Object Relations
January 15, 2025 at 11:38PMJessie Kindig reflects on the simple pleasures of winter in Vermont, revelling in life slowed by cold air and snow. As she observes the beauty of the landscape in winter, her father making homemade spinach ravioli, and the unexpected delights of the local general store, she considers labor as a kind of offering and how lucky she is to be a writer trying—and sometimes failing—to get it all down just right.
To make an offering that brings things into relation. To make dinner as if dinner were to write a novel. To have dinner be the novel. To write an essay as if it were splitting wood. To have the woodpile be the essay you write. To write dinner and chop poems. To bring the wild forest into the home because the home is made of the wild forest, and so to be at home in the wild forest and to find the wild forest in your home. To keep trying to write branches against the sky because in writing them you make a world with them where you become each other.
Related reading on walking and writing
Stet: On Cutting—but Keeping—Everything
“I prefer to keep my darlings on ice.”
Trespassing For The Common Good
“In England, a movement is growing to defy enclosure by trespassing on private land.”
How Does the Writer Say Etcetera?
“Sumana Roy ponders the linguistic and aesthetic significance of ‘etceterization.’”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/15/object-relations/
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