This week, we’re picking unexpected books, renewing creative vows, and contending with unfinished projects.
MUSIC
Finding your voice again
Through the act of creation, Maggie Rogers has embarked on a journey of rediscovery.
somewhere between lost and reborn
—Maggie Rogers in Maggie Rogers
Everything before 2020, I remember in a straight line. Everything after, I remember as a spiral. This strange post-covid non-linearity. I’m back in my studio again after six years. Just me and my laptop and my synths and my piano. My hair is long and curled by ocean water again. The summer sun has brought my freckles to the surface. For the first time in a long time, I look the same as I did then, in the before. And it feels nearly the same. Like I could fold together two pieces of paper and they’d make a complete image, the middle disappearing altogether.
It’s a strange full circle moment. I feel somewhere between lost and reborn. Writing and writing and writing. Tinkering with songs. Clarifying the vision and going over it once again. Dropbox folders within Dropbox folders. Different versions of the same thing with the hope that one arrangement shift might crack the code.
But I’m trying. Stepping away from the drawing board, turning around, going back again. Asking myself to be brave. Re-learning real, honest vulnerability after ten years in the public eye. I want to say something true. I want to make something urgent and essential. I want to make something that makes me feel.
That’s the music update. It had been a while, so I felt I owed you one. “Owe” is a funny word, but you are very much with me, both within the work and alongside me, on this journey. I’ve written…so many songs. The weight of them is piling up within my arms. I carry them around with me everywhere I go. And I think I’ve got a few more to write. Being a great writer is also being a great editor.
There are mood boards. I’ll show you one day. For the first time ever, there have been multiple titles (This is usually the thing that I have first—even before the music—it sticks, and it doesn’t change. But this album, instead, has been ever-evolving and I’m allowing space for that.) A friend said to me recently, “This album has a birthday.” That was helpful to hear. A sense of pre-destination. The work we create is always creating us. I am renewing my artistic vows. I am choosing to have faith.
VINTAGE SCENTS
LITERATURE
A novelist’s final project
William T. Vollmann is a prolific, award-winning writer. He also happens to be dying. Alexander Sorondo traveled across the country to interview Vollmann about his magnum opus.
“We Always Leave Things Unfinished”
—Alexander Sorondo in big reader bad grades
“I’ll be dead very soon.”
He doesn’t have a cell phone or use the internet so it takes a week to get the answer but finally his publicist comes back with a politely breathless email confirming that, yes, if I can make it out to Sacramento next week William T. Vollmann will meet me at 9 a.m., June 23, at a small coffee shop that’s been built into an unsuspecting structure and then from there we can walk to his studio, hang out til around noonish.
It’s June 15th.
I start reading his new novel, A Table for Fortune. It comes out in August. It’s 3,096 pages. Calling around, preparing the article, I mention to sources that I’ll be flying out and interviewing Vollmann. A source implores me to read as much as I can. Says they saw someone talking with Vollmann, pretending to’ve read the whole book, but then got outed. I ask if Vollmann was angry. They wouldn’t say angry, no…more like “visibly upset.”
I read faster.
[. . .]
“Chemo mind” keeps him in a fog. The cancer causes pain such that he can hardly sleep. “Last night I got about an hour.” When he finally got up he had to take an opioid, which makes him “fuzzy.” All of this is compounded by the medical marijuana that’s proven a great help but leaves him kinda fried. “I couldn’t believe, after a couple weeks in Cuba, how much sharper I was, mentally, because all I had was my opioids.”
Hence he’s not tangled in any big fiction project right now. For nearly 40 years he’s been working simultaneously on each volume of a sprawling septology, Seven Dreams. It tells the history of the North American continent. Volume Five, The Dying Grass, came out in 2015. Reviews were glowing. The Washington Post called it “the reading experience of a lifetime.”
