What should I read today?

A recommendation round-up for your reading needs:

“How do we save everyone, everything?” For Guernica, Meg Pillow’s essay “Living Memory” highlights the work of Black archivists honoring and preserving accounts of the early pandemic and the work and experiences of protestors occupying Louisville’s Injustice Square in the memory of Breonna Taylor, asking, “Who, then, are the chroniclers of Black lives in the pandemic? Who is doing the work of remembering the Black essential workers in the battle against COVID-19? Who is memorializing the history of the people who are fighting for racial justice, and who is doing so in more depth and detail than the small snapshot that I offer here? How are they capturing the stories of people whose lives have been so disrupted by the pandemic and white supremacy that it prevents them from building their own comprehensive history?”

“Why do we spend so little time contemplating the sweet brutality of our short lives?” Into SmokeLong Quarterly drops a delicious piece of flash fiction by Marne Litfin, “Build-a-Bear,” set at an outpost of the mall-ubiquitous plush assembly factories that has a special feature. Is there something magical happening at this store?

“You’re wearing that?” In Electric Lit, Rax King unpacks the kind of toxic teenaged love that is both abusive and obsessive in her essay, “I Married Jordan Catalano.” (A side question of my own: Am I the only one who thinks it is utterly unjust that he, not Angela or Rayanne or Rickie, became the namesake of the Xennial microgeneration?)

“Well, why can’t you get back to the place you were a year ago?” In Taunt, read this fascinating intergenerational conversation between three members of the Lindsey family — Ramona, Zach, and Faith — about cultivation: in art, culture, community, family, living and thriving outside the gender binary and apart from external expectations. Is the very idea of a career limiting to personal evolution?

“If the dream of Parton’s song is transformation through gratitude and sheer force of will, what is the dream of Lynn’s?” Shawna Kay Rodenberg’s essay in ELLE, “Maybe Dolly Is the Goal, but Loretta Is the Truth,” takes a close and personal look at Appalachian women, ambivalence, paradoxes, and resistance to apologetics. What are the complex realities we’re ignoring in favor of more direct and satisfying narratives?

“Was it safe?” In Oxford American, Anjali Enjeti’s essay “The Haunting of Lake Lanier” considers the deadly body of water, Georgia’s largest, and its “storied past—beginning with the Cherokee removal, to the banishment of Black people in Forsyth County, to the lake’s disembodied souls in search of some kind of absolution—that I carry with me whenever I visit.” A childhood spent on and around Kentucky Lake made me fascinated by America’s manmade lakes and what and who we forcibly submerged in their making. Is the legend true? Is Lake Lanier haunted? What part of this country isn’t?

Book-wise, I recently finished Larissa Pham’s Pop Song and am now reading Elissa Washuta’s White Magic. What are you reading next?