Search Results for: essay

The Hate Is Coming From Inside the House

Image from Quote Catalog via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Body positivity, fat activism, intuitive eating: all of these things are meant, in part, to free us from the tyranny of diet culture. But if you’ve spent 50 years living your life according to the Gospel of Jenny Craig — each of those 50 in a world that doesn’t hate fat people any less — it’s hard to keep the self-love switch in the “on” position. In the New York Times, Sarah Miller takes a hard look at her relationship to her body and to body positivity.

I am not saying that no one has accepted her body, that it’s all a lie. I am just saying that I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone. And while there is certainly more of what is called a “celebration” of different shapes, it is rare that those shapes are not proportioned in a fairly universally attractive way.

Even if by some miracle I were to accept being not thin, as I have many times — for five or 10 minutes or three whole days like when I finished Lindy West’s excellent memoir, “Shrill,” and naïvely thought I had finally been cured of my sickness — I would remain the sort of person destined for re-infection.

That person is always prepared for contempt from men who don’t find her physically attractive, and has been on high alert to general woman hatred since she was 4. (Honestly, I pity the women who are not.) At any rate, I’m 50 and I am way too scared of the world to stop dieting.

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Margery Kempe: Patron Saint of Writing Moms

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Sara Fredman observes that becoming a mother helped her perspective as a writer, much like Margery Kempe, a medieval mom with 14 kids who managed to write The Book of Margery Kempe — a treatise on her own spiritual reinvention that may very well have been the first memoir. Despite the sore boobs and the sleep deprivation, Fredman says being a mom sharpened her focus and motivated her to write within the small windows that having three small children allows. Read her essay at Electric Literature.

New motherhood blindsided me like a semi truck. There was the fact that breastfeeding physically tethered me to my child like one of those yo-yo balls from the ‘90s, able to extend only so far before I had to rocket right back.

There are some who would use motherhood as a cudgel or a cautionary tale in an attempt to convince us that becoming a mother—or too much of a mother—means locking ourselves out of the writing life. But the truth is that, like Margery, I found that motherhood unlocked something in me. Maybe it was surviving four days of labor or fourth months of no sleep, but when I emerged from the fog, I had more to say and an increasingly fiery need to say it,

Having children has simultaneously fried my brain and made it sharper and more focused. I don’t know how this is possible, but it is my truth. I see things differently now because growing and birthing a baby changes you. It can change your palate and your shoe size and it most certainly changes your brain. For Margery, this meant a series of divine visions that altered the course of her life. For most of us, the changes are far less spiritual, but they can be similarly revelatory.

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When Readers Support Longreads, We Can Nurture Strong Relationships with Writers

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As an editor, the biggest compliment a writer can pay me is to send a second pitch my way. Building a strong relationship with authors — the kind that lasts for years and transcends the vagaries of daily traffic and Twitter chatter — is my favorite thing about being a Longreads editor. Here’s the thing: none of it is possible without readers’ support. That’s why we’re aiming to raise $50,000 during our Winter Member Drive this year.

When you, our readers, become members, you not only show us your trust in our editorial choices; you also make it possible for us to nurture some incredible writers. Every contribution you make — especially when it’s a recurring (monthly or annual) one — goes directly to our story fund and gives us the space to think big, to commit to long-term projects, and to sustain some of our audience’s favorite reads.

Over the last few years, the Longreads team has doubled down on publishing longform series on topics ranging from history to music. There’s something very special that happens when a writer gets to return to the same topic and explore it, over the course of months and years, from new angles. Their connection to the subject matter deepens. Their authority becomes both more apparent and, at the same time, more laid back. Their voice develops and modulates as loyal readers keep coming back.

In Anne Thériault’s Queens of Infamy — going strong for two years now — this long-term commitment has led to a passionate following that eagerly awaits each new, darkly funny account of women rulers from centuries past. Tom Maxwell’s Shelved series, with 14 essays under its belt, has been unearthing the stories of unpublished albums by some of the most famous musicians on the planet. From perfume to mirrors, Katy Kelleher has been diving deep into the ugly history of beautiful things, a gorgeously written exploration of material culture.

