About

This space is made by me, Éireann Lorsung, sometimes with the contributions of other writers. Thank you for reading and subscribing.

From the first post on this newsletter, a little more about what you can expect here:

I have always been a person for whom writing is one thing among others: a part of life that goes on, like breathing, during the everything else of my days. Washing dishes, walking to the bus stop, buying groceries, being with others, teaching and other paid work, sewing, doing philosophy, caring for my family—all these are threaded through the part of me that writes, and the writing part is threaded through all of these. Howe’s idea of bewilderment has led me to think about writing and living (making clothes, meals, rooms; working for pay; relating to other beings, to ideas, to objects and texts and images, and to places) as processes where questioning my received understandings—my pictures of a world that “just is”—is primary, the groundwork for both writing and living.

So in this space, I’ll think about—and invite others to think about—what Frank Bidart means when he writes that “being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal”. Our ordinary lives, where the biggest questions of meaning—what justice looks like; what liberation is; how to live together; what art means—show up in patchwork ways. Our work: to live them and to make art of them, to bewilder ourselves in the living of them, to make (in Toni Cade Bambara’s words), “revolution irresistible”.

If you enjoy these essays, please do share them. But please attribute them and share the source along with them—they are free; your readership is the return for my writing.