“Day by day and night by night we were together,—All else has long been forgotten by me.” -Walt Whitman, “Once I Pass’d Through a Populous City”
Today marks my last post for The Common Reader; I will continue to write, of course, but I will be moving on to another venture. For those of you who read my words, thank you for keeping me company in the past year. It is a kindness to have an audience, no matter how brief or how intimate. Thank you for reading TCR and may you continue to do so.
In the past year, I have had the good fortune of turning 40 and balancing writing while raising a toddler daughter, interviewing Nishta Mehra about her incredible nonfiction debut Brown White Black and Sophfronia Scott about her beautiful essay collection, Love’s Long Line, and wondering how archivists will understand our time since not many of us are writing letters these days. I also wrote about “the found poetry of Internet browser tabs,” discovering a century-old sourdough starter, and the grace of friends whose children become your child’s friends, too.
Mostly in my writing, I enjoy exploring the promise of second acts, of surviving loss, and how food and culture and the stories we tell about the two conflate. I will forever be interested in stories where we share how we keep going until the end is near.
One of the inspirations for this publication’s title is Virginia Woolf, who published her version of The Common Reader in 1925: “For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”
I hope I have shared some worthwhile observations during this revolution around the sun. In the meantime, it has been a pleasure spending time with you.