There are more I could mention — from Rebecca Schuman’s scathing reevaluation of ’90s pop artifacts to Soraya Roberts’ brilliant weekly columns on the intersection of politics and culture (seriously, read them!). But the point I’m trying to make is simple: we need your support to make these relationships sustainable. Our readers’ commitment to Longreads is what makes it possible for Longreads to commit to writers and their work over time.

Thank you for contributing during our Winter Member Drive — every dollar helps, and every recurring contribution helps even more. If you’re ready to become a member (or re-up your previous contribution), you know what to do — just click below.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

This illustration, created at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses, including the novel coronavirus identified as the cause of an outbreak of respiratory illness first detected in Wuhan, China in 2019, 2020. Courtesy CDC/Alissa Eckert, MS. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from James Hamblin, Josina Guess, Edward Carey, Paraic O’Donnell, and Ruth Graham.

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* Bundyville. (Deeply reported and up for a National Magazine Award.)
* Queens of Infamy. (Delightfully nerdy historical satire.)
* Fine Lines. (Thoughtful personal essays on aging.)
* Shelved. (Deep dives into ditched deep cuts.)
* Hive. (Women on the music that moves them.)

In 2009, Longreads started as a hashtag for sharing great reading on Twitter and we remain passionate about and committed to selecting and sharing the best writing on the web. 

We’re proud of our deeply reported stories and thoughtful personal essays, as well as excerpts of and commentary on the books we love. Read this note from our founder Mark Armstrong for more details on what we have planned this year.

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1. You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

James Hamblin | The Atlantic | February 24, 2020 | 12 minutes (3,045 words)

You might not know you have it, though.

2. The Wind Delivered the Story

Josina Guess | The Bitter Southerner | February 27, 2020 | 8 minutes (2,143 words)

In this haunting essay, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past when she discovers, over time, newspapers in her yard telling the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 mass lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused.

3. On Getting Lost

Edward Carey | Texas Highways | February 1, 2020 | 9 minutes (2,457 words)

A journey through the Big Thicket of Texas.

4. MS Is Meticulously Destroying Me. I Am Being Unmade.

Paraic O’Donnell | The Irish Times | February 11, 2020 | 23 minutes (5,757 words)

“It’s not that you surrender, in the end. Even surrender takes effort, and you just don’t have the energy.”

5. The Bible That Oozed Oil

Ruth Graham | Slate | February 27, 2020 | 19 minutes (4,852 words)

A small Georgia town, a prophecy about Donald Trump, and the story of how a miracle fell apart.

How Do You Live In a Body That Doesn’t Feel Like Yours? If You Have No Choice, You Just Do.

Photo by Ford Motor Company via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

It’s hard to choose a passage to highlight when every paragraph of an essay makes you stop to catch your breath because it’s so lovely, or candid, or difficult. Such is the case with Paraic O’Donnell‘s Irish Times essay that juxtaposes the progression of the seasons with the progression of his Multiple Sclerosis. I’ve chosen one particularly no-holds-barred section that’s both blunt and darkly comic, but I could just as easily have chosen one of dozens of other paragraphs.

In software engineering, there’s a concept called graceful degradation. That’s where, if something unexpected happens, the system doesn’t just silently lose its shit. It issues a brief statement and tries to get its affairs in order. Having performed these final acts of heroism, it can go tits up with a clear conscience. That’s graceful degradation. It’s an elegant term, I’ve always thought.

Anyway, with multiple sclerosis, graceful degradation is very much not a thing. It’s the opposite kind of deal, in fact. When you’re exhausted, which is most of the time, what happens instead is graceless degradation. There’s just no kind of showmanship or dignity to the proceedings. You’d see better performances, in the collapsing line, from a fucked deckchair or a condemned block of flats.

It’s a shitshow, seriously. You hurt yourself, sometimes, just trying to sit down. Actually injure yourself. It’s a fucking fiasco, is what it is.

And you feel, after exertion, like a crash test dummy. You feel like a shit zombie, like a tortured golem. You can’t cry any more – this is still a thing, for some reason – and you’re getting resentful about that, because sometimes you desperately want to.

You feel, sometimes, like a motherless child.

