Show & Tell: Not Gonna Be Able to Do It.
Unstacked Digest for the week of September 8-14
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
Due to travel and some personal life things I simply could not write a full Grown-Up Show & Tell. I have a lot on my plate and then of course life has gotten in the way. I am going to take this week off Substack in order to get my ducks in a row. So you’ll get a mini GUS&T and no post on Friday. Thank you so much for your understanding.
I do want to just shout out the amazing time I had at the Mississippi Book Festival. I got to do a panel with Jason Reynolds and Hanif Abdurraqib. We talked about books and criticism and Hanif swore a lot in a church. Plus I got to see my girls
& — though we are accidentally committing to never getting a picture together. The MBF is one of the best literary events there is. It is brilliantly organized and they get the best guests. If you can ever make it Jackson for this event, you 100% should go.
Look, I know Charlie Kirk was killed this week. I honestly cannot have hot takes on that. I don’t have it in me. Plus, other people already have shared all my takes, because this one ain’t that hard.
That being said, if you want to read something really good, read
’s piece.
This Week in The Stacks
I talked about hair and Vogue, who even am I?
The wonderful
and came on the podcast to talk about their “community in a book” The People’s Project.
The National Book Foundation released their longlist in nonfiction. I have thoughts.
Books I Read This Week
I mentioned a weeks back that I’m reading for the The Blacklist’s Unpublished Novel Award in the romance category, and so I can’t talk about what I’ve been reading this week.
What I can say, is next week you can expect my review of Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book though, so get excited.
Housekeeping
This month for my NPR Here & Now hit I talked about how to have a thriving book club, where you maybe actually talk about the books (if you want).
I guest hosted another episode of
’s Viral Article series. This time about the Elizabeth Gilbert excerpt in The Cut.One more spot opened up in my Understanding Shakespeare class. It starts on Wednesday. Grab it now!
Thank you all for being chill and not
mad at me for needing a week off. I will do my very best to back next week. I promise to having good for you all very soon. Until then, you can watch this very bad thing. Who asked for this?
I started the Glamorous Trash ep and here is my Eat Pray Love/Liz Gilbert contribution: I had also never read it, on principle. I was also an early hater. Then I was in a memoir class and we read three wildly different chapters from different authors and an excerpt from EPL was one of the selections. Then we had an assignment to try to emulate the voice and style of one of the excerpts we read. I had HATED the EPL excerpt, found her voice insufferable. So I decided to challenge myself as a writer and choose to try to write in that style and it ended up being one of my favorite chapters of CNF/memoir I’ve ever written 😂
I love when creators I care about take breaks. It's so rad. Thank you for modeling this for us!