But every book since then has been a problem: too many pages, too many fonts, the title’s controversial, there’s too much math; releasing a two-volume art book in 2022, with a pair of understaffed indie publishers, Vollmann kept getting galleys sent back with typos throughout, shoddy production quality on the photos, publication running a year behind schedule. He doesn’t have the time for it anymore. He’s working on two short books right now: one’s a long personal essay, the other one’s literary criticism. Straightforward stuff. There’s no mention of fiction.
“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”
“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”
“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”
He shows me a wall with a long art sequence called “CUNT,” with a collection of other paintings beside it: nudes and studies, bodies warped and accurate, writhing or posing. The display is a proud one. He seems happy to show me.
Above the paintings there’s a shelf with a row of framed photos. Artful black and white from reporting trips around the world. Vollmann himself in drag as “Dolores.” A Black soldier. A woman cradling one child on her hip while holding the hand of another. His daughter Lisa in a school photo, smiling.
The illness didn’t feel like much of an obstacle in his Cuba trip, though he did worry about getting detained someplace, his opioids stolen.
In 2024, Granta was planning to send Vollmann to Tajikistan.
“That’s when my cancer came back.”
OUT OF OFFICE
SELF-ACCEPTANCE
All the world’s a stage
The discourse around what we do for ourselves and what we do for public consumption has reached a fever pitch. Viktoriia Vasileva considers that both journeys might actually yield similar results.
Coming out as “performative”
—Viktoriia Vasileva in Vik’s Busy Corner
I am in the Union Square Barnes & Noble, hunting for a new puzzle piece to add to my SS26 persona. I decided I will avoid the books that are marketed directly to girls like me: a writer in her 20s quits her corporate girlboss dreams to do something crazy (move to London, work at a restaurant, let a questionable guy treat her badly).
I try on the classics—my brain has been starving for vocab that hasn’t been infected by the internet. I insert myself in between self-serious young men in a wild assortment of shorts in Music, Film, and History. It dawns on me: what about that book about English football hooligans (Among the Thugs) that’s been in my Goodreads forever? I picture myself holding up a cover with a bold Brit chewing on a cig at a classy French bistro in the summer. I hear myself work it into a convo with a guy who looks British but is born and raised in New York as he takes a sip of cold beer. I feel the energy on the other end of a work call shift when they see a quote from a rancid ’80s football fan on my screen. Yea, that’s perfect. I beeline to Sports.
Is this performative? Of course, I am intrigued by the premise: an outsider, whose curiosity wins over survival instincts, throws himself into the world of drunk and reckless lads to figure out the cause of the horrifying violence and chaos they bring everywhere they go. Getting piss drunk and beat up for a story? Real journalism! But the game day decision to drop twenty bucks on admittedly subpar writing rather than some Steinbeck was made because I thought it’d be unexpected for a kind of snobby young woman, like me, to randomly know a lot about the gross ’80s football mob.
Be authentic. Be you. Well, this is me, and my brain is full of tiny, hyperspecific fragments of a life I want to live, a person I dream of being, the people I want to surround myself with, and they don’t always match my reality. Now that I am getting into doors I dreamt about when I started writing this newsletter, both socially and professionally, I feel the pressure to impress. I want to be a clever writer and a smooth conversationalist. I want to look more put together and interesting. I want my ideas to be simple and precise. But I also don’t want to feel like I have to try hard for any of it.
My working theory is that the key to having “effortless” swag, “genius” ideas, and a “dream” career is less about strategy and moodboards, and more about an open and curious mind and arranging your life in a way that brings you to the right people and places intuitively. The same crowd that rolls their eyes at the bros who shop Bode compliment my The Row-presenting loafers that I came across in Spain, guided by a paparazzi photo of Harry Styles I had imprinted in my brain, even though both of us are performing, just for a different crowd and with a different level of precision and mystic.
