If you’re at all familiar with Literary Substack, you’ve probably heard of Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer.
Jami, who writes the Substack “Craft Talk,” created an accountability project with a writer friend in 2018 where they each promised to write 1000 words a day for two weeks one summer. The project has since grown to more than 32,000 participants with daily encouraging emails from Jami and other writers.
Jami also recently released a book based on the project, aptly titled “1000 Words.” The book is a collection of advice that’s been sent out over the last six years from more than 50 writers, mixed with Jami’s own words about owning your work and staying creative.
I’m currently on a personal journey to get out of my own damn head about what it means to “be a writer” and instead just, you know, being a writer. So I naturally scooped this up immediately (from a local bookstore, naturally).
Last night, an entry from Carmen Maria Machado (a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and author of one of my favorite memoirs of all time) fully transformed my relationship to a key part of my writing life.
Your subconscious is your best friend as a writer; it spits out beautiful, bizarre ideas and solves narrative problems and also has a wicked sense of humor. So many magical and memorable moments of my own work emerged from that under-place…and that process cannot be triggered by putting your butt in a chair; it requires you to be flexible, thoughtful, and purposeful about the way you collect, catalog, and access your own ideas.
One of the most useful things I’ve ever read about process is an essay Kelly Link wrote about narrative obsessions in 2010…it established a very healthy relationship with my brain; so much so that while I experience all kinds of impediments to my work that are outside my control…I have never experienced writer’s block. Because I am constantly nursing my obsessions.
Which is to say, Feed your brain. Take care of it. Let it do things in its own way. pg. 86-87
I realized I am nurturing my brain constantly with literature, newsletters, podcasts, tv shows, and more. And instead of thinking of these things as distractions from my writing, I should be thinking of them as fertilizer for the work to come, that I now, for the first time in my adult life, believe is coming.
This is how “Creative Nourishment” was born.
This is a new section of my newsletter solely dedicated to thinking about and discussing and interrogating the work that I’m feeding my brain. I’ll be writing about anything and everything I consume. Sometimes they will be reviews of the work, but mostly they will be essays on the world and how the work fits into it.
This will be a perk for paid subscribers. It won’t be on a regular cadence but I promise they will be thoughtful, and you’ll get insight into the weird workings of my brain. And who wouldn’t want that?
My first interaction with Zadie Smith’s work was through her 2012 novel, “NW,” which follows four Londoners as they build lives outside of their childhoods spent in a Council Estate.
Apparently, I gave this book 3 stars when I read it in 2020, which surprises me as I think back to my reading experience. All I can remember from this book was how much I didn’t understand it.
I’m not sure if was the authorial voice or the fact that the novel set in London with speakers of a dialectical English I’ve never encountered, but the prose was impossible for me to follow. I remember almost nothing about the characters or plot. It felt like an attempt at an inflated literary work that lacked any foundation to carry it along. It was a book very much not written for me.
I share this for context as I began another Zadie Smith project: “The Fraud.”
This novel tells the story of Mrs Eliza Touchet (Smith never used periods with Mrs. and Mr. titles, and I found it quite disorienting), cousin by marriage of English novelist William Harrison Ainsworth. Eliza joins her cousin’s family as a housekeeper after her husband and son died of scarlet fever, tasked with maintaining the home, managing the ego of her cousin as he’s consistently spurned by the 19th century literary scene, and navigating the social and racial complexities of a changing world.
Eliza’s charges also include Ainsworth’s three grown daughters, two of which have reached a spinsterdom much like her own, and his housemaid-turned-wife Sarah, an illiterate woman born to the lower classes who loves to gossip and revel in her new found status.
Despite being set in 19th century England, a time period where I would expect to understand almost nobody, the voice of Smith’s narrator in “The Fraud” was much clearer from the very beginning. I understood the narrative point of view, the subtle hints of how it felt about its own characters—a slightly arrogant distance, kind yet dismissive, tinged with an air of superiority that zeroes in on another’s flaws without introspection. The way you might turn to a coworker after showing your boss who makes triple the amount of your salary how to sort an Excel sheet: “can you believe this guy?”
As Sarah grows accustomed to the dwindling advantages of marrying a fallen literary darling, she suddenly has more time to become engrossed in “The Ticheborne Case,” a true historical court case that rocked London in 1873. A man appeared in the city claiming to be a Sir Roger Tichborne, who was long believed to have perished in a shipwreck en route to South America. The authorities assert this Sir Roger is actually Arthur Orton, a butcher from Australia who learned about the Tichborne family’s hefty reward for their lost son.
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