Michele Filgate

@readandbreathe / readandbreathe.tumblr.com

Michele Filgate is an essayist, critic, and freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Slice, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, The Rumpus, Salon, Buzzfeed,  The Barnes & Noble Review, Poets & Writers, The Boston Globe, Fine Books & Collections Magazine, DAME Magazine, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Time Out New York, The Daily Beast, O, The Oprah Magazine, Vulture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Capital New York, The Star Tribune, Bookslut, The Quarterly Conversation, The Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. For seven years she worked as an events coordinator at several different independent bookstores: first at RiverRun Bookstore in Portsmouth, NH; then at McNally Jackson in Manhattan; and finally at Community Bookstore in Brooklyn. Michele was the producer of a segment for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric called “Assignment America” and has also produced literary segments for “Word of Mouth” on New Hampshire Public Radio. She teaches creative nonfiction for The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and is a member of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors. She lives in Brooklyn. Visit her website. Read her articles, essays, and interviews.
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Anonymous asked:

Hi! You always seem to have amazing book suggestions and I'm at a loss of what to read next...I just finished Beautiful Ruins and absolutely loved it! I was thinking of reading Fates and Furies next? But, I would love any suggestions from you :)

Beautiful Ruins is a wonderful book! I really love Fates & Furies, too. If you liked Beautiful Ruins, try Alexander Chee’s The Queen of the Night.  I also recommend The Night Guest by Fiona McFarlane.

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We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love—a connection between things. This arcane bit of knowledge is respoken every day into the ears of readers of great books, and also appears to perpetually slip under a carpet, utterly forgotten. In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single lifespan, to watch the great impersonal universe at work again and again, to watch the great personal psyche spar with it, to suffer affliction and weakness and injury, to die and watch those you love die, until the very dizziness of it all becomes a source of compassion for ourselves, and our language, which we alone created, and without which the letter that slipped under the door could never have been written, or, once in a thousand lives—is that too much to ask?—retrieved, and read. Did I mention supreme joy? That is why I read: I want everything to be okay. That’s why I read when I was a lonely kid and that’s why I read now that I’m a scared adult. It’s a sincere desire, but a sincere desire always complicates things—the universe has a peculiar reaction to our sincere desires. Still, I believe the planet on the table, even when wounded and imperfect, fragmented and deprived, is worthy of being called whole. Our minds and the universe—what else is there? Margaret Mead described intellectuals as those who are bored when they don’t have the chance to talk interestingly enough. Now a book will talk interestingly to you. George Steiner describes the intellectual as one who can’t read without a pencil in her hand. One who wants to talk back to the book, not take notes but make them: one who might write “The giraffe speaks!” in the margin. In our marginal existence, what else is there but this voice within us, this great weirdness we are always leaning forward to listen to?

Mary Ruefle https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/someone-reading-book-sign-order-world 

#lit#Mary Ruefle
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lithub
lithub.com

Announcing Red Ink, @readandbreathe‘s series on women writers! The name is inspired by this v. inspiring quote from Mrs Dalloway.

The series launches May 9th at BookCourt with“Finding Solitude in a Noisy World,” a panel featuring Katherine Towler, Angela Flournoy, Molly Crabapple, Leslie Jamison, and Valeria Luiselli (and Kings County Distillery bourbon).

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readandbreathe

It’s true! I’m starting my own quarterly series, and I’m thrilled that Literary Hub is co-sponsoring Red Ink. I’m excited to host these events at BookCourt, my local indie bookstore. Sign up for the Red Ink newsletter! 

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My most prized possession: a first printing of Virginia Woolf's A LETTER TO A YOUNG POET. Virginia was born on this day in 1882.

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The writer has to see everything – you have to see not just the highway but what’s beyond the headlights; what’s standing out in the trees; you have to know what earth looks like from the point of view of the stars; you have to know what lily pads look like from underneath, from the perspective of a fish on the bottom of a pond. And if you can’t know that, and if you can’t imagine that as a writer, then what’s the point in writing creative nonfiction? What’s the point in writing if you’re not going to try to project yourself into those points of view? I’m sure other people have their own reasons for writing. But that’s my reason for writing.

