragraph level, or maybe it doesn’t feel like it fits together quite right.

SHANNAN: It reveals more about yourself. It’s nice to know when you feel you’ve grown. As a teenager, I was a huge Sylvia Plath fan. I now appreciate her as a literary figure; I wouldn’t say I’m a fan anymore. There’s no hatred or anything, but it’s been interesting to encounter some of her work again and see things I didn’t see before, from a more critical eye — not necessarily negative. It’s made me feel, oh good, I have grown as a person. I can see these things now, which I couldn’t before.

Although sometimes there are authors who, in a sense, become like your children. Even if they produce the shittiest piece of art, you can’t say it’s bad, because you feel such a strong kinship to those artists. They’re few and far between, but there are some like that. And that’s something really sweet and special too, to a reader.

JESSIE: I think so. I definitely have a couple of authors like that. Or they’ll have written one masterpiece so great that I think, they can do no wrong. I’ll keep reading them. I’ll keep trying.

SHANNAN: Thank you so much, Jessie. This was so wonderful. I encourage everybody to please check out The Unseen Review. Jessie is so, so, so wonderful, and so lovely to have on Substack. Make Substack a better place.

JESSIE: Thank you. And you — same to you, Shannan.

SHANNAN: Thank you. And I hope we can do this again. It was lovely to have all 178 of you here. I guess that’s it. Happy reading, everybody. Bye.

Share

Leave a comment

Maybe the first clue should have been that for a long time my favorite movie was The Exorcist (1973). And for a long time after it stopped being my favorite movie, I thought there was something seriously wrong with me for that to have been my favorite movie and for me to have watched it over 30 times, often alone. But lately (after living an ascetic life essentially as a female monk for 8 1/2 years), I got to investigating that mini-obsession/admiration.

What did I feel all those times that I watched and rewatched The Exorcist as a deeply afflicted young girl? Was it still scary after the first time? Was it even scary the first time? I don’t think so. It was familiar, though. It was fiction, I know that. It is fiction, but only in the way that all fiction is “just fiction.” Everything is rooted in reality, after all.

To my great comfort, then, I realized, after many years, that what made me love The Exorcist was not the horrible trauma a young girl goes through or the devilish imagery or the thrill horror might offer, but because ultimately, at its core, 1973’s The Exorcist is a story of light (weak, sometimes barely-there light coming from imperfect souls) triumphing over powerful, hot, wet, evil darkness. It’s a story of love, of not giving up on those you love, and yes, it’s a story where the presence of the divine is palpable and ultimately outshines in every way the presence of the devil.

Now, I’m not Christian. This isn’t a caveat. I actually do not ascribe to standard religious denominations at all. If you wanted to squeeze me under a label, you could say I’m a lover of the Bhagavad-gita and all that might mean. I do not conceive of the devil as what is depicted in general within Judeo-Christian practices/literature. Although, I must say, some of the art associated with these depictions is…beautiful, haha. (Hey, sorry, but part of understanding our divinity is knowing all is ultimately divine, even the devil).

I do however think the idea of the devil or of evil is very real. It’s more complicated and less complicated. And maybe I’ll get into it more later. Today, though, I want to share some practical things you can do if you feel in anyway touched by a sense of evil in your life.

This will be especially helpful to those who feel they live in, or have lived in, a haunted house. I was born into a haunted house and I grew up in a haunted house until I was about 5. When we left India for Canada, however, the ghosts followed us. Some beings of darkness are like that. They are not bound to a place so much as to you. Some of them are bound in beautiful ways or tragic ways and others in ways that will slowly drain you if you do not free yourself.

There was more than one presence in my haunted childhood home. For all I know, there might have been a hundred or more. Though this is misleading. All around us, there are presences good and “bad”, pure and “evil”. Some though are very comfortably situated in their own realities and do not bleed out into ours. It is the ones that do, however, whether partially or completely, that tend to affect us the most.

Some can be called upon. Some come hurtling through because they have unfinished business. Some are mysterious tricksters and will do whatever they please, whenever they please. All of them can be sent away if you can reclaim your highest sense of self.

Okay, without further ado then…1

Acknowledge what’s happening to yourself

… and to no one else (for the most part). If you do indeed have folks in your life that you completely and utterly trust and indeed would trust with your very life (& soul), then yes, heartily tell them, share every sordid detail. Hauntings, when shared with respect amongst humans who care for the other, lessen in their evil effects. Friendship heals the heart, and not just yours, but the ones doing the haunting too. If, however, like I didn’t then, you do not have such a person in your life, and indeed only have people who’d either never believe you or make fun of you or add any kind of negativity to an already awful situation, then keep it to yourself, but open yourself up to light and love and friendship and understanding in other ways, namely:

Call upon the divine

If you ascribe to a particular understanding of God, then that’s your way to call. If you do not, then close your eyes, light a candle, walk in nature, notice your breath, and call upon the divine within you. You are not matter, you are not the body, you are the universe and all that it is made of. The great divinity is there's for the taking for you, however you choose to reach for it.

Prepare your body and mind for lucid dreaming.

This can be a difficult undertaking and one you might not feel ready for, which is okay. You don’t have to do this, but it’s one of the most vital ways to free yourself of a haunting once and for all. However, do note that this requires great amounts of empathy for the being or presence that is haunting you. And empathy cannot grow where there is any kind of fear or discrimination. Lucid dreaming, also, can occur in two ways. One is spontaneous, where your body and mind automatically know that this is the time to enter this mystical state and you go to sleep normally one night but “wake up” for what might feel like hours or days or years or a timeless amount of time.

Or, the other way lucid dreaming occurs is, of course, with a lot of preparation and intention. And what is the goal of this lucid dreaming? Well, in this context, it’s to actually to turn the idea of the haunting around. As much as the haunting being is haunting you, so too are you haunting them. Now, in this lucid dream, your single goal is for you to help them see this, and thus build kinship before you ultimately let them go to their next phase of existence, whatever and wherever this may be, so long as it is completely cut off from you. You can see why this requires great empathy, and no fear, then. It often means interacting face to face with that entity, and thus opening up the possibility for a much more worrisome situation: a possession. But if you follow the previous two steps, I promise you that will not take place.

Learn where the haunting begins

Is it rooted in place? Your body? A particular set of experiences? Does it make its presence felt only at a certain time of day, after interacting with certain kinds of people? Take notes. Be introspective. Do not be afraid. Do not judge. This is important fieldwork. Write things down. Feel freedom in your hands as you put these realizations and observations on paper. It’s okay. Our ancestors have been dealing with hauntings for millennia. Everything will be okay. Become your own witch doctor.

Do not seek out gurus, mediums, psychics, cleansers, witches, realm readers, yogis, priests, etc.

Unless they appear in your life of their own accord, that is. Oftentimes, even well-meaning spiritualists can fuck up a haunting and make things worse, what to speak of those driven by anything else but pure concern for you. I have lived through this, I do not recommend it. By all means, call upon your guides, ancestors, divine caregivers, but let them come at their own pace, or let them send you the courage you need to carve your own path out of the haunting.

Align deeper with your dharma, your life’s purpose

It’s a cliché for a reason: an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. The Sanskrit word dharma is sometimes popularly translated as “religion” but that is not the correct translation. The true meaning of “dharma” is your own life’s purpose. Align with this more, and move away from what is not your life’s purpose. I know, easier said than done, but it can be done, indeed, it is meant to be done. And remember that even things which may not immediately be your dharma but are stepping stones towards you being utterly aligned with your dharma, they are also a part of your dharma and deserve your full heart and soul and attention. This is perhaps the single most important thing here. More than anything, anything, anything, this will help in every way, mystically, slowly yes, but utterly and wholly.

Subscribe now

The ghosts had to go. Mira had put it off far too long like she always did and now she was standing in her cabin, shivering on a summer night. Leaving a bowl of cold turnip soup and stony sourdough bread on the table, she walked to her study. She knelt to the keyhole and fished for the key in her blouse, forever lassoed around her neck on a silver chain.

Mira stepped inside. Everything was perfectly commonplace. A wide, oak desk. The plain, iron lamp with an ivory lampshade ruffled at the top, a pearly cord dangling down. Bookshelf dusty as ever with thick, upturned volumes full of coffee-stained dog-eared pages. And to the corner, beneath the boarded-up window, an ordinary glass cabinet lined with 332 little goat milk bottles encasing 332 wispy, smoky thumb-sized beings.

Ghost-collecting wasn’t much of a star career, but it’s one she’d ended up with after many failed attempts to try to be anything else. It’s not like they were rich and she could harbor great ambitions but perhaps she could have studied to be a librarian or at the very least a dentist. Her mother, though, would have none of it. Any time Mira indicated she’d like to perhaps not wind up a crazy old kook in a lonely cabin by a frothing river, her mother warned her that try as she might, life could only go one way.

But Mira had had enough. After all, 64 years of doing the same thing get’s tiresome. Today is the last time I’ll do this, she announced to the ghosts, who, of course, did not reply but gazed up at her, soft as newborns. Suspended in their silver half-lucid sleep, with varying degrees of distance from their human lives and memories, none of them could truly form any cohesive thoughts or sensible opinions. Not much different to regular people, Mira thought, reaching for a crystal bowl on her desk.

She placed it in the center of the room in a chalk-drawn circle on the floor, she poured bluish rosy water from a pitcher. Everyone retires, why should a ghost-collector be any different? In any case, she thought of herself as no more than mystical pest control in her heart. A thankless task that most didn’t even believe was needed but were pushed into by some overly persuasive relative who wasn’t religious enough to call an exorcist.

One by one, Mira took each of the milk bottles out and lined them up in concentric circles around the crystal bowl of blue water. She’d collected them over the last three or so years, traveling sometimes several hundred miles, and brought them all back right here. When she’d set one inside the cabinet, she’d whisper a mantra to bind them there so that none of them could even think to leave. Were she someday to come herself into misfortune, they’d stay there like that, unable to haunt another soul, and forgetting day by day who they once were.

As Mira lifted one bottle, and then the next, she whispered a mantra into each ghost’s face. It always bemused her, how the shape of their face and the way their eyes looked in particular were the last bits of form to dissolve into that cloudy mist the rest of their body took on. She did this a total of 331 times, each time uncapping the milk bottle, whispering the mantra, and watching the ghost float like a marionette off a stage, and swoop down into the crystal bowl as though being absorbed into a tornado.

When it came time for the 332nd bottle, however, the mantra didn’t seem to work. Mind you, this was a mantra she’d known before she knew any other nursery song. So, she said it again, louder this time. Still, nothing. The ghost wouldn’t budge. Mira put the bottle down and set the lid aside, something she’d normally never do. She rubbed her eyes and put on her glasses to get a better look at this suddenly stubborn ghost.

Ah, he was one of the ones she’d collected more recently, so most of his body still looked like that of a man. Mira remembered a little. He was somewhere in his eighties when he died, and she’d collected him wandering around his daughter’s childhood bedroom weeping in the corner like a hungry kitten.

“Why are you doing this?” she said, though she felt she might as well have asked how. No other ghost, after being collected like this and kept in a bottle for upwards of a year had ever refused nor had the power to refuse to be sent away.

“I’d just rather not,” he said. As a rule of thumb, Mira avoided conversing with the ghosts she collected. Usually, the last words she’d speak to them were when she was luring them into the goat milk bottles. Well, it wasn’t quite as crude a thing as luring, but in the end, they were being trapped even as their absence ultimately freed those they were haunting.

“But you’d no longer be trapped in a goat milk bottle,” Mira said. What she didn’t say was that hey, buddy, I’m done with this ghost-collecting business after you lot, and I’m going to try once again to live an ordinary life, and I can’t do that if I still have one thumb-sized ghost in a little goat milk bottle hanging around with me. One does not walk around seeking a common life with a ghost in their pocket—least of all a ghost as stubborn as you!

“Then tell me what’s next,” he said.