These, then, were the prevailing conditions in the spring of 2013. This was what I was up against. And faced with odds like these, I did what anyone would do. I bought a colossal number of plants, took a boatload of drugs and embarked on a massive construction project.

Twitter is often a festival of hate and ignorance and poop, but sometimes it also brings you links to pieces like this, pieces that you’d never have seen otherwise, and then you remember how being connected to the whole world can be a beautiful thing.

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Longreads Needs Your Support to Raise $50K During Our Winter 2020 Member Drive

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Longreads is celebrating its 11th anniversary this year. Nine years ago, we launched an optional membership—first for readers to support the service, and later to support our story fund for original reporting, essays, and podcasts.

Now, here we are in 2020—we’ve published stories from thousands of writers, and we’ve raised over $1 million from readers. Last month, Longreads earned its fourth National Magazine Award nomination, for the second season of Bundyville, Leah Sottile’s groundbreaking podcast in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. The stories you read on Longreads eventually became books, like Michele Filgate’s outstanding collection What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, and Jeff Sharlet’s This Brilliant Darkness.

Last year I shared a short Twitter thread about the early days of Longreads and its membership. Twitter has certainly changed a lot since the early days of the hashtag, but our mission has never changed, which is to support and celebrate great stories on the web, and organize this community of readers to fund new work.

Longreads is pushing to achieve long-term sustainability, and reader support is more critical than ever to ensure that we can keep publishing the stories and voices that challenge us and expand our understanding of the world. Our goal for this drive is $50,000. And your support means we can keep publishing this work with no paywalls—free for everyone to enjoy and share.

We have more exciting projects coming soon—starting with today’s launch of HIVE, a new series about women and the music that influenced them. Then in March we’ll debut a new podcast from the producers behind Bundyville, and an important new collaboration with The Marshall Project.

We can’t do any of this without you. You can become a monthly or yearly subscriber, or you can make a one-time payment. Just go to Longreads.com/join.

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How a Hurricane’s Trailing Winds Retold Willie Earle’s 1947 Mass Lynching

A lynch mob, with police, following the mob's unsuccessful attempt to lynch CY Winstead, who was in the county jail, Roxboro, North Carolina, August 19, 1941. (Photo by Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images)

In this haunting essay at The Bitter Southerner, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past.

When an Autumn hurricane’s trailing winds disturb old newspapers stored in her shed — blowing them around to lodge and rest in various places across her yard — the old sodden papers revealed themselves over time to tell her the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused, a pivotal event that marked a change in public opinion in South Carolina and the South against unchecked mob violence.

When my family and I started to settle into our northeast Georgia farmhouse two years ago, we found a box of Athens Banner-Heralds and Atlanta Journals and Atlanta Constitutions from the mid 1940s through the early 50s. I pored over the brittle yellow papers, a time capsule of this region’s attitudes on race, gender, economics, politics, and agriculture. I wondered at the treasures hidden in those stacks, and what coverage, if any, I might find of some of the racialized terror and lynchings of those waning days of overt American apartheid.

During a blustery autumn storm, the tailwinds of a hurricane, the wind whipped through the woodshed and stirred up some of the papers, littering them around the property. Each day we would pluck a few – a strange harvest of stories. Opinion columns about communists clinging to the blueberry bushes; by the smokehouse, a story of a man dying because a segregated hospital refused him treatment; in the kale I found the price of cotton: 36 cents per 1-inch middling. I would nibble on these stories, roll them over in my mind, then bury their empty husks beneath a pile of oak leaves.

Then a keeper appeared to Michael in the grass between the old well and the pecan tree. The front page of the Athens Banner-Herald from May 16, 1947 read, “State Seeks Death Sentence For All 31 Lynchers.” He lifted the dampened page and laid it to dry on the dining room table. The article gave graphic details and ample evidence, including confessions and incriminating accusations from the taxicab drivers who killed Willie Earle to avenge the fatal stabbing of a cab driver named Thomas Brown. Arrested, then almost immediately kidnapped from jail, Earle had no opportunity to stand trial – his guilt or innocence never proven.

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The Wind Delivered the Story

Longreads Pick

In this haunting essay, Josina Guess confronts South Carolina’s violent racist past when she discovers, over time, newspapers in her yard telling the story of Willie Earle’s 1947 mass lynching and the subsequent acquittal of all 31 accused.

Published: Feb 27, 2020
Length: 8 minutes (2,143 words)

Miami: A Beginning

William Gottlieb / Getty / Design by Katie Kosma

Read an introduction to the series.

Jessica Lynne | Longreads | February 2020 | 10 minutes (2,737 words)

Hive is a Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them.

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Much has been written about certain cities and their landscapes that conjure a particular sentimentality or feeling within those who live there or those who chose to visit. At times, the lore is so great that it overwhelms. New York, for instance, ignites a peculiar sense of inertia, a stagnancy that cannot be perfectly described even though when you are there, it presses itself onto you and it is hard to ignore. We have come to know Paris as a city of love; it seems impossible to escape a looming sense of romance. The poems and the essays and the paintings and the photography and even the songs have given to us this mirage. As any young, eager traveler to Paris might be inclined, I once searched, many years ago, hoping to find love in the first, sixth, or 13th arrondissement.

I did not, however, fall in love in Paris. I fell in love, instead, in Miami. 

When I tell people that I fell in love in Miami, I have noticed a reaction that first takes the form of surprise then quickly turns to intrigue. One friend responded with a smile and a curt, Sexy. I imagine, for most people unfamiliar with the vastness of  Miami-Dade County, when one hears love and Miami, one might be inclined to think of Miami Beach — a denizen of glamour, glitz, nightlife — and thus picture a scene incongruent with that which we dream up when we say love. This imagining does not include the walks I have taken throughout Opa Locka, ambling along without a plan. It does not include Adelita’s Café on NE 2nd Avenue where dear friends once took me to eat breakfast while Honduran music videos played in the background. It does not include the many concerns of climate catastrophe that hover. Perhaps, it is because I grew up in a region defined, in part, by swampland and coastline, beaches and a nebulous hurricane season — a region that in certain aspects of its topography reminds me of Miami — but I have never been surprised by what happened to me. I have always understood the water to carry forth potencies.

Time is a mysterious phenomenon because when I fell in love in Miami, I was floating through a period of depression and having difficulty communicating this to friends and loved ones. I had traveled to the city for a research residency hoping to read or write or work myself out of it. That moment in my life feels as though it was decades ago and also as though it just happened last week. It, in actuality, unfolded in the middle of a Lenten season about two years ago. As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport. When I look at that photo now (I have not been able to, not wanted to delete it), I wonder if that Jessica knew what awaited her.

Miami humidity is a familiar sensation to me, comforting in fact. It reminds me to move slowly. To breathe deeply. It reminds me that water, in each of its three states, has something to teach us about how we should be in our bodies, what we should do to best care for ourselves. There are those who loathe the excess of moisture in the air. I revel in the stickiness. 

It is possible that as I texted the person with whom I would fall in love on my way from Miami International Airport to the residency home in Little Haiti where I would spend the week, I said something like this to them about the city. It is possible that they responded back to me with an affirmation of sorts, because though they did not live in Miami either, they too were from a place of humidity and hurricanes. They too understood the ways in which those forces rumble through the body. Maybe this is why, on that night, the night that feels like it occurred both decades ago and just last week, as we settled into a nervous then tranquil video chat, I knew that love was happening to us.

As I packed my suitcase, anxious to leave a still winter New York, I texted the person with whom I would eventually fall in love a selfie of me wearing a wool winter coat, frowning in the back of a taxi, on my way to JFK airport.

Isn’t love just as mysterious as time? I am not sure how to recount the beginning except to say that our beginning was cliché even if I knew it was special: We met on social media. Isn’t this how it tends to go nowadays? They think you’re cute. They follow. You think they’re cute. You comment. The dance ensues until that first encounter or touch or night spent together. That night, the person with whom I would fall in love and I laughed through our screens because we did not yet know what or when that first encounter would be and somehow that was alright for the moment. Even then, I recognized that serendipity rarely shows up in relationships of distance. So instead, we talked about other things: sargassum, the sea, salt-water, roosters, the moon. 


