Monday Miscellany: Speak the silent want

Notes from June 9 - 15

Jun 16, 2025

Hello from the North Carolina mountains! I’m in Montreat for my annual mini-retreat with my mom, who is here for a music conference. This is my first time spending significant time in the western part of the state since Hurricane Helene came through last fall, and I definitely got emotional driving through the iconic stone gate and onto campus. What a beautiful place. What resilient, compassionate, and incredible people. My heart.

While Mom is in classes and seminars during the day, I’m usually posted up on a bench somewhere reading a book and taking in the views. This morning was foggy, and after breakfast I sat by the waterfall with We Deserve Monuments, which I’ll tell you about next week. For now, I present a couple of very different reading experiences and an album that is destined to become a favorite:

Read this week

Despite the hype around Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner when it came out, and then again when it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, I had pretty much decided to let it pass me by. The synopsis—a spy novel about eco-terrorism—sounded interesting but maybe not for me. And then I started attending and enjoying NCMA’s book club discussions and this one was chosen for the June meeting, so here we are.

I feel so deeply neutral about this book. None of the characters were especially compelling people, and in fact I found many of them pretty distasteful to spend time with. The plot was very slow-moving and didn’t particularly grab me. And yet the writing is gorgeous; what ultimately kept me turning pages, and prevented the reading experience from being a dud, were the historical and philosophical tidbits, the ideas about human nature.

For nuance and verve, English wins. We took a Germanic language and enfolded it with Norman French and a bunch of Latin and ever since we keep building out. Our words, our expanse of idioms, are expressive and creative and precise, like our music and our subcultures and our street style, our passion for violence, stupidity, and freedom.

In the end I enjoyed the conversations this book led to, and I think hearing other people’s reactions to it increased my appreciation a bit. I’m not mad I read it, but I do feel validated in my initial assessment—I would’ve also been completely fine to have missed out. (That said, I think Rachel Kushner is stupid talented and I do plan to read more of her work in the future!)

On the heels of such an intense and intellectual novel, I felt like immersing myself in an absolute comfort read. So Bookshops & Bonedust by Travis Baldree it was! This is technically a prequel to Legends & Lattes, which I read several years ago, but the two can easily be approached independently and I don’t think enjoyment of either one is reliant on knowledge of the other.

Bookshops & Bonedust is about an orc named Viv who finds herself in a small coastal town with a few weeks to kill while she’s recovering from a battle injury. She spends this time getting to know some of the locals, like Fern the rattkin, who owns the local bookstore, and Maylee the dwarf, who runs the bakery. And yes, maybe she runs into some trouble related to the necromancer she was hunting when she got injured, and yes, maybe she discovers a love for spicy books thanks to Fern, and yes, maybe she also falls into a romance of her own during this convalescent period! It is a truly delightful, comforting, and fun time all around. I won’t say whether or not I’m in a minor existential crisis after reading about all these sweet creatures finding their passion and their purpose…

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Currently listening

When my besties I’m With Her1 released their new album Wild and Clear and Blue at the beginning of May, I wasn’t ready for it yet, but as I was driving into the mountains yesterday on my way to Montreat, I thought—yeah, it’s time.

And since then, I’ve already listened to it several times through. As expected, the vocals are airy and smooth and beautifully layered, lovely on their own but best in lush three-part harmony. The instrumentals are perfect too. Will I ever tire of the combination of fiddle and mandolin? I don’t think so. This music is simultaneously weightless, a dandelion seed floating on a breeze, and substantial, a weighted blanket calming in its heft. It feels like contra dancing, or like the platonic ideal of Home, or like walking along a creek under the shade of the rhododendrons, all of which are maybe the same thing to me.

I dare you to listen to this one song and tell me you don’t feel calmer. Just don’t accidentally embarrass yourself by immediately starting to sob at the old home videos of Aoife, Sarah, and Sara as little kids.2

(Side note: Good god, speaking of existential crises! What is it about revisiting yourself as a child via photos, videos, or other memories, that activates the “Am I doing the right thing with my life? Am I happy? Would that small person be proud of who I am now?” part of the brain?! Please tell me I am not alone in this. Are we where we want to be? Do we feel free? And if not, what needs to change?)3

Scenes from Winston-Salem Pride / No Kings March, a visual for June 14’s poem

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!