This stumped Mira. She fumbled at some words, but she could tell the man—the ghost—was unconvinced. She sighed and took her glasses off again, letting her neck and back slump down, even though she knew it would make it harder for her to stand up.

After a long pause, she said “I haven’t quite had to think about that part yet.”

The ghost, too, was silent. Mira felt a warm breeze snake through the slats of the boarded up window. She’d done the job herself, of nailing the slabs of plywood to the wall from the inside and outside both ever since the neighbours’s daughters had wandered over from their father’s farm to see if they could confirm whether the rumors were true. A thin, long moonbeam dazzled on the floor like a strand of fine hair. Mira felt the inexplicable urge to weep.

“Would you tell me my name?” the ghost said.

“I—,” Mira hesitated. Think, you foolish hag, she thought, but her memory truly wasn’t much good anymore. Not that it had ever been. Oh, she’d always loved to read and write and that sort of thing, but perhaps that had done her more disservice than good. If you can always look stuff up in books and notes, she’d thought, why memorize any of it? Seeing the forlorn look on the ghost’s face, she said, “Ash. Your name was Ash.”

Ash was a man Mira had been with in her 40s. At the time, she’d felt she might have children with him and perhaps they’d grow old together, but then one lazy afternoon while she napped in a pool of sunlight on the porch, he’d wandered into her study and though he’d been forbidden to, opened up the glass cabinet and taken a ghost out of the bottle, trying to inspect its little body. Of course, that had led to all sorts of problems, like momentary possession and repeated nightmares thereafter. And then, about a month after the incident, he got in his Volkswagen and drove off into the sunset, never to come back.

“Was I good man?” Not-Ash asked.

“I’m sorry,” Mira said.

“I was evil, then!”

“No, no I mean…,” Mira sighed. “I lied. About your name, just now. It wasn’t Ash. Ash was someone I knew. I’ve forgotten your name.”

Not-Ash was quiet.

“I could look it up in my journals,” Mira offered. “I keep a meticulous account of all my collecting, and I’m certain I brought you here last Fall.”

Not-Ash shook his head. “That’s alright, I wouldn’t want to trouble you like that.”

Well, Mira thought, you’re already troubling me by not going away. I’m putting off being able to close up this cabin once and for all and drive myself off into the sunset, or maybe to Chicago or get on a plane to Uruguay.

“Why did you say that name so quickly, though?”

“Ash was someone I was in love with long ago, and I guess you sort of look like him.”

“So, I still have a face?”

Mira put her glasses on again and nodded.

“How come you’ve never bothered to find out what comes next?”

Though Mira couldn’t see it in his eyes, she knew there was a bit of indignation brewing in his words. This made her feel snappy.

“I guess I’ll find out soon enough, and I won’t be scared like you!”

“But what if you end up like me and there’s no one to collect you like you did me?”

Mira swallowed hard and the tingly, wet sound bounced off the wooden cabin walls. She looked back at the window, at the crisscrossing wood and the wonky nails, and below that the glass cabinet which would now be filled with 331 empty goat milk bottles and locked up forever.

“It makes me very tired, what I do,” she said, slowly rising up “I think I’ll sleep for now, and in the morning, you can let me know what it is you’d like to do.” With that, she walked towards the door.

“Wait,” he said. “I think I’d like to look up at the sky one more time, before I can really decide, you know. Would you take me with you?”

Mira thought for a moment and then picked up the goat milk bottle with the thumb-sized ghost of a man whose name neither of them could remember, and together, they left the cabin to sit outside on that warm, summer night where the moon was as big as a coin put right up to the eye.

Subscribe now

Kashi stares at the broken fan. Her mother left her here three days ago. Didn’t say a word. Just collected a fat envelope and rode an auto rickshaw for who knows how many miles out of the city, maybe all the way to a train station to get over to the south side where the houses don’t smell like piss all the time.

The older woman who took her in and sent her mother off told her that Dr Roy would be around at the end of the week to check her. Until then, she was supposed to get comfortable. Make friends. Eat. She was shown into the mess. White walls but otherwise dark. Nine women sat around a single long wooden table. Kashi just stood there by the door as they all looked up at her. What could she say anyway to these pregnant strangers sitting around waiting for food like that? And it was so weird being the only one without a baby inside. Not that Kashi really wanted a baby. But she’d been sold off to a gestational hostel of all places by her own mother of all people and now she’d have to carry some firangi’s fetus for the next nine months. And would she be free after that? Something told her these nine pregnant women here weren’t having their first.

A thin, dark man with an old striped apron and a hairnet brought the dinner, pushing a steel cart with ten plates and ten small plastic cups each containing three pills. He stopped beside Kashi and this made her feel strange enough to head toward the table. But before she could go any further, one of the women shrieked.

“Dr Roy got a big client today or what!” she said, her eyes fixed on a crispy brown ball slimed in syrup on a stainless steel plate. Then, she looked straight at Kashi. The girl picked up the gulab jamun rather elegantly with thumb and forefinger walked to her, thick rose gloop dripping on the white and black tiles, and popped it into Kashi’s mouth. The whole thing took only a few seconds but it appeared to happen in slow motion: the woman lifting the spongy sweet, giving it a small squeeze so it produced an almost inaudible gleeful squeal as buds of sap oozed from its heart; her pitter-pattering over to Kashi and Kashi opening her mouth as though she’d been instructed by an outside force; the gulab jamun filling her mouth and in an instant exploding like a small bomb, the sweet goo, crispened black skin and rubbery insides melting into her teeth and on her tongue and down her throat. Then, the gulab jamun was in her belly and she felt so sick but also thrilled.

“You’re new, that’s why,” the woman said in response to Kashi’s dazed expression, her words akin to a squawk, perhaps because of her inexplicable joy. “I’m Pinky. Come eat with me.”

In the two days since that first meal, Kashi hasn’t eaten anything. She’s always prided herself in being able to go for days without a single grain or seed. Water’s always been enough: reliable, simple yet mystical, taking on the colour of whatever vessel it fills. Now, she hears a scratch at the door, as though someone were using a set of talons. She gets up and opens it. It’s Pinky, the woman who shoved the giant dessert down her throat. She’s a dark-skinned, thinner girl with an almost imperceptible bump. Her soot-coloured hair frizzes around her. She stands itching her left leg with her right toes, painted a bright bile yellow.

“You a special one?” she says. Her voice is tempered today, but still has a distinct trill to it, as though she’d rather be singing the words.

Kashi’s a little distracted by the way Pinky is slightly rocking on her heels now, back and forth, one hand on the door jamb. “Hm?” is all Kashi has time to say before she chirps up again.

“I mean, you are the prettiest! Maybe that’s why. Some big sahib’s picked you, and now Dr Roy’s here early just to check you out and see if all’s in order.”

“What’s all’s in order?” Kashi manages to ask.

“You know, all the stuff that’s got to be in order.” As Pinky says this, she looks Kashi up and down and then laughs.

“Are you always so happy?” Kashi says, a little sharply.

“Now that you’re here,” Pinky says, unfazed. When Kashi neither replies nor reacts, Pinky tells her she must come out right now.

Kashi grimaces, and now she’s the one conducting the head-to-toe glare. She notices how Pinky’s long maxi, predictably pink, has small birds sewn on the hems. She thinks they are crows at first. But whatever they are, they don’t look like they belong there. No, these birds didn’t come with the dress when it was purchased from some street corner stall or scavenged in a redi-market. And then the dress swooshes and swirls and Kashi feels a little dizzy.

“Coming?” Pinky, who had turned around and already started walking off, says, glancing back at Kashi.

Kashi touches her forehead. “For what?” she murmurs.

Pinky smiles and takes Kashi’s hand. “Oh, you’ll see, little myna.”

“Kashi,” Kashi corrects her.

“Oh but myna is the most beautiful little bird! You’ve seen them, right? Outside the windows? I think they sing sweeter than koels and nightingales but because they look like common sparrows, no one gives them a second thought!”

Kashi stares at her blankly.

“Okay, maybe not myna, how about mina? Little mina, little fish, you move like a fish, all mysterious and hidden away—”

“Aren’t we going somewhere?” Kashi interjects.

Pinky holds her hand and pulls her along.

Dr Roy checks on the women every week. They stand outside his door, which always stays open, and one by one disappear behind the white curtains. All that can be heard are muffled voices and metallic clangs. Sometimes, the click of a camera. And then the women walk out carrying a thing resembling a lollipop in their hands as though they were little children who’d just visited a dentist. When it’s Kashi’s turn for the first time, she shuffles into the room and wants to close her eyes, it’s so bright. No fan in here, though. A window AC hums away in the corner, filling the space with a sense of winter. The doctor is seated on a black, leather chair.

Dr Roy’s younger than most doctors she’s seen, though she hasn’t seen many. He asks her to remove her salwar. “Lie down,” Dr Roy says, voice unwavering, eyes glancing through some papers he’s holding nimbly in his long fair hands. Kashi isn’t too dark herself but she is still a girl you might refer to as “dusky” if you had to provide a missing person’s report. You wouldn’t use kaali, though – never. Kashi is secretly proud of this. She doesn’t really want to be a gori anyway, because too often those girls look like they could be albinos or diseased with leprosy or something else. Dusky is in the middle, it’s a balance of the skin, the perfect amount of light and night.

“Legs on the stirrups,” Dr Roy instructs in an even tone. He bends down to look.

Kashi feels uneasy. She doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find. She wonders if her mother told him that she’s a virgin and now Dr Roy will find out she most definitely is not.

Dr Roy does not touch her. He looks and then scribbles something on his white papers full of numbers and the occasional set of long words Kashi cannot make out.

“Dress yourself,” he instructs.

“I’m okay?” she asks.

He looks at her now and Kashi realizes this might be the first time he is really seeing her, eye to eye. She notices his green eyes. What an odd colour for a desi! She has heard how men from Kashmir sometimes have green eyes because of the black magic their mothers perform to ward off soldiers. She feels very warm between her legs, as though someone were sitting beneath her holding a soft, bright flame.

Dr Roy looks confused by her inquiry. “Your name is Kashi, no surname?” he asks.

The way he says her name is so … educated, she thinks. No one was a BA-pass in her colony, let alone MA or MBBS. The only reason they even learned there was something like an MBBS was by watching Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. Kashi watched it in the hall twice with Arun. She feels a crack in her throat even though she hasn’t done anything but lie down and then get up and think about the green-eyed doctor a little. She looks away from Dr Roy at the skeleton behind him, at the diagram of a woman’s body on the wall, at the wall itself, naked and white, the blackened light switch, and then the cable that runs down to the floor, a grey dustless granite. She nods.

“Your mother tell you anything about the hostel?”

“She said she was taking me somewhere I could be useful.”

Dr Roy laughs almost imperceptibly, but in that quiet, white room Kashi feels the laughter fill the whole space around her. She looks up. And, just as suspected, he has perfect teeth. Arun’s teeth were yellow and crooked and often stained black from the tambaku.

“I am sorry she was unkind to you, Kashi.” Dr Roy has said her name twice now. This feels unusual. No one of such importance has ever said Kashi’s name more than once.

She bursts into tears, sputtering fat drops falling out of her eyes and pooling under her nose and lips, down her neck and disappearing into her kameez. She remembers hearing of saints who can cry so much their eyes become like water guns spraying everywhere, firing waterfalls and drenching everyone in their vicinity, puddles forming at their feet as they weep and weep for God. Her name too is after the holy city of Kashi, where many firangis flock to wear white robes for a month and practice a strict routine of yoga and meditation every day. But none of them can match those waterfall-eyed saints. Kashi’s always been spellbound by such displays of devotion. Not by the devotion, but the displays. How a body can do such things as create tear rivers for all that ache and love inside. How mothers bewitch their babies into having emerald eyes.

Dr Roy does not attempt to console her but he also does not ask her to leave. He sits down on his chair and looks at her, from time to time writing things down. Eventually, Kashi composes herself. She is so embarrassed she wishes she were dead. But she also wants to never die, so she can always sit there, crying, before Dr Roy. Arun would have walked out or slammed her against a wall by now.

