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In this week’s issue:

• Post: Roma: A Site of Memories
• Recommended Reads: NaNoWriMo, Claire Keegan, and George Saunders "Love Letter"
• Observations & Musings: Toni Morrisson on literary archaeology

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Roma: A Site of Memories

Most Saturday mornings I play basketball in Roma Sur. And most mornings after I'm done I meander back to Condesa, exploring new streets or stopping at a stand or cafe along the way. The past two weeks I walked down a street called Tepeji, a quaint and narrow asphalt path running east to west for a couple blocks before disappearing, swallowed up by a larger thoroughfare. The street is the childhood home of director Alfonso Cuarón and the site of the house he filmed for the award-winning Roma.

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The photo on the left is the house Cuarón grew up in. The one on the right is directly across the street and the one he chose to film because it received better natural light.

What if you were able to recreate the sights, sounds, objects, and furniture of your childhood? What are the artifacts that stand out most prominently?

This week my sister shared photos of us siblings when we were young and in one of them (shared below...not a particularly flattering photo...although I had hair so very flattering?) I saw an old chair that I loved to lounge in as a kid. An object that I can still touch and feel (thanks to the photo) but forgot existed. It was neat to experience the memory again.

Roma was Cuarón's opportunity to do something similar but at a larger and more gorgeous scale. The movie is an autobiographical sketch and snapshot of his family growing up amidst the wonder and turmoil of early 1970s Mexico City.

In making the film, Cuarón was able to recreate that scene of his life in splendid detail. Miraculously, he located most of the furniture and old objects that painted his house and lens on the world as a kid.

The process of recreation started between Cuarón and his production designer, Eugenio Caballero, also from Roma, spending hours reminiscing about their childhoods. Old images flashed and filled. They then supplemented those conversations with archival research and stories from families.

But Cuarón wouldn't show anyone a script. Not to the actors, not even to his production designer. He wanted them to immerse in the scene that he and they conjured rather than a written script. For Caballero, whose job it was to stage the house and the rest of the city as it was then, not working from a script meant that he had to rely on Cuarón's memory for recreating the home.

What emerged are some of the images below and an exceptionally beautiful film.

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The city is a character too. Both because of the historical moment that descends upon the lives of the people in the movie, but also because of the sounds that follow them as they move through the story.

Even today the city sings and rattles with many of the same sounds.

Mexico City is a place in constant tension between what it is and what it was. -- Cuarón

I suppose the same can be said of each of us.

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Recommended Reads

​Don’t Just Write a Novel This November. Write a Bad Novel. (Slate)

National Novel Writing Month (annoyingly called NaNoWriMo for short) takes place every November. Writers of all stripes step up to the plate to take a crack at a novel draft. The concept is simple, but not easy: if you log 1,667 written words per day toward your novel by the end of the month you'll reach 50,000 words, which is the standard length of a novel. By the end of the month (if you follow the guidelines) you'll have a very shitty first draft of your novel. There's an entire online community connecting writers so they can report on their progress and encourage each other. For the past few years, ever since I started writing fiction in earnest, I've dipped my proverbial toes in the NaNoWriMo water. I usually stick it out for about ten days before I slink away. This year I'm back at it and have crossed the ten day mark. The momentum of being able to write here this year has helped immensely. But more than anything I have a project -- my great grandfather's WWI journal -- that's captured my curiosity. I'm not doing 1,667 words of fresh material related to the journal, but instead including my own journaling and essay writing as part of that total count. The journaling in particular feels integral to the fiction in fact. Overall I'm a big fan of NaNoWriMo because it creates a frictionless path to write and write a lot. It's about word count and nothing else. Forget the other stuff -- outlines, revisions, plot-lines, publishing -- because it only interrupts the spigot. Embrace the shitty first draft and follow your creative impulses.

​Claire Keegan Harnesses the Power in Brevity (NYT)

Two of the best books that I read this year were by the same author, Irish writer Claire Keegan. Both are novellas set in Ireland. Foster (60 pages) is the story of a young girl taken by her parents to live with another family. The story is told through the prism of the young girl and it unfolds slowly. As readers, just like our protagonist, we don't have the full picture of why she's being taken to this other family or for how long, but we know her biological family has fallen on hard times. There's mystery and fear, but also eventually warmth and love provided by the new family. All seen through the eyes of a child. The prose is subtle and so is the pacing. Publishers listed it as a novella, but Keegan considers it a short story. A short story that does so much more with so much less than most novels. I finished Foster and immediately sought out her next book. Small Things Like These is a novella (114 pages) set in 1980s Ireland during the Magdalene laundries scandal, which resulted in over 30,000 girls institutionalized ostensibly to receive help but really into forced manual labor by the Catholic Church. The protagonist is a local merchant with a family of his own who finds out and takes the risk of challenging the institution. The book is another example of the power of brevity. There seems a strange gatekeeper complex in the publishing world that says that successful novels need to reach a certain length and format. Keegan accomplishes in 100 pages or less what so many novels fail to do in 300-400 pages, and yet the novella is not a popularly recognized and praised format.

Keegan's writing process, as noted in the article, typically starts with an image and then she writes generatively by longhand. She revises obsessively and rarely if ever plots out what she is writing: "I don't think you can be in the paragraph if you've already decided where you need to be."

​"Love Letter" by George Saunders (read by Stephen Colbert)
​Interview with George Saunders on Colbert's The Late Show (YouTube)

I've waited with trepidation the past few months for US election day. Even while I comfortably stepped aside from the daily deluge of election news and commercials since moving to Mexico City, it doesn't mean I worry less. I looked away at times over the summer because a rout seemed inevitable. And then the idea of a federal government run by Marge Green and Lauren Boebert (we wait with bated breath). I looked away the way you do when your favorite team desperately seeks a comeback but instead gives up another touchdown. And yet I turned back and tuned in on election day, scrolling and refreshing Twitter as I've done for so many elections past. One of the interesting things about an election day, at least in the US, is how quickly narratives get written and erased over the course of a day. Now that it looks certain that a red wave was transformed into a Democratic Senate and a razor thin Republican House, my own narratives of what happened have come and gone. Ecstasy at an upset. Thrilled that our country didn't choose crazy. But then soberly reminded that we barely made the right decision and that we still teeter close to the edge. The links above are about George Saunders and a short story from his recent collection, Liberation Day. The story is called "Love Letter". Written in the form of a letter from a grandfather to his grandson, it tells the story of a future political environment and how we might face it together. The first video is of Colbert reading the story on stage. It's a beautiful rendition. If you prefer to read the story, it was published in the New Yorker. The second video is an interview between Colbert and Saunders on The Late Show. Also wonderful.

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Observations & Musings

"If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic. I suppose I could dispense with the last four if I were not so deadly serious about fidelity to the milieu out of which I write and in which my ancestors actually lived. Infidelity to that milieu - the absence of the interior life, the deliberate excising of it from the records that the slaves themselves told - is precisely the problem in the discourse that proceeded without us. How I gain access to that interior life is what drives me and is the part of this talk which both distinguishes my fiction from autobiographical strategies and which also embraces certain autobiographical strategies. It's a kind of literary archeology: On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image - on the remains - in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth. By "image," of course, I don't mean "symbol"; I simply mean "picture" and the feelings that accompany the picture."

Toni Morrisson, from The Site of Memory

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