Believe it or not, today, April 1st, is the anniversary of my dissertation distribution (my distribuversary, if you will). Yes, I actually clicked send to all five committee members on April Fools’. No, this is not a post about that nor about any of the tomfoolery related to that whole process. But it feels appropriate, if not downright necessary, to acknowledge the date, because despite everything it was still one of those Big Life Moments where you feel something significant is happening as it happens. So here’s to the two-year mark. Still recent enough to feel strange, already far enough to feel like it happened to someone else.
But no, this post is about March. And it should have gone out before the month was over. However, in the spirit of honesty and transparency, I will explain that it didn’t because I could not bring myself to write anything in a timely manner.
In March I wrote two very demanding posts, in the sense that I wrote so much more than I usually do and then edited twice as much. I got some very nice feedback, both here and in person, but I lost some of that steam along the way. There were some stories I wanted to share, some characters from my personal baggage that I wanted to introduce to you, yet nothing gripped me enough to convince that it would grip any one reader. To be candid, I didn’t know what I had to offer and if it was worth the time and effort, and this type of doubt, harkening back to my lonely dissertating days, is still the type that paralyzes me beyond my conscious efforts to break the cycle.
That is not to say that March was idle. On the contrary, it was a lively month. Not-my-spring break week was abnormally warm, a feeling heightened by Instagram and Facebook memories showing me snow and freezing temperatures in previous spring breaks. But the skies were clear, so we got to enjoy long walks by the park, breathe some fresh air, and stretch our legs. There was some ice cream and the bottles of wine progressively turned from red to white. There was a lot of sneezing thanks to all the increasing pollen but also wearing yellow sneakers to welcome sunny days and stopping by to look at flowers along the way.
March was an accidental Women in Translation Month, as I’ve spent most of it reading titles under this umbrella (with the big exception being the wrapping up of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth with
.1 I read two back-to-back in the first week of the month, then decided to commit to it, working my way primarily through my backlog (with one exception, purchased in March as I chanced upon a used copy at my local bookshop). I’m not one to usually follow through thematic readings, but “women in translation” is an easy one to follow: just barely consistent enough that I get to call it some type of unifying principle, but varied enough that I get to hopscotch through genres and moods.Three collections of short stories, two traditional novels, two novel-essay-memoir hybrids. Seven countries, six languages, five new-to-me authors. And even the ones that may not be contenders to “favorites of the year” have undeniably different voices, and look at the world from very clear perspectives. It was inspiring, but also daunting, to read them, to appreciate them (beyond “liking” or “disliking”), and then sit in front of my screen and wonder what do I have to contribute.
And as I mulled them over, one quotation kept coming back to me.
In a scene in Book II, Chapter XXIII of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1817), Anne is writing a letter and discussing the depth and strength of feelings—women’s and men’s—with the friendly Captain Harville, and she refuses that literary and historical examples be brought up to support his point of view because, as she puts it:
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.”
In my most optimist (it happens every once in a blue moon), I think to the major and minor feelings I’ve read in the past month (and over the years) and I want to believe that Austen would have a harder time having Anne say this and be taken seriously. But then, late in March, I find the following in Olga Ravn’s My Work (2020):
“Over the course of her education, Anna got the impression that any art made by a woman except Virgina Woolf was a secret, because no one referenced or engaged with it, and therefore Anna too was a secret.” (192)
Plus ça change…
In Rio, March was traditionally the rainy month that announced the end of summer. Everyone, everywhere, should know this classic of Brazilian music:
March round-up:
Things We Lost in the Fire, by Mariana Enríquez (trans. from Spanish by Megan McDowell)
Learning to Talk to Plants, by Marta Orriols (trans. from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem)
Our Lady of the Nile, by Scholastique Mukasonga (trans. from French by Melanie Mauthner)
Fox, by Dubravka Ugrešić (trans. from Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and David Williams)
You Glow in the Dark, by Liliana Colanzi (trans. from Spanish by Chris Andrews)
My Work, by Olga Ravn (trans. from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russel)
Out of Time: Short Stories, by Samira Azzam (trans. from Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman)
The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton
I closed the month reading Maurice Druon’s Le Roi de fer, the first volume in his Les Rois Maudits/The Accursed Kings series, and with Madame de Sévigné’s Lettres de l’année 1671 as my current bedside table book.
There’s nothing worse than writing because you want other people to like what you write, to feel compelled by it. It’s bad not because you’ll end up writing something less “worthy” but because it stifles your self-esteem and your desire to experiment, to have fun with your writing. You second-guess yourself, you question every single word you write. So my unsolicited advice to you (lol) is: write whatever grasps YOU. If you don’t feel like writing at all, don’t. But don’t stop writing because you feel you don’t have anything to offer your readers - which, of course, is NOT TRUE AT ALL. When you write for yourself, your passion and your craft shines through, and that’s what will eventually grasp everyone else. :)
March is always such a bizarre month, isn't it? I defended my dissertation THREE Aprils ago, and I'm with you in the strange feelings that looking back on such a daunting project evokes: It feels near enough to still be a bit of a sore bruise to the touch; it felt far enough away that I sometimes forget I did it at all, let alone did it in a way that felt so right and finite at the time.
Cheers to your month of amazing reads! (And omg Mirth ending tomorrow is giving me ALL THE FEELS.)