2 exciting announcements & a lost baby whale

Dispatch #20: (fragile, resilient, textual, animal) bodies

Hi friend,

I’ve got two exciting announcements today. Firstly…drum roll please…I’m so happy to be back guest hosting The Slowdown! 🎉🎉🎉

I’ve got 20 episodes in all – 10 releasing now & 10 more coming in October. Monday’s premiere episode was about getting spiritually slapped by a sea lion (say that ten times fast). Tuesday’s episode seemed to be about my elementary school art teacher crushing me, but turned out to be about my superpower. Check out those first two episodes (& more) here. This time in my return to the show, I focused on highlighting poems of empathy.

Empathy is an oft underestimated emotion, misunderstood as fairly simple, even sweet or cute. But who do we reserve our empathy for? Where does it begin in us – & do we have a finite capacity?

I sought rebellious poems that refuse the clean line between beloved & rejected, beautiful & ugly, worthy & undeserving, & other such straight-laced dichotomies. Instead, I'm attracted to poems that boldly dwell in the dialectic; in both-ness.

Speaking of getting spiritually slapped, I’m stoked to announce that In Surreal Life has dropped its first ever merch – a transcendent t-shirt with supernatural powers. This is a big move for our community. I’m so proud of the vision & collaborations that made this happen. Some fun facts:

1. The shirt was designed by ISL alum Katia Engell, who is now our brand new Marketing Manager!

2. The tee is replete with creative dream energy & when worn may produce the urge to spontaneously write poems.

3. Buying the tee directly supports In Surreal Life, encouraging even more opportunities for writers of all ages & experiences to thrive! It’s a perfect gift for the notebook-filling, poem-gobbling human in your life.

4. Our focus group for our slew of different designs was made up of past ISL Visiting Artists.

5. Are you a “Classic” or a “Legend” ISLien? (Plot twist: you can be both)

Over the past few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about (& absorbing podcasts, movies, newsletters & books about) bodies. Transparency in the writing & revision process of bodies of text, the fragility of the human body, the resilience of the human body, humans guiding lost animals, & the lies that the beauty industry tells us so we keep buying shit.

I’ve gathered some of the highlights:

• This informative, practical, & inspiring dispatch about revision from Safia Elhillo’s Girls That Never Post immediately turned me into a paid subscriber.

• Loved this down-to-earth interview with Jennifer Egan on 10% Happier. Listening to novelists while writing a novel is like wearing floaties in the deep end. I feel buoyed & championed & held. I feel like there’s not only room to grow, but even play.

• I grew up playing soccer on various competitive leagues (& still play 1-2 times a week) so this Women’s World Cup season has me realllllllllllly excited. We’re almost at the end of the tournie, but I can’t stop winding back this Brazil vs. Panama clip. The absolute creative magic that happens at 2:38 stuns me.

• I recently saw Our Body, directed by French “documentary titan” Claire Simon with an all-woman crew. I’m squeamish about blood & surgery, so while I wasn’t exactly prepared to see, as one example, a real-life cesarean of twins (!!!), I am changed for it. What The New York Times had to say.

• I wept through The End (on MAX & Amazon Prime) which “profiles five people living at home with terminal cancer, whose families recorded their journeys towards ‘the end.’” Released in 2004, it appears to be recorded entirely by families & hospice staff on old camcorders. I can’t find a trailer, or any information online about the process of creating this experimental & radical film, or really any advertising for it at all. I recommend proceeding with caution as the content is brutal. Nonetheless, the difficulty of the viewing experience is consciousness-raising as it demystifies & humanizes one of our culture’s greatest taboos: dying.

• While watching The End, I couldn’t help but think back to my experiences during the pandemic, while taking a year-long training program called A Year to Live. I signed up alongside 400+ meditators willing to conduct a 365 day experiment: what if I knew I only had a year to live? I spoke about it on a vintage Slowdown episode alongside an incredible poem by Mahmoud Darwish.

• I can’t recall who recommended this episode of This American Life to me, specifically “Act Two: Synchronized Swimmers” about a lost baby whale with an unlikely guide/temporary mother, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. Just mind-blowing.

• 'There's no ethical way to sell products that target signs of aging' via The Unpublishable. “I think we will see the industry co-opting the language of inclusivity & diversity & social justice & progressive politics to ultimately sell people the same sexist, ageist products & convince them that this is somehow a form of empowerment. Meanwhile, the industry will siphon women’s actual sources of power in the process: their time, their money, their effort, their energy, their thoughts.”

• Scraps from my desk collaged together directly on my photocopier: a Hebrew address book, a torn page from a vintage astronomy textbook, a paper crane from the 2017 Odes For You Tour with Angel, & a chocolate bar wrapper.

• 🎵 People by Libianca is on repeat in my house 🎵

• Lastly, Shel Silverstein. Now & always. Nourishing the kid in me & encouraging the adult, too.

The Voice by Shel Silverstein

So take a moment. What is the voice in you saying, right now? Are you warm, hungry, distracted, enlivened? Confused, open, cherishing, tender? How do you recognize what the voice has to say? How might you open up a bit more to let it in?

What does your body know & how does it speak to you? Is it through gurgles, dreams, tremors, gut-talk, brain-lightning, deep hush?

Take a deep breath, right now. What’s available on the other side of a deep breath?

If you have been feeling a bit like a lost baby whale, are you open to new guides?

I’m rooting for you.

With ample maple syrup,