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This is another thing I have come to love about Miami when I visit: the moon. Though Miami is a big city and it is sometimes difficult to see the stars, the moon that night was a waning crescent. In this phase, the moon is most visible right before sunrise as it points eastward. A waning crescent moon is seen right before a new moon which is in itself, a time for clarity, rebirth, revision. During the new moon, the gravitational pulls of the sun and moon are aligned and if you are near coastline, you will notice the extremities of high and low tides. That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue. 

En Route

On February 12, 2019, as NASA’s Mars rover, Opportunity, died, the team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory effectively gave the robot a resting tribute by playing Billie Holiday’s rendition of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Opportunity first landed on Mars in 2004 as the search for water on the red planet began in earnest. Engineers last received a communication from the robot during a dust storm on the planet in the summer of 2018. According to one NASA dispatch from that June, high amounts of dust prevented Opportunity from receiving the solar power necessary for recharging: 

NASA engineers attempted to contact the Opportunity rover today but did not hear back from the nearly 15-year-old rover. The team is now operating under the assumption that the charge in Opportunity’s batteries has dipped below 24 volts and the rover has entered low power fault mode, a condition where all subsystems, except a mission clock, are turned off. The rover’s mission clock is programmed to wake the computer so it can check power levels.

If the rover’s computer determines that its batteries don’t have enough charge, it will again put itself back to sleep. Due to an extreme amount of dust over Perseverance Valley, mission engineers believe it is unlikely the rover has enough sunlight to charge back up for at least the next several days.

By February, it had become clear that Opportunity’s data transmission from the summer of 2018 would be its last. Holiday’s voice became the voice of final goodbye. 

I was in New Orleans, another coastal ecology always contending with the water, when I read this news. Away from this person I now loved as Valentine’s Day crept up, I had never considered Holiday’s “I’ll Be Seeing You” to be a song of farewell. It has always been, for me, an amorous sonic epistle, a way of saying, here, you are where my heart belongs. Away from this person I loved as Valentine’s Day approached, unable to figure out how to be in person together, separated still by an ocean and time, I played this song if only to remind myself that distance would not become a permanent impasse. By that February, we had almost perfected a system: one month here, one month there. There being, at first, the small island where the person I loved was born, a short trip from my Brooklyn home. This was our rhythm soon after Miami. Then, as the person I loved relocated for school, there became a big, gray European City. Here morphed into a series of different cities in which I took up residence after moving out of Brooklyn. I had decided I needed to travel as I figured out the terms of a book project I wanted to take on. 

And so, guided by the desire to sharpen ourselves, we leapt in different directions as we still attempted to hold onto each other, transience best understood as the context for our love.

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If you have heard “I’ll Be Seeing You” at any point in your life (and chances are that you have), you have most likely listened to the version Holiday recorded in 1944 — the version played for Opportunity, in fact — though it was not originally her song. Composer Sammy Fain and songwriter Irvin Kahal wrote the song in 1938 and as WWII began, it gradually personified the ache and hope of a generation that watched their loved ones leave without an assurance of return. Fain and Kahal’s tune was a hit; Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra each recorded their own renditions. Yet, it took a Black woman to lend the song its gravitas. 

If Aretha Franklin is the singer who first taught me how to see God, it has been Holiday who has taught me how to name a kind of romantic love. 

I was a few months shy of 14 when I first heard Holiday’s version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It was summer 2004 and the film adaptation of Nicholas Sparks’s novel The Notebook had just been released in the U.S. The film tells the story of an unlikely pairing of two white South Carolinians — Allie and Noah — in the 1940s who, in spite of their class differences, fall in love one summer against the backdrop of the Second World War. We learn of the drama of their romance via flashbacks of an older couple eventually revealed to be the elder Allie and Noah. 

That night, we were both, quietly, preparing to receive each other, in spite of the distance — moon, water, heart in dialogue.

In the scene I found most striking, the scene that defines the film for me, Noah and Allie are on their first date and begin to dance in the middle of the street. Slowly, they move as Holiday starts to croon. I did not know anything profound about romance then as a teenager, but I knew that I had never heard a love song like that before. I’d heard few voices that hummed through me like Holiday’s did that afternoon. 

