Welcome back to another edition of Daily Crumbs: Weekly! In case you missed it, I published a long-form essay last week — “2023-2024: Reflections and Intentions” — the first of hopefully many in The Writer’s Log.
In it, I speak of grief, peace, and rebuilding oneself, and declare my undying love for literature. It’s a paid piece and a great way to support my work. As always, if you can’t afford it but would still like to read it, send me an email, and I’ll happily forward you a link.
Happy Crumbs!
An interesting take on (building) fandom on
and finding your inner (true) artist: “Exposing Yourself For Fun and Profit.”I don’t mean I want to be a performer. I mean I want to be real. I want to be authentic. Bob was both from Go: completely himself, completely free of what the crowd may have wanted him to be for them. In a way that’s impossible to convey in words, that first concert somehow gave me permission to be as genuine as I wanted to be — something, by the way, that I still hold back from.
“The Audacity of E. Jean Carroll.” A jury ordered Trump to pay Carroll $83.3 million. She might never see the color of that money, but boy, did that news feel good to read — now, if he could be banned from running altogether, that’d be great…
But as I sat in court in Manhattan last week, watching Mr. Trump glare and mumble at the back of Ms. Carroll’s head — she sat two rows in front of him, pin straight in her chair, the first time she’s been near this man in nearly 30 years — I couldn’t stop thinking that this trial was also about something else: the value of a woman, long past middle age, who dared to claim she indeed still had value. Just how radical was it for Ms. Carroll, 80, to demand that she was worth something?
Speaking of another horrendous reality, this report on “Rape-Related Pregnancies in the 14 US States With Total Abortion Bans”:
In this cross-sectional study, thousands of girls and women in states that banned abortion experienced rape-related pregnancy, but few (if any) obtained in-state abortions legally, suggesting that rape exceptions fail to provide reasonable access to abortion for survivors. Survivors of rape who become pregnant in states with abortion bans may seek a self-managed abortion or try to travel (often hundreds of miles) to a state where abortion is legal, leaving many without a practical alternative to carrying the pregnancy to term.
This stanza from this poem by Margaret Atwood:
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
And finally, “Letting Go of Controlling”. This world does not deserve Tara.
Have a lovely, lovely week.
Talk soon. a. xx