I am getting back into the habit of making up stupid side quests and picking up weird little hobbies because of course, that’s what makes life fun, but also because it gives me an arsenal of stories, connections, and skills necessary to entertain interesting people and opportunities. I respect the hustle and discipline it takes to send a daily newsletter or post three videos a week and I understand the value of visibility and status these things can get you, but I also know that isn’t how I want to spend my time and I am feeling more confident I can figure out a different way to make my thoughts and ideas visible. Instead of replicating what cool or successful people do in hopes of becoming one of them, I try to imagine what I would do with my time and money if I were 10 percent cooler and more successful, and then I go do it.
TIME TRAVEL
FILM CRITICISM
Full disclosure: this movie allegedly falls flat
Tom Barrie saw Steven Spielberg’s most recent film. He’s not impressed.
Disclosure Day. Yikes
Longtime Spielberg fans will recognise the premise of the film, which is essentially the same as that in War of the Worlds, E.T., A.I. Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report, hell, even Jurassic Park: how, the film asks, would humanity react to encountering great and possibly otherworldly scientific power? And how might we confront or use that power?
[. . .]
It’s not a bad premise, really. Several of the ingredients here lifted from the well-stocked sci-fi larder, including crop circles and astral projection, offer really good potential for set-piece moments and visuals. There are likewise a handful of excellent action sequences, albeit spoiled by [Josh] O’Connor being forced to exclaim “Oh, gahd, oh, whaht am I doing, oh gahd” over and over again in a sort of sub-Marvel attempt at comedy as he e.g. hijacks one of those massive American SUVs with the blacked-out windows and drives it straight through a rickety clapboard house. There was certainly potential.
The CGI animals were a problem, though. Deer have always been a problem for people tasked with animating them—they have to be light on their feet while still very heavy animals, and studios seem unable to rig their CGI models in the right balance—while the cardinal, raccoon and other beasties that appear in front of Kellner and Fairchild throughout the film also reside firmly in the Hallmark Channel uncanny valley.
The film is also way too slow. Scenes drag. But, more than anything else, it was David Koepp’s script that was the problem. Koepp is a longtime collaborator of Spielberg’s, and while the latter came up with the initial 50-page story, Koepp himself put it down at length on paper (or, apparently, on iPad).
Maybe I noticed this more because I watched the film with closed captions in an accessible screening, but it is absolutely heaving with clunky expositionary dialogue. Ironically, given the captions, there’s so much plot and characterisation spoken aloud in Disclosure Day that it would have been more suitable for a screening for the blind than the deaf: just so many questions in so many rooms. For at least the first hour of this film, everyone tells everyone else every detail of their life story in every scene. When I looked back at my handwritten notes I found I had written and underlined, several times, the phrase “Exposition Day”.
I don’t want to spoil the whole premise beyond the first 30-odd minutes of Disclosure Day’s 145, so allow me to give a handful of examples from within the main characters’ backstories. In the film’s very first scene, Kellner and Jane flee from the goons in a stolen car while he desperately tries to call an ally. “These are satellite burner phones, we only use them once,” O’Connor breathlessly explains to her—and the audience, who presumably can’t be trusted to fill that information in themselves.
FASHION
ADVICE
Breaking news: reading supports the writing process
Naomi Kanakia has always wanted to be a great writer but ignored some critical advice when she was starting out. Hindsight is evidently 20/20.
Don’t write for a magazine that is bad
—Naomi Kanakia in Woman of Letters
One of the most common pieces of advice for aspiring writers is: “You should read a few issues of a journal before sending them any of your work.”
Like most writers, I ignored this advice, and I submitted quite frequently to journals that I’d never read.
In my defense, when I started submitting, I was writing science fiction short stories, and I was quite familiar with the field. I had been reading year’s-best anthologies for years. I usually read the prize-winning stories. I often bought breakout story collections. I had read slush for a magazine (Strange Horizons), and I’d participated in various workshops. So I had a sense of what the field wanted.
But it was still a mistake to not regularly read any of the sci-fi journals. It’s not that I didn’t try to read them. I’d often get up a head of steam and say, “I am going to start reading [such and such journal] every month.” But then I’d read a few stories, and I wouldn’t like them, so I’d give up.
