Little Things To Inspire You This Week #18
#18: A few stories I've loved recently.
Happy Monday! I hope everybody had a lovely weekend and that East Coasters got to enjoy some time outside with clean air following last week’s toxic smoke nightmare.
Tonight I head to Europe for my Write & Flow retreat in Paros, Greece. Since I launched my retreats last year, they’ve been a major source of joy and fulfillment in my life, and I’m very excited to meet the 17 participants joining me — several even from this Substack community! I’ll continue to send newsletters from Europe.
Today, I’m sharing a few stories and snippets that have moved me recently. Paying subscribers additionally receive journaling prompts, recommended reading, and more. Enjoy!
Last week I finished MAAME by Jessica Goerge and loved it. I looked up its author and found this on her Instagram:
Earlier this week, 13.07.22 to be exact, marked my first official day as a full-time writer. When my book is published (Feb 2023), I'll have been working towards this goal for almost a decade.
For anyone who doesn't know but may be interested, I've been trying to get published for over 8 years and MAAME (my debut novel) is my 6th book. I have 200+ submission rejections in my inbox (a large % of which was my own fault: "Dear agent, I know you only represent adult fiction but maybe you'll be interested in my YA!), tens of half-filled notebooks, and a "failed" partnership with my first literary agent, so needless to say, this has been a long time coming.
MAAME was a “Book Of The Month” and “Read With Jenna” pick, a Barnes & Nobel select, is already being adapted into a TV show, and debuted as a #5 NYT Bestseller. It’s George’s first published novel, but as she describes it, it’s the 6th (6th!) she wrote. She kept going despite hundreds of rejections and working a full-time job as an editorial assistant. Consider this your reminder to keep going. Rejection and perceived failures are part of creating but never need to be an ending.
Author Ron Currie wrote a phenomenal piece about the WGA strike in The New York Times. Through sharing the story of his father’s life, who worked as a TEAMSTER until he got sick and was forced into retirement, he summarizes precisely why this process, this system, this society, is so dehumanizing and broken. It gets to the crux of the strike better than anything else I’ve read. (And, if you haven’t read Currie’s novel Everything Matters! I highly recommend it.) Here is some of his essay:
“My father, barely more than 50 years old and with only 20 percent of his heart still working, lost the modest life he’d put together through tireless labor over decades and had to move with my mother into my aunt’s house for a time. He had, in his sudden infirmity, become an abstract problem for a business entity whose only concern was to hold on to every penny it could, decency be damned. And though his Teamster reps tried to intercede on his behalf, they were unable to persuade that entity to think of my father — and treat him — like a man.
I learned two things as I helplessly watched all this going down. First, only a sucker bets on a future more distant than his next breath. And second, the difference between being shaken down illegally and being shaken down legally is that instead of going to prison, the crooks in neckties get stock bonuses and gold Rolexes and hearty pats on the back for a job well done.
…
I wonder if the people on the other side of the negotiating table will ever understand that it’s not about money and never has been. There’s an almost genetic-level memory of struggle and privation among working people, and we’re tired of having to fight like animals simply to be treated like human beings. We’re tired of entering into agreements that, one way or another, always get broken.
That’s what this strike is about, at least for me. I don’t need a cut of Netflix executives’ stock compensation. What I need — what I demand — is that they treat me and the people I love as though our lives and labor are every bit as significant as theirs.”
The New York Times interviewed Saving Time author Jenny Odell and I loved this quote from her about the meaning of life:
Do you have any advice for how people might answer that question for themselves?
Like, what is the meaning of life?
Yep.
The closest thing that I have to an answer is that I want to be in contact with things, people, contexts that make me feel alive. I have a specific definition of alive, which is I want to feel like I am being changed. Someone who’s completely habitual is set in their ways of thinking and doing, that type of person is liable to see days in a calendar as being pieces of material that you use to achieve your goals. There’s all kinds of degrees between that and someone who’s so completely open to every moment that they’re dysfunctional or something, but I want to live closer to that second pole. I think about things that are enlivening to me, and they tend to be encounters, conversations — that type of conversation where you and your conversation partner are changed by the end, you’ve covered new ground, you are both now somewhere else. But it’s also encounters with nonhuman life that is growing and changing, and realizing that I am also changing and evolving. To me those are the reminders that, yeah, I’m alive, today is not the same as yesterday, I will be different in the future, therefore I have a reason to live, which is to find out what that change is going to be.