“Heightened emotional states are to be expected,” Dr Roy says. “The medications will do that to you. But this is good, it simply means they’re working. Your body’s becoming a perfect vessel.”

Kashi has never heard anyone describe any part of her as perfect. She does not know what the other word means, but it hardly matters. She nods.

“Have you made friends yet?”

Kashi shrugs.

“Try some lighthearted gossip with the others,” Dr Roy says. “Watch a few films. Eat fruit. Make friends. Women often get lonely when they’re carrying.”

Kashi nods as if she understands what this means.

“All right, off you go. I ought to stick to the schedule next time! You’ve made it a bit hard, but that’s all right.” Against her own desire, Kashi ambles out of the room and all she wants to do is run to the bathroom to check just how pathetic she looks but there’s Pinky again. She grabs Kashi by the elbow and screeches “Come with me!”, whisking her down the hall.

Pinky’s brought her to the bathroom and locked the door behind them.

“It’s your eyes,” she says, her hands twitching, face sweaty.

Kashi takes a quick glance at the big mirrors, trying to see if her eyes look swollen. Dr Roy will be stooped before one of the other women’s legs now, peering inside, writing down notes over another set of numbers.

“Or maybe the way you drink water,” Pinky continues, ‘like you don’t take it for granted. Makes me feel like I can trust you’.

“With what?”

“I’m finishing my first trimester.”

Is Kashi supposed to congratulate her? “Why are we locked in here?”

And then Kashi notices little drops of blood on the floor where Pinky is standing. She sees Pinky’s hand between her legs and then looks up at her.

Oh, Kashi breathes out. “You need Dr Roy!”

“No, no, no, listen,” Pinky’s talking faster now. A few more drops fall on the ground and, is that … what is that … Kashi squints and bends a little away so her shadow isn’t obstructing the view of what it is she thinks she’s seeing.

Feathers. Small, silver feathers. Lying there innocently inside the drops of blood, tinged a little pink, but otherwise fluffy and sublime. Kashi wants to reach out and pick them up.

“It’s my third round,” Pinky says. “And that’s all you get here. If you miscarry them all, then zzzip, bye bye, tata!” Pinky raises her hands up in the air as though she’s a thief who’s been caught in the act. Her left hand is covered with blood and some shimmering feathers. Again, Kashi wants to reach out and pluck them off. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. This girl can’t be much older than her.

“You really should go to Dr Roy, you know,” Kashi says. “I can’t do anything. I haven’t even been pregnant before. Not once!”

Pinky seems a little distracted. She’s peeling the feathers off her hands. Kashi wants to ask her why there are feathers in her blood. Who knows, maybe firangi’s babies have feathers.

“Yes,” Pinky sighs. “You’re right, of course. I just thought some girl-to-girl time first would be nice. But Dr Roy likes me, he’ll help me. For all I know, this isn’t even the baby leaving just yet.”

And now, Pinky’s looking away, into the mirror, but not at her own reflection. “Last time, it was bones,” she whispers. “In the toilet, small chicken bones. Before that, eggshells, brown but with spots of white, like little diamonds. Dr Roy had to pick them out of my hair, you know, down there.”

Kashi’s body stiffens a little. She’s not sure what Pinky’s going on about, but if this is Pinky’s third pregnancy, then it means she’s been here for at least a year even if the other two didn’t take. A whole year of check-ups with Dr Roy. No wonder he likes her.

“You should go now,” Kashi says as she unlocks the door and walks out.

Next time Kashi sees Dr Roy, she doesn’t cry. She’s managed to get a hold of some nail polish from Pinky and now has cherry red toes. After removing her salwar, she itches the back of her left leg with her right toe.

“When are you going to do it, then?” she asks.

Dr Roy raises an eyebrow and it makes Kashi feel all soft inside as though she were a gulab jamun covered in all that sweet gloop.

“Sorry,” she says, lying down on the examination table. “I mean, the baby. When are you going to put the baby in me?”

Dr Roy slips on some latex gloves and Kashi feels a twinge in her belly. “Is it a rich desi couple or they’re angrezi only?”

Dr Roy doesn’t sit down on his chair but instead walks over to her. He looks down at her and smiles a little. His eyes are green like a forest, Kashi thinks and then feels that it sounds stupid because it isn’t really anything she can say out loud to him. Green like grass in the monsoon. Too much. Green like limes, like baby leaves.

“When I was little,” Kashi says, staring right back at Dr Roy, “I always thought I’d have the baby of the man I fell in love with. I guess that can’t happen anymore.” She tries to look especially sad when she says this last part, drooping her eyelids a little and tucking her chin into her neck.

“Kashi,” Dr Roy says at last. “I want to tell you a story.”

Kashi props herself up on her elbows. She can smell his breath. Of course, it’s minty with the slightest hint of smoke, not cigarettes but something finer and more mysterious, like hookah.

“Many years ago, a girl came into the hostel who was quite like you.”

Dr Roy’s voice is even and rhythmic, as though he were speaking alongside a metronome.

“Like me?”

“Yes, because she was perfect.”

He thinks I’m perfect!

“And because of this … unusual perfection, a very rich Japanese merchant and his wife, a Swiss, chose her as the vessel to carry their baby. She was delighted but had so many questions. And these were not usual questions. She wanted to know how the two of them had met and why they couldn’t have the baby on their own. Isn’t that odd, Kashi?”

Kashi knows she should say something but she feels still and her throat, dry.

“Well, maybe that’s not too odd and I’d feel the same except that she got a hold of the would-be-mother’s cell. None of the women here are permitted any sort of direct contact with the would-be parents of the babies they’re carrying. And perhaps this rule has been put into place because of this very incident that I’m about to tell you.”

Dr Roy touches her then, for the first time. He lifts one of her elbows and slides it down, and then does the same with the other, so that Kashi is on her back again. He turns around and walks to his chair, sitting down. Lifting her kameez up, he peers inside.

“So she started texting her, freely. And the strangest thing – the would-be mother was replying. Poor lady, I think she was just very eager for a baby. Didn’t want to upset the woman who was carrying it for her. That’s my best guess.”

There’s a pinch and a tug in between Kashi’s legs. She tenses up. Dr Roy pats her leg. She releases, pushes her back into the table and tries to breathe slow and deep.

“Next thing you know,” he continues, “the Swiss woman is sending this girl old photos of her husband. Apparently her grandmother had told her that babies end up resembling whatever their mothers think a lot about during the gestation. So this innocent Swiss woman is sending photos of her husband to the surrogate. Photos of him as a boy, as a young man in the army, their wedding, and so on. And this girl just stares at them all day long, scrolling through her phone back and forth for hours on end, all while she grows perfectly round, the baby kicking up a happy storm.”

Dr Roy’s fingers are inside Kashi now, pushing deeper. She winces, wants to scream. This is nothing like any kind of sex has ever felt. Of course, she is aware this isn’t sex.

“This continues for weeks like that – the girl’s absurd spiral of questioning. But she’s not a bit satisfied. She messages the Swiss woman asking about where they live and what it’s like there, down to the details about where everything is on their estate, which other people frequent the property and how many servants they have, even house pets, all their names, their appearances, so on and so forth. As her final trimester approaches, the girl’s got all these photos on her phone that are small windows into the life of this Japanese merchant and Swiss woman. It’s no longer just photos of the would-be-father. There are photos of all his friends, family, the house help, his pets!”

Dr Roy still hasn’t removed his fingers but Kashi is no longer uneasy. There is a strange comfort, a heaviness, an assurance where there was, only moments ago, gut-churning pain.

“Really, I’m still unable to make sense of what happened next. When the baby was born, the Japanese merchant was very upset with his wife. He claimed the child looked like their cook and that the Swiss woman had done some strange finagling of vials in order to cheat him out of his wealth and run off with her lover, the lover being, supposedly, the man who made their teriyaki and tartiflette!”

Dr Roy’s fingers slip out of Kashi. He removes the gloves and throws them in the wastebasket. Picking up a pen, he scribbles some notes on his papers and then turns to look at Kashi again.

“Naturally, the Swiss woman was distraught. Her husband boarded the next flight and was out of there, intent on a divorce. She took her baby and went to a nearby hotel. But this girl, Kashi, so perfect once, and still quite beautiful but utterly exhausted from childbirth – she was broken. She felt she’d been the cause of something terrible. She couldn’t live with that.”

“Did she kill herself?” Kashi blurts out.

Dr Roy laughs. Hearty and round, like a deep bell. “She ran off in search of the woman. Our staff found her, of course; that very evening, in fact. She was muttering something about the mother feeding the baby from a bottle and how the bottle was not white but pink. All very strange. I was not the main doctor here then, but my colleague informed me about this before he took me on. It’s unfortunate. Now, what do you think I’d like you to understand from this?”

“You didn’t finish,” Kashi says, sitting up, still without pants. “What happened to her after–”

Dr Roy presses his pen to her lips. “You don’t seem to have gotten the point, then.”

Pinky’s lying on Kashi’s bed. “It stopped when I was about to tell him,” she insists.

“How can something like that just stop! If you don’t tell him, I will.”

“Oh, just a few weeks here and now you’re some kind of spy?”

Pinky groans and squeezes her stomach.

“See,” Kashi says. “It’s still happening.”

“No!” Pinky squeals.

“I’m going to tell him right now.”

“He’s not here!”

“He gave me a number I can call if I want to reach him.”

Kashi’s standing up now and about to open the door when Pinky grabs her from behind. She pins her to the door. “Oh, so you’re cell-to-cell now, huh? Well, he’s given me more than a number.”

“You’re lying,” Kashi says.

“And you’re delusional. You think Dr Roy loves you or something? That you’ll pop a few pretty white babies out and then he’ll give you a gold star and a diamond ring and a mangal-sutra?”

Kashi tries to shove Pinky away but she’s surprisingly strong.

“What,” Pinky jeers, “can’t fight off a pregnant woman?”

“You,” Kashi breathes and pushes, “are probably not even pregnant!”

They’re both on the bed now, Kashi on top of Pinky though a little below her torso so as to not press down on the bump.

Pinky licks her lips and straightens her back on Kashi’s bed. “Ohhh, Dr Roy,” she moans, rolling the r. “Please, why do you need to impregnate me with a needle, can’t you do it yourself with your big hard–”

Kashi grabs a pillow and hits Pinky with it a few times. She feels a stir of joy unlike anything she’s felt before.

“I need you to do something,” Pinky says between the soft thuds of the pillow on her body. “Stop, serious, serious, god promise.”

Kashi sits back on her knees and pulls Pinky up. Pinky’s holding her stomach and trying not to wince. The two look at each other, their breaths filling the silent, dark room with a mild, rhythmic whirr.

“Tomorrow morning when it’s time for the check-up, I need you to distract Dr Roy for a little while. Please?”

Kashi feels a little cold. Pinky grabs her hand and holds it to her belly. “Feel, feel,” she says, her face dazzling with a grin. “First movements! See, you’re magic. I know you can help us.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want him to check me this week. If he spends longer with you than normal, he won’t have time to see me tomorrow. And the baby’s moving already, you felt that right?”

Kashi nods. The flicker of the tremor in Pinky’s belly had been brief but vibrant, a swish and swirl.

“See,” Pinky continues, “Dr Roy likes to be efficient. He might think there’s a bigger problem than there is. Then he’ll order tests to make sure. But those tests can actually make the miscarriage happen. I don’t think my body can take a third one in so short a time.”

Kashi nods slowly. Pinky touches her cheek and leans in closer, kissing Kashi, right on the lips, just like that, a little peck, then more and more and then it’s all tongue and lips and saliva mixing together. Kashi gently pushes Pinky back on the bed and pulls her salwar down. She feels a little like Dr Roy, and she actually thinks this in her head, pretends to be Dr Roy. This thrills her. Kashi bends down to kiss Pinky more but startles back. In between her dark, dry legs are long, white, bloody feathers, moving a little, as though wanting to fly off into the wind.

