Robyn Ryle

A person who writes, etc.

[robynryle-blog]

What we’ve got

I’m knocked back to journaling. Some writing has to be better than nothing at all. I’m paralyzed. Jeff says it will come back. I seize onto his words and hold tight. I try to believe they’re prophetic.

My dreams have come back and I’m not sure how I feel about that. When my shoulder hurt, I couldn’t sleep well. I woke up over and over again in the night. I looked at the clock and wished it was morning. I didn’t much remember my dreams. Now they’re back in all their intensity. People from high school and elementary school keep popping up. People I knew for most of my life until I went to college. They’re grown now or they’re not, but it’s like my mind is trying to find some safe place. I wake up in the morning and think, wouldn’t it be nice to try and get in touch with Jason Burton? As if those people know some essential and unchanged part of myself. As if together, we could carve out a space where none of this has happened.

I bounce back and forth. Not between, it-will-all-be-okay and we’re-fucked. I bounce back and forth between, we-will-fight-with-everything-we-have and people-still-laughed-in-the-concentration-camps. People survived worse than this will be, right? Only, not all of them did. Some of them did. But there was still life and joy, even in that darkest place. I know this is hyperbolic. It’s what I’ve got.

Jeff goes to New Albany for the day and I realize how lucky I am not to be alone. How would I survive trapped in this house with only my own thoughts all the time? He gives me a reason to tone down the gloom and doom. This is not a bad thing. Having a husband and a child are tethers.

They tie you down. They keep you from drifting off. They keep in check the part of you that would risk anything to make this stop because they don’t understand that a little part of you just wants to make this stop. They remind you of what your life means to others and not to yourself.

I’ve stopped playing Pokemon Go. It’s a drag past level 30. Adding a tracker system doesn’t fix it. I’ve started reading again instead. I’ve remembered that pleasure, the pleasure of going somewhere else altogether. Places sad or intense for their own reasons. Places that are not here and now.

I’ve started knitting again and playing the piano and sometimes just singing. Singing in the empty house. Singing sad songs. Singing Jason Isbell. Remembering the sound of my own voice.

Jeff says this new year will be the year of gathering friends around us. I like the direction. I like the purpose. It’s what we’ve got.

[smalltownpokemon-blog]

I play Pokemon Go with the sound off. With the sound off, you hear things.

One day, I heard two crows in the tree above me making very un-crow like noises, a noise more like something you’d expect in a jungle—percussive and clucking.

Squirrels chirping at each other.

Birds on the top of a telephone pole chatting away.

A vulture that flew low enough over my head that I heard the sound of its wings flapping, a whispering noise that made me duck.

Down by the river, I swear I heard a strange grinding, buzz that was the collective sound of twenty Canadian geese munching on grass.

Motorcycles without mufflers. Cars without mufflers.

Leaf blowers and lawn mowers.

A guy on a motorcycle that sounded like a leaf blower.

The intense cricket colony in a flower bed at the end of the alley, as if all the world’s crickets had taken up residence in this one group of plants.

A woman yelling, “F*&% you, whore!” out her car widow. I could never figure out who she was yelling it at. I hope it wasn’t me.

Dry leaves blowing along the sidewalk.

The lapping of the river water against the shore after a barge passes by.

Dogs barking. And then more dogs barking. And then, yet more dogs barking.

Footsteps.

Conversations.

The quiet between a couple reading together on a bench beside the river.

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

[robynryle-blog]

That point

There’s always a point in the semester, no matter how well you plan, no matter your intentions, where you feel like your life has been taken away from you. You try to remember the last time you exercised. Or the last time you settled down to watch TV or read a book without knowing that later you’d regret not getting the extra bit of grading or prep work done. That point where you feel like very moment must be used to maximum effectiveness. Maybe there’s a way to avoid getting to that moment, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

[smashfizzle]

You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love’s no longer being served.

Nina Simone (via smashfizzle)

[robynryle-blog]

The Selfie Girls Everyone Mocked Use Their Fame For Good

They turned down free tickets and asked for donations as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

I’m sure I’m not the only one saying this, but I think it’s no coincidence that everyone felt just fine making fun of these young, mostly blond, beautiful young WOMEN. So what if they were taking selfies? THIS is the sign of the collapse of civilization? Not another school shooting? Or Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy? Or our continued obliviousness to global climate change? It looks to me like some young women having fun with other young women, and maybe that’s the problem. Their self-contained enjoyment of themselves and each other. I think this is just another case of assuming that anything young women do must be stupid and trivial because young women themselves are stupid and trivial. Rant over.

[smashfizzle]

Design*Sponge Column Guidelines

Hello All! 

Earlier today I was ecstatic to announce my collaboration with Design*Sponge, and I wanted to make sure I had guidelines up by the end of the day. I made it right under the wire! First, a few housekeeping items, then the good stuff:

I’ll be accepting creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry for the column.

Here are the themes for the next six months of posts. Remember the themes are to be interpreted by the writer however they wish. Some will be on the nose and others will a little less obvious. These are equally lovely. I just want good writing. - 

October / Neighbors

November / Photos

December / Around The Table

January / Moving Out

February/ Guests

March / The Bed

All published work will be paid.

