Links We Shared When We Thought the World Was Ending

It's officially been one full month of the new Scratch! Thank you all for being here with us. This project felt necessary and important when we started discussing it more than a year ago, and now that we’re sharing it with the world weekly, we’re grateful that others agree.

You may have noticed that Scratch, while about writing and money and getting by, is not a how-to publication with tips and tricks for making money (sorry!). Instead, this project has always been focused on writers and survival. This past week the four of us, along with the rest of humanity, felt deep existential panic when a fascist posted a threat of annihilation to the internet. Suddenly, Latria was sending us all poetry, and we exchanged various words of comfort along with our usual dissection of industry news; we thought to ourselves ‘this is survival, too.’

This week, we're presenting a brief roundup of the above. Hopefully, these links bring you a little bit of joy, curiosity, or remind you why you write.

— Manjula, Latria, Rahawa, and Maggie

On Helen DeWitt and the Windham-Campbell Prize

Actual living genius Helen DeWitt got the call from the Windham-Campbell Prize ($175,000) and withdrew because she felt unable to meet the publicity requirements. The literary internet had a lot of opinions about this.

I read the whole play-by-play that DeWitt posted the day the (other) prize winners were announced, and mostly it made me profoundly sad. It’s painful to contemplate the great many systems and institutions that have failed this human. Just the idea of being this isolated, this abandoned, is enough to destabilize my worldview right now. This is not hot-take material, honestly. It’s a tragedy. 

I will, however, say that the literary internet should be extremely alarmed by the fact that apparently one of the comments on DeWitt’s post is from known literary troll Ed Champion (and yes, that link is 10 years old, which is the last time I heard about that dude). So, here’s my hot take: Hey, Ed Champion, STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM HELEN DEWITT. 

[Editor's note: Manjula wrote this before DeWitt revealed she'd been offered and accepted $175,000 from the libertarian Mercatus Center. I doubt that DeWitt, a person who couldn't figure out how to find Wi-Fi in Amsterdam, knew much about the Koch-funded think tank before now, but a new round of discourse has inevitably sprouted.]

Blogs Forever

Speaking of blogs, Charlotte Shane is my favorite blogger right now. She has a newsletter and an actual weblog, and I recommend them both. From her most recent dispatch: 

“I don’t want more dead material poured into the pool of my mind, or careless hands stirring up the old muck. I don’t want to be in spaces on or offline where agitating our fetid little ponds is all we do to each other. I want filtration, fresh rain, sunlight. I would like for someone’s hand to scoop out a bit of my debris. I would like to be that hand for someone else.” —Charlotte Shane, Meant for you

Hardback Luxury

And, thanks to a pre-order I made before I did my taxes and realized I can’t afford hardcovers anymore, here’s one thing that’s giving me hope this week: 

Actually, people fought back. 

—Manjula

The Whole Lindy West Thing

I told a friend recently I am recusing myself from the Lindy West discourse, because a) I live in Seattle and it is a small literary place, and b) honestly, polyamory discourse is not that interesting to me? Lastly, c) I wish people cared more about books and writing than the influencer-ness of it all? 

But the most recent New York Mag Book Gossip newsletter revealing the first month sales numbers of Adult Braces did catch my attention. Namely because, to me, it shows how sad nonfiction sales are right now — 3,000 books in the first month is by no means bad, but I bet they are much much lower than Shrill’s numbers. So: Are books dead? Are they too expensive? Would we rather gossip about people we know on the Internet than read books? TBD.

My Current Library Read

Relatedly, Latria said she read that someone said Adult Braces reminded them of Joan Didion’s Notes to John, which is a book of letters she wrote to her husband about sessions she had with a therapist that was published posthumously. Well, I happen to be reading this book right now because I taught a course on Didion’s work this winter and saw this recently at the library. As it turns out, getting deeper into Didion through work she never intended to publish is actually illuminating. Hopefully, I’ll add some of this into the syllabus next time I teach the same course.