The following day, Kashi can’t stop clasping and unclasping her left hand with her right and then her right with her left. A woman who looks like she might burst with a baby any moment now is in front of her. Pinky is behind her. Kashi hates it that Pinky’s asked her to do anything at all. Her stomach turns as though there were a little windmill inside her. Why can’t Pinky just run away herself if she’s afraid of what Dr Roy will do? Again, Kashi’s let herself get all caught up in another’s problems.

She never believed it when her mother yelled at her about being fat-brained. Those are the words she used. You look like a skeleton but you’re so fat-brained. Or, All the fat’s gone to the brain, none on the bones. People will think I starve you and make you work. They don’t know that you don’t have a head on you to do any kind of work. Got you that job as a tutor at that nice house and the lady sent you home that very hour. What did you do there, huh? Bas, Bollywood dreams and boys and nothing else. Why do I even send you to school? Do you know what the fees are! And on and on it went like this. Kashi learned to block her out, thinking of her mother as a giant fly buzzing around. She’d sit beneath the fan in their one-room house and watch it spin its slow, white circle, around and around, the air gathering and dissipating. If I were a little lighter, she’d think, I’d fly away right now thanks to this fan.

But now she feels that her mother was right. And even that her mother had predicted this. Maybe here you’ll get some sense. That is, if you don’t get tangled up in something else. At least you’ll know all I did to help you. And, one of her favorite lines, when you have your own kids, you’ll see. God forbid you have a girl too, then you’ll see what it’s like. You’ll see.

Pinky touches her shoulder from behind and Kashi is pulled out of her stupor. Pinky’s hand’s on her stomach again and her eyes are searching for some kind of assurance. She’s so much shorter than Kashi, the top of her frizzy black head barely making it to Kashi’s shoulders. Kashi nods slightly. Pinky’s face shines with a smile. Her teeth are a little jaggedy too, now that Kashi looks closer. Her mouth, small and round and deep pink inside, her tongue perfuming the air with peaches – the only thing Pinky’s been eating since that day in the bathroom.

The other woman has come out by now, a grey lollipop in her hand. Kashi takes a deep breath and enters Dr Roy’s office. He’s sitting on his table writing notes. Always writing notes. Maybe that’s something she can do to distract him. Ask him about what he’s writing. But then she remembers what happened the last time, the story he told her. He’d be disappointed. Dr Roy looks at her now and gestures for her to sit down. His green eyes, oh how could she disappoint his green eyes?

“Your eyes,” Kashi says, her cheeks burning pink. “Are … are you from Kashmir?”

Dr Roy tilts his head a little and puts his pen down. “Yes,” he says. “Ma is Kashmiri. Dr Ravi Roy, my father, was from Kolkata.”

“That’s why,” Kashi says, smiling. Did she brush her teeth this morning? Yes, she did, she and Pinky went to the bathroom together and … she and Pinky–

“Your eyes are very beautiful too, Kashi,” Dr Roy says.

This is all she’s wanted, really. To sit across from someone and tell him about his eyes and he tells you about your eyes and you two just sit there and look eye-to-eye for the longest time and then someone turns the lights off and the moon is out and there’s music and rain and–

“Today’s an important day,” Dr Roy says.

Kashi’s body stiffens. “The procedure?”

Dr Roy nods. “Your body’s responding well. And you’re ovulating right now. My guess is we inseminate you in the next few minutes, the embryo will flourish. Next thing you know, we’ll be using that machine over there on you.”

Kashi turns to look at what Dr Roy’s pointing at – a large rectangular contraption on wheels and, hanging off a thick grey wire, something resembling a cross between a stethoscope and a microphone.

“The doppler,” Dr Roy says. “We’ll be able to hear the baby’s heart at just six or seven weeks. It reminds me of a wild horse running along endless paddocks.”

This is something so particular to Dr Roy. He’s like Gulzar. Kashi’s heart does a little dance. Maybe she can say this to him … does that count as a distraction even if she really means it?

“I can’t help but notice your mind’s elsewhere,” Dr Roy says. He looks concerned, with only a flicker of harshness in his eyebrows.

“Oh,” Kashi sighs. “It’s just that, well, Dr Roy … my mother used to tell me that babies—even in the womb, you know, when they’re just eggs or skeleton-like, they know where they come from. Isn’t that strange? Because sometimes I think even I don’t know where I came from. I mean, I know who my mother and father are. But I don’t think they loved each other very much. And that’s why, I always thought…well, I’ve already told you that, I mean…is it terrible to ask you if you remember what I said? About what I want, or thought I always wanted…”

Kashi doesn’t know if she should finish this sentence. For all she knows, Pinky’s already made a run for it. Or maybe Pinky isn’t running anywhere at all. She just needs to not be seen for this check-up. But what will happen in one week? If the baby falls out of her is she planning to scoop it up and put it back inside her and then stitch up her body so it doesn’t happen again? Kashi really is fat-brained. She hasn’t even asked Pinky her plan. Maybe Pinky did some black magic on her. That’s the only reason Kashi even wanted to kiss her in the first place. Maybe she’s making her see things. Her mother always told her that women like that can make you see things. She never specified what those things were but Kashi thinks bloody feathers could be something a chureil might show you with her kala-jadu. But Pinky did look distressed as she clenched her stomach. And the blood was very real, the smell, the drip drip drip and then the swift, soft feathers, so white, almost perfect.

Perfect, that’s what Dr Roy had said to her when he’d told her the story of that other woman. Kashi thinks about the other woman and all the other other women that have passed through the halls of the hostel, growing big with babies they’d never keep.

“Kashi?” he says now. He stands up and pulls her to her feet. He’s so much taller than her. She stares into his eyes.

“For nine months,” she says.

“More or less, but nine months is considered perfect.”

There’s that word again. Her heart is in her stomach, rioting with a pitchfork.

Kashi hears a distant cough, the timbre of Pinky’s voice, and then a gush, water crackling to the ground, her footsteps, running wildly, wild horses on a paddock.

“I want to be perfect.”

Dr Roy smiles. “You are! Come now, lie down.”

“Wait, Dr Roy–”

How can she distract anyone? She is so distracted herself. Fat-fat-fat-brained girl. If she has a girl, she’ll know, know what it’s like.

“Kashi, please, we need to get to the procedure.”

“If I’m so perfect, why don’t you kiss me?” she blurts out.

Dr Roy lifts an eyebrow and Kashi’s whole body shivers. She wishes she’d asked Pinky exactly how long of a distraction she needs. She wishes she could just ignore the whole thing and get the baby needled into her and stay quiet and still, dreaming of floating away like a feather in the wind. A feather, the feathers, the wind, a window.

Kashi’s never noticed it before—the big, wide window behind Dr Roy’s desk. Perhaps because he’s always kept the curtains drawn. But now the sun is gone, the monsoon is awake, the sky is black like ash dissolved to the bottom of the ocean, and there is a stillness in the air that you could reach out and pop if you had something sharp enough.

“That wouldn’t be very professional, Kashi,” Dr Roy says, even as he inches closer to her.

He comes to her, angling his body away from the window. She doesn’t know why she does this but she knows she can’t let him turn around to see outside. She hears the cough again, outside, but now it’s louder, slowly unfolding into a simper and then a wail, unfurling, lengthening.

Dr Roy looks to the door, but Kashi pulls him close. This isn’t the first time she’s kissed a man because she wanted something from him. But what does Kashi want from Dr Roy? Nothing that she can define. And then as she’s kissing him, she thinks about the kiss between her and Pinky, how much softer it was and wetter, too. Dr Roy holds Kashi’s waist and this thrills her enough to look away from the window herself. She reaches her hands down to his pants, and feels a pager tucked into his belt. She slides her hands over to the buckle but something makes her eyes open wide. A glint of white light in the black sky, a confetti of red feathers, and then Pinky’s voice writhing and rising all around them. And then the sky explodes, brilliant with black flames. Dr Roy pulls back and turns around. Kashi teeters on her heels and falls backward a little but catches herself with the chair. Her lips are burning. She runs to the window and looks out, shouldering Dr Roy in the process. He doesn’t seem to care, he’s frantically beeping his pager. Kashi leans on the windowsill and sighs.

A thousand starlings fill the sky, swirling and careening with the wind, moving at first into a hive of wing and song, and then disbanding, meandering, falling like a dark deck of cards the clouds are shuffling. Kashi’s heart beats faster. She feels the starlings, multiplying and mirroring into infinity, resemble the clusters of golden fish in the sapphire ponds of Amritsar, glazed black beneath the shadow of devotees dropping breadcrumbs into the water. Kashi’s only been there once, but now the world outside this window is a temple and the avatar of the Lord is in the unblinking eyes of these birds. Kashi looks around on the ground and in the sky and up and down again, trying to find the origin of this never-ending, undulating cauldron of birds susurrating through the sky. Her gaze at last rests on the roots of a crooked banyan tree, cracked in the middle as though by lightning and now laying split open on the wet asphalt. There, out of reach but entirely visible, on the edge of the footpath, at the smoke-thin end of the murmuration is Pinky, her legs spread apart, back arched, forehead beaded in sweat, a mad grin on her lips. Starlings fall out of her as blue eggs that burst open and rise into the sky, wings whorling up and inking the air, creating dazzling silver dust clouds in their wake.

Kashi laughs. She wants to reach out and touch the birds just as she did the feathers, wants to reach out and touch Pinky. As though by instinct, she turns around, but Dr Roy is no longer there. She can hear the hullabaloo outside, the muffled screams and crazed, rageful shouts, the blame being exchanged between important people, the useless requests to be quiet, hush, hush, don’t ask questions, get the girl, get the girl, the baby, what baby, the babies, what babies, where, where, nowhere, not here, not now. Kashi wants to urge Pinky to get up and run away but she doesn’t have to. Perhaps this will be a story Dr Roy tells to another girl who comes in here, months or years later. How a girl gave birth to strange birds and then was flown up and away by them, disappearing into the universe like chimney smoke, wisp, wisp, snuff, snuff, gone, forever. Or maybe they wouldn’t want to talk about it. Maybe they’d change the story a little, as necessary, to ensure the new girl delivers a perfect baby.

Kashi touches her belly, imagines a baby, white as a bowl of cream. She grimaces. She’s always thought she needs to be as light as the wind to escape. She closes her eyes, and thinks about whales, big as many buses with hearts the size of elephants, chugging through the ocean, blue and infinite.

Share

Hi everyone, I think we’re all subscribed to too many newsletters, following too many creators, taking in too much information, and spending too little time with ourselves. For the last week or so, it seems like every day this Substack of mine is getting around a hundred subscribers a day. I’m not boasting. I honestly don’t get it myself. I think most of you are subscribing because of my notes which are pretty good, I must admit. But really, for the most part, I don’t get it. I don’t think of myself as a super interesting person, rather a very strange person, always have. In anycase, I’m going to help you out and give you an easy reason to unsubscribe. Or 20:

1. I have no idea what I’m doing here

2. Most of the things I’ll put out via Beautiful Losers will be unclassifiable

3. I’m not interested in helping you be a better whatever (fill in the blank, writer, reader, poet)

4. Indeed, I have no vested interest in your self-improvement

5. I don’t mean the above in a jerky slashy bitchy way…I just don’t care for writing advice at the moment, and I’m feeling drained by advice in general. I also think there’s something to be said for meeting people where they’re at and just sharing art without the need to optimize or refine or whatever

6. Everything I’ve said above might be contradicted by my next post (which doesn’t exist in any tangible form yet and not sure when it will)

7. I’m not an expert in anything

8. I barely have a Bachelor’s degree

9. I dropped out of my MFA because it fucking sucked

10. My opinions often change

11. I believe in God as a personal figure not a vague concept to be wished at

12. I often like the idea of doing things more than actually making time to do them

13. Most internet-era arguments bore me to death and I think there is concentrated effort in the very real legions of hell that are our governments and other powers that be to try to distract us from things that truly matter

14. At the same time I believe with all my heart in the innate goodness of the universe

15. I look down on journalism

16. I look down on the idea of looking down on anything

17. I aspire for greatness

18. I think true greatness has nothing to do with material success and because of this I think I’ll never achieve tangible material success because I believe in manifestations and yet I also believe in manifold reality

19. I’m interested in way too many things to ever feel like I can nail down some semblance of a niche to focus on and write about.

