Resource Roundup #44
For the week of August 19th.
Happy Friday, folks. How is it late August already? Cooler weather is creeping in, and the mornings are starting to feel crisp. Everything that begins must end. Us too. There’s beauty in that repetition. I’m easing into it.
For your weekend, resources below…
A very Southern Gothic new song from Jamie Campbell Bower. Watch the video, and then read my hot takes on Southern Gothicism from this week’s newsletter.
Irene Vázquez wrote about healing for Black and Brown Indigenous communities along the Mississippi River for Pulitzer Center.
I’ve been thinking a lot about recovery recently, and I’ve really been loving Holly Whitaker’s newsletter. This quote really stuck in my brain this week:
“A major part of what recovery is, particularly for those for whom this is a chosen, lifelong, and yeah, I’m going to say it, spiritual path—is becoming uncategorizable, because we’ve shed every last bit of programming that would have us believe that we are small, powerless, voiceless. Many of us find ourselves where we do because we lived most of our lives inside the always erroneous belief that there was something profoundly wrong or broken about us. This is where community comes in. We need the mirror, the reminders, the support, the examples, and yes, the accountability. We become accountable to each other, not to these shitty systems that want us numbed out and bereft of a life of depth, meaning, connection, and creating a world that works for all of us.
As our recovery practices evolve and deepen, we become aware of how the vast majority of the rules we operate under work for very few people. We begin questioning these rules; we throw the rules in the garbage. Best of all; we make our own.”
RKS is a favorite band of mine, always, but I’ve been returning to this song this week:
Read this piece, “You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body is a Confederate Monument”, by poet Caroline Randall Williams for a class this week. “What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past,” she writes. Go read this.
Another great thread on Southern history:
