Hello,
It struck me, as I was talking to Sharon Salzberg, that an interview is often a meditative experience. You show up in good faith, seeking connection. You marshal your attention into focus, only to notice that it’s meandering, and so you try to usher it back onto course again. You learn quickly that you are fundamentally imperfect and not in control, but that's okay. You are just one human, after all.
I wonder how much we’d all know about these ideas without Sharon’s teaching. For decades now, she has been urging us to offer ourselves more compassion, to allow ourselves the scope to be imperfect, and to extend the same kindness to others, even complete strangers. Her latest book, Finding Your Way, is a condensation of those ideas, made up of short essays, interviews, anecdotes and exercises. It is, I think, an excellent guide for the beginning of a year, steering us towards a kinder, more sustainable way of moving through the world. That’s why I was so glad when she agreed to join us for January’s True Stories Book Club.
There’s an audio feed of our conversation at the top of this letter, and a transcript below. Beyond the paywall, there’s a full video feed - click ‘CC’ to turn on the subtitles.
Our next Book Club guest is Maggie Smith, talking about her stunning memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful. Members can join us live - and put questions to Maggie - on 29th February.
I’d like to add a little - probably sporadic - segment into future newsletters, called Five Brilliant Things. It’ll be a handful of recommendations for Substack newsletters I’ve loved recently, and which I think you’ll love too.
I’m doing this because I don’t really want to be hanging around on Substack’s native social media feed, Notes. Having left Twitter, and cut back on Instagram, I just do not need to get sucked into another place. The only thing that makes me feel sad about that is not being able to support other writers on here - particularly ones who don’t arrive with a ready-made audience - and so I’ve decided to do it in my newsletter. I always love reading the lists published by people like Emma Gannon, Sam Baker and Roxane Gay, so I thought I might do a limited version of the same.
Inevitably, I’m starting by recommending six writers, but you didn’t ever expect me to be consistent, did you?
Five Brilliant Things:
Amanda LeDuc on being a sceptical believer:
“It is frustrating, sometimes, being in this liminal space. I want to believe so wholly in the reality of life after death and the fact that my soulmate friend can send me signs from whatever awaits us beyond. I want to believe that this pull to watching the stars and the sky and taking trips across the ocean to watch the stars fall over a Dark Sky Island means something even more than working through grief. I do! Over these last few years I’ve had so many glimpses of this. And somehow even in spite of this there are times when I find myself pulling back, thinking well you don’t really know either way, Amanda, so ease up on the woo-woo and let’s not get carried away.”
Mythological Africans on the folktales behind Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart:
“By including these stories in his book, Chinua Achebe ensured that the oral traditions of his people, whose continuity was under threat by the changes that colonialism was bringing, stayed in circulation.”
Simran Jeet Singh on the slow change of his identity shift into ‘writer’:
“I’ve been so worried about how other people see me that I can’t even see myself.”
Guesting on Emma’s Gannon’s The Hyphen, Katy Loftus writes about the afterlife of burnout:
“I had a sense I was in a spiral that would end with my own death, so everything else felt dim in comparison.”
An ecstatic, tree-lined weekend selection from Maya C. Popa’s Poetry Today:
“Wherever you are called is Here/ And you must treat it as a powerful stranger”.
Also, I’m very pleased to see that Gareth Howell-Jones has arrived here on Substack - he’s a wonderful, thoughtful writer, so do give him a follow. If Substack is worth its salt, he’ll find an adoring audience here.
Enjoy!
Take care,
Katherine
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