Resource Roundup #59
For the week of December 16th.
Happy Friday, Folks.
A few admin things: if you missed our post earlier this week, our team will be taking the rest of the year off of the podcast to make a solid attempt at some R&R. We’ll be back in January!
Regular posts and resource roundups will continue as usual.
Lots to dig into this week, below.
I’m headed back to South Carolina tomorrow to visit family through the new year, and I’ve been thinking a lot this week about all the places I call home. Tomorrow I will drive through the fields along the highway into the marsh, watching the landscape change. As always, I recommend the photos of Looking at Appalachia, which collects images across all the states that make up the region. The photo, above, comes from the South Carolina section.
What a fun concept the Shabby Doll Advent Calendar is! New work each day on an incredibly gorgeous platform.
SO excited about the Soft Lightning Zine on rural queerness, which you can pre-order here. To make it even better: Part of the proceeds go directly to Eastern Kentucky Mutual Aid who is helping folks meet basic needs as they recover from the floods that happened in Eastern KY in July 2022.
I spent most of my time alone. Sometimes I hate it, other times I am sure this is the only path to self-knowledge. Mostly, I find myself convinced solitude is a trap I can’t find a way out of. But I quite liked this piece unpacking Montaigne’s thoughts on solitude:
“It should no longer be your concern that the world speaks of you; your sole concern should be with how you speak to yourself. Retreat into yourself, but first of all make yourself ready to receive yourself there. If you do not know how to govern yourself, it would be madness to entrust yourself to yourself. There are ways of failing in solitude as in society.”
If you’re in the arts, you’ve definitely seen this article floating around this week, about the decline of working class people in the arts. The article is about England, but it’s true everywhere: the proportion of musicians, writers and artists with working-class origins has shrunk by half since the 1970s. I often feel that the only people who seem to get a book or movie deal these days are people who already know people, leaving the rest of us in the dust. But we need working class stories, and we need to move away from elitism in the arts world. I don’t have the answers for how to do that, but it’s a process long overdue.