Questions and submissions (Guidelines Below!) should be directed to [email protected]

1. Because this is a curated bi-weekly column, I only get to highlight 24 voices per year. Therefore, I will not be taking submission in the traditional sense where you send me an entire completed work and I decide whether or not it’s right for that month. Instead, please email me a link to or PDF of something you’ve written, a website or blog if you have one, the month and theme you’re interested in, and a brief (BRIEF) synopsis of what you’d like to write. From there I will either graciously decline, or follow up with you about sending a draft.

**PLEASE DO NOT SEND ME COMPLETED PIECES IN YOUR FIRST EMAIL**

2. The work we agree for you to file should be approximately 1000 words, unless it’s poetry which we’ll discuss on a case-by-case basis. 

3. “Emerging writer” is not about age. I don’t care how old you are. I define an emerging writer as someone without a published book, or MAYBE with only one published book. 

4. I am not interested in anything that has been published anywhere before, not even your blog. 

5. Please be patient. My goal is to respond to each submission within 72 hours.

I’m sure there will be more questions, so please direct them to the email address above, or message me questions here. Do not pitch me here, though. *Pitches only go to email*. 

Got it? Good! Let’s go!

[jennirl]

Be greedy and indulgent when you read the work of the poets of color in this year’s BAP like Saeed Jones, Claudia Rankine, Chen Chen, Rajiv Mohabir, Monica Youn, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Jericho Brown, Natalie Diaz, Evie Shockley, and Airea D. Matthews. And beyond this book, beyond this moment, I encourage everyone to seek out the work of Asian American poets who weren’t included in the anthology but whose poetry we ought remember long after we forget this white guy in yellowname: Cathy Hong Park, Ken Chen, Tan Lin, Hoa Nguyen, Jason Koo, Jackie Wang, Wendy Xu, Trisha Low, Patrick Rosal, Brandon Shimoda, Bhanu Kapil, Wo Chan, Sally Mao, Ginger Ko, Muriel Leung, Jennifer Nelson, and Geraldine Kim. If that’s not enough, you can find more on Twitter under the hashtag #ActualAsianPoet.

They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist, Jenny Zhang (via jennirl)

[theliberaltony]

I don’t mean to be rude here. I am running for President of the United States on serious issues, okay? Do you have serious questions?

Bernie Sanders

When asked a question about Hillary Clintons hair by a reporter.

(via theliberaltony)

[nprbooks]

“There are several ways in which Zen Cho’s Sorcerer to the Crown invites comparison with Susanna Clarke’s best-selling, BBC-adapted Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell,” says reviewer Amal El-Mohtar. “It features squabbling English magicians, a Regency setting, and a mysterious decline in English magic attributed at least in part to difficult relations with capricious fairies. But where Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is a severe, atmospheric marshalling of scholarship both fantastical and historical — a book about books, riddled with footnotes and nested stories — Sorcerer to the Crown is a relentlessly charming, character-driven romance in which women and people of color take center stage.”

Read the full review here!

– Petra

[robynryle-blog]

Flagship

I love the way you can listen to a song for months and months, absorbing it on some kind of deep subconscious level. You don’t even think about it much. It’s just there. Then one day you wake up, and all the words are in your head. You spend the whole day singing it. You realize you LOVE that song, like it was a seed that got planted months ago and just now it bloomed. That’s how I feel today about Flagship off Jason Isbell’s new album.

[robynryle-blog]

Noveling

Every morning for the past 3-4 weeks, I get up and put my butt in a chair and write. At least 1700 words. On good days, 3000 or so. It’s exhausting and exhilarating all at the same time. I can’t wait to be done, but I also know that when I get there, I’ll feel more than a little lost. I know there’s something really satisfying about the process. I plan out a scene, take a deep breath, sit with my fingers poised above the keyboard. Realize that I am creating a world, word by word, and that is exactly what I have always wanted to do.

[robynryle-blog]

Patta had been known, as the result of a suggestion in the press, to declare various 'crime alerts', in which he singled out a particular crime, much in the way he would select an especially rich dessert from the cloth-draped sweet table in a restaurant...

Donna Leon, Death at LaFenice

[robynryle-blog]

'Is she pretty?'.... 'If you like tall blondes,' Brunetti said. 'Don't you?" 'My wife doesn't permit me to, sir.'

Donna Leon, Death at LaFence

[robynryle-blog]

Awesome trailer for the Nomfiction Anthology over at Big Truths.

[robynryle-blog]

I have a dad bod. Here’s why women love it.

My six-pack abs weren't as successful with the ladies.

“Traditional gender roles are the reason, they say. Primordial women needed brutes who could slaughter wild beasts for food and stiff-arm competing tribes that wanted to kill their offspring. More recently, our great-grandmothers needed partners who could toil in factories, plow fields and protect the home from intruders.”

My COLLEGE students would know better than to make these kinds of sweeping generalizations about gender history, but this guy can get paid to say it in The Washington Post. Who is the “they” who’s saying this? No one. No one who knows anything about gender says this kind of shit.

[robynryle-blog]

From graduation to garbage job (literally): One twentysomething's struggle

True comic about college grads being underpaid and underappreciated in the post-Great Recession economy

This is so sad.