I want to tell you about two very different writers. Both are worth reading. Their writing resonates with me for very different reasons.
Patricia Lockwood is a quirky, “let ‘er fly” poet, novelist, and essayist. She disdains genres. Her novels and her memoir Priestdaddy (her father is a priest) defy explanation.
And I can’t stop thinking about her. A few nights ago a few friends and I heard her speak, perform, gesticulate, and surprise us at Talking Volumes, presented by MPR News and the Minne Star Tribune.
Luckily, my psychologist friend drove us because I immensely dislike heading into the Twin Cities of Minneapolis or St. Paul, where we convened in the old Fitzgerald Theater. I’m so glad I went! (And we discovered an old convent-bar for wine and snacks afterward!)
I’m reading No One Is Talking About This, Lockwood’s first novel. She partly is the protagonist. The book written in fragments. I don’t get most of it. I think I get this one:
Back in 1999, she had watched five episodes of The Sopranos and immediately wanted to be involved in organized crime. Not the shooting part, the part that they all sat around in restaurants.
Seems pretty straightforward, right?
I like that she puts bits out there. I do that sometimes (I’m becoming more confident about my writing, believing that all my little notebook notes belong somewhere).
Lockwood forgets stuff (and she’s only 43). She doesn’t know what’s going on at times, like when she had long covid, but she digs into that. She asks herself big questions, Are you not a person?
And she’s funny as hell.
“If she had stayed in Ohio,” she writes, “she would have disappeared into the Internet.”
She’s brilliant. She’s a thinker par excellence.
Turn, turn, turn, and you will find Jill Lepore, the brilliant Harvard history prof who also started teaching at Harvard Law School last year. As she started delving into more Constitutional Law, Lepore collaborated with data scientists, political scientists, and a team of Harvard undergraduates, to create “publicly searchable full-text archives of more than 11,000 amendments proposed in Congress between 1789 and 2022.” That never made it into law. First of all, it takes too long — seven years of state legislative approval
What does this mean? The US Constitution was made to be amended. We need to change the process, outlined in her new book WE The People. A History of the U.S. Constitution.
In addition to Howard Zinn, I often go to Lepore for my history, although she’s mostly a fan of the enthusiasm Zinn forged in previously bored high school history students. Not so much his historical views.
I’ll add that Lepore’s “The Lost Archive” is the only podcast I’ve ever listened to, because it’s so damn entertaining: https://www.thelastarchive.com/season-4-
It’s time to write. And it’s time for history to get it right.
Tucson Writer Editor 