Sunday 5

covid-edition

(If you’re getting this and don’t usually, that’s because you haven’t paid for a subscription just yet. Which is a-okay. But if you’re able, you would get 5 recs of what I’m into every Sunday.)

Yup, the cron got me. If snuggling with my favorite 1.5 year old is how I get got, well so be it. Let it be said that I went down via the kiss of the most perfect baby lips I’ve ever seen.

Legit Cron Court

Quarantining with my 5 and 8 year old girls, who also got got for a week + is…wow. Hopefully I’ll have something great to say about it by next Wednesday. (You might have noticed I didn’t have shit to say about it last Wednesday, because I was asleep on my couch in between negotiating peace treaties over Lego nightgowns and clearing up massive paint projects).

In the meantime, here are five newsletters I think are worth subscribing to:

1. Ann Friedman is an old, dear friend and one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with (she edited me waaaaaaay back in the day at my first regular column at The American Prospect). She also has an eye for what’s interesting, a wicked sense of humor, and an iconoclastic streak that makes me swoon.

2. I’ve loved Joshunda Sanders’ voice and sensibility since I first encountered it on the page. I was co-editing an anthology on “click moments” for third-wave feminists (seems like such an antiquated thing all around these days…but I digress…) and she submitted an essay that SUNG. I was like, “Who is this woman and how can I read everything she writes forever?” I was lucky enough to eat tacos across from her in Austin and the rest is history.

3. Molly May is one of those people, much like my own mom, who talks about something and you’re like, “Whoa, that’s far out,” and then six months later, everyone on the planet is talking about it like it’s perfectly normal. Molly has been ahead of the curve on a bunch of things that have been transformational for me: somatics among them. Also just sort of the basic fact that women have a lot of buried rage. And much more. Follow her and feel yourself ahead of the curve.

4. Another gorgeous, ahead-of-the-curve human who gets nature and somatics and all the things is Amanda Machado. She’s the kind of person that I take a walk in the woods with and, by the end, my brain is buzzing with new ideas and my soul is reaching for a more liberatory ways of being in the world. Her writing is like that, too. She’s also teaching a workshop soon, so get signed up before it fills up.

5. If you know me and my writing, chances are you are already hip to Parker Palmer’s—my mentor, dear friend, and my kid’s namesake! But if by some bizarro chance you haven’t read his work, now is the time. I suggest starting with Let Your Life Speak (the first book I ever gifted my now husband John) and if you’re still on Facebook, follow him there (he drops little wisdom all the time). He also co-hosts a podcast with another deeply wise human (and folk singer!), Carrie Newcomer, that is worth a listen.

I think I’ve talked ad nauseam about these cats so you probably already know, but I would also immediately subscribe to Garrett Bucks and Sarah Wheelers’ Substacks. (I wish I could invite you to our text thread, as well, because it’s bangin’.) And George Saunders is doing some cool stuff on short stories on Substack that I mostly don't have time to pay attention to, but maybe you do? And I love everything Erin Lane writes. Okay I’ll stop…could…go…on…forever…