Kyra Maya Phillips's Blog, page 3

Marginalia: Ongoingess.

Hi friends,

Happy new year! I bet you’re surprised to hear from me so soon. As a new year begins, I am, like most, attempting to kickstart and sustain good habits. Marginalia is a good habit; without this tiny little missive, I feel like all I do is consume without the follow up contemplation that I find so essential.

In between complaining about the horrendous heat (upwards of 35; I’m melting) and managing my children during an eight week summer break, I have been reading, watching and liste...

Marginalia: Forever 44.

Hello dear friends,

I should start every one of these newsletters with an “I know it’s been a while” because, well, it seems it has always been a while. So, here it goes:

I know it’s been a while. There have been some major changes on my side of the (Australian) tracks. We moved to a new neighbourhood, which, with two small and very energetic boys, is only slightly easier than moving to a different country. No matter: I now have my dream rooftop and chimney views, and it seems we have found a...

Marginalia: We are internally plural.

Hello dear friends,

It’s been a while (again). Here I resurface with another irreverent issue of Marginalia, surely the Internet’s most unreliable newsletter. I always kid myself into thinking that I can regularly sit down and cleverly synthesise what I consume, but, the truth is, my kids are kids, my job is a job, and, well, I am exhausted when not exhausting.

No matter, here is a list of ten or so things I have been loving over the last month.

I hope you love them, too.

And if you have any...

My Favourite Books of 2017

The Ice Palace by Tarjei Vesaas

“Promise in deepest snow from Siss to Unn:

I promise to think about no one but you.”

This book was recommended to me by a cab driver who, with an enthusiasm that was a pleasure to witness, remarked that it should be the most famous novel in the world. And it is indeed a small masterpiece worthy of far more fame than it currently enjoys. Written in luminous, lyrical prose, this story relays the tale of two girls, Siss and Unn, who together spend an evening so p...

Cory Taylor on dying with honesty

My second child was born last May, so 2016 was not particularly bookish. I did, however, read many short novels and memoirs, many of which have been the most extraordinary books I’ve come across. One that stands out is “Dying,” by Cory Taylor. Just before her 50th birthday, the Australian novelist was diagnosed with Stage 4 Melanoma. Her memoir, short but dense, is a human, matter-of-fact and haunting piece of writing. With clear and direct prose, Taylor provides tremendous lessons for the l...

One Last Thing Before I Go

Sometimes, words are ineffective. We want to tell people how much we love them, how sorry we are, or how much we need them, but language, together with the discomfort that vulnerability brings, fails to lift the veil off our true emotions. It’s this barrier – the barricade that so often gets in the way of building relationships in which we are truly seen – that this episode of This American Life so beautifully explores. In the first act, Miki Meek tells the story of a disconnected phone boot...

The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes

“A child of 5 who leads a normal life wouldn’t be able to recount his childhood with this level of accuracy. But we, Helena and I, remember it as if it were today, and I can’t explain why.”

Emma Reyes was abandoned by her mother; left, as a six or seven year old, in the Colombian countryside. She grew up in a Bogota convent, where she worked long, arduous days under the cruel oversight of Catholic nuns. After her escape from the convent in her late teens, Emma made her way to Argentina. From...

Tangled Up In Blue

About eighteen months ago, I moved from the UK to Australia. After spending almost the entirety of my 20s in London, I felt lost as soon as I left the place. Our 20s are typically the years we spend looking for ourselves. London is where I went through that process. Along the way, my identity super-glued itself to where I lived; by the time I turned 30, I lost all flexibility: London became the only place I could feel uniquely myself. It was no surprise that my departure triggered a crisis o...

Reading ourselves awake

Image via Unsplash/Karim Ghantous

 

When I was 15 years old, my family moved from Venezuela to the United States, where I was immediately thrown into the American school system. I started my sophomore year in high school with passable English, spent a few months as an ESOL student, and struggled through the Harry Potter series. In the middle of the 10th grade, my English teacher assigned the most important task of the course: an analytical paper on a classic novel of our choice. Not knowing w...

My Desert Island Library

Illustration by Jane Mount, from Ideal Bookshelf https://www.idealbookshelf.com/

 

Cast ashore on the proverbial desert island, I’d for sure need a bookshelf. These are the books I can read and re-read over and over again (in no particular order):

Stoner by John Williams

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

M Train by Patti Smith

The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh by Vincent Van Gogh

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Grief the thing with Feathers by Max Porter

...