Hello Folks,
Like most people, in these last few days of 2022, I’m finding myself looking back on the months, wondering where they went, and yet, also wondering how it could have felt so long. I hardly recognize myself from a few weeks ago, much less the beginning of the year. Today, as I walked along the streets of my hometown, looking at all the businesses I used to frequent as a teenager—many of which are now empty or something else entirely—I found myself thinking: everything is changing. This city, Charleston, is one steeped in history, and it’s also different each time I visit, each version—both of the city and the people I have been within it—layering on top of each other to create some composite whole. I can walk the same streets, I can know them by heart, I can know all the places that have nurtured me and that have hurt me and that have broken me open and then made me whole again and none of that is a guarantee of familiarity, of permanence. That used to scare me, but these days, I think: good.
I’ve been reading N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became, which follows New York City as it becomes a living, breathing thing. The story weaves through six people who make up the different boroughs and organs of the city, and it’s a book that’s rife with feelings of familiarity to any who call the place home; Jemisin makes little effort to provide a way in for outsiders, dropping names and directions, landmarks and neighborhoods that hold deep importance for those with that knowledge and will mean nothing to those without. It got me thinking about the way the work I most desire to write is work that makes the South come alive in the same way— to bring those myths and stories to light and then to burn them out, rewriting new ones in their place. I think again here of Claire Vaye Watkins’ excellent work on the West, and this interview (fittingly titled “It’s Harder to Love Up Close”) where the interviewer remarks in relation to her writing that “the West needs to come alive in fiction, but also to die. It needs to make humans hurt the way humans have hurt it.”
Landscapes can hurt, and especially those with mythologies attached. For New York, that looks like a city of dreams, a place where you can be molded into the best version of yourself. For the West, another promiseland, a chance to make the world anew. For the South, it’s a pastoral paradise, a place of leisure, beauty, and tradition. But within all of those myths are deeper truths, and some of those can hurt. Sometimes, it is more difficult to love a place when you know the truth about it, which is why there are so many who will do anything to keep from recognizing truth. It is often harder to love up close.
When I first began to turn back to my roots and into the world of Southern Studies, it was through this nostalgic, elegiac lens. I was far away, and homesick, and that made it so much easier to root myself to this place. I could love it without ever having to be there. I could claim it in the hollowest of ways. Doing this work far away also removed the real-life implications; it took me away from other people who call it home and the ways my work might impact them, both good and bad. It often meant that, in a room of people from elsewhere, I got to feel like the expert, the authority. It meant that I could convince myself I knew things that of course I did not yet know. It allowed me to love a place without having to let it change me, or without really having to be there to witness that change. It gave me distance, and safety; I could fight for the South in a place where I knew I would be more likely to be accepted and welcomed. It is so much harder to fight up close.
Now, having been back on the ground for a few years, I can certainly see how naive I have been. I can see the layers of these truths one over the other and I know that unpacking these mythologies will be difficult, perhaps even impossible, to do within this lifetime. Change happens slowly, especially here. But here is the most important part: that does not mean change is impossible, or that it isn’t happening. It is, and we are all witnesses to its slow process. We are all changing, too.
Today, as I looked at my reflection in a passing window, I knew that fifteen year old me would hate me, seventeen year old me would be impressed but confused, and ten year old me would be impossibly proud. That’s the one that matters. The me who entered this year, and the me years ago who entered this work, feels almost impossible to reconcile with the me who stares back in the mirrored surface. But this me, the one who has made a career out of writing stories set in marshlands and mountain ranges, the one who has created characters to see herself in, the one who has built a life surrounded by artists and a life that, even when impossibly lonely, feels like it could not be lived by any other version— that’s the person who is closer to the deepest layers of truth at my core. That’s the person it took years and years to find.
Last week, I finished reading Lee Mandelo’s Summer Sons, a sweeping gothic set in Tennessee. It involves ghosts and queerness and street racing and academia, all things I feel I have looked for in so many of the books I’ve read (if you’re a fan of Maggie Stiefvater’s Raven Cycle books, imagine this as a grown up version). It’s similar in vein to one of my favorite books I’ve read the last few years, Genevieve Hudson’s Boys of Alabama, another queer Southern Gothic mystery involving magic and witches and football. Sometimes it still blows my mind that books like this exist now, books I could have only longed for fifteen years ago. Books that could have undoubtedly changed my relationship to home if I had had them to read back then. This place is changing, and so are the stories told within it. And those are just the ones published— there are thousands more out there waiting to be told. I hope to be there helping tell them.
I’ve been deep in the world of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative the last few weeks, but I think this Neil Gaiman quote really sums it up better than I can:
“Fiction is the lie that tells the truth.
We all have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge and the individual is less than nothing.
But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”
If we don’t imagine difference, we will never see it. Someone out there is imagining change, and some of those changes are worse for all of us. Their stories cannot become the ones that overpower, the only ones in the room. Collective storytelling can change the world— in a matter of weeks, days, hours. It can. I believe that.
Sending you all so much peace as the year comes to a close.
— Spencer
PROMPT OF THE WEEK:
You are in a field. You are on a sidewalk. You are in a cafe. What lies above the ground, and what lies beneath it? What did this place look like ten years ago? Fifty? One hundred? Who called it home? What are their stories?
FIVE THINGS THAT BROUGHT ME JOY THIS WEEK:
This very angsty playlist I made while living in the desert four years ago and seem to return to every December. Aptly titled: yes im changing.
Sunlight. Enough said. I am simply a little plant that needs to photosynthesize.
The things I would have done to be at this evening of performances…
Christmas presents of gift cards to local bookstores which means my reading list just expanded again. Next up: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Tripping Arcadia; Wake the Bones; The Marriage Portrait; Matrix.
Late on this, but the latest album from North Carolina based band Wednesday. Love this one, a cover of the Drive By Truckers classic, especially.
Thank you so much for this amazing newsletter!! I love your Substack. Such powerful writing. Grateful to have the opportunity to spend time with your work. 🙏🏼
Yes - Wednesday is sooo good. And they're opening for DBT on their Saturday night HeATHENS show.