Live More Lives
Reading between the gutter and the stars
Dear friends, travel with me for a moment to smoky, brutal, cosmopolitan late 19th century London. As we briefly poison our lungs in the sulfurous local smog, observe this era of essayist journalists, of pamphleteers and of writers who serialized their work, of Romantics, polymaths, autodidacts & amateurs, explicators of nature, and pure charlatans. The writers of this time were opinionated, often lyrical, and deeply individual. They spoke directly to their readers, freely moving from fiction to memoir to journalism to lyric poetry to disturbing and enticing new scientific discoveries in chemistry, biology and physics. No subject was off limits. As Merve Emre writes in the New Yorker about the progenitors of such writers (those who focused on literature most of all),
The earliest critics were the descendants of the Renaissance humanists—editors and translators well versed in the art and literature of antiquity, from which they derived the standards they used to judge modern works. Theirs was a “Science of Criticism,” Lewis Theobald, a fastidious editor of Shakespeare’s plays, declared in 1733. It consisted of three duties: “Emendation of corrupt Passages,” “Explanation of obscure and difficult ones,” and “Inquiry into the Beauties and Defects of Composition.” Emendation and explanation required the kind of intimate linguistic and historical knowledge that could be acquired only through extensive schooling. Inquiry, however, lay “open for every willing Undertaker,” Theobald wrote, “and I shall be pleas’d to see it the Employment of a masterly Pen.”
At risk of sounding a little ghoulish, let me state that I am a willing Undertaker of this task.
As your weekly guide, I’ll take my cue from the eclectic & freethinking spirit of the early journalists, novelists and essayists (not the charlatans though). Much of this is repeated on the About page, where you’ll also find more about me and an initial schedule for letters (Sundays and Fridays, for now). Just to remind you, as a subscriber (with essays and much of the content available to all, with a few goodies reserved for paid subscribers—or patrons—of my work),
you’ll receive weekly reflections, literary essays, personal and professional news, occasional discussion of my ongoing journalism, trial runs for the new book of essays I’m working on, and immersions in my writing and that of others.
you’ll join me in shop talk on the writing process as I work on a novel trilogy and as I go into my third year of learning from a master (none of whose own secrets will be shared here, however—for that, you’ll have to sign up for one of Martín Solares’ legendary workshops yourself);
you’ll be exposed, through links, stories, photos, images and descriptions, to written and visual art and to other ways to stimulate the thoughts and the senses through Art and Nature, both broadly defined;
you’ll benefit from exercises to practice your writing skills, your reading skills, and your wondering skills, taking you into both Nature and into Art to get ink and dirt on your hands. I hope to eventually offer unique programs relating to the themes of this letter, to help with your writing & creative work, and to have some heady discussions;
you’ll get to relax and listen. I hope—and really, this is one of my favourite things—to spend some time simply reading aloud to you via Zoom (fiction in real time!) so you can curl up in your pyjamas and ingest literature as a child does, for pure enjoyment. You would not believe the diversity of fiction and other literature that lends itself to being read aloud. Audiobook, schmaudiobook: this is personal, selective, social, and intimate in an entirely different way.
Most of all, and running through it, is a rich vein of gold (Fool’s gold, perhaps, but then I treasure the glittering pyrite I have from my mineralogist grandfather). This is it: in this mostly-weekly letter written directly to you, my fellow adventurer, I share the secrets of living more lives. I have learned these secrets through diligent study at the School of Literature and the School of Life as
a child reader who decided to be a writer at age 6 and began publishing as a teenager;
a young adult with both depression and ambition;
a new mother living with chronic illness, pain, and a desire to break out of the drudgery of domestic life under those conditions—and to teach my children the art of wonder;
a travel-loving, café-haunting adult immune-compromised in this new age of plague;
an autodidact (as far as reading and writing are concerned, anyway—I studied biology and political science, with a smattering of literature and visual arts) who has read widely, read deeply, and read well;
a journalist and the author of two books that use curiosity, Romanticism, and the techniques of fiction to explore my own life and the lives of others, both real people and characters imagined by other writers;
(My own writing—please check it out!—has been described as sensuous and compelling, intoxicating, captivating and rage-inducing, powerful—and yet somehow both measured and dispassionate).
As a result of all this, I have spent a lifetime living dual, or, rather, multiple lives as I experience both my own adventures and realities and those of fictional characters. A lifetime, then, of learning to take the one life we are each born with and extend it through time and space by facing reality, by writing (which we will work on together), and by reading fiction. What I share with you is the fruit of this reading, thoughts about loyalty, solidarity, empathy, consciousness, subjectivity, experience, aesthetics, discernment, reality, courage, meaning, and enchantment. If you follow along with me each week, I’ll teach you to live more lives.
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