Back on the (Evil) Horse

On writing and reading after a hiatus

Greetings and salutations my friends! It has been a minute since I typed at you, like four years. Hello, how did so much time pass by? Honestly, it seems like ten years given all the crap that has happened as our country becomes engulfed in the flames of facism. I trust you are all doing as well as can be expected, tending to your families furry and otherwise, and keeping your heads above water as best you can.

What brought me back from the shores of obscurity and into your in-box? Well, a number of things. The first thing is that all of a sudden a LOT of you have substacks, which is great, and most of you are not charging subscription rates which is also great because I CANNOT AFFORD TO SUBSCRIBE TO ANY MORE SUBSTACKS. People say that Substack reminds them of the early days of blogging, and that might be true, except that most blogs were free then. I know that writers gotta eat, but readers gotta eat too. (Yes, I know about subscription tiers, but if I’m subscribing to a substack I want access to all the posts and the full chat experience, because that is what makes a substack feel like a blog, and I too am nostalgic for the early aughts Internet.) At any rate, whether or not a having a substack is like the early days of blogging is something we can debate, but given how many of you are participating in communities here, I thought I’d get back on the horse and create a few posts of my own.

Not literally back on the horse, because horses are Evil. They can read your mind AND kick you to death while they do it.

The second thing that brought me back is that I am currently at work on a memoir entitled The Feast of All Saints, about my various losses of faith in both Catholicism and academia, with jokes. It’s a little bit Elena Ferrante-esque thematically, grappling with working class friendship and bullying, and it’s also something of a campus memoir—the second half takes place in Urbana, Illinois during 1992-1995, when I first entereted graduate school in English and my heart got as thoroughly stomped on there as it eventually did by the Catholic Church. (Though I have to say, Pope Leo is making me feel more Catholic, in the sense that I can now see myself going to Mass now and again). At any rate, some of you are hard at work on your own manuscripts, and I always enjoy checking in with other writers, so I thought I would add my own voice to the conversations y’all are having about the writing process, particularly the horrors of the first draft stage, and about starting a career in creative nonfiction. Though I intend to teach as long as I can manage it, I also want to start thinking seriously about selling my writing and getting my work out there in the world. If you are also interested in these things, perhaps we can support one another here.

The last reason that I got on here was simply that I miss writing about reading. I continue to read as voraciously as possible, given the constraints of work, eating, sleeping, etc. The summer has opened up more time to spend with books, and I’m excited to share my commentary and bibliography with you here.

Speaking. of Elena Ferrante, Stepanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds is like My Brilliant Friend with Black girl protagonists. The protagonist is drawn to Maria, an orphan living with her grandparents, by their shared experiences as working class students attending Catholic school in Rhode Island. They are also both artists, and both end up going on to Bard together to study. The narrator is a study in intellectual intimacy, as Ruth meditates on the boundaries between art and life and how they converge in her on again/off again friendship. Ruth is also trying to make sense of her romantic attachments and the various meanings they have within the context of her relationship with Maria. Wambugu captures the complex emotions of not just female friendships, but of how friendship and love get tangled up in the quest to say something profound through Art.

I reread Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, and it was as good as I remembered it. The main character Jessa Morton is a taxidermist following in the footsteps of her father, whose suicide note assures her that she will know how to handle things. And there’s a lot to handle—Brynn, her brother’s wife and her long time crush and lover, has left the Morton family to raise her children, and Jessa’s mom is having a kind of artistic awakening of her own that involves arranging the taxidermy in lewd poses. Mostly Dead Things takes place in a humid, sticky, psychedelic Florida where people are constantly opening beers in the car, going swimming in bathwater warm shores. I really felt like I was there with my thighs sticking together reaching for a beer dropletted with condensation. I wanted to hang out with Jessa and her messed-up family, and I wanted them all to just get over toxic Brynn already.

I also reread Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State for something like the fourth time. It’s a master class in storytelling while handling a squirming toddler—Daphne, a thirty-something mother, whose husband is sequestered in Turkey due to an immigration snafu, decides to take off with Honey, her daughter, and spend some time in the high desert of Altavista, where her mother inherited a double wide she then left to Daphne. Like Arnett’s Floria, Kiesling’s far northern California comes alive with majestic trees and thin mountain air, and a small town steakhouse where Daphne meets secessionists who want to split from California to create the state of Jefferson. This seems like a book about hanging out in a small town, and it is, but it’s also about family and separation and how people manage to maintain their bonds with one another. Plus I have never read a narrator telling me a story while all the while wrangling an eighteen month old. If Kiesling isn’t a parent, she’s nevertheless captured that particular mix of irrationality coupled with frenetic movement that makes parenting toddlers such a production.

There’s more, but we’ll get there. The last reason I restarted this substack was because I wanted to be back in the conversation. I do have a website that I will be working on, and once I figure out how to connect it to this substack, hopefully you’ll be able to find all things Book Doctor in one place. But for now…hello again! It’s good to be back amongst the substackers.

Bibliography

Arnett, Kristin. Mostly Dead Things: A Novel. Tin House, 2019.

Kiesling, Lydia. The Golden State. Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2018.

Wambugu, Stephanie. Lonely Crowds: A Novel. Little, Brown, and Co. 2025.