10 things of interest #13
an espresso cookie recipe, conversations on love and digging deep
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Another month, another favourites round up and I am beyond excited that we’re heading into March. Spring is almost here and summer is one season closer.
- from Conversations on Love gathered 20 lessons on love from several Substack writers and shared them in a heartwarming Valentines day post. This is my favourite line from writer , “I learned that love and romance do not exist only at the bottom of a champagne bucket, or on bended knee atop the Eiffel Tower. They’re in the chai latte you queued 20 minutes for; in floodlit corridors on unreasonable seating; in the reassuring click of the door of the cab that’s whisking you home.”
In a collab post with
, shares 10 tips on how to best share our personal writing. The two that I remember the most and keep close when I’m writing are these: “You don’t need to be an outlier,” and “No one will say it quite like you.”- wrote a stunning piece on becoming a live-in caretaker for her 87-year-old mother. Through setting boundaries and sorting mental acrobatics to deal with her mother, she used this as her writer-in-residency period, helping her make peace with a difficult living arrangement.
In “On Spring flowers, and the radical creative opportunities of grief.”
reflects on her sisters death and how grief forced her to notice the creative opportunities around her. Through it, she had to accept that grief and death comes for all of us, and it’s how we choose to deal with the aftermath that matters.I stumbled across the work of
and fell in love with this little piece about a spider who weaved a web in her garden. In “I like what you've done with the place,” Sophie draws connections between a spider’s web she accidentally damages and the knitting of a jumper with too many mistakes to continue.- strikes again with the first chapter of his book, “A story of a year.” He writes with unmatched descriptions that are fascinating to read. Over the course of this year, he’ll share a year of cookery “dictated by seasons and what [he] might find in hedgerows and fields, and what [he] might find in the butcher’s shops, fishmongers and farmer’s markets of the towns and villages dotted along the river here.”
It should perhaps be law that everyone keeps a stash of cookie dough in their freezer. This recipe makes use of coffee grounds and now I have an excuse to bake every week. It also makes use of white miso which is an ingredient I don’t get to use enough.
Sometimes you’ll stumble across writing that connects with you so much so that you wonder how anybody could have written exactly how you feel.
did that for me. In “I need to be seen,” she wrote about the raw need to be seen, to be acknowledged and identified. I get it. I’ll leave you with this quote: “And I think this is because feeling unseen is a unique type of agony. Like a silent scream that reverberates within; a sense of naked exposure to judgment and rejection — the absence of acknowledgment, the absence of shared moments and shared space, the absence of connection.”Poet
gave “A pep talk on writer’s block.” But what I loved was that the suggestions were unconventional: “Indulge in your obsession,” “binge on beauty,” “eat a rambutan.”And lastly, if Joy’s suggestions are not enough,
from Counter Craft reminds people that the best advice is to finish it: “Finishing means failing. If you always stay in the drafting stage, success—however you define it—is always on the horizon. But failing is how we teach ourselves to write. You have to write a lot of bad poems to write a good one. Nearly every novelist has “trunk novels” they’ve abandoned, yet which taught them how to write the novel they did publish. And every book goes through many drafts before it is finished.”
Natalie thank you. I shall now go to find Sophie Mackintosh’s piece on the spider.
Thank you again.
Thanks for the shoutout!