20. I’m a mom and I love being a mother and I love my child. My identity doesn’t revolve around motherhood, though. Or womanhood, for that matter. Or the fact that my skin has more melanin.

Having said that, I’m so happy you’re here and if you do stick around, I feel you’d like being here and reading the kind of stuff I write and decide to share whenever & however I do.

All good things,

Shannan

I’m finally starting to feel like a real person again. I can finally say I’m happy, I’m excited, the long road ahead feels alive with the brownie-sundae sugar-buzz of possibility and goodness.

These last two months though have been a whirlwind. And before that, the last two decades also.

I don’t quite know how to update you any of it. I don’t even think I need to. I doubt any of you have been waiting to hear from me. I promise I don’t say that like your borderline college girlfriend (jk not jk), but just in earnest. We are all of us too busy now in our modern lives in the West to truly await another’s letters. Long, long gone are the days when we sought companionship in the form of distant lovers and friends. Now, despite being liberated of those pesky N95 masks, we wear masks of our own making and despite there being no legal ramifications to it, we look down upon the popping of our ephemeral bubbles.

It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s just a thing thing. And before you come out with your daggers of “hey hey Shannan used the it’s not x it’s y AI phrasing”, let me call you into my little lair here and give you a hug and say, shhh, child, why do you let them tell you what you can and can’t say, still, after ALL THAT!?

In any case, I checked my Substack Dashboard today for kicks and saw there were almost 7000 of you! When I was a loner in middle school sitting on the portable steps during recess reading Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf and listening to Michael Jackson and Damien Rice and Bright Eyes, I’d have never thunk so many strangers on the internet would willingly sign up to listen to my ramblings, but here we are.

In the spirit of this meandering comeback letter, I’ll share some highlights (and lowlights?) of how the last couple months have been and what I think the next might/ought to look like. Here goes.

• I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• I probably shouldn’t say so because in this industry you’re supposed to stay on cordial terms with everyone and pretend to like something even if you don’t and make a lot of superficial friends and get along and go to usually bad readings and get drunk and enjoy the romantic idea of being a writer more than being a writer but I just can’t so there, yes, I dropped out of my MFA program because it fucking sucked

• If you’re reading this and you know which program I’m talking about and you had a great time or are having a great time at that program, I’m genuinely happy for you because it’s a good thing to have a great time at your MFA program and I’m all for good things

• If you’re reading this and you are a part of the faculty of that MFA program then let me say that I respect you for what you do, and alongside that I think just as much as a student ought to learn from a teacher, so ought a teacher to learn from a student, and my one cent is that y’all have a fair bit to learn (so do I but let me reiterate, so do you)

• I am not anti MFAs, I think they are the way forward for many artists and I think lots and lots of funding should go to them alongside lots and lots of direction and guidance to help utilize that funding in a legitimate way

• I think MFAs today focus far too much on your background and culture and race and politics than your craft sensibilities and just, you know, learning to read and write

• I do think politics is inextricable from art

• I think a classroom ought to be a space where experiment is encouraged as much as if not more than experience

• Where you come from matters, who you are matters, our identities matter, but ultimately they are all MATTER, they are not us… we are humans, beyond the purview of this material world, we are all of us spiritual beings, and in forgetting that, we lose something intrinsic to the practice of art

• Nuance could be a cool name for a pet, it sounds like a fat French cat

• Part of the reason I dropped out has nothing to do with how horrible my experience was at the MFA program and a lot to do with how horrible my experience was living in Trump’s USA

• Fuck Trump so fucking much

• So glad I can say that now that I’m in Canada

• Seriously, fuck that dude

• And honestly fuck the people who didn’t do everything they could to keep him out of office

• The harm he’s caused reverberates torrentially across the world each and every second

• Sometimes the lesser of two evils is a temporary good

• All evil is evil, but some evil is less evil

• All good is good, and true good towards one is as powerful as true good towards all

• As my husband, the fucking magnificent poet once wrote, THE UNIVERSE IS A KINGDOM OF KINDNESS

• I believe that in every possible way

• It hurts me day in day out to witness the suffering of others and because of this I refuse to read the news

• I’m a coward, but this is how I go on

• I try to put everything I have into raising a beautiful child in all her being, giving her the childhood I never had, and putting as much good into the world as I can through poetry and art, and this is how I go on

• Moving to Canada has been a fucking relief, did I mention that?

• I ran away from home at 17 from a violent and abusive home and came back years later to discover that my father had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt on my credit card (credit cards I’d never created, but that he had using my social insurance number with forged signatures)

• It took me over half a decade to fix my credit (still not fully there), put myself through my undergrad, raise my kid as a single mom, pay for my divorce from an abusive arranged first marriage, and finally feel free in some way

• Now, at 31, I am happy and it is good, capital G-good even, and I am grateful I can say that I saw…I see what a beautiful life is, or at least how to make one

• When I was 11 and then again at 14, I tried to end my life and routinely between 10-16 I spent many waking hours dreaming up ways to die

• At the time I felt like a coward for not going through with it but now I feel like a fucking superhero for continuing to stay alive, no matter how hard it got

• To write about darkness when you’re in the light is a beautiful, gentle, tender thing

• You get to appreciate all the ways in which the darkness is formed, and how it looks from the outside, how you reach in from this space of bright light and can almost touch and smell what it was once like, and yet, miraculously, you’re safe and cradled in the light

• I’m meditating again and starting yoga again

• I was a trained yoga instructor in a last life (which is to say a decade ago)

• I think an MFA that involved yoga and meditation might have been so cool

• If no one ever reads my poetry and novel, it’ll be okay

• Whether or not any of you are believers, all creativity comes from and is meant for God. You can sub out the word God for Universe or the local McDonalds, but the essence remains the same.

• This is not ours, it never was, life is a gift to be given back, art is a gift to be given back, joy is a gift to be given back

• Seriously though the MFA sucked a lot of life out of me. And so did living in the US during an insane fucking time

• Revolutions don’t need to overthrow empires

• Many revolutions are themselves manufactured by empire

• One’s work is one’s duty is one’s life force is of utmost importance

• I keep thinking about this part of an interview of Leonard Cohen’s where he says: “It's hard work. I think everybody, or most people, work hard and I've always been happy to be employed... I think that the real poison, if there is one, it's unemployment, even for the people who have jobs, there are so many people I know who have jobs but they aren't really employed, they don't feel they can really throw themselves into their work and I've had the privilege in my life to have been able to throw myself into my work.”

• As for the future of Beautiful Losers, I don’t know, but I don’t think it will be conventional. I think I want to write whatever I want, as always, but I don’t want to sound like all the thousands of Substacks out there.

• So maybe next time I’ll tell you about the time I joined a cult in New Zealand.

• Or I’ll share some more of my poetry curriculum

Love,

Shannan

Weird Girl Lit is now a marketing category and reallllly popular one. Which is…weird. But I don’t feel bad about it (mostly because there are Actual Things in the world to feel about it and people finding more books they love isn’t one of them even if it’s intrinsically linked to capitalism).

In case you don’t know what Weird Girl Lit is, loosely I’d say it involves a female (or female-adjacent) narrator (or main character) whose relationship to the world has gone a little awry. Perhaps she’s alienated from her own body, domestic life, her language, or some combination of all that.

The prose tends toward the uncanny rather than the realist, though this isn’t a rule in any way. There’s often an interest in the grotesque, the abject, the hungry, the dissociative. Familiar things will often stop feeling familiar and vice versa. At its best it’s a contemporary inheritor of the Gothic, surrealism, and a specific strain of twentieth-century modernist interiority. At its worst it’s a girl being sad in an apartment, though one can argue that’s more, well, Sad Girl Lit which I wrote about here:

Reader Poll

In any case, if you go online elsewhere you’ll easily find lots of Weird Girl Lit reading lists, so why do I need to put one together? Well, I think a lot of the stuff out there is repetitive and overwhelming of a certain kind/type/culture. It’s also super American and often gender-exclusive. There’s so much fantastic literature out there once we let go of certain bounds, primarily for many of us these are genre and country (when it comes to books and the authors we’ll read).

So this reading guide hopes to be a bit different. Besides novels, I’m also sharing poetry and short story collections that, to me, fall under Weird Girl Lit, as well as hybrid words. Aaand you’ll find some books below that aren’t strictly by female-identifying authors because why should something like Weird Girl Lit be inhibited and encumbered by societal constrictions or even, by the supposed limits found in its own name?

Alright, here we go! And of course, please feel free to add your own in the comments and let me know what you’ve already read, loved, (or even, gulp, disliked!

Novels

☆ Pre-1950

• The Book of Margery Kempe — Margery Kempe

• Nightwood — Djuna Barnes

• Good Morning, Midnight — Jean Rhys

• Tropisms — Nathalie Sarraute

• Two Serious Ladies — Jane Bowles

• Rebecca — Daphne du Maurier

☆ 1950–1980

• The Naked Woman — Armonía Somers

• The Vet’s Daughter — Barbara Comyns

• Cassandra at the Wedding — Dorothy Baker

• The Woman in the Dunes — Kobo Abe

• The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

• Ice — Anna Kavan

• Dark Spring — Unica Zürn

• The Wall — Marlen Haushofer

• Malina — Ingeborg Bachmann

• Sula — Toni Morrison

• The Lesbian Body — Monique Wittig

• The Hearing Trumpet — Leonora Carrington

• Eva’s Man — Gayl Jones

☆ 1980–2000

• Cassandra — Christa Wolf

• The Piano Teacher — Elfriede Jelinek

• Sphinx — Anne Garréta

• The Notebook — Agota Kristof

• Poor Things — Alasdair Gray

• Sexing the Cherry — Jeanette Winterson

• A Gujarat Here, a Gujarat There — Krishna Sobti

• Hotel Iris — Yoko Ogawa

• O Caledonia — Elspeth Barker

• I Love Dick — Chris Kraus

• The Virgin Suicides — Jeffrey Eugenides

• The Autobiography of My Mother — Jamaica Kincaid

• Amulet — Roberto Bolaño

  ---

☆ 2000–2021-ish

• Fledgling — Octavia Butler

• My Heart Hemmed In — Marie NDiaye

• The Vegetarian — Han Kang

• The Seas — Samantha Hunt

• Frontier — Can Xue

• The Hunger Angel — Herta Müller

• White is for Witching — Helen Oyeyemi

• Our Lady of the Nile — Scholastique Mukasonga

• The Taiga Syndrome — Cristina Rivera Garza

• Pyre — Perumal Murugan

• Untold Night and Day — Bae Suah

• Annihilation — Jeff Vandermeer

• Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin

• Memoirs of a Polar Bear — Yoko Tawada

• Little Star — John Ajvide Lindqvist

• Hurricane Season — Fernanda Melchor

• Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl — Andrea Lawlor

• Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

• Pink Slime — Fernanda Trías

• Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

• The Employees — Olga Ravn

• Sorrowland — Rivers Solomon

• Sterling Karat Gold — Isabel Waidner

• Ultramarine — Mariette Navarro

• Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch — Rivka Galchen

• Slewfoot — Brom

  ---

☆ Current

• Lapvona — Odessa Moshfegh

• Bunny — Mona Awad

• When Women Were Dragons — Kelly Barnhill

• Monstrilio — Gerardo Sámano Córdova

• Big Swiss — Jean Beagin

• Hunchback — Saou Ichikawa

• Discontent — Beatriz Serrano

• Mary — Nat Cassidy

• State of Paradise — Laura van den Berg

• Audition — Katie Kitamura

• Thirst — Marina Yuszczuk

• Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte

• Goddess Complex — Sanjena Sathian

• Perfection — Vincenzo Latronico

• Midnight Timetable — Bora Chung

• The Hounding — Xenobe Purvis

• Tetra Nova — Sophia Terazawa

• She Made Herself a Monster — Anna Kovatcheva

• The Lamb — Lucy Rose

• A Good Person — Kirsten King

• Hexes of the Deadwood Forest — Agnieszka Szpila

  ---

Short Story Collections

☆ Pre-1980s

• The Lottery and Other Stories — Shirley Jackson

• The Street of Crocodiles — Bruno Schulz

• Panics — Barbara Molinard

• The Complete Stories — Clarice Lispector

  ---

☆ 1980–2000

• A Kitchen in the Corner of the House — Ambai

• The Bloody Chamber — Angela Carter

• Thus Were Their Faces — Silvina Ocampo

  ---

☆ 2000–2020-ish

• Skin Folk — Nalo Hopkinson

• Magic for Beginners — Kelly Link

• St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves — Karen Russell

• Mouthful of Birds — Samanta Schweblin

• The Complete Stories — Leonora Carrington

• Vertical Motion — Can Xue

• The Visiting Privilege — Joy Williams

• Fen — Daisy Johnson

• Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings — Kuzhali Manickavel

• Apple and Knife — Intan Paramaditha

• The Most of It — Mary Ruefle

• What is Not Yours is Not Yours — Helen Oyeyemi

• Where the Wild Ladies Are — Aoko Matsuda

• Cursed Bunny — Bora Chung

• Daydreams of Angels — Heather O’Neill

• The Doll’s Alphabet — Camilla Grudova

• The Houseguest — Amparo Dávila

• Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado

• What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky — Lesley Nneka Arimah

