BY: J. Markowitz
The physicality of Mag Gabbert’s poetry and essays is dreamily overwhelming. We enter a twilight through the medium of a body—her body—which her craft makes so palpable that it could be our own. Via the sensations of her vulnerabilities, Gabbert delivers us to the liminal spaces between pleasure and shame, power and exploitation, existence and the body. She takes us to the edge of her mortality, because it is there that we are most aware of our own aliveness.
I have begun this review eight times now. I know the topics I want to cover, the words I want to say, but the disjointed and interrelated concepts resist a cohesive narrative. The cause, I suspect, is not my lack of writing skills but the high quality of Leah Dieterich’s in her memoir, Vanishing Twins.
Alcohol is the drug of choice for many people, and the war on drugs tends to kindly turn a blind eye to the copious amounts of alcohol consumed daily and advertisements that glorify social drinking. Yet, millions of Americans are living with alcoholism, and thousands die alcohol-related deaths each year. In her debut collection of essays, Nothing Good Can Come from This, writer Kristi Coulter tackles the prevalence of alcohol in society and the motivations behind the desire to overconsume. Through her personal narrative of drinking and sobriety, Coulter examines the reasons why women drink, the effects of drinking on her life, and the long road to self-discovery and strength as a sober person.
The author spoke with contributing writer Charli Engelhorn about the inception of this book and the value of discussing the role alcohol plays in our lives.
This is an age of loneliness. This is what I’m thinking on the bus during my morning commute. I’m surrounded by a seawall of slack, blank faces, the impassive slate of cliffs. Nobody says a word; they just gaze into the cups of their palms, thirsty for plastic wisdom and blinky emoticons, which have mostly replaced emotions. Even liking something nowadays is a deliberate act.
Everyone is lost in the magic of tiny screens, wrapped in private thought bubbles, protected from the silence by noise-canceling earbuds, selecting the clatter of podcasts or the hum of iTunes over the warm body in the next seat. Their faces are still, but their fingers are industrious: it’s a factory of people engaged in the same repetitive swipes, clicks and taps, over and over and over again.
Aside from the tapping, nobody makes a sound.
David Ulin’s The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time was rereleased this fall with a new introduction and afterword that speak to our contentious political climate. Ulin–critic, author, and ruminator in the best sense of the word–reframes his 2010 argument for the role of books in 2018’s dysfunction, fake news, and fractured narrative. Can reading save us? Ulin isn’t sure, but he sees value in resisting cynicism.
The author spoke recently with critic Heather Scott Partington by email about the value of engagement with the written word: an “empathy machine” and our “ongoing human conversation.”
My introduction to Gloria Harrison was the short film Let’s See How Fast This Baby Will Go, based on her essay of the same title, first published by The Nervous Breakdown. It is the true story of a nineteen-year-old woman in labor, on the verge of giving away her baby, who first stops to buy a car. That woman is Gloria.
Gloria Harrison is a storyteller whose work has appeared on The Nervous Breakdown, This American Life, The Weeklings, Fictionaut, Other People with Brad Listi podcast, The Manifest Station, and Sweatpants and Coffee. In January 2017, a short film adaptation of her story that appeared on This American Life, “Let’s See How Fast This Baby Will Go,” was released by Australian director Julietta Boscolo. It is currently playing at film festivals around the world.
While roasting a chicken for dinner and mixing banana bread for the weekend, I turn on the television to listen to the news, mostly for background noise. The regular reporting is on hold, though, as the driver of a red Ford Explorer leads the California Highway Patrol on a chase through North Hollywood, Studio City, and Sherman Oaks. Normally, these pursuits happen at night, under cover of darkness on relatively empty freeways, blue lights flashing through the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. But this chase is different: it is happening at five o’clock in a residential area near the Westfield Fashion Square shopping center off Woodman Avenue. I know the area well; it’s one block from my yoga studio, two blocks from my favorite nail salon.
I set the oven to 350 degrees, then turn up the volume on the television.
Leslie Jamison wasn’t a stereotypical drunk. She wasn’t a stereotypical student, either. Even at the peak of her alcoholism, Jamison held down a job, published a novel, and attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Yale, and Harvard without hitting a conventional bottom. If you read Jamison’s 2014 essay collection, The Empathy Exams, you know her unique voice, her elegant syntax, her capacity for listening to another’s pain and rendering it on the page as something unnervingly fresh. The Recovering is the story of Jamison’s journey to get sober, told through the filter of her research about the lives of other artists and writers.
After living in Virginia for a year, I was feeling the loss of friends I’d left behind. Meeting people in my new life was difficult, as I worked from home alongside my husband in his art business. My human contact was almost exclusively through the Internet, and I felt increasingly lonely.
Not knowing where else to look, I turned to the very computer that was keeping me isolated to search for community. I found a group of women about my age that hosted events somewhat near my home. After participating in the online forums a while, I felt comfortable enough to attend my first gathering: a small lunch at one of the women’s houses.
I had just landed my first international writing assignment and it was turning out to be a dud. I’d come 5,000 miles to cover one of Holland’s historic windmills, and it wasn’t even working.
“You have to run them weekly, or they deteriorate,” Jaantje Bloembergen told me. But she hadn’t turned hers on in a year.
The April day I parked my car at the windmill Jaantje and her husband had converted into living space, she was in high spirits. Her tangle of gray hair framed a smiling, ruddy face. I took to her immediately.