Every Thursday, I'm setting the table for your weekend…a little collection of reads, recipes, fun things, and whatever else caught my eye this week. It's the moment before the chaos when you get to decide what kind of experience you want. NOT a to-do list…just really sweet possibilities.
The weekend…whoa baby, where to even start!?
Friday night: pop-up at the Starlite Motel with the Catskills Cocktail Club. I totally sold out of food…possibly way too early, but entirely a great problem to have. Millie “helped”…in her own way, on her own terms, which for an 11-year-old angsty tween is probably appropriate, and I guess I have to take what I can get.
Saturday morning I woke up with the sun and drove an hour north to Andes to help my girl Nicole at Cafe Mutsi. She really needed hands on the coffee bar, so there I was, slinging flat whites and lattes all morning. I will NOT be adding barista to my resume anytime soon… because well, I spent most of the day in open battle with the milk-to-froth ratio situation. But there was one woman who told me it was the best flat white she had ever had, and I cashed that in for life and called it a day. ♥
Then I picked Millie up from the Starlite and drove back up the mountain to Dear Native Grapes for a friend’s birthday celebration. Millie was there to help me (*cough redeem herself from the night before cough*). We served Mutsi’s greatest hits and then, on the dark mountain drive home, we told each other ghost stories to stay awake. And, when we really needed it, we blasted 90’s femme rock & Lola Young & Florence and the Machine & Robyn, singing at the tops of our lungs until we pulled into our hotel.
The next morning, Yas and I dropped Millie at Frost Valley for her last week of summer camp. She all but pushed us out the door. Have fun in your yurt, kiddo :)
I’m exhausted just writing all that out, which is probably why my body and mind have been running on fumes ever since…and did I take it easy this week to recover? EFF NO, I’m a crazy-ass Virgo. Insidious at 11pm on Monday (so good!). Drinks with dear friends from Charlotte (hello, Stonemans!). A live reading of this piece at the Spill Your Ink Substack writers event on Tuesday (I also made snacks, because of course I did!) A co-parenting schedule meeting with Jay. Therapy. Drinks with my best friends who are finally back in the city after their summer vacations. And tonight: a NUSHU event.
I might get to sleep tomorrow. Maybe :)
You can gauge my mental status by the links I serve up each week, and this one is wide-ranging. This is usually the moment my mom calls to do a wellness check. Yes, ma, I’m okay…just gearing up for VIRGO SEASON, in all of the ways. Love how all-over-the-place this issue is…kind of like yours truly <3
Pull up a chair, turkeys!
THE GRAZING PLATE
(quick bites, short reads, things to nibble on)
The internet has made writers obsessed with becoming writers instead of writing There’s Lina, sitting in a Hamburg café with her ridiculously expensive leather notebook, her equally expensive pen, and her AirPods playing the "writer aesthetic playlist”…she's performing being a writer more than actually writing. She maps out the aestheticization of all of it and asks whether spending more time feeling like a writer than doing the work has quietly become the actual point. "The problem isn't the aesthetic. The problem begins where the aesthetic replaces the activity. Where you spend more time feeling like a writer than actually writing." YES, ma’am.
everything slides down so easy in august
Emily wakes up every summer morning and says "thank you thank you thank you thank you" out loud, to no one and everyone: for the mosquitoes that bite her leg while she sits in the sun, for the oysters that slide down like they were harvested to be hers, for laundromat baptisms, for tiny spoons of ice cream accepted with the ceremony of a child at communion. She writes about what summer does to her creativity and what fall quietly takes back. "I learn every year that I cannot improve myself into becoming the person I actually want to be, and every time I am on the pilates reformer I forget and tell myself this existential dread is worth it."
THE UTENSILS
(tools, recipes or things that help you do the work)
10 tactics for when action is the answer to re-enchanting the self
Michelle emerges from six hours of reading other people's live wires, mentally bloated with inspiration, and then does nothing. She calls the gap between idea and making "ether to matter": an idea in your head is vaporous, and most of its actual formation only happens in the making. The tactics she gives are not gospel, just a pile of options…Reframe discipline as devotion…Subtract before you add. "Your brain will chase a game long past the point where it will chase an obligation, and it is remarkably easy to trick. I have never once beaten my own resistance with reasoning, and I have beaten it dozens of times with a kitchen timer."Dolly Parton's "Down From Dover" Will Make You a Better Writer
RIP, legend. Kaitlyn takes "Down From Dover," a Dolly Parton song about a girl who waits through an entire pregnancy for her lover to come back, and he doesn't, and she uses it as a masterclass in what writers owe their characters and their readers. "Nameless cities and amorphous streets may flatter a reader's intellect but it doesn't do much to move anyone, one way or the other. And you are in this profession to move people, whether you are brave enough to admit it or not." Kaitlyn writes about it beautifully, a craft essay that works on you slowly.Find Your Ikigai
Ifeoluway asks: what makes you want to get up tomorrow? Then works through an answer, drawing on the likes of Viktor Frankl, Harold Kushner, David Goggins, Murakami, Fred Rogers, etc… A map of how people have moved through their worst seasons by finding something to move toward. "Meaning doesn't always mean finding a reason for what happened. It can mean deciding what you will do with what happened." "You don't have to finish. You just have to begin. Once you start, you may discover that continuing is a little easier."