  ---

☆ Current

• Gods of Want — K-Ming Chang

• Evil Flowers — Gunnhild Øyehaug

• A Kind of Madness — Uche Okonkwo

• Shit Cassandra Saw — Gwen E. Kirby

• Entry Level — Wendy Wimmer

• The Girl Who Cried Diamonds — Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

• White Cat, Black Dog — Kelly Link

• Ghostroots — Pemi Aguda

• Mouth — Puloma Ghosh

• Ninetails — Sally Wen Mao

Poetry Collections

☆ Pre-2000

• Collected Poems — Chika Sagawa

• Ariel — Sylvia Plath

• Extracting the Stone of Madness — Alejandra Pizarnik

• Transformations — Anne Sexton

• The Descent of Alette — Alice Notley

• Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson

☆ 2000-2020-ish

• Alphabet — Inger Christensen

• Dark Matter — Aase Berg

• Ossuaries — Dionne Brand

• Ban en Banlieue — Bhanu Kapil

• Given — Arielle Greenberg

• Flemish — Caroline Knox

• Autobiography of Death — Kim Hyesoon

• Measures of Expatriation — Vahni Capildeo

• Discipline — Dawn Lundy Martin

• Someone Else’s Wedding Vows — Bianca Stone

• Arrow — Sumita Chakraborty

• Sea and Fog — Etel Adnan

• Wound from the Mouth of a Wound — torrin a. greathouse

• God’s Green Earth — Noelle Kocot

☆ Current

• Mirror Nation — Don Mee Choi

• Perverts — Kay Gabriel

• And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight — Lynn Xu

• Villainy — Andrea Abi-Karam

• Judas Goat — Gabrielle Bates

• What good does it do for a person to wake up one morning this side of the new millennium — Kim Simonsen

• Iguana Iguana — Caylin Capra-Thomas

• Oracular Maladies — Sophia Terazawa

  ---

Leave a comment

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you all like to read and write poetry. I do too. I’m also an editor of poetry as well as prose, as some of you might already know, and just today we announced a close-reading session over on Strange Pilgrims which has filled up within minutes of opening:

Strange Pilgrims

Introducing Strange Pilgrims Club

Hello fellow strange pilgrims…

Read more

7 months ago · 38 likes · 8 comments · Strange Pilgrims and Shannan Mann

In there, I talk a little bit more about the reasoning behind wanting to do a reading club as opposed to a workshop on writing or submitting or anything else. Of course, I do those also, and ONLY POEMS, our poetry magazine, regularly runs some kickass workshops. You can check them out here!

But as a lifelong reader, I’ve always felt the lack of spaces dedicated purely to reading and understanding a creative text, without any desire to bring our own writerly egos in to it (well, as much as that is possible). So, while the Strange Pilgrims Club will be for prose, I’d like to try out a Beautiful Losers Club dedicated to close-reading poetry.

Just as I mention in the linked post above, this is indeed an experiment, and I’d like to keep the space intentional and intimate. For this reason, enrollment will be first-come-first-serve and there will be a waitlist. I will share the recording later on, but if you’re interested in joining in live, please sign up here:

Sign up for Beautiful Losers Club!

During the session we will:

• Do quick introductions

• I’ll share a brief presentation to assist our close read

• We’ll read each poem in full and unpack different elements of what makes it work, what stands out, even what you might not necessarily enjoy or understand

• Participate in open yet structured conversation

I want this to feel like the best kind of workshop classroom. The part I’m most looking forward to is where it opens up into everyone talking about poetry, and about what literature is doing right now.

The session will run for about 60 minutes. If the conversation is thriving I won’t end it prematurely, and anyone who needs to drop off at the 60-minute mark is free to do so (ought to go without saying that I won’t hold you captive before this either, but I want to nurture a sustained space for conversation and analysis, so I’d encourage you to stay for the full 60 minutes at least).

Alright, that’s all from me. Not sure how many folks we’ll get for this man, but I’ll most likely cap this at around 15 people, so it really is first-come-first-served. Please note, that I will keep a few spots reserved for ONLY POEMS Members!

May your life be full of poems,

Shannan

Every poet who’s thought about writing a novel has heard the same advice: slow down, add more, learn to plot. Some of the best novels, though, often work the way poems do—through rhythm, image, compression, obsession.

So below I’ve got just that for you. Beware, though, this isn’t a list of “lyrical” novels—that word has been used to death and means nothing anymore. You won’t find craft books here either. I truly feel that the work of learning to write a novel doesn’t primarily occur by reading about how to write a novel. We learn, most foundationally, by reading other books and talking about them.

So, dig into any of these and tell us if we missed some that should be here! And if you’ve read any of the books on this list, tell us what you thought?

Leave a comment

1. Beloved — Toni Morrison

2. The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector

3. Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys

4. Human Acts — Han Kang

5. Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf

6. Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo

7. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino

8. Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston

9. Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez

10. Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler

11. Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi

12. The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

13. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro

14. The Stranger — Albert Camus

15. Hopscotch — Julio Cortázar

16. Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov

17. As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner

18. Piranesi — Susanna Clarke

19. Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree

20. Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee

    ---

    Share

The Lie

Her body was part-whale, part-mouse—behold the lie!  
It lives in your belly. Like an unborn baby you mould the lie. 
   
Slice my ears with the jagged stars. What did you ever do  
with the gift of music? I buried the violin and told the lie. 
   
This lamp in the ocean. A wolf with feathers for fangs. The woman who bares   
her wrist like a rumour. Nothing will change. Try it—kiss, kill, scold the lie. 
   
I fear I will turn to maggots swelling in the rain. I run from clouds  
caging your form. I have lost, though once I thought I controlled, the lie. 
   
“No one can see us.”—“The sun is smoke in my city.”  
You do not need eyes for (there is no blindfold!) the lie. 
   
Most of the time I laugh at misfortune. I am mad, you are mad—come,   
are we both not too old for the leash? For once, with me, uphold the lie. 
   
Day breaks, night falls, time eats itself like a cannibal in heat. You will burn to black  
in the Universe’s marriage with Nothing. What ever remains but the cold, the lie? 
   
Am I forgiven, my Lord? Place the gun on my cheek like a mother’s hand.   
I begged at your feet for the fortune of faith. You, Dear One, sold the lie. 
   
It writhes in my gut, a worm in my blood, a bird in my groins.   
No, no! A song, a scarf, a horse, milk, the sea, a marigold—the lie. 
   
Tonight, I will leave for the mountains, I will leave for the river. I will leave,  
Shannan. Stay a while in the thirteenth hour of memory, please—hold the lie. 

Subscribe now

Note on Art

Joyce Lee’s artwork1 felt like the perfect visual companion to this ghazal2. The skeleton draped in ribbon, bursting with pearls, caught mid-laugh or mid-scream, crowned with golden teeth—it’s got that same energy of ornamentation over emptiness, beauty as a kind of defiant costume we wear over the truth of our bones.

There’s also something in particular about that pink bow—so delicate, so deliberately placed—that echoes for me the form of the traditional ghazal itself as an obsession with transformation and disguise. We’re all chimeras, all impossible composites, are we not? The skeleton knows it. The speaker knows it. God, too, must be aware. As well as Death, and the devil, and all that is dark and holy.

Share

Can I tell you a secret, I ask him, and he turns around. In the darkness, his head appears to float midair, the slivers of his half-open eyes searching for me. I find his hand under the sheets and squeeze. I think I’ve known for a long time, I say, my words a register above whisper. He leans closer.

You know, I go on, like the way you always knew you were an artist, and that’s what you were made to do. I know it’s not the same thing, not even close probably, but I just know it in the same way. All it took was coming here, and meeting that crazy neighbor, who, as it turns out, isn’t that crazy after all. I wish I’d thanked you sooner, for moving us, I mean to say, for moving here, like for moving, oh God, my words are coming out wrong, I’m too excited. Feel!

I bring his hand to my chest, and a tremor goes up his fingers, so quick I don’t think even he’s noticed, but I have, I’m noticing it right now, every drop of blood in his veins is a singing bird. I wipe sweat from the back of my neck and try to just focus on his hand on my chest, so cold and rough. I can still feel the blue acrylic paint that splashed the space between his forefinger and thumb that morning after we had another fight, this time because there weren’t any eggs despite my having asked him to bring them. But that was before I knew.

I mean, I always knew, like I’m trying to explain to him now, but I mean knowing in the way of conscious knowing, I guess. I consciously only knew after I got back home from next door with the one blue what I thought was a duck egg like a perfectly polished sea stone in my palms. I went to the kitchen sink and set it inside, letting the water wash over its speckled, oval body. I stared at it for so long I didn’t realize when the sun went down and everything was dark.

He’s moved his hands to my left breast now, squeezing over my t-shirt and trying to wriggle inside through the neckline. I wonder if he’s even been awake this whole time. I really need you to hear this, I tell him, and curl my shoulders inside to nudge him away. His hand flops between us like a dead fish. His breathing grows lighter, and his eyes are almost fully open.

Outside, night is giving up. I turn over on my back, dragging his arm with me to rest on my stomach. I’m going to tell you now, but you need to promise you won’t run away. He raises himself on his elbow and I look through the triangle created by his arm at the egg I kept next to the bed after he’d already fallen asleep.

I think about the egg as an another planet, with waves inside it, the yolk a bloody sun, and inside the yolk a yellow sea filled with boats made of leaves, of the women that inhabit that world, long twisting hair braided down their back shimmering like eels below the water, and the water around us, in the room, bursting from the egg, but also the walls, the oak floors, the earth outside, with the worms and the bones buried underground long ago. What have you done, he says, clutching my body like a child. Above us, the ceiling begins to crack and I feel my body fill with light and float.

Subscribe now

Notes on Art

I paired this story with Kremena Chipilova’s “Caged”1 because it captures that strange, heavy tension between being held and being trapped.

In the painting, the hand can be viewed as the cage, yes, but you see that it’s also adorned with rings and fine nails, suggesting a kind of “beautiful” or “domesticated” restraint. I love the surreal touch of what appears as the bird having a human finger for one leg.

To me, it mirrored a moment in my story where the boundaries between the protagonist’s physical body and her internal world start to blur. I’d like to think that both the painting and the story are about that exact second when the “conscious knowing” finally breaks through or beyond the surface.

