Finding Time To Write, A Playlist of the Week's Best New Albums, and more

A playlist of the week's best new albums, interviews with Brandon Taylor & James McBride, an excerpt from Joshua Mohr's new memoir, and more

Sep 02, 2023

I wrote little last week.

In between my first full week of teaching and the first two classes of the final year of my MFA program, there was barely time for sleep, meals, and the occasional conversation with my partner.

I feel guilty. My new fiction project prompts me while on the bus. “Does this rider remind you of that character in your story? How?” I make a note in the corner of the next day’s lesson plan, then go back to work.

Writing is a priority, but not always “the priority.” I am always working on finding the balance between my job and my writing, my life and my writing, but realize everything is entwined. Some days (and weeks and months) are better served for focusing on writing. Others for work. Others for friends and family. Even some mornings, afternoons, and evenings. Sometimes even hours and minutes.

Recognizing that I don’t have to write every morning, or even every day, has given me much-needed relief. Knowing that I have the time to write this weekend gives me joy.

Do you have any tips on organizing your writing/work balance? I would love to hear them.

A Playlist of the Week’s Best New Albums (93 songs, 6 hours and 59 minutes)

I am an admirer of Sadie Dupuis’ work, whether solo, in Speedy Ortiz, Sad13, Quilty, or as a poet. The new Speedy Ortiz album is fierce both sonically and lyrically, easily one of my favorite albums of the year.

Other releases worth your ears this week out incude albums by Sprain, Jeff Rosenstock, Brian Eno, Slowdive, Taking Meds, SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, Puma Blue, and Field Medic.

A caveat: I just queued up every album mentioned in Bandcamp Daily’s ever-interesting and eclectic weekly recommendation list. So many interesting

Largehearted Likes:

Does New York City have the world's best food?
Nate Silver’s analytical breakdown of NYC’s place in the food city hierarchy
Turtles All the Way Down
A Brooklyn dive bar named after a term that defines infinite regress? An odd choice for my school’s unofficial choice for “teacher bar,” but the perfect spot to gather after students leave for the day.
Food & Wine’s best new fall cookbooks

Largehearted Links

Kirkus interviewed America’s “storyteller-in-chief,” James McBride
I’m telling you, when you go looking for the story, you just have to open yourself up to the idea that the story is in the air; you have to find it and let it find you. So anytime I start working on a new book, I travel around, I go to restaurants, I sit in McDonald’s—I don’t go to bars very often because they’re nothing but sports centers now. People watch TV, they don’t even talk. You go to historical societies and you talk to people—some of them don’t want to talk to you, some of them are just ridiculously provincial, and then others are really, really interesting people. You find out stuff, and then you start.
The Weakerthan’s Reconstruction Site (one of my favorite albums), turns 20 this month, Bandcamp reconsidered the album
Reconstruction, then, was the difficult third, with a high-concept story arc that allowed for multitudes: Harmer’s cheery country-pop duet “Benediction” is immediately followed by the tempestuous guitar wars of “The Prescience of Dawn”; pop-punk gems such as “The Reasons” are contrasted by the chiming vibraphones and organ of “(Past-Due)”; and despite its lyrics’ focus on death, Reconstruction is easily the band’s most playful record (more on that later).
Kindling
: This is The Barrens, a Stephen King bookclub, discussed The Shining
Speedy Ortiz’s Tiny Desk Concert
Alice Carriere on her new memoir
”Even when it was a challenge to, let's say, find the words for what I was experiencing, it was exactly that challenge that kept me from getting lost. And I really hope, through this book, I can help people who are inside of the dissociative experience articulate it, and I can help those who are outside of the dissociative experience — I can help them to understand it.”
Listening to Taylor Swift in Prison
There was, in her voice, something intuitively pleasant and genuine and good, something that implies happiness or at least the possibility of happiness. When I listened to her music, I felt that I was still part of the world I had left behind.
The Vulture podcast’s interview with author Brandon Taylor
When Brandon Taylor’s newest book, The Late Americans, came out in May, it faced criticism for not reading more like his tweets. That critique drew its own criticism for not providing a fair basis for a book review. “It feels like what happens when we mistake our preoccupations for a valid critical lens,” says Taylor. The novelist believes there is a place for the personal in criticism, however. “It can show a set of considerations that the academy would’ve typically excluded, and for that reason, the internet’s democratizing force on art is great,” he says. “But also we should bring gatekeepers back. It’s getting weird.”
The Creative Independent’s interview with The Tallest Man on Earth’s Kristian Mattson
In the early days, when I just started, I had a creative freedom that I am now constantly working to find. And I do find my way back to it, but now it’s a more deliberate process of trying to trick myself into getting into that state of just playfulness and not caring about anything.
Alexandra Chang’s interview with Shondaland about her magnificent story collection, Tombsweeping
I love reading short stories, and as a writer what I love is the constraint of a short story — what’s so exciting about the form is the limit that you have to work within. … Choosing to work on these short stories over another novel was more about having already worked on these stories for years. It felt right to finish them up and put the strongest ones in a collection together.
Lavalove’s cover of Nirvana’s “Lithium”
An excerpt from Joshua Mohr’s memoir Farsickness