THE VESSELS
(what holds us, what gives our chaos shape and space)
a meditation on the changing of the seasons
Corinne started a new job, which meant letting go of people she loved working with and a version of her life that worked really well. "I think you can be deeply grateful for one season and still be ready, or at least willing, to see what comes next." She gives nine warm, practical ways to step into a new season without forcing yourself to be ready for it, threaded through with "Frank Sinatra autumn" energy and her own Landslide-in-the-car moment. With Fall Equinox around the corner… "You don't have to be ready for the next season. You just have to be willing to step into it."the selves we become in other people's light
"I think a person is a bit like a room, rather than a fixed thing." She builds the whole essay on that: a room doesn't change because the furniture moved, it changes because morning reaches it differently than evening does. The people in our lives don't change us so much as illuminate the parts of us that were already there. Some bring out gentleness…some bring out cruelty we didn't know we were capable of. "If someone believes you are intelligent, you will begin to risk intelligent ideas. If someone treats your vulnerability like an inconvenience, you will learn to hide it; and yet, if someone treats it as sacred, you will never hide it again."Being True to Something that Calls to You
Joan quotes neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist on faith: not certainty, not evidence, but "being true to something that calls to you." They write about Zen, about zazen and sesshin, and then brings in Damien Echols on what discipline actually is: "Freedom is being able to decide what matters more: what feels good for the next five minutes, or the person you are trying to become over the next five years." They didn't think she had a mission…then they realized they did. "Entering into silence is a way of listening for what is calling. It may not be logical or reasonable. It may not make sense."
THE GLASSWARE
(the bubbles, the refreshment, what quenches)
What Are Your Wardrobe Blindspots? (Vol. 2)
Angie’s framework is Depth vs. Breadth. Depth: you keep buying the same thing in different colors (the high-neck tank, four of them). Breadth: variety across categories, not just within one. She walks through real client closets and the recurring patterns she sees, including a client who kept buying pieces that looked beautiful in the store, that made perfect sense individually, that she never wore, because they reflected her surroundings (what the women at her children's school were wearing, what the stores near her carried) instead of herself. "I don't really care how much you own as long as you have a point-of-view around those pieces and a reason for being." I’m gearing up for my annual closet clean-out this weekend, so this was very timely!Calm Down, It's Only Monday
Ali opens with"I've been writing a lot of poems lately, which is never a sign of chill mental health" and I nearly spit out my morning coffee laughing. The park near her apartment was closed that morning because a mountain lion had killed a deer, so she went to breakfast…added blueberries to her pancakes…the lesbians downstairs lost their dog…she had a dream where she pulled a piece of ginger out of her arm, then a tiny kitchen sponge, and no one around her seemed to care…then she walked into a bodega that sold roasted potatoes for $1.99 and that fixed everything. Mountain lions and roasted potatoes and dead deer…pure poetry. More writing like this, please:)
THE NAPKIN
(for wiping away the week’s mess, the reset)
In The Shower
Love Michelle’s writing and this piece is no different…she took a shower inside stolen time. "Privacy has a sound. Small, plain. Sometimes only a click. This morning, the water felt like mercy." She writes about ugly crying in the shower, where the noise covers it, and no one needs advice. She writes about grief for her father, how under hot water with eyes closed he can feel almost near, not alive, not here, but down the hall in some old ordinary way. She nudges the heat higher until her skin goes red and the freckles merge. "Heat says, 'here you go, Michelle, this is your body, still yours babe, still able to feel something besides duty.'" She opens the door when the house makes a sound…so is she.
THE DESSERT PLATE
(the sweet stuff, pure joy, no justification needed)
My Daughter Doesn't Trust Me
I read this one out loud this past Tuesday night at the Spill Your Ink Substack writers event. Equally terrifying and beautifully humbling, exciting even. If you haven't read it yet: it's the one about Millie, her life’s chaos (brought on by yours truly) and the years she has spent resenting what all of it meant. She helped me at the events this weekend…I think we may be turning a corner…I hope :) ♥
Happy Thursday, turkeys!
More of this next week <3
xo, Jess
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Setting the Table drops every Thursday. Long-form essay on Sundays…
the perfect read for…I don't know…maybe with that cup of coffee you'll
have first thing in the morning. See you there. ♥
Jess, again such a lovely piece and moreover, such great leads to new people for me to read. ♡
🥰