However, that’s no excuse, since I could’ve just skipped the stories I didn’t like. But, at the time, I felt even the best stories in these journals were unlikely to be better than the greatest stories of the past. In fact, I thought that even the current year’s prize-winning stories usually weren’t as good as the greatest stories of the past.
I did allow that some living writers were truly great—Ted Chiang, Maureen McHugh, Karen Joy Fowler, Nancy Kress, Robert Reed, Greg Egan, and a few others—but these were all writers from the generation above me. I did not attempt to see potential greatness in my peers.
Clearly, I was protecting my self-image. I wanted to be a great writer, and if I’d allowed myself to see that other people were doing something worthwhile, then I would’ve been assailed by a lot of doubts about my own abilities.
At the time, I honestly imagined I’d be a breakout era-defining writer, and that I’d somehow stand alone, and I’d have no peers. Which is absurd! Ted Chiang started publishing around the same time as Kelly Link did, and in some of the same journals. They are certainly peers (to each other). Even if I’d been my generation’s Ted Chiang, I would’ve had a peer.
And I did have a peer group of writers who broke into the top journals at roughly the same time as me: Vylar Kaftan, Aliette de Bodard, Tina Conolly, Caroline Yoachim, Leah Cypess, and a few dozen others. I encountered these writers in various fora, and I connected with them on Facebook, and I met them sometimes at conventions. We were certainly friendly, and I still have fond memories of most of these writers.
But I never went the extra step and attempted to evaluate their work to figure out which of them I truly respected as writers. And that’s something I regret now, because if there had been a writer in this group that I really admired, then it would’ve been very easy to tell them so, easy to start emailing them, and easy to learn from them.
As a writer, I often felt like I was trying to enter various clubs that didn’t want me. But at any given time, there’s always a club that you don’t need to enter: a club that you already belong to. The club comprises your peers—the people who are publishing in the same journals that you’re publishing in. Amongst that group, there ought to be a few people whom you respect. If there’s not, then it means you’re publishing in journals that are bad, and you should really start submitting to different journals.
INQUIRIES
Substackers featured in this edition
Art & Photography: Estee Zales, Margot Lévêque, Kash Lingat, Cabin Nine, Tasnim Ahmed, Kristin Merrilees
Writing: Maggie Rogers, Alexander Sorondo, Viktoriia Vasileva, Tom Barrie, Naomi Kanakia
Recently launched
Joshua Taylor Bassett, an artist, Times bestseller, and Emmy Award–winning actor, is now on Substack, where he’ll be sharing “philosophy, poetry, and songs in the form of essays.”
Versha Sharma, a journalist and editor who most recently served as editor in chief of Teen Vogue, has launched on Substack.
Longtime Miami sports columnist Dave Hyde has joined Substack after leaving the Sun Sentinel. He’ll be focused on analyzing “the biggest stories in South Florida sports.”
Outsiding, a program hosted by Caitlin Moran and Adam Frost that celebrates “nature, gardens, and the joy that being outside brings,” have brought their podcast and bonus content to Substack.
Former MLB pitcher Ryan Sherriff is now on Substack, where he’ll be writing about baseball, his career, and “what happens when it’s over.”
Inspired by the writers and creators featured in the Weekender? Starting your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
The Weekender is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, audio, and video from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited by Danya Issawi out of Substack’s New York office.
Writer, or not, a lot of people feel that way. It comes from placing too much value on the opinions of others. I suppose there are circumstances where one has to do that, as when one is seeking a job, a promotion, or a friendship, but it always changes us just a bit, and it can be detrimental to one’s creativity as we become someone we are not in order to gain favor. I, personally, feel it is always better to “be yourself” because your real self is going to show up eventually. Oscar Wilde is credited with saying, “Be Yourself. Everyone Else Is Taken.” I feel that is good advice.
So true