As I bid adieu to 2025 and try to feel like a grown-up learning ice-skating for the first time on the shining glittering liminal rink that is 2026, there are few things of which I feel certain.

One big one, however: loving literature is plain tough. It’s always been tough, I suppose, being a cerebral person, feeling alien even when not alienated per se. Thinking differently, loving strangely, on and on. I saw in these last weeks so many year-end wraps, new year predictions, all sorts of scares, dares, nightmares.

Specific to publishing, the consensus seems to be both that it’s doing better than ever (self-publishing is no longer “shameful”! Positive win!) and that it’s in dire straits (we all knew publishers were just glorified gamblers right, come on, was this truly news for anyone?). One thing I noticed: none of these…shall we say…editorials, seemed to talk about lit mags. A lot of them, though, did have opinions about Substack. And what Substack publishing means for writers, gatekeepers, editors, and so on. Some of these opinions were less than rosy:

I gave an official statement of sorts to Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg. Here it is in full:

What I mostly sense here is the gatekeeper’s anxiety. Gatekeeping has its functions, of course, but this concern that editors/agents/publishers are framing as being for the writer is likely faux-concern. Take for example the magazine editor worried about half-baked ideas going out for free, ideas they would have apparently “paid for.” This assumes a world where editors see raw potential and develop it. That world doesn’t exist anymore. Magazines don’t have the mandate for that kind of mentorship. No one is sitting around going “ah this is the next Joan Didion if only I could help them fix their mixed metaphors and concretize their obscure pop culture references and add a bit more Americanah.”

Chalk that up too many writers or too few venues/overworked editors, whatever. The thing about people in traditonal publishing is that they’re married to traditions, so anything that challenges the status quo destabilizes them. I imagine some agents and editors are afraid that they might become irrelevant as more and more people continue to find an audience. Substack lets people do that while potentially getting paid. The alternative isn’t “that writer gets properly developed by gatekeepers,” it’s “that writer never gets any feedback or develops an audience at all and ends up doing odd jobs without any health benefits.”

And then, almost more egregious is that distraction line. How hilariously paternalistic. Some people’s Substacks are their next book. Some people’s newsletters are how they connect to readers. Some people use it as a workshop space. The idea that there’s one correct path (write book → get agent → get editor → get published → repeat) and everything else is “distraction” serves institutions, not writers. The most interesting thing perhaps is that much of the same people who are saying this kind of stuff to unpublished writers are saying the exact opposite to trad-published ones: get on Substack, dance on Tiktok, put pre-order links all over your online creative spaces — it’s obscene.

And I say all this as a writer who desires to “traditionally” publish a book. I do agree that not every writer needs to be on Substack (or any social media for that matter). But an intellectually and artistically free society necessitates the ability to choose without feeling belittled or cornered.

That the kind of editors, agents, publicists New York Magazine might anonymously interview for these clipped hot-takes would think that Substack is, decidedly, *bad for you wittle writers*…well…again…this isn’t a plot-twist, my dear Watson (sorry not sorry but we’ve been delightfully drowning in Sherlock Holmes this holiday season). And of course, let me be kind and say that these are snippets. Certainly if one spoke in confidence, there’d also be nuance, understanding, acknowledgement of the specific as opposed to judgement of the general?

Thing is, bring yourself face to face, heart to heart, with any individual person or their creation and you’ll quickly see that nothing can truly be boxed in. We are not copies of copies of copies as the so-called art and literature produced by AI. We are, inconceivably, utterly, hopelessly unique despite being borne of the irreproducible self-replicating mechanism that is…humanity and civilization.

How is that possible? I’ll leave that to the scientists and theologians. For me, the realization has been thus: so what if Substack will be set on fire or sink to the bowels of Enshittification? So what if the rate of reading declines grows yet steeper and by the end of 2026 no one, not a soul, not you nor me nor anyone, is truly reading anything, merely scanning and scrolling? So fucking what, I say, if the words upon words we write throughout this year and years past, reach no one but the space just beyond our lips, hanging there in an abysmally illiterate universe?

What’s the alternative? Don’t write? Don’t think? Don’t try and uplift other writers and thinkers? Don’t try and create new ways to reach outwards in the darkness? Don’t do what it is that you can’t live without doing?

I suppose. But this is true insomuch as you might think death to be alternative to living. And those of us who’ve felt aflame with life at some point or another will be able to uproariously yawp that no, indeed, death of the body is not the perfect opposite of life, but rather death of the soul. And what do we say to killing that deepest, most beguiling, truest part of us that goes on in this world despite it all?

Not today. Or, in other words: fuck that.

It is in that mood, then, that both (my we’ve-been-reincarnated-together-for-a-hundred-years husband) and I are deciding to “rage, rage against the dying of the light” that might be portended by all the doomsdaying that goes on here, there, everywhere.

Practically speaking, we’re juggling several projects. Our poetry magazine, ONLY POEMS, is 2.5 years old and growing more beautifully than we could have ever hoped for. I wonder if anyone ever predicated that in circa 2023. That over 50,000 people would fall in love with a poetry magazine started by two grad students while their toddler slept. No, probably not.

I say this not to gloat in anyway. I’ve laid my heart at the same altar as Leonard Cohen’s music and can earnestly say when I sing along in my broken voice to “If It Be Your Will”, I feel the truth of universe singing with me.

Rather, I say this to prove a little point. None of your creative ideas need to be the ones that “everyone’s” talking about and predicting, and trend-charting and so on and so forth. Do the thing you can’t help but do. That, in and of itself, is success.

Besides OP, we’ve also launched Strange Pilgrims, a literary magazine for prose seeking to publish the most “real, surreal, & brutally beautiful writing.” This one went viral on Substack and we received over 7000 submissions in our first ever call. It’ll be interesting to see how that momentum continues and how, inevitably, things stabilize and what beautiful strange stuff emerges from that.

Other than this, on a more personal level, we are writing, if you’ll believe it or not. Beyond Substack, beyond editorials, opinions, and so on, we are at work on first books. Karan’s just gotten an awesome book deal for his debut poetry collection and I’ll share more about this in the coming weeks (perhaps get him to come out of his shyness and share the process of it himself!).

As for me, I’m still writing that horror-magic realist novel. Writing short stories that blend fantasy and meta-modernism and the mundane with a bit of sci-fi. Writing poems about being the only person after the end of the world left alive.

A confession, so often this year I’ve pulled myself from trying to even indulge in thoughts of “gaming the system.” Let me be frank, with the level of publishing research and insider insight I have right now (which isn’t as much as say a Big 5 editor or top agent would but is quite a bit more than someone not so entrenched in this space as me would), do I think I could vomit up a cozy-romantasy with the just the right selling-points and land some kind of solid deal?

I bloody well think so.

Do I want to do that?

Oh, sigh, don’t we all want to sometimes betray our souls and be positively beleaguered with tons of fuck-you-money?

I’d say so.

Have I (or, let’s face it, Karan) pulled myself away from that ridiculous precipice and come back to the page, the blank page, the blinking page, my page, my words, myself, every single time?

Damn right.

My friends, you are the best person out there for the job. And the job is, quite simply, to be yourself. Be more and more of who you truly are ever more and more as the months and years pass. And by the end of this ride, you will have found the truest self.

I’ll leave us with these words of a literary master I adore, Ursula K. Le Guin from A Wizard of Earthsea:

“You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything. So I thought, once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do. . . .”

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Good morning (or evening, or ever-after),

Sometimes I send you poems I’ve written here, because they tell me that’s originally what Substack was for. Incidentally, creation too. Was/is for poetry, that is. Though, Capital-P poetry. Which is not limited to written poetry. The below, though, is just that: written poetry.

May you be uplifted and uplift others!

S

Little Blue Dot

by Shannan Mann

My favourite mountain is a volcano. The way   
it just blows up whenever it’s had enough.  
When asked my influences, I say Eyjafjalla.
Though I am not hiding from anyone, I am  
also not making myself any easier to find.  
Smog has made the stars obsolete. No one laments   
Orion or Andromeda. Rivers are frothing   
tar, but since we are looking at them through  
Instagram filters, they look pretty cool. Really,  
the planet is falling apart. As am I. Most likely  
you too. Isn’t it right, then, that our home mirrors  
our cracks? How cruel the gavel of time: I melt   
at the sight of hummingbirds and blue whales  
but they go on dissolving and unforming, faster  
than ever before. Yet sometimes I admit   
I’m seized by the guitar  strings of wind   
on an unnaturally snowless winter morning.   
Spying birds migrating away to warmer   
mountains, I can almost fool myself  
that there is such a place for me too. Not heaven,  
but the ladder to it. Not God, but a glimmer  
of the Self mustanging along pastures, wild,  
rough light of the unified theory of the multiverse.  
In other words, an impossibility, like earth.

First published in The Missouri Review as Poem of the Week (Nov 25, 2024)

Share

My friends, it’s the end of the year, winter has its soft paws in our souls, and we’re all—in some small or large capacity—about to have a change of pace for the next little while before we greet 2026 (in terror or a flurry of excitement…that I leave up to you!).

All in all, it’s a good time to write and an even better time to write more. If you’re a poet or dabble in poetry, perhaps you might naturally gravitate towards slower poems right now, akin to contemplations or prayers. Slow doesn’t always mean sad, of course, and sad isn’t necessarily even tragic. In anycase, poetry in and of itself has some kinda magic that wrenches out the saddest songs from our hearts and forces us to somehow try and commit them to paper (or, you know, the screen).

Now, you might be writing more journalistically (as in, poetry is a way to beautify the diary entry for you), and I promise you, there’s nothing wrong with that. Still, if that is primarily the case, this post/email probably isn’t for you. You may even be offended by it. For that, I sincerely apologize in advance.

If, however, you—like me—enjoy critique, revision, and have a desire to publish your poetry, then below, I’ve share some observations to help you avoid certain pitfalls that can come with, what I’ll simply call (and hope for you to understand in all its glory and variegatedness) the Sad Poem.

Subscribe now

First, though, some examples of some of the best sad poems I know.:

• Ghazal for Dida by

• Michiko Dead by Jack Gilbert

• Leave a Message by Bob Hicok

• Elm by Sylvia Plath

• [All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.] by Alejandra Pizarnik

• Gently, Gently by Bert Meyers

• As Ever by Agha Shahid Ali

And now, in connection with the poems I shared above, some observations, organized best I can, to help you stop writing bad sad poems, and…start writing good ones.

On repetition and form as containers for grief

Karan’s ghazal ends every couplet with “god,” creating this incantatory rhythm where the word becomes more complicated each time it appears—blessing, question, threat, absence, and so on. Agha Shahid Ali (my most favorite poet) does something similar in “As Ever,” where the ghazal form holds the desperation:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

So I’ll regret it. But lead my heart to pain.
Return, if it is just to leave me again.
...
An era’s passed since the luxury of tears–
Make me weep, Consoler, let blood know its rain.

Pizarnik repeats “All night” until it becomes a kind of madness:

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me. All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone.

That repetition mirrors the very human experience of insomnia and obsession.

Bob Hicok uses anaphora too: “When the wind died...When the maple tree died...When the roses died...When the child died.” Each “when” is a small funeral, and the structure lets him build to that devastating final line about calling the dead even though “The dead have no ears, no answering machines / that we know of.”

On getting weird with your sadness

Plath’s “Elm” never once says “I’m sad” or “I’m depressed.” Instead the speaker is a tree, or maybe possessed by a tree, and the imagery gets visceral and strange: My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires” / “I am inhabited by a cry.” That’s so much more unsettling than any direct statement of pain could be.

Pizarnik gives us “feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart.” Anatomically impossible yet emotionally nothing could be more honest in that space. Likewise, Bert Meyers writes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

And you, mad as a clarinet
where the street divides;
a city of raindrops in a bush;
the slow honey that drips
from the sky’s old ladle…

See how the surreal blends and folds and opens up. As when Hicok writes “the father dug a hole in his thigh / and got in,” — the surreal folds right back into the self, the physical, the tangible, and for a moment they are one.

