58: Proustian Burgers
This week a story I wrote about burger vans was published and I was surprised and delighted that so many people shared their personal responses to it. Whenever I write anything, I try to forget that other people are going to read it. Even this newsletter is being written under a veil of pretence that only I will ever see it. So to find out once it was out in the world that other people had very personal connections to the thing I had written about -- a simple, ordinary thing -- was brilliant. Wonderful. I had no idea that I was touching on something fairly universal. All I knew was that I wanted to write about burger vans, and that I was being enabled to write about burger vans.
There was another edge to this piece, but I hid it. I can't remember anything else I've written about being small that wasn't tinged with darker emotions. I set myself a challenge at the start of planning out the piece to write something with lighter textures, something positive and heartfelt, knowing that I find it much easier to force emotional connections by trawling the depths (and therefore I lazily resort to it more often than I'd like).
I read somewhere once that as a writer, you should remember that you don't have to give everything of yourself away. That you don't owe anyone the whole of you. It's difficult as a person who lives online, and who finds it therapeutic to dig at what hurts and talk, and talk, and talk about it, to know when to be private. In this story, I chose to share an image that brings me huge amounts of joy and comfort, and purposefully left behind the parts that, although emotive, bring nothing to my life now. To me, that signifies growth. And I'm proud of myself.
Other Stuff
Six-year-old Faith and her mum spent lockdown creating the UK's first magazine for Black girls. Watch the video, you need to meet her.
Jessica Helfand on storytelling and her teenage obsession with T. S. Eliot.
Caves! Underwater! Underwater caves! In this one divers found a neolithic pigment mine deep in Yucatán, Mexico. The photos are amazing. Swimming in deep, dark caves that were full of busy people 11,000 years earlier, and were flooded with rising seawater 3,000 years later.
Californian TV channel KCET has some excellent and really beautiful mini-documentaries on their YouTube channel (no, I don't know how I find these things). I've really enjoyed the Nightshift series. Each episode follows an individual through their working night. I thought you foodie people would particularly enjoy meeting Harriet, a baker who works for Bub & Grandma's bakery in LA and Carlos, a fruit vendor whose father set up their family business at 7th Street Produce Market after moving to the US from Mexico.
Sarah Mirk has drawn some brilliant cartoons and illustrations to explain what's happening at the protests in Portland.
Here's a pretty comprehensive article on some of the atrocities happening in Portland (this was published on the 15th July, so not brand new, but still relevant, sadly)
A reminder: when sharing videos, photos and information about the protests in Portland, or anywhere for that matter, please make sure you're not inadvertently sharing media where protesters can be identified. Arrests are made weeks after the event owing to shared images. Protect the protesters and support them however you can.
A story about lockdown, comfort food, class, nationalist resistance to British colonialism and the essentialness of Parle-G biscuits.
Otto Saumarez Smith believes that power station cooling towers are worthy of saving. I liked how this story explains why cooling towers look the way they do. I'd never considered there being any aesthetic thought behind them before.
"...as it was impossible to conceal them, it was best to divorce them from any surrounding humanising detail, so they could become enveloped by the surrounding countryside – thereby becoming ‘as impersonal as hills’"
My Stuff
Please pre-order Counterpoint Mag where you'll find my first ever published short/flash fiction! It's about being trolled by tarot cards
As I mentioned above, my latest piece for Pellicle is about burger vans (not food trucks) and you can find it here
Thank you once again to those of you who kindly tipped me via ko-fi over the past week. I have used the cash, amongst other essential things, to pay for an editing workshop at Moniack Mhor (online, not physically, sadly).
View of Ferrybridge B power station behind the Church of St Edward the Confessor in Brotherton, North Yorkshire, photographed by Eric de Maré in 1960.
Photo: © Eric de Maré/RIBA collections