Moon Poetry

Hot take: Christina Koch for the Pulitzer? Did you read her Instagram captions describing the Artemis II mission's lunar flyby? Poetry. 

The most ominous thing I’ve ever loved.

It wasn’t just an eclipse with the Sun hidden behind the Moon...we could also see earthshine, the Sun’s light reflecting off Earth, wrapping the Moon in a soft, borrowed glow.
– Christina Koch, Artemis II

—Maggie

On AI and Labor

“Refusing to accept an AI-poisoned future of journalism” by Marisa Kabas (The Handbasket)

The pro-AI, “just asking questions” crowd would like us to believe in the inevitability of a technology that fulfills the capitalist goal of infinite labor without compensation. At present, those who run book publishing and legacy journalism outlets are convinced the future of their industries lies elsewhere than in the (largely underpaid) hands of those whose craft built them. Kabas’s response is aligned with my own, which is, bluntly, absolutely the fuck not. As artists, our futures rest in each other, and no bottom line in the universe can change that.

On Writing Instruments, Loathed and Loved

“The Fountain Pens Of Video Games” by Nicole Carpenter (Aftermath)

Those of you who watch the TV show Your Friends & Neighbors might have caught the brief appearance of Scrivener in this week’s episode. (No? Just me?) For Aftermath, Nicole Carpenter created a delightful, illustrated roundup of the fountain pens that have appeared in various video games. As someone who has spent far too many hours both staring at a blank page and playing Red Dead Redemption 2, I appreciate the effort. 

On Housing and Black Geographies

“Oakland and the Ghosts of Urbicide” by Brandi T. Summers (Places Journal)

I had the pleasure of seeing Summers at the American Association of Geographers gathering I reported on last month. In Places Journal, Summers writes about the Oakland she grew up in, what’s been lost, and how: “For me, Black place is a setting that holds social rootedness; it is that which instantiates, in physical form, the experiences and aspirations of Black people. Black space, in contrast, is relational; space is produced through the dynamics of power and community held in place. . . . Urbicide destroys Black place and Black space alike. Such spatial violence unmakes a location, and it tears apart the feelings and connections, expectations and understandings, that are nurtured in and shape that location.”

I've lived in Oakland for nearly a decade at this point, and it felt affirming to see the machinations of dismantling/displacement explicitly named.

—Rahawa

On Poetry

Last week, when I thought the world as we knew it was ending, I had the instinct to share poetry. There’s the new Nikky Finney poem, “Longshot” over at The Rumpus, along with two new-to-me poems by Aracelis Girmay. I was delighted by the appearance of a new Morgan Parker poem, ”Meanwhile It Rains for Two Weeks and the Heat Never Breaks” in The New Yorker. Parker’s book of essays, You Get What You Pay For didn't get the accolades it deserved and I'm still very mad about that. Bonus poetry moment: Nikky Finney's performance of “The Girlfriend's Train” (text here) on Def Poetry Jam Season 4 Episode 2. I taught this poem to my Writing the Body students in January, and I think about these lines every day:

We were just wondering
how you made it through
and we didn't?

On the Man that Shaped the Trees

Topiary artist Pearl Fryar (from Bishopville, SC) died earlier this week. It often took five years or so to shape his creations. Fryar knew how to create a sense of wonder, and at one point 10,000 people came to this little strip of land in South Carolina's interior to see his work. I never made it there, so I have to live through the experience of others. Tommy Tomlinson's Charlotte Observer piece from the 1990s is a delight to read as is Shani Raine Gilchrist's piece from the Oct/Nov 2020 issue of Garden & Gun. I'm big on the idea of seeing artists move, live, and talk, so here's Fryar talking about his work in his own words for National Geographic.

—Latria

This post was edited by Rahawa Haile.

Scratch is a weekly newsletter about how your favorite writers are surviving (or not). We are a four-person collective publishing essays, interviews with other writers, and topical inquiries into the publishing and media industries today. If you like what we’re doing here and want to support us, a paid subscription is the best way to do so.