Nina MacLaughlin's Blog, page 6

Thick sycamores flank a half-mile stretch along the...

Thick sycamores flank a half-mile stretch along the Charles
River in Cambridge. A limb came down. I carried it home. I made this spoon. I
liked the way it felt in my hands. It was a gift. Neighborhood wood.

A closeness comes from an every-day giving of attention. It’s...

A closeness comes from an every-day giving
of attention. It’s automatic. Something cannot be a part of the rhythm
of your days and not become an intimate. In time, we reveal ourselves to
one another.

I wrote about plants as a way of not writing about violence for Lit Hub.

On Rediscovering the Natural World Through Ovid

To have someone understand our story, to know what we’ve...

To have someone understand our story, to know what we’ve suffered,
experienced, endured, and to sing it back to us, isn’t this, in the end,
what we long for? Is this, then, the ultimate seduction? Is this what’s
so terribly irresistible? To have our own story told to us? As Daniel
Johnston, another sort of Siren, sang, “To understand and be understood
is to be free.” It is to be released, unbound, to return to the place we
belong.

I wrote about Sirens for The Paris Review.

My new book, Wake, Siren, a re-telling of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is out today.

[Gustav Wertheimer, The Kiss of the Siren, 1882]

“It is November, the only time the rain makes sense,”...

“It is November, the only time the rain makes sense,” writes
poet Ani Gjika. It has not started raining yet, not today, here in this
November, but the sky is low and grey-white. Last night, after a gauzy pastel
sunset with inviting bands of molten pink, a fat bright moon revealed itself.
But not for long. I went looking for it later, but the clouds had come, and it
was gone. Other things have disappeared. The city mowed the milkweed down along
the river. Here and there, a few remain, and split, and spill. A display so
soft and ecstatic that one reaches the limits of language. At some point, words
are not what best expresses; the moment comes when what’s there to be said
needs be communicated in ways that have nothing to do with sentences. Time
moves. I pull on boots, wrap a scarf halfway up my face. It is November.
Nothing much is making sense.

Two weeks from today, my new book, Wake, Siren will come out...

Two weeks from today, my new book, Wake, Siren will come out from FSG Originals. It re-tells Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the perspective of the female figures transformed.

Some kind words have been said about it.

Kelly Link wrote, “Old myths translated into bright and glorious colors. I loved this.”

Heidi Julavits wrote, “Wake, Siren is the book I’ve been waiting for since I was ten years old and reading The D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Savage,
cheeky, incisively aware of the social-domestic-economical-political
thorninesses that prick (and mortally or immortally wound) interactions
between power unequals, MacLaughlin opens a pressure valve that’s been
sealed shut for centuries. With Wake, Siren, MacLaughlin proves she is a writer of unparalleled versatility, formal daring, and political imagination.”

Kirkus, in a starred review, called it, “vital, vivid, and angry.”

Shelf Awareness used the words, “vivid” “wrenching” “urgent” a “gutsy reimagining,” and “the raw, smart, outspoken result practically sears the readers hands.”

It’s available for pre-order now, and I’ll be on the road a little bit doing some readings as fall gives way to winter. I hope you’ll take a look when it arrives in the world later this month.

You can find out more information here.

The spoon touches back, just as the earth presses up intoyou...

The spoon touches back, just as the earth presses up into
you every time you put your weight upon it. The spoon touches back and tells
you the shape it wants to be. It tells you what it likes, and you tell it what
you like, too. This afternoon, as I massaged the beeswax and flaxseed oil into
this one, I was telling it what I liked it, which was rubbing the warm wax all
into it.

A fork tine could take your eye out. A knife can open veins.But...

A fork tine could take your eye out. A knife can open veins.
But think of the spoon, the smooth, gentle spoon, first utensil to slip into
the receptive pink mouth of the infant, slurried squash in its dip, first utensil
made by human hands, round of edge, small mound on back, a hollow, a curve, a
handle, the harm it could do, nothing more than a fast thwap on the ass and a
bright mark left behind that would fade inside of an hour.

I finished this one this weekend.

The Big Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopeia’s wide W,the...

The Big Dipper, the North Star, Cassiopeia’s wide W,
the Northern Cross. Summer. We lay in a field on a piece of rock in the ocean
and looked up. Shooting stars flung themselves across the sky. Some of us
wished in silence. Another night, I slept alone in a tent by a rock cliff on
the Western edge of the island, and once night fell, felt scared to walk to my
night’s home alone, an eight-minute walk through ferns, on needled forest path,
up some rocks. What did I fear? Losing my way? My footing? The ghosts? The
emergence of clawed creatures from the caves? Were there others about in the
woods, shipwrecked, hungry? Why couldn’t I go alone? Was it just the dark? The
outer dark? My inner dark? The woods at night should always be a little bit
scary. If they’re not, your imagination died. The times when people
have told me that I’m brave are the times I have been the scaredest. My brother
walked with me to the tent, then left, and the moon, a night before Full
Sturgeon, became my companion on the rock. “The lucid moon,” as Ted Hughes has
it,

and the Great Outer Darkness
Which is the same as the small inner darkness

After huge weepings
And vanishing of islands
To watch

Because nothing else can watch

Leading
A ghost
Of query, alone, to a

Doubtful haunting—

Reading the empty chart that the stars are
Under the hopeful light of the leaf.

And now we’ve reached the moment when thepeaches need to be...

And now we’ve reached the moment when the
peaches need to be eaten over the sink. How can anyone feel clean right now, in
thick July. The fruits are good—a peach over an apple any day of the year—but
high summer brings an itch beneath my skin, a torpor. Impatience and sweat. Two
days ago, thunder heads collected in great bulbing swells to the east. Come,
come, please, I thought, break this heat, rip the sky right open, rip the heat
right open, come please break everything open. I finished a new spoon finally but
this one didn’t speak to me the way the others did.

The CitizenBy Pablo NerudaI went into the tool shopsin all innocenceto buy a simple hammeror some...

The Citizen
By Pablo Neruda

I went into the tool shops
in all innocence
to buy a simple hammer
or some vague scissors.
I should never have done it.
Since then and restlessly
I devote my time to steel,
to the most shadowy tools:
hoes bring me to my knees,
horseshoes enslave me.

I am troubled all week,
chasing aluminum clouds,
elaborate screws,
bars of silent nickel,
unnecessary door-knockers,
and now the tool shops
are aware of my addiction—
they see me come into the cave
with my wild madman’s eyes
and see that I pine for
curious smoky things
which no one would want to buy
and which I only goggle at.

For in the addict’s dream
sprout stainless steel flowers,
endless iron blades,
eye-droppers of oil,
water-dippers of zinc,
saws of marine cut.
It’s like the inside of a star,
the light in these toolshops—
there in their own splendour
are the essential nails,
the invincible latchkeys,
the bubbles in spirit levels
and the tangles of wire.

They have a whale’s heart,
these tool shops of the port—
they’ve swallowed all the seas,
all the bones of ships,
waves and ancient tides
come together there
and leave behind in that stomach
barrels which rumble about,
ropes like gold arteries,
anchors as heavy as planets,
long and intricate chains
like intestines of the whale itself
and harpoons if swallowed, swimming
east from the Gulf of Penas.

Once I entered, I never left
and never stopped going back;
and I’ve never got away from
the aura of tool shops.
It’s like my home ground,
it teaches me useless things,
it drowns me like nostalgia.

What can I do? There are single men
in hotels, in bachelor rooms;
there are patriots with drums
and inexhaustible fliers
who rise and fall in the air.

I am not in your world.
I’m a dedicated citizen,
I belong to the tool shops.