Kahal’s lyrics embody the familiar longing that occurs between lovers separated. As Holiday’s voice eases into that opening horn melody, steady and deliberate, each lyric pronounced and clear, she carries those words into a significant emotional, poetic plane.  Holiday’s lento performance stands in for all of us who have just as slowly and tenderly opened that anticipated letter with “I love you,” or “I am always thinking of you,” awaiting. And in the distinctive fortitude that defined a hallmark era of jazz and the blues as musical genres, it was Holiday who offered an unmatched vocal rhythm and inventiveness. Perhaps she has taught us all how to love: her 1956 rendition of Vernon Duke’s “April in Paris,” evoking sentiments I once hoped to find in that very city but could not quite grasp at the time. Her version of Duke’s similarly classic standard, “Autumn in New York,” conjuring the lurking beauty of the fall season in a city that can be hard to embrace in moments. To listen to Holiday is to listen to a woman who has lived and loved, and that acute transmission of heartache, of a resolute knowing, is her potency, like the water. 

“I’ll Be Seeing You” is not about one city. It is about the moon; it is about everywhere. It is about all the locations in which we have yearned. When I think of the person I loved, I fold myself inside of Holiday’s transmission. 

* * *

There is so much about a long-distance relationship that can seem fleeting, and because the moments of physical togetherness and intimacy become planned in a meticulous manner, it always feels as if you are chasing time. Trying to get it to not just slow down, but to stop. Trying to extend a day into a week, a week into a month. In a long-distance relationship you are constantly grappling with the tension between aloneness and loneliness because the threat of being overwhelmed by nostalgia feels palpable. That night in Miami, under the waning crescent moon, when I knew that I would indeed love the person who I loved, in spite of a distance that I could not yet see reconciled, I thought to myself, Billie will steady us. 

I carried that song with me everywhere. On the New York City subway, at the Acropolis in Athens, in a quiet bar in Bonn, at the Souk of Marrakech. I learned how to find the person I loved in the poetry section of a New Orleans bookstore, that vintage shop in Baltimore, a Lisbon pastelaria. Each new place, Lady Day in my head, on my heart, reminding me to look at the moon before sleep, that I would always find a reflection of the person I loved there, too, until the next visit. 

An Ending

I keep coming back to three lines in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

When you travel everything goes with you, even the things you do not know.
They travel; they take up space; they remain the things you do not know;
they become the things you will never know.

I tell myself that when you are in a long-distance relationship, especially one that requires crossing water as commute, travel can become burdensome and exhausting and the last thing you want is to carry excess. Brand does not speak of romantic love, I know, but recently, I cannot read these words without thinking about the unknown excesses that traveled with me as love took me back and forth across an ocean. I only knew, instead, how to name what was becoming my loneliness. I am sure the person I loved was unraveling in this way too. 

Here are some items that I would regularly pack: a raincoat, two books, a comfortable pair of sneakers, a laptop, a purple caftan, five T-shirts, a few sweaters, three pairs of jeans, multiple love notes. 

Even now, I am worried that I have exposed too much. 

I didn’t know what to do with myself after the person I loved and I decided that it had become too heavy to carry the distance anymore, so I went back to Miami. 

Greeted by friends at the airport, I temporarily swallowed the lump in my throat that had swelled as I stepped off the plane that August morning. Even in my delusional attempts to not think about my last visit — the visit when I fell in love — my body remembered the humidity which meant it wouldn’t let me forget what this city held for me. I wasn’t ready to divulge the details of the breakup, so I smiled my widest smile and let my friends take me to Jimmy’s Diner for breakfast. The entire conversation, an exercise of restraint for me. When you travel, heartbreak travels with you, whether you want it to or not.  

I didn’t unpack my suitcase when I arrived at my hotel later that day. A storm was lurking, I knew, but I wanted to wander about Little Havana for a moment, even if it meant getting caught in the rain. I grabbed my clutch, my phone, my headphones. I greeted the older women having lunch in the lobby before exiting and turning left on SW 9th Street. I pressed play and let Billie wash over me, and I walked and walked and walked.

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Jessica Lynne is a writer and art critic. She is a founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives. Her writing has been featured in publications such as Art in America, The Believer, BOMB Magazine, The Nation and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about love, faith, and the American South.

