I haven't written a Tinyletter in weeks. I bet you can guess most of why: Charlottesville, vacation, post-vacation catch-up, Houston, heat wave. More or less in that order, chronologically if not emotionally. All of my big feelings are vast and horrible and my small ones seem too petty, even for me, a woman who wrote a post-election defense of the mode. (I did recently read Sarahs Blackwood & Mesle's essay on pettiness and Ferrante,  though, and love it. Highly recommended if every other piece of Ferrante criticism you've read has left you going: no.)

Despite this, I have so many things to tell you. For instance: that you can read an excerpt from GRACE AND THE FEVER on Hazlitt, and that, if you read the whole book, you will be joining the illustrious editorial staff at The Atlantic (hi, Tinyletter subscriber Julie!) in doing so.

I recently wrote about pairing alternative flours with seasonal fruit for Healthyish, as well as about the ceramics at this one restaurant that has great ceramics (I hear the food is decent too). 

And I interviewed Adrian Shirk about her book And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy for The Hairpin. So in lieu of personal writing, which I just can't seem to do lately, here's an excerpt:
 

Q. I’ve read a lot recently in this vein, not about women and religion but about women living in public: Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck and Alanna Massey’s All the Lives I Want and Lauren Elkin’s Flaneuse, to name a few. These books that are on the one hand about imagining the histories of women but at the same time, imagining what having those stories might mean for us as women now, constructing our own lives.

In the essay on Voudou (this is obviously specifically about the black experience, but it has some resonance, I think): “Suppression, erasure of culture, religion, relatives, entire family lines. You no longer work in linear narratives. Or you do, but only by imagining unbroken lines of connection wherever they’ve never explicitly been debunked. You have to.” Which to me feels like sort of the overarching project, in certain ways. Where you’re writing yourself into a historical narrative as a way of asking where and how you can belong in one. Do these women belong in history? Do you belong in history?

A. Do you belong in history? Who knows! What are the ethics of writing oneself into a historical narrative? A lot of that is still mysterious to me.

What I do know is that offering a subject-driven narrative of history, is, I think, undeniably of value. I am present in this stuff; I’m interested in this; I’m writing this.I have a personal stake in this, and now that I’ve revealed myself, I can’t avoid the next step, which is explaining why I’m here. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that Ihas to reveal her autobiography; there’s a lot of ways that could take place.

What was really moving to me about bringing up that line is that when we’re working with material about marginalized people—women, people of color, poor people— we’re working often with an absence of record, an insufficient record. So in that absence, in those gaps, there seems to be some necessity— and some historian is going to murder me!— but there is the necessity for some imagination.

 

Not imagination as an end, or as a replacement for what may later be corroborated by archival evidence. But there seems to be a real need for a space to broaden one’s historical imagination, to blast open space to think in.
 

To blasting open space to think in,
Zan

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