What’s the thing you read when you want to remember how to write?
You’re at the newsstand and have decided you’re leaving with four magazines. What are you picking up? (from any era, be as oddly specific as possible).
Okay. This is big. Hm. I mean, look: I want to buy back my Seventeen and YM collection from 1997-1999. Also, Teen People. But only up until 2000 when I stopped reading it because I thought, at 15, that I wasn’t a teen anymore. After I left my teen years behind (LOLOL I was a child!) I started buying InStyle because I liked how I wasn’t intimidated by the trends they showed me. Also, the ads were so pretty.
Oh! NME, but when I was just starting out as a sweet baby music journalist in 2009 and had all the energy in the world to look up and listen to and see bands that soundtracked some extremely necessary but turbulent years. I ended up writing for NME about two years later, and while that was a huge and super-cool milestone, it was absolutely not the same as finding a new issue somewhere that only ever got two copies in every other week. If you’re a young person reading this, please know that the enthusiasm you feel for everything is so important! I tried to play mine down forever, and wow — a mistake!
What’s the thing you read when you need to feel something?
Wild by Cheryl Strayed. I think about it all the time. Right now I feel like I’m trying to re-configure my own life after losing my dad, grampa, and uncle in a seven-month span, and re-visiting Cheryl’s reclamation of self and of grief is that important reminder that as bad as it feels right now, you can (and will) keep going.
What newsletters have you continued to happily subscribe to?
Is there a thread you love that you come back to (or finds its way back to you)? (if so, why)?
I love threads for as long as it takes me to read them, and then I disappear like the Phantom of the Opera, yelling what I read on a thread from a chandelier.
But I do love a thread. I love an angry thread. An interesting thread. A thread where 29525825 people throw in their worst/best/funniest experiences. I love a gossipy thread. I love a thread of GIFs. A thread of inside baseball information about something I’m not at all well-versed in. Give me your threads. I love your threads. Unless they’re hateful or spreading misinformation or something equally awful. Those threads can go to hell.
What’s your favorite This Is A Great Day On Twitter day (one of those days when you couldn’t stop reading the timeline)?
At this point, it’s the simpler the better. Like, every and any MET gala meme — not praise for, or information about, the looks themselves; I want to laugh and I want to laugh until my throat is sore.
What’s the first book you remember reading and loving?
I loved Frederick — about this mouse who liked poetry instead of manual labour. And he doesn’t fit in with his mice pals until they realize that his gift is just as important as theirs, and they all end up appreciating the shit out of each other. What’s the best thing you’ve read this month?
Right now I’m reading Gabrielle Korn’s book, Everybody (Else) is Perfect and I love it so much! I’ve been a fan of hers for a long time, and her book is exactly what I expected.
Who’s the Twitter follow that hasn’t let you down, since the beginning?
This is unfair.
Hagi and
Koul, most definitely.
Josh Gondelman who is so kind and so funny and how dare he be both.
Karen Kilgariff! I would like her brain. Pixie Casey, whose account is locked, but still: I like everything she posts.