Jo Ann Beard https://yelinwords.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/joannbeardfinal.pdf

#lit#Jo Ann Beard
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Unless you're a doubter and a worrier, a nail biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That's the quality I've found most consistently in those lifestory writers I've met. Truth is not their enemy. It's the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It's the solution

from THE ART OF MEMOIR by Mary Karr

#lit#memoir#Mary Karr#The Art of Memoir
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Dressing Myself for the First Time

“First, I chop off their hair. Then, I cover their plastic bodies in fluorescent, puffy paint, tattooing them with crude words. When I'm finished, their stiff outfits are crumpled beside them, perfect representations of what I hate. Gone is their long, crimped blonde hair; now it's short and spiky, like a hedgehog. Their stylish dresses in hot pink, purple, and lime-green swirls are cast to the side. I am controlling beauty instead of letting it control me. My Barbie dolls are no longer pretty. I revel in their ugliness.”

I wrote an essay for Refinery29 about learning to like clothes.

#body confidence#refinery29#lit#AntiDiet project
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Busyness is an excuse, a way to sidestep others, even those we actually care about. A bit of joy is had in turning on whichever device, that portal that siphons the mind away from the here and now, that doesn't ask us explicitly for anything except to behold it. This makes immediacy less and less easy to handle. What is in front of us is unbearably real, with its insistent materiality from which it is uncomfortable to shy away. There is no possibility of delaying our response to it. The real just waits. Increasingly, human interaction without a filter verges on the painful because the skills in dealing with others face-to-face have been abandoned for the refinement of digital social skills. All communicative occasions today are ideally set up to avoid that horror of the modern soul: awkwardness.

from "On Distraction" in THE OTHER SERIOUS by Christy Wampole

#lit#quotes#Christy Wampole
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Where do any of us come from? Is it a country? A mother? Or is it perhaps an image, a song, a story inside which we feel...named?

from THE SMALL BACKS OF CHILDREN by Lidia Yuknavitch

#Lidia Yuknavitch#lit#quotes
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The Places We Read

“Where we read is almost as crucial as what we read. Solitude is hard to find; especially when you live in a city or share your home with someone else. There are always other things demanding one’s attention. That’s why it’s critical to create solitude amidst the chaos of daily life. Readers know this better than anyone else: Reading shields us from the drudgeries that surround us, provides opportunity for escape from otherwise chaotic environments. The places we read are inextricably linked with the books themselves, the mere recollection of which can become an exercise in nostalgia.”

My latest piece for thelithub.

#reading#lit#Literary Hub
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nationalbook
www.nationalbook.org

Get tickets to the greatest basketball game in literary history and help middle school students in Detroit fall in love with reading.

On June 20, the National Book Foundation (presenter of the National Book Awards) is hosting The Other NBA, a charity basketball game featuring winning writers vs. publishing powerhouses. Proceeds will support BookUp, the Foundation’s after school reading program, expand into Detroit, a city with a 47% adult illiteracy rate.

Buy a ticket for just $25 or make a donation today.

Details:

June 20, from 3 - 6 pm St. Francis College (Brooklyn)

Featuring Jonny Diamond (Literary Hub), Natalie Diaz (When My Brother Was an Aztec), Michele Filgate (Salon), John Freeman (Freeman’s), Katie Freeman (Riverhead Books), Alex Gilvarry (From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant), Valeria Luiselli (Faces in the Crowd), Mitchell S. Jackson (The Residue Years), Steph Opitz (Texas Book Festival), and Jess Walter (Beautiful Ruins). Plus Jason Diamond (Men’s Journal), Paul Morris (PEN), and Kevin Nguyen (Oyster).

More details and tickets here: www.nationalbook.org/other_nba.html

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readandbreathe

Support a great cause and watch me (try) to play basketball! 

#lit#basketball#National Book Foundation#BookUp