Editor: Danielle A. Jackson

Fact checker: Matt Giles

Copy editor: Jacob Z. Gross

 

Welcome to Hive

William Gottlieb / Getty, Universal Records, Michael Ochs Archives / Getty, Epic Records

“I was happy when I saw my dance all over,” Jalaiah Harmon, 14-year old dancer, choreographer, and creator of the Renegade dance told Taylor Lorenz of the New York Times. Last fall, the suburban Atlanta teen, trained in all the classical forms, took to her bedroom and created movement to accompany the stuttering 808s of “Lottery,” a single by Atlanta hip hop artist K Camp. Its lyrics and sonics describe a flamboyant kind of self-possession. Harmon recorded the moves on her phone, uploaded her recording to the social video app Funimate, and then to Instagram. The dance went viral when TikTok influencers recorded and uploaded themselves doing it, buoyed by the attention of celebrities like Lizzo and Kourtney Kardashian. Harmon — young, Black, female and Southern — was rarely named or linked to in the frenzy. But Black Twitter intervened, and by the following winter, she would be. Harmon performed centerstage with cheerleaders at February’s NBA All Star game, and publicly, K Camp thanked her for making his song “the biggest in the world.”

In the early days of rock and roll, according to Ann Powers, “Girls ran the fan clubs, bought the records and the magazines, filled the concert halls.” Harmon’s creative brilliance, an extension of the girl-fueled heritage of popular music, is also a reminder of all the credit we have yet to give.

Women are underrepresented, missing, even, in many areas of influence and power in the music industry — as journalists, songwriters, producers, and executives. But they’ve long been the quiet center of music culture, keeping it vital. This is especially true of Black teenage girls and femme people, whose tastes and creative responses to what they love shape and originate many trends. You don’t get Beatlemania without teenage girls, or Sam Cooke without swooning adolescents like my mother, who remembers slow dancing to “You Send Me” at junior high school dances and blue light parties with Blue Magic crooning from the speakers. My memories of our household of women thrum. The TV, brown and boxy, atop a shelf of vinyl, taller than me by miles, playing “Freeway of Love” — the pink Cadillac, Ms. Franklin’s short cut and stonewash denim an everlasting, glamorous imprint. My teenage sister’s blouse with lace and ruffles and her feathered curls bouncing to the first saxophone notes of “The Glamorous Life.” My mother and her marcel irons in the bathroom mirror singing “You Bring Me Joy.” These women make the music I love, live. They help me remember that despite the dominance of male critics and tastemakers in the mainstream press, teenage girls — in hallways between classes, scrolling on their phones, making up dances in their rooms — are shaping what’s next.

Welcome to Hive, a new Longreads series about women and the music that has influenced them. The pieces in Hive live in the gap between the swarm or hive — the crowd of girls and femmes who form the base of pop trends — and the critical male voice that has shaped the “formal,” “legitimate” interpretation of music culture. The essays embrace fandom and rigor in equal parts, considering both as conduits for creativity. “Strange things happen when an artist is moved to a new depth by another,” writes contributor DJ Lynnée Denise, in her forthcoming essay about Southern crunk funk artist Joi. In this series, each contributor trusts their tastes and thinks with and through the music to tell a story of unexpected connections and embodied intellectualism.

Hive is inspired by: the Beyhive; the family of women who shaped my tastes; zines from the ‘90’s; viral Vines, the hustle, mashed potato, and dab; epistolary essays; Tumlbr; group texts; the voice of Alice Smith; and each contributor’s voice and experience.

“I wanted to be less peripheral to the things I poured my attention into,” writes contributor Eryn Loeb, in an upcoming essay about how creating a zine in her local scene as a young girl shaped her as a grown woman writer and critic. I imagine the Hive essayists writing to their teen selves, to each other, and maybe to you, reminding us that we’re all already in the center.

Also in Hive:
Welcome to Hive: Series Introduction by Danielle A. Jackson
Miami: A Beginning, by Jessica Lynne
On Watching Boys Play Music, by Eryn Loeb
Funk Lessons in Sonic Solitude, by DJ Lynnée Denise