On the physical manifestations of grief

Bad sad poems work mainly with the psychological (without much depth and mostly through cliché) . Good ones can be felt in the body. They yank you into their world. Note in Karan’s Ghazal for Dida: “You blew on the first morsel, then offered each idol” / “she weighs the beads of her rosary to seduce god.” Those are hands doing specific things, rituals you can picture…enact…be possessed by as you read.

Agha Shahid Ali: “Shouting your name till the last car had disappeared, / how I ran on the platform after your train.” Here’s an action anyone who’s been left can see themselves doing. Or “To find her, ‘round phantom-wrists I glue bangles”… the physical is invaded by the psychological, and in that act there is horror…because grief inevitably leads to some form of horror, terror, dread.

And see Meyers, here:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

At night, I was the one
who became a cello,
strung with all our roads,
where memory hums
to itself like a tire.

He’s not saying “I wept from sadness because of stuff I remembered,” but rather gives us the metaphor of becoming an instrument, the image of memory as a humming distended tire.

And of course, Jack Gilbert’s poem in its entirety is sadness made physical. “Michiko Dead” is about carrying a box that’s too heavy, adjusting one’s grip as different muscles tire. He never says “grief” or “I miss her.” Instead, he describes arms underneath, thumbs shifting, blood draining from a raised arm, going numb, finding a way to keep carrying without ever putting it down. Fucking brilliant piece of writing, man.

On sound and music and pain

Bad sad songs often make me cry if I’m in a crying mood. Bad sad poems make me mad, often. Music has the boon of, well, music…whereas poetry’s just got words.

Notice Pizarnik’s syntax, how it gets tangled and frantic:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing.

Please, read it aloud, and feel it for yourself, the painful music in the language, the sobbing, ringing loud and clear.

Or dear Sylvia here:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   
Echoing, echoing.

Those hard consonants, that repetition of “echoing.” The sound…harsh and relentless.

Meyers uses music explicitly—cello, clarinet, tuning fork—but he also makes the poem itself musical:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Gently, gently,
through anger and pain,
love justified itself,
like the nails in the house
during a storm.

Feel that softness in the repetition against the hardness of what he’s describing?

On refusal to comfort

None of these poems offer resolution. Plath ends with the tree/speaker still “inhabited by a cry” that “flaps out / Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.” That’s terrifying, not comforting.

Pizarnik: “All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.”

Karan Kapoor: “Your name is her offering, Karan. The day she dies / you will lose your name, and you will lose god.” The poem doesn’t say “but then I found meaning” or “but love remains.” It ends with that double loss.

These poets trust readers to sit with discomfort, weep, be transformed, mourn, linger on the page…live with the grief and let it leave you silently, perhaps when you’re least expecting it to.

On beginnings

I’ll end with this one. Just look at this utterly heartwrenching yet beautifully simple opening from Bert Meyer's “Gently, Gently”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

We, too, began with joy.
Then, sickness came;
then, poverty.
We were poor, so poor,
our children were our only friends.

I wish more poems started like this. Not just the sad ones, all of them, happy ones, weird ones, funny ones. So damn simple, yet so transcendental. My whole being feels these opening lines…I want to hug the poet, I want to love the world, I want to hold my daughter forever.

Share

Subscribe now

I must confess, I don’t use Spotify much. I’m kind of big on self-hosting, so I have my own music (as in, artists and albums I’ve handpicked for myself) on Plex and audiobooks on Audiobook Shelf and that’s where I get my creative auditory stimulation from, so to speak. But another place I do spend a lot of time on is, well, right here—Substack!

For better or worse, a large part of my life is linked to Substack. Through work, personal projects, and the magazines I edit, I sort of live here (or so it feels sometimes). So, I thought I’d try and do a Substack Wrapped for myself, looking back at 2025 to the best of times and the worst of times.

Well, a note on the worst. I don’t like ripping on other folks’ work…ahem…publicly. If we hang out in person and pass some tea and snacks around, I promise you’ll get my entertaining oft-cynical ass to fess up and drop a bunch of hot takes, but let’s just say I believe in some type of old-school class and a sense of grace and just plain old social decorum. Plus, why spend time riffing on what you hate when you can glorify what you love! (Okay, sometimes the former’s more fun, but you get what I mean).

Still, as far as the “worst” goes, I’ll say this: it’s been increasingly difficult to find work that feels genuinely exploratory, that takes real risks, that exists outside the algorithm’s preference for easily digestible takeaways.

I know a lot of folks also hate Notes on here, but I do understand why Substack implemented them. And yet, the obviously AI-gen’d Notes that masquerade as human thought on here are just…ubiquitous and annoying. Don’t get me started on the generic “great post!” comments and the clawing-at-the-metrics-ladder nature of some of the interactions.

Then again, so much of this just comes with being on a social platform, and though many of us might have forgotten, it also just comes with coexisting…on a planet…with other individuals. Some of us are weird, some of us are stupid, some of us are annoying, some of us are all three or some combination of the three plus any number of other descriptors at some time or another. So…I guess I wish more of us could adapt (adopt??) a more balanced, “middle-way” type approach when it comes to such things. And then, you know, move on to the good.

Let’s do that, then. Move on to the good.

Total posts read ✦ 339

This one’s easy to calculate for me, and I’ll explain why. Last year, I jam-packed my saved posts folder for Substack app, utterly overwhelming myself. So, at the beginning of 2025, I decided I’d read one at least Substack post everyday. Just this morning, I finally got around to reading this lovely piece:

SubMakk

You're Writing a Book. So Stop Writing a Movie.

We’re in a golden age of TV (if not quite a golden age of full-blown cinema), so I don’t blame anyone for consuming a vast proportion of their narratives on screens. But so many issues I address with my writing students stem, I suspect, from subconsciously internalizing what works on the screen and trying to make it work on the page…

Read more

a year ago · 1233 likes · 24 comments · Rebecca Makkai

5 Favorite Substacks

I’m a bit of a sucker for rankings but I feel like they ultimately play to our lower desires (not meaning sexual here haha, talking in a more spiritual sense I suppose). So, while these are the five Substacks I definitely read the most this year and thereby one can reasonably say they are my “favorite” Substacks on here, please know I’m not ranking them from best to least or whatever. Each of these is phenomenal and you should spend time with these writers words!

Dear Head of Mine

An editor's weekly newsletter about books and other things

By Sean deLone

I’ve said it before and I'll say it again, how doesn’t have thousands upon thousands of readers is beyond me. Well, I guess I can surmise why — he doesn’t pander or speak down to you and he definitely doesn’t try to be flashy and trendy. His Substack is deeply valuable to any writer at any stage of their career, and yet it isn’t just teeming with useless AI-gen’d advice posts and hacks. Honestly, I wish more of Substack was like this!

How to Glow in the Dark

Book publishing advice and community for authors of fiction and nonfiction, written by the agents at Neon Literary.

By Anna Sproul-Latimer

has got such a stirring and charming voice that I’d probably read a the recipe for making gray rocks from her. Alongside that, she delivers no-bullshit posts full of useful information for authors with insights into the publishing world (something I’m actively researching myself, as some of you already know).

Counter Craft

fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books, other things

By Lincoln Michel

For all the conceit of Substack being a home for writers, it’s actually been quite difficult for me to find writers on here whose Substacks aren’t…sigh…boring? ’s Substack is the opposite of whatever kind of boring Substack you can conjure in your head. With each post, one thing is shiningly evident: he really gives a fuck about literature. And I like that. I like when people don’t just come on here to bitch and snitch…when they genuinely, deeply fucking care.

Footnotes and Tangents

Slow reads of great books. Book guides and a reading community to help you get more from the best stories.

By Simon Haisell

I’ve never met in person, but I feel like I know him for some reason. And I sense he might be one of the nicest British dudes around. Plus, it makes me super psyched to see him as one of the top 10 Literature Bestsellers here on Substack because what he’s offering is something very close to my own heart: a way to read beautiful literature slowly and thoughtfully.

ONLY POEMS DAILY

Wake up to a poem every day & slip into a slower, sweeter life.

I can’t help it if the newsletter of the lit mag I created is also one of the best ones on this platform, okay? Every single day, we send out a beautiful poem into the world…and I feel like that’s one of the noblest ways to start a day…open your eyes, take a breath, read a poem and enter the world.

11 New Substacks I’ve Discovered

Perhaps like any other art-obsessed writing and reading fiend on here, I do a silly dance in my head whenever I find a particularly striking, new (to-me) writer on here. So, below (and again in no particular order), are some of the posts I came across on here that led me to discover more wonderful Substacks:

Tumse Na Ho Paayega

How to live an intellectually rich life

Go to the main page of Wikipedia…

Read more

2 years ago · 8676 likes · 279 comments · Utsav Mamoria

Lurker

A Folk Horror Crash Course

What could Yellowjackets, Florence + The Machine’s upcoming album Everybody Scream, and the Christmas special of Detectorists possibly have in common? Beyond release dates within the last five years, each seems to indicate something of folk horror’s trickle down into more mainstream media. No longer, it seems, is the genre confined to art house producti…

Read more

a year ago · 629 likes · 38 comments · Lizzie Bickerstaff

Derek Thompson

Everything Is Television

A spooky convergence is happening in media. Everything that is not already television is turning into television. Three examples…

Read more

a year ago · 2254 likes · 36 comments · Derek Thompson

Story Notes!

How Hayao Miyazaki builds a story

Hayao Miyazaki tells stories like no other director. Each element of the story is a direct representation of Miyazaki’s thoughts put to paper, unbridled by words or structure. In this way, his films offer a rare window into his inner world, and the entirety of production takes on the spirit of its director…

Read more

2 years ago · 2548 likes · 26 comments · Wren Petkov

Delivery & Acceptance

Merchants of Culture: A Conversation With S&S Editor Yahdon Israel

I wanted to chat with Simon and Schuster editor Yahdon Israel after reading his refreshingly frank interview with Merve Emre for her excellent (and I’m not just saying that because she’s a client) series “The Art of Editing.” I particularly loved how Yahdon reframes how we should think about …

Read more

a year ago · 218 likes · 39 comments · Alia Hanna Habib

Final Ghoul

Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein and the Death of Ambiguity

When speaking to Waterstone’s about his latest feature film, Frankenstein, Guillermo del Toro stated: “there’s a teenage Protestant girl inside this Mexican, Catholic boy”. He meant it, I think, as a gesture of reverence. An admission that beneath his baroque monsters and gothic tenderness lies a streak of moral earnestness. For years, del Toro has clea…

Read more

a year ago · 993 likes · 93 comments · Neave Glennon

Craft by Vera Kurian

What if things are happening but your story is still boring?

CRAFT is a reader-supported email newsletter about the nuts and bolts of fiction writing and the world of publishing…

Read more

a year ago · 28 likes · 7 comments · Vera Kurian

Past the Dragon

The Most Disappointing Fantasy Novel to Ever Break the Genre

What do readers want from a good Fantasy book…

Read more

2 years ago · 440 likes · 86 comments · Clifford Stumme

Beyond the Bookshelf

To preserve depth and freshness in our lives, we need privacy

Navigating the passages between books and being…

Read more

a year ago · 35 likes · 9 comments · Matthew Long 📚⚓ and Esha Rana

Adam Walker

The Fall of the English Department

The mid-twentieth century was the golden age of the university English department in the U.S. Up until the 1990s, the average English major would have studied nearly every major work from the medieval period to modernism, from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Today, most English majors can graduate without a sense of literary history. Many programs don’t requ…

Read more

a year ago · 343 likes · 44 comments · Adam Walker

weird medieval guys

The coolest medieval woman you've never heard of

Christine de Pizan (and her dog)weird medieval guys is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber…

Read more

4 years ago · 4866 likes · 64 comments · weird medieval guys

Share