#nina maclaughlin

[mournfulroses]

Nina MacLaughlin, from Winter Solstice: An Essay, originally published in 2023

[llovelymoonn]

on november

nina maclaughlin the paris review: "on the first of november, the ghosts arrive" \\ emily dickinson in a letter to elizabeth holland (early nov, 1865) (via @flowerytale) \\ anna akhmatova rosary \\ philip jenks colony collapse metaphor: "november" \\ robert frost the complete poems: "my november guest" \\ ellis nightingale (@ellisnightingale) \\ @honeytuesday \\ nina maclaughlin the paris review: "the dark feels different in november" \\ l.m. montgomery anne of green gables \\ maggie stiefvater the scorpio races (via @metamorphesque) \\ sylvia plath the unabridged journals of sylvia plath (via @louisegluck)

kofi

[ricardoreading]

In my family, we don’t make much eye contact with each other. Rarely do we hug. We laugh hard and tell the same stories and like being around each other, but we do not look each other in the eye. I have wondered about this. Growing up, I felt bewildered at other people’s houses, seeing my friends embraced by their parents, their heads petted, their faces kissed. How strange, I thought. When we gather now, we laugh and the feeling is mostly of ease and well-being but discomfort, too, because who is more frustrating and devastating than the members of your family? The comfort and discomfort of brothers and sisters and parents, of knowing each other so deeply and so well, in ways we don’t ever know other people, and also not knowing each other at all. There’s a distance there, born of embarrassment. It’s the embarrassment of intimacy, of this shared blood chugging in the veins, and the embarrassment of mortality, You will be gone, and you will be gone, and I will be gone, and I cannot know that and meet your eyes right now. — "All This Blood and Love" by Nina MacLaughlin

[girlwithlandscape]

“November is a hinge in the year, and the door gets opened to ghosts.”

— Nina MacLaughlin, “On the First of November, the Ghosts Arrive”

[thethirdbear]

but the dark feels different in november.

[justforbooks]

A celebration and meditation on the season for drinking hot chocolate, spotting a wreath on a neighbor's door, experiencing the change in light of shorter days. All aspects of Winter, from the meteorological to the mythological, are captured in this masterful essay, told in wise and luminous prose that pushes back the dark.

Winter begins with the shortest day of the year before nightfall. As in her companion volume, Summer Solstice, the author meditates on both the dark and the light and what this season means in our lives. "Winter tells us," Nina MacLaughlin says, "more than petaled spring, or hot-grassed summer, or fall with its yellow leaves, that we are mortal. In the frankness of its cold, in the mystery of its deep-blue dark, the place in us that knows of death is tickled, focused, stoked. The angels sing on the doorknobs and others sing from the abyss. The sun has been in retreat since June, and the heat inside glows brighter in proportion to its absence. We