Reverse Hangman
Hi, hello.
Leonora Carrington, “The Hangman (XII)” (c. 1955)
This morning, Celine Nguyen’s newsletter personal canon arrived in my inbox with the subject line “writing is an inherently dignified human activity.” She preempted all of my hesitations and fears of starting a newsletter: that I’ll be bad at it and that it will be an embarrassing endeavor. And hey! Maybe it will be. Maybe it already is. My palms started sweating just thinking about the idea, like they do when I think of things like skydiving, which I will never do.
I rarely use my tarot deck, but I decided to pull a card for whether I should start a Substack. The card was a reverse hangman. Upon first glance, this didn’t seem like a good sign. But, when I looked up the meaning, I saw that the reverse hangman can point to stalling on a decision because you don’t feel 100% ready. If not now—a rare time when I have space and time (crazy, I know)—when?
I chose the name “Dear Henrik” because writing a newsletter seems scary but writing a letter to a friend does not. Writing “dear” and the name of a friend instantly gives you a prompt. Also Henrik has a newsletter, Escaping Flatland, that has grown to be his family’s main source of income, which is cool, and beyond that, has allowed him to create a life that really fits him, which I think is extraordinary. The name of my own newsletter feels like a talisman.
In an early draft of my novel-in-progress, I had written, “An imaginary reader. Is that all I need?” I think that bit was inspired by an interview with Chris Kraus where she says, referring to writing the paradigm-shifting I Love Dick, that it’s all relational, that once she knew to whom she was writing it all came easy. She meant her friend and co-editor at Semiotext(e), Hedi El Kholti (not the Dick in the novel).
To begin somewhere, I’ve decided to open my copy of The Paris Review No. 254, Winter 2025 and write about whatever feels alive to me. When asked in one of the interviews if swimming is important to her, the British poet Alice Oswald (whose middle name is Priscilla) replies:
It was probably when I took up gardening that I discovered that being was better than thinking—that actually you don’t have to think things through, you can garden all day and your mind will have been moved by the gardening. And it’s the same when you’re in water. You’re thought through by the water rather than having to think.
This caught my attention because I’ve recently become obsessed with Ayurveda (past interests include clowning) and in Ayurveda there is an emphasis on balance between lunar and solar, between doing and resting. And I think Oswald highlights something we’ve forgotten in our very one-sided culture: that there are more options available to us. Leave it to a poet to put it so beautifully.
Now, before I go make lunch and then do laundry, here’s a line that made me laugh out loud on what it’s like for Oswald to be married to another writer:
I’d say the income’s not great, but that’s more than made up for by how stimulating it is.
Until the next one,
Priscilla