When you touched my collar bone
You left some grains of sand.
A woman kissed me
because she was surprised to see me and because she was crushed up against me by a crowd. Can you return in memory to the feeling of believing something you no longer believe? I visited a museum that recreated a single day in the past, over and over. What day would you choose, if you were making a museum of your life? On the streaming show Sunny (Apple TV), the husband and son of a woman are purportedly killed in a plane crash, and she's given a robot programmed by her husband especially to meet her needs. What happens when you find out what the person you have lived with thinks you need?
I learned to tap dance with two friends in a splintery loft in Soho. My friends were experienced dancers and very chic. Afterward, we would drink in Fanelli's across the street. I loved looking up to people who knew more than I did.
When you don’t have language for something, the feeling is a smell, the time is now, and the space is surprise. People believe I’m good at laundry. You have to laugh at the beauty of being so young you find other people powerful. In an early scene in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Constance visits Mellors, the game keeper on her husband’s estate. They’re in his stone house, where he’s hatching pheasants. She takes one of the chicks in her hands and starts breathing hard and fast at the living thing she has imagined in Mellors’s pants, and what makes the scene sexy is he doesn’t know what to do with the bird, or the woman, or the British class system.
It’s exciting to set sail on a late trip around the sun. You can see the hard sand of the beaches you will run along. Sammy Davis Jr died of throat cancer at 64. In a televised tribute to him, Gregory Hines comes down to where Sammy is sitting and brings him his tap shoes. Sammy puts them on, walks onto the stage, and dances the way he’s always danced. Gregory can’t always hold his own in their tap dance conversation. At the end, he laughs and falls to the floor and kisses Sammy’s shoes. Of course he does.
I went to a reunion. Everyone was there, even the dead. I was happy to see people I wasn’t happy to see. It’s like being at a casino and gambling away because it doesn’t matter if you lose. Some blueness has come into the light. I don't know how many times I have placed my nose against another nose. Mostly with my dog, I’m guessing.
When people speak of “facing reality,” they mean, “I’m depressed.” In time, you get better at things you practice. Everyone can trot behind a hot dog dangled on a stick. Everyone dreams of a different hot dog.
If you drink on an empty stomach, the alcohol is a paper boat sailing to your brain along water after a rain. The progress of macromolecules to living cells took half a billion years. Nothing happens fast enough except things we dread. Masturbation beat the invention of fire by eight millions years. Some people can identify a bird from a flash of color or a moment of patterned flight.
Yesterday, at a stoop sale, I bought a stripy dress that looks like the cotton shirts from Normandy. The dress cost $5, and the woman who sold it to me, said I could look at myself in a mirror. I said, “That’s so kind.” Then I said, “I’d rather stab myself in the heart than look in a mirror.”
Recently, I’d looked in a mirror, and one hip was higher than the other. It was like realizing I’d missed scenes in a TV show I was watching. I never had a body that opened doors. With a body that opens doors, you don’t notice the doors. I never had a body that could lift cars off the ground. The first time I had sex with Richard, he walked naked from the bed to the bathroom like an animal in the forest, knowing I was looking at his ass.
Often in Hudson, I pass the house of a friend to admire her smooth front steps. The other day, she was outside, looking sleek in black tights, and I bought a bottle of face lotion she sells. It's supposed to make your skin glow. Tomorrow, if you open your windows, you might see me.
A NEW WAY TO READ. A NEW WAY TO WRITE.
Next month Everything is Personal will be two years old. During this time, something transformative has occurred for me and perhaps for the way readers consume literary writing.
The biggest news may be that people are paying to keep the publication afloat rather than to read it. There is no paywall to content, and the writing aims entirely to arouse pleasure. I don’t teach anything. There are no practical applications. I don’t cover a beat. This isn’t journalism. The writing loves the seductive power of the individual sentence.
People are paying because they don’t want the publication to disappear, and they can see that writing it is a full time job. Everything is Personal has a circulation of 10.300. That’s sizable for a literary publication. And what’s different about this one from most others is that readers interact with it all the time. They write comments, and I respond. We’re getting to know each other.
Thanks to everyone for supporting this form of publishing. Media outside Facebook and Substack are referencing Everything is Personal as a publication in its own right. I continue to write for other literary magazines, but the freedom of working this way, supported by a subscription base, is deeply exciting. Because of it, I believe I’m writing at the top of my game, and I’m encouraged for anyone else tempted to try it.
Here’s the rub. With a subscription-based structure, there is always churn.
People lend support and move on. I don’t resent this. But unless new people take a turn at a paid subscription, the enterprise can’t continue. If you’ve been enjoying the writing for some time and have hesitated about becoming a paid subscriber, please consider jumping in now with the understanding between us you may want at some time to jump out again. New subscribers get a 25% discount. That’s $37.50 per year or $3.75 a month.
With a paid subscription of any amount, you are also invited to monthly Zoom conversations, where I talk in detail about how the pieces here get made. I hold back nothing. Writing isn’t magic, nor is the creation of a voice that talks directly to the reader. I happily share my toolkit of skills.
The Zooms are great fun. People talk and get to know each other as well as Richard and me. Everyone is invited as well to send ahead questions about their own writing projects. There is no extra cost for the Zooms.
NOTE!! You can’t start a paid subscription on your phone via the app, but you can if you use the Substack website on your phone through a browser such as Safari or if you use a computer. lauriestone.substack.com/subscribe
ZOOM CONVERSATIONS
The next Zoom Conversation is on Saturday July 27, from 3 to 4 EST. RSVP to: lauriestone@substack.com. Free to paid subscribers at any level.
What's the difference between writing sentences aimed at seducing the reader through excitement and surprising language and catering to readers who don't necessarily share your social values or literary interests? I think the differences can be confusing. Let's talk about this. Also, 1974, a memoir of the Vietnam years by Francine Prose. (see the stack post lauriestone.substack.com/p/1974-a-memoir-by-francine-prose) How can you turn a meditation on another writer’s work into a dramatic narrative as opposed to a review that summarizes and evaluates the piece?
Summer 2022
Richard and I drove to the city for an event at KGB Bar. We met a friend in a community garden on Third Street and Avenue B. A huge willow had righted itself and towered over the bench where we sat. Our friend is a photographer, who sees things only she sees. She said her muses know what she’s looking for and have nothing else to do but direct her to certain markings on the street or lights on an airport runway.
The sense of floating in New York City was different from when I was the same thing as New York City. Richard and I saw a couple I had been to their wedding and now their kid was in college. A writer I knew from catering, who sat on a bar stool with her extravagant tumble of curls, told me I looked the same. I don't look the same.
People ask me if I miss New York. Maybe they are asking if I miss them. In a bodega, a man wearing a bandana was mopping the floor. He called me mami. I called him popi. I said, "I love when people call me mami." He said, "I love to be called popi. My mother calls me popi.” The waitress at the cafe was that beautiful, young energy of pleasure you take in giving good service. I had a Negroni and some crazy delicious dish of Brussels sprouts. The world swirled by on Second Avenue, the rapturously attired and the out-patient dejected in the same parade.
After the reading, I said to Richard, “I love you.” I meant I’m happier with you than I think I've been with anyone else. I'm not sure. How can you know something like that? When I read through old notebooks, I'm startled by the specificity of interiors and landscapes that summon emotions of the past. Such is the enchantment of language.
Working together one-on-one.
To work with me on a one-to-one basis, please email me at: lauriestone@substack.com. The first conversation is free to establish whether we are a good fit and I can assist your writing projects.
There are three links at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” Your responses attract new readers, and I love to hear your thoughts about the form and content of the posts. Please tell a friend to check out the stack. Huge thanks and happy summer.
I'm a newbie and SO happy to be here! In my totally stressed-out, over-thinking present, I can't tell you how lovely it is to glide along the silky smooth flow of your eclectic thoughts.
Dear Laurie,
Today reading you I realized I know of a book you MUST read if you have not. I've never, ever thought of you as someone who must read this or that or anything else. It is a late John Berger book where, in various cities, beginning in Lisbon with his late mother, he meets up with the ghosts (mostly ghosts) of the people he's loved in his life, men and women both... It's spectacular, and speaks deeply to the kind of work you're doing here, but with a different and equally fascinating brain. Or bwain, as he would say. The way you are New York, he is Europe; and no other writer I know is Europe, as opposed to country-in-Europe. It's called Here Is Where We Meet... xo/V