A relaunch + some news

Featuring life updates and a new direction.

the beach… because it’s august, i guess?

I started writing this newsletter during quarantine and then basically abandoned it as life got in the way. How pesky, when life becomes rich and full and diverts your attention from writing little essays about how depressed you are!

My last post—about interviewing for a job with the poet Stanley Moss, who died this year—was over three years ago; a lot has changed since then. I quit my job a little over a week ago. And in just over a week I start grad school: an MFA in fiction, at NYU.

I’m beyond excited. Not just about quitting my job (lol) and not just about going back to school, but to have all that TIME. I stopped writing on Substack in part because when I had time to write, I wanted to spend it on freelance work or on fiction. Then I cut way back on freelance stuff to focus exclusively on fiction. But hopefully now I should have time for a little of everything: I’ll be working on a short story collection and (soon) a novel, but also more criticism and essay-writing, and ideally I’ll have some time for writing that’s just goofy and fun. Blogging, if you will. I think it’s good for me to shoot from the hip sometimes. By nature, I’m a slow and obsessive writer—what one college writing teacher called a “diamond polisher.” I can spend weeks agonizing over a sentence. I find it hard to loosen up. But that’s what this blog will be: fun, voicey, and (mostly) low-stakes.

I want to write about books, sometimes, but probably not in a serious lit crit kind of way. Mostly I want to write about dinner parties I love and restaurants I hate; petty media nonsense; petty twentysomething nonsense; personal style and its discontents; New York; indecision; the qualities required for a dive bar to be “good”; hobbyist art criticism; movies; shoes. Think more Laurie Colwin than Eve Babitz, but more Eve Babitz than Joan Didion. Think: I’m having fun.

The first real post should be out this week.

Talk soon,

Mariah