Readings for November 6, 2022

The Wingback has been review heavy lately, so let’s take a breather. By which I mean that I need a breather because I’m in the middle of the fall semester with a lot of projects on my plate right now.

Which brings me to my first recommendation, this lovely essay on stamina as part of a writing career by poet Carl Phillips in the Sewanee Review. I highlighted a few great passages in this essay, but here’s a particularly great one from near the end:

For me, both as reader and writer, a piece of writing (but again, the same for all art) is only as interesting as its capacity for surprise. And it’s the possibility of surprise—the firm belief in that possibility—that keeps me reading and writing. Which is to say, it encourages stamina, a drive to keep moving forward, perhaps at a different pace as I get older, perhaps no longer in the grip of crisis, but I’m moving forward.

I would really like to do in-depth guided read-alongs for novels; would you all want to do that? Like, we’d decide on a book and then read a chapter a week, and I’d provide reading questions, or writing prompts, or resources for essays on the book itself or the themes in the book? Maybe we could use Substack’s new chat feature to talk about it.

What kind of book we could decide together. Classics you always meant to read or didn’t like when you had to read it in high school; novellas in translation that we could read quickly; big doorstopper novels that we could read slowly; there’s a whole world of literature out there we could tackle together, no previous experience required.

This week may be a tough one for readers in the United States (or it may be a fantastic one because we’ve all worked hard and done our part! Let’s find out!). In any case, everyone can enjoy these “stone-faced writers” posing with adorable animals over on LitHub. The first image, of linguist Yuri Knorozov, cracks me up every time I look at it.

I found a new-to-me word this week: ecdysis, which is the process of shedding a shell, like a crab or an insect would. This is the opposite of endysis, which is the process of putting on a new coat of fur or feathers, like mammals and birds do. It’s November, and the end of the year is coming up, and there has certainly been a lot of change lately on every level. I hope you find these words handy; they feel fancier than “shed” or “molt” or “regrow.”

Whether Gurley is yawning or screaming depends on your state of mind.