Resource Roundup #5
For the week of May 13th.
Hey Hi Hello,
Lots going on in the world this week, lots of resources to check out below. As always, reach out with any questions/suggestions/comments. Happy Thursday!
Thanks to all the young southerners taking over TikTok, I finally have a word for myself: yallternative.
An important read about the fight to get Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood recognized on the National Register of Historic Places.
We all know the brilliance that is Stacey Abrams. But do you know Stacey Abrams, the novelist?
This is such a beautiful piece on musician Valerie June, who grew up in rural Tennessee. I’ve been obsessed with her music for years, and it’s wonderful to learn more about her as a person. I think we agree on most of our life philosophies, and I love her message about showing with both love and toughness:
“Positivity is a practice,” June says. “It is work and it’s a job and dreams are work… They’re not like cotton balls and fluffy and soft. They’re more like grit and dust and work.”
My dream home is apparently in West Virginia:
I’ve been thinking about narratives of getting better ever since I read Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering a few years ago. That book changed my life, forcing me to think about my own complicated relationship with depression and creativity. I often think about this paragraph:
“If addiction stories run on the fuel of darkness— the hypnotic spiral of an ongoing, deepening crisis— then recovery is often seen as the narrative slack, the dull terrain of wellness, a tedious addendum to the riveting blaze. I wasn’t immune; I’d always been enthralled by stories of wreckage. But I wanted to know if stories about getting better could ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart. I needed to believe they could.”
I’ve been searching for— and trying to write— stories that prioritize recovery ever since. That show us that happiness is an interesting of an end as tragedy. We need more of these stories. I thought about this some more this week when reading this piece from Scalawag about the overwhelming whiteness of both addiction and recovery in Appalachia.
Nathaniel Rateliff performed a gorgeous set for the NPR Tiny Desk (Home) series recently.
In the wake of Elon Musk’s SNL performance this past weekend, I’ve seen many start to think of him as more of a relatable, awkward, for-the-people billionaire (especially with his pumping of crypto). Let’s not forget that SpaceX took over a Texas beach town and made it into their new rocket hub.
And lastly, this tweet, which has been my general mood every day for the last three years:
