Resource Roundup #3
For the week of April 29th.
This week has felt strange and productive, and I can’t believe it’s already Thursday again. Anyone else feel like this year is flying by? So it goes. So we keep going.
Lots of good stuff for you below in this week’s Resource Roundup. It’s text heavy this week, but all of these are worth your time.
A reminder that we greatly appreciate any recommendations, stories, and feedback. We’re currently looking to feature stories from individuals living in the rural South, so if you have a story to tell (or have responded to one of our prompts), feel free to send it our way.
This essay by Brandon Taylor on art and black bodies and family absolutely floored me. I subscribed to his newsletter almost immediately after starting it, it’s that good. I’ve been thinking about this paragraph all week:
“I think it’s more like she sent him away because she didn’t like him very much and they didn’t understand each other, or understood each other too well. And I’d like to be able to sit them down and ask which it was. But my mom died and my brother and I don’t talk, and here I am just thinking about the red lines in Nicolas de Staël’s painting, trying to figure out if it is possible to be black and to think of art when your people are dying simply because they are alive.”
Trying to hold love and empathy for my body as it grows has been harder than I thought. But Elaine Neil Orr writes so beautifully about aging and springtime for The Appalachian Review that reading this piece feels like taking a big exhale.
The music of Bartees Strange is the best thing I discovered in the past year. Strange grew up across England, Germany, Greenland, and the city of Mustang, Oklahoma, which shares the name of my favorite song of his. His music is heavily influenced by the emo scene of the Midwest and Deep South, and lyrically astounds. I listened to this song on repeat for about two solid weeks when I first found it, and I still scream along to the lyrics “Is anyone really up for this one, if I don’t hold nothin’ back? Is anybody really up for this?” every time I hear them.
I ! Love ! Lauren ! Groff ! Her novel, Arcadia, is my favorite book and so severely underrated. I first read it in 2018, during a huge period of change in my life, and it felt like it broke me open and then gave me the words to find wholeness again. I love how she writes about Florida and home and beauty and healing, and I love this immersive story about wealth and inheritance she penned for The New Yorker this week.
Classical musicians playing to an audience of cows? It’s likelier than you think.
And lastly, this interview with Rainesford Stauffer, author of An Ordinary Age, in Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Shock newsletter, which unpacks the American narrative of striking out on your own and how to reconcile the pressure to move away from home to “be something” in the world with our innate desires for community and connection. I know I definitely relate to this:
“It took writing and reporting that to admit, out loud and to myself, that I wanted to move home. Granted, I’ve been home a lot. But hearing other people echo versions of similar things was a relief: I’m giving myself permission to want a thing that I’m apparently not supposed to want.”
