Election week highs/lows
Some uppers and downers
Big deal! I have an interview up at Electric Literature with the one and only Leslie Jamison. It was a true career highlight to talk with Leslie about her new memoir, Splinters, which is utterly beautiful, sensuous, glimmering, and revelatory. We talked about avoiding the binaries of motherhood, writing into shame, the ghosts of moralism, and how becoming a mother, and watching her daughter learn about clouds and whales and sharing, has changed her as an artist.
Leslie even very generously said this about my book, which I will be tattooing on the backs of my hands so I can see these words whenever I write:
I truly loved your writing about motherhood in Touched Out as well, especially in this particular way: thinking rigorously about the ways many things can be true at once about intimacy and bodily closeness.
This conversation digs into all my favorite topics— holding the tension between motherhood as labor AND as wonder, how writing memoir transforms us, genre and form, women wanting— basically all the things I never stop thinking about in one place, filtered through the mind of one of of our literary greats. Go read it all here, and be sure to stay for our inversion of the what do the men in your life think about this book what will the baby think question.
If that were not enough to make my week, Touched Out also came up in this brilliant and timely conversation between Leslie and on KQED’s Forum w/
. They chatted yesterday about all the recent writing on marriage, motherhood, and divorce—a trend Tracy also breaks down incisively here, calling Touched Out “one of the most original and provocative pieces of feminist writing I’ve read in the last few years”!!I also spoke with French writer and academic Alice Braun about my book for her conversation series on writers who mother/mothers who write. Read the interview here.
AND I’m completely thrilled to share that I will be teaching two classes at University of Iowa this year, as part of their writing festival— one class on the essay, online this spring, now open for registration, and one in person, for a full week on U of Iowa’s campus, on “home-building”.
More information on other spring and summer classes coming at you next week.
Besides the above wonderful conversations and the very good, nourishing experiences I’ve had teaching and writing this week, I’m having a hard time, friends. I’m a little sick (just a dumb cold), but more pressingly, the prospect of another election between two very old white guys who are both politically inept and out of touch, along with the ongoing assaults in Gaza, has got me down, to say the least. I appreciate what
wrote this week:I was glad, of course, to see Vice President Harris call for an "immediate ceasefire" yesterday after five months of witnessing and funding the aforementioned death and destruction, but highly disappointed by the words that followed this call: "for at least the next six weeks." There is such blatant mediocrity in calling for a temporary ceasefire, as if to reach for a permanent end to the constant carnage in Gaza is too lofty a goal for this president, despite the popular support of such a position. As if America's greatness, the existence of which this administration insists upon, stretches only as far as its capacity for destruction and tax loopholes.
It is not lost on me that six weeks is enough to get through the majority of Democratic presidential primary elections, following a 100,000 "uncommitted" vote last week in Michigan, "a state that Biden won by only 154,000 votes in 2020" (AP). But there is no need to be satisfied with the mediocrity we are offered. It is not our civic duty, despite what some party loyalists and officials may suggest, to be made content with crumbs. The way so many of us have been doing for months, we can and should demand more from our elected officials. A permanent ceasefire that includes the safe return of Israeli hostages. Language matters, and six weeks is not enough—a ceasefire bookended by mass death is not a ceasefire at all.
And re: the other guy in the race? Well, you know. In the face of such violence, and women dying from abortion bans in the US, it’s disheartening to consider how much further either of these administrations will take us off track. Here’s a helpful tool:
