letter from brooklyn: morning glory
+ profiled the novelist garth greenwell for nymag + lit hub said nice things abt thot pudding
Hello, hello. As a partisan of New York summers (I said what I said), I felt absolutely attacked by the chillier weather yesterday morning. Any transition involves an ending; I am someone who resists endings, even as my life has been party to a healthy number of them. In any case, when I ran some errands (letter posting, library book return, lighter fluid acquisition, community garden plot ministry), the thermostat had returned to balmy. FOR NOW. Now I’m back at my desk, drinking smoky tea, eating a salad Shireen made and dropped off, and writing to you.
Two notes before we get into it. I profiled the writer Garth Greenwell (my first profile!) for New York magazine. Word is it’s good; you can read it here.
Also, Brittany Allen at LitHub shouted out thot pudding in a list of Seven Literaryish Substacks You Should Subscribe To, Stat. I love and read almost all of the newsletters mentioned, from Jami’s to Brandon’s to Hamilton’s, so this was sweet to see. I’ll also throw in recommendations for Catherine Lacey’s, Patrick Nathan’s, Celine Nguyen’s, Meghna’s, and Alf’s, all of which I pretty consistently read-on-open. Here’s what LitHub had to say about the pudding:
I did smile at “heart-forward.” It felt like a success of a particular and private kind, because the way I used to write and think was once so relentlessly head-forward1. It deprioritized the body. It forgot that imparted emotion—of all kinds, from serrated humor to numbed-out-loneliness to taut envy—is the soil that most people’s thinking actually lives in, grows from.
Speaking of soil.
In late 2022, after volunteering for years, I got off the waitlist for a plot in a neighborhood community garden. It’s one of my favorite places. Big and tree-laden and verdant, chickens and bees tended in its tucked-away corners, its (human) members a funny mix of neighborhood transplants and old heads.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to thot pudding to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.