Monday Miscellany: I see our ancestors peering through your eyes

Notes from June 2 - 8

Jun 09, 2025

Last week started with a few of the most acutely stressful days of my year so far. Things at work have been tough, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I could feel anxiety and exhaustion building in a horrible feedback loop despite my best efforts to slow down and calm my system. And then, after peaking on Thursday, those symptoms started to abate, just as suddenly as they arrived. Jordan and I spent the weekend in Richmond, and though I’m sure the mini-vacation wasn’t solely responsible for bringing me back to normal, it also didn’t hurt! I’m hoping to write about our trip and share a few photos soon, but for now, I present a slightly abridged miscellany for your Monday evening perusal:

Read this week

The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser has been on my physical shelf for a couple of years now, and my mental list for even longer. I first encountered Hauser’s work through a friend from my Master’s program, who went on to earn his PhD at Florida State and overlapped with them there. From what I remember about reading that first novel, The From-Aways, over ten years ago, is that I liked but didn’t love it.1 The Crane Wife, though? I took to it immediately. It spoke to me. Five glowing stars.

The title comes from Hauser’s essay (originally published in The Paris Review back in 2019) about calling off their engagement ten days before the wedding was supposed to happen and then going to Texas to study whooping cranes instead. It references a story from Japanese folklore, in one version of which

there is a crane who tricks a man into thinking she is a woman so she can marry him. She loves him, but knows that he will not love her if she is a crane so she spends every night plucking out all of her feathers with her beak. She hopes that he will not see what she really is: a bird who must be cared for, a bird capable of flight, a creature, with creature needs. Every morning, the crane wife is exhausted, but she is a woman again. To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. She never sleeps. She plucks out all her feathers, one by one. (79)

This essay is undeniably the anchor, but there are also gorgeous pieces about family, gender, addiction, boobs, queerness, home, dating, expectations, and independence. Hauser is the perfect blend of smart, funny, and emotional, and I identified very much with Their Whole Thing.

I consider myself a scientifically minded person, but will cop to also being schmaltzy and whimsical as fuck. (213-214)

Um, SAME.

I spent most of my reading time nodding, laughing, reading passages aloud to Jordan, tearing up with my hand to my chest, writing down quotes, and thinking of friends I wanted to share certain essays with. My only complaint is that the book wasn’t long enough. If you, too, are strongly analytical and deeply emotional, know how hard it is to be or be seen as a woman in the world, or have struggled to carve your own path through the life you think is expected of you, run don’t walk to The Crane Wife and come thank me later.

My IRL book club is discussing Heartwood by Amity Gaige tomorrow and I finished it just in time, on the way back from Richmond yesterday. If we hadn’t been spending our weekend at a family reunion and exploring the city, I think I probably would have knocked this one out in a single sitting. It’s a literary mystery set in the woods of Maine, about a 42-year-old nurse and Appalachian Trail thru-hiker named Valerie Gillis who has vanished from the trail only a couple hundred miles shy of its end point at Mount Katahdin. Through various characters and perspectives, including the female game warden leading the search, interviews with Valerie’s husband Gregory and trail partner Santo, AT hiker message boards, and an elderly woman in a Connecticut retirement home, we slowly learn more about who the missing woman is and what might have happened to her.

I’ve heard this one recommended for people who enjoyed The God of the Woods by Liz Moore and I would second that. Heartwood isn’t as long or quite as layered, but it has a similar vibe and in my case was just as compelling. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. There’s the central mystery at the book’s core, but Gaige is also weaving together some other seemingly unrelated threads and digging deeper into a few of the side characters and their family relationships. I’m looking forward to discussing this one with my book club! It would be a great choice to take on a camping trip this summer.

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Haiku round-up

Haiku is a poetic form that originated in Japan, containing seventeen syllables in a five-seven-five pattern. At the beginning of 2024, I started writing one every day, and while traditional examples include thematic reference to the seasons, mine tend to be a bit more all over the place. Here are this week’s efforts—enjoy!