Notes on a carer, sitting for Alice Neel, and poached rhubarb in season
Elif Shafak selects her top Substack reads this week
This week’s digest was guest edited by award-winning British-Turkish novelist and storyteller Elif Shafak, who writes Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak on Substack, where she shares stories, thoughts, and anecdotes deriving from her personal, unpublished notebooks. Some of her most popular posts to date include “Write What You Don’t Know,” Amateur Writers vs. Professional Authors, and Separate Taps, Vinegar on Chips, British Things…. If you enjoy her selection here, be sure to head over to Unmapped Storylands and subscribe. Editor’s note: Substack Reads will be on a break next week.
Dear Substack Community,
I am excited to share with you some of the best writings I have read on Substack recently.
I am relatively new to this platform and there are many brilliant accounts out there that I am yet to discover, but among the ones I have discovered so far, the following have stood out for me. Yet before mentioning them, perhaps I should tell you that I have always loved and appreciated interdisciplinary journeys. Writers are learners at heart. We must keep learning our entire lives.
But what does a novelist read? The answer is everything, really. That is because writers need to be two things: good readers and good listeners.
I passionately believe in this. We cannot stay inside cognitive comfort zones where everything is familiar. Instead, we have to venture into new territories, reading extensively across the board, both fiction and nonfiction. Our reading lists need to be eclectic—from East, West, North, and South, not just Eurocentric literature.
As for the things we read, I have never liked the arrogant duality of “highbrow literature” versus “lowbrow literature.” Who makes these distinctions, anyway? Who gets to decide? Let’s dismantle the old, hackneyed dualities. Let’s keep that childish curiosity inside alive. We can and should be reading everything and anything that speaks to us personally in this particular moment in time—from political science to philosophy to cookbooks, from international relations to song lyrics, from nature writing to graphic novels. The mind is nourished when it embarks on interdisciplinary journeys. I believe in the power and beauty of turning ourselves into intellectual nomads.
So I try to approach my Substack readings with a similar attitude.
Here are some of my favourite reads, from poetry to politics to feminism to food… Let’s start with poetry.
POETRY
“They hang in the sky like questions”
“The Irish poet, conflict mediator, and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound is utterly brilliant. He writes from the heart and with soul. These are powerful and insightful essays from someone who is clearly a true lover of poetry and language—and also hares! Ó Tuama says, ‘To be born is to be born with the possibility of courage. Hello to courage.’
Another fabulous address for poetry lovers is Andrew’s Substack: Coffee with Keats, which wonderfully focuses on both classic and modern literature. By publishing weekly in-depth and critical analyses, always with a cup of coffee in hand, he offers both original poetry and anecdotes and stories”
—Pádraig Ó Tuama in Poetry Unbound
I am back on the road, with trusty bag, trusty travel kettle. Awake at 4am in a Pittsburgh hotel earlier this week, I opened up the window. My room looked over the bricked-in powerhouse of the hotel, with the sound of fans, pipes, the guts of air conditioning, water heaters, and radiators of the building. There was the early blush of light coming into the horizon, and also, gloriously, the sound of a skylark. A soloist whose small body piped out music that carried across the city, clearer than the machine. I leant out the window and snapped a photo. Pittsburgh—home of old factories, three rivers, big buildings, and a friendly skylark. Their song is varied and sustained; I hear that lines of their tunes can reach syllables of the hundreds.
Yes. Syllables. In birds. Them too.
ART
Sitting for Alice Neel
“The art historian, broadcaster, and curator Katy Hessel’s work is profoundly inspiring. If you are interested in art, creativity, and forgotten stories in history, The Great Women Artists is a fantastic platform, ‘celebrating all things women artists’!”
—Katy Hessel in The Great Women Artists
What’s it like to be in the room when someone’s painting? To feel that atmosphere and electricity as someone marks a canvas, stroke by stroke, creating a work that will be around longer than anyone in that room. What if that painter was Alice Neel (b. 1900; d. 1984), the American artist who worked from her small live-in studio on New York’s Upper West Side and painted people of all ages, professions, genders and backgrounds. What if that sitter was you, except you were bulging—along with your twin—inside your mother’s belly?
A few weeks ago, I received a message on Instagram from @india.evansnyc to say she was that twin. I immediately wrote back, along with a flurry of questions to try my luck: How did your mother know Neel? What was she like? What was it like to sit for her, and how did she set up the scene? How did your mother feel sitting for her pregnant, and did she replicate how she felt internally? What was it like to be in her apartment? What were her views on the world?
LITERATURE
Notes on a carer
“Hanif Kureishi’s The Kureishi Chronicles are full of intelligence, wisdom, and chutzpah. These are dispatches from his hospital bed as he writes and muses on the art of storytelling, sex, drugs, music, and sometimes popular culture. This week: care”
—Hanif Kureishi in THE KUREISHI CHRONICLES
My carer is Nigerian, in her early thirties and with braids. She is short, squat and strong, and lives at the top of the house. When she is not working for me or her other “clients,” she works in a male prison, where she is an expert on restraint. Sometimes she demonstrates how to pin down an angry murderer on one of my sons.
Indispensable to my survival, she wakes me up at 7am every morning, washes me, flushes my catheter, empties my bowels, takes my blood pressure and temperature, gets me dressed, makes my breakfast and coffee, and hoists me into my wheelchair. “I really don’t like penises,” she said the other morning when she was cleaning my naked body.
TRAVEL & PHILOSOPHY
Seduced in Condesa
“I am always intrigued by writing that tackles the questions of home, motherland, belonging. Where do we feel at home and where do we feel like ‘the Other’? I recently read a piece on these themes by Tobi Ogunnaike, a former Silicon Valley engineer who is now pursuing a totally new career in creativity. In his Wandering the Grey, he offers ‘vulnerable reflections’ and says, ‘…home isn’t tied to a single place. It’s a perceptible, unmistakable feeling. I know when it’s absent and when it’s present, I bask in its grace and depth. I could feel at home at an Afrobeats party on the moon…’ ”
—Tobi Ogunnaike in Wandering the Grey
Modern life feels like Diet Coke. All the fuzzy allure of stimulation, with none of the substance to satisfy you. Morning breaks, and we heap our breakfast plates with helpings of short-form content and hollow laughs. Sip by sip, we’re sinking in shallow waters.
But then, certain moments offer a life raft. The first thirty-seven seconds of “When I’m in Your Arms” by Cleo Sol draws me to the shore. The second I hear those opening notes, I feel rescued from the digital void and taken to a warm place.
BOOK NEWS
The first German translated book to win the International Booker Prize
“The Booker Prizes’ Substack is a marvellous hub for all book lovers, literature lovers. From exclusive interviews to long reads, there is so much quality writing here, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend it. In this post, the International Booker judges, author, translator, and more share thoughts on the winning book, announced this week, ‘Kairos’ ”
—The Booker Prizes in The Booker Prizes
In luminous prose, Jenny Erpenbeck exposes the complexity of a relationship between a young student and a much older writer, tracking the daily tensions and reversals that mark their intimacy, staying close to the apartments, cafés, and city streets, workplaces and foods of East Berlin. It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture. The self-absorption of the lovers, their descent into a destructive vortex, remains connected to the larger history of East Germany during this period, often meeting history at odd angles.
Michael Hofmann’s translation captures the eloquence and eccentricities of Erpenbeck’s writing, the rhythm of its run-on sentences, the expanse of her emotional vocabulary.
FOOD
Best season pickings for May
“Foodies Across the Pond is truly lovely. Cookbook authors Jane and Lisa are friends from the U.K. and USA. They share food stories and life stories from both sides of the Atlantic and, here, a great poached rhubarb recipe”
—Foodies Across the Pond in Foodies Across the Pond
“Eating the season” is all well and good, if you know what is coming into season and when. In an age where we are so used to produce being imported, and on our shelves 12 months of the year, we are losing the art of eating the season.
MUSIC
A message for my subscribers
“Singer, performer, writer, and visual artist Patti Smith’s The Reader Is My Notebook is a gem. Patti is an amazing artist not only with her music but also through her connection with words. Her songs encompass one of the largest vocabularies in the music industry. Long before she was a rock star, she was a writer and poet, and on this platform she invites us into her brilliant mind”
— Patti Smith in Patti Smith, The Reader Is My Notebook
FEMINISM & DISABILITY
Blue nights
“The Disabled Feminist is another worthy read. The newsletter collects essays by journalist and author Lydia Wilkins, who rightly points out that ‘feminism is weaker when it leaves disability out of the conversation.’ I think feminism is weaker if and when it leaves all strands of intersectionality out of the conversation. From race to class to disability rights, there are so many glass walls, not just glass ceilings, that we need to dismantle. This platform brings us a step closer to a new level of feminism and connectivity where women’s-rights and disability-rights movements beautifully intersect”
—Lydia Wilkins in The Disabled Feminist
Tiny buildings mean the usual suspects drink outside—an overspill often marked off by a cordon. A story is swapped here, contacts exchanged there, a joke woven between the two. It’s May 2022, a time when shadows dance and music plays into the early hours—“CHAMPAGNE!” cries a male voice at every given hour. People-watching is almost addictive in this time frame—the gossip that spills into the open like fine wine, the unexpected stories collected in an arts space. It’s where TV began, an escapee from the train to Auschwitz plays live music weekly, the artists plot their art. You start to wish for more blue nights like this, moments in time suspended and captured while a world outside continues to turn. It’s a grubby glamour of sorts, a night like this.
Recently launched
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writers celebrating publication.
Paul Scheer shares an excerpt from his new book, Joyful Recollections of Trauma, which was published this week:
Franklin O'Kanu describes his new book, An Unorthodox Truth, as “a book about you and how you came to be in this place and time”:
Hanif Kureishi announces his new book, Shattered, his account of the year he spent in a hospital after an accident, in the post shared in today’s digest:
Daisy Buchanan arranges a pre-order party for her new novel, Pity Party:
Notes from our guest editor
Noteworthy
Inspired by the writers featured in Substack Reads? Writing on your own Substack is just a few clicks away:
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers. This week Reads was curated by Elif Shafak and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray. Subscribe to Unmapped Storylands with Elif Shafak on Substack, follow Elif on Notes, visit Elif’s personal website, and follow her on Instagram.
Got a Substack post to recommend? Tell us about it in the comments.
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I love these weekly collection which help me to expand my horizons to authors that I may have never come across in my entire life.
Thank you so much for including us in your weekly collection!! We're beyond thrilled and so honored to be among such fabulous newsletters!