I am leaving on a trip today and had a hard time deciding what books to bring with me.
I finished The God Of the Woods by Liz Moore last evening and Here After by Amy Lin this morning. I enjoyed both of these books for very different reasons.
I have some books downloaded on Hoopla and Kindle apps. I threw the Paris Review, Ploughshares and Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy essays in the yellow backpack.
The Bradbury Trio [reading a poem, an essay, and a story every day] fuels my writing.
This structure inspires my writing. Sometimes I take a form from something I have read, or an idea, or something adjacent that comes to mind after reading it.
I hope the reading you do today leads you to writing that could have not been created any other way.
Here are some texts I found impactful:
Poems:
Two poetry books I am enjoying:
When The Stars Wrote Back by Trista Mateer and
You Still Look the Same by Farzana Doctor (Available on Hoopla if you have access through your library)
Story: How Regular People Talk
This was a recommendation from a revision partner and I keep rereading it.
Essay: Mini Retirement
This essay is fascinating to me. I know people who have taken years off in between work years and find it to be a puzzling way to live. The article references a teacher who works for four years and takes one year off. An adult “gap year” so to speak.
I am not sure that getting back into the workforce is as easy as this article makes it seem like. I would love to hear your thoughts…
Have you read anything interesting this week that you need to share!? Please do so in the comments! I love recommendations and have found some of my favorite stories that way.
A little more about me: Tammy L. Evans is a writer, teacher, and coach living in a tiny house on a peninsula with her husband and adventure cat. Her location device is her loud laugh. She is currently working on a short story collection. Her poetry has been published in The Storyteller, FoxGlove Journal, Story Hall, Blue Insights, The Partnered Pen, and others. Her fiction has been published in Gone Lawn, Cabinets of Heed, Spelk, Five on the Fifth, Clover and White, Fiction Berlin Kitchen, and others.
On mini retirement, I have done this a few times, but not since I had kids and bought a house. I did it several times while studying when I had minimal expenses, and one time more recently when the company I was working for agreed to give me a year of unpaid leave so I knew I had a job to come home to. One part of me loves the feeling of having a total break, nothing to check in on and no one to be accountable to. The other part of me wants to create something of my own which would mean I can’t step away indefinitely, but I also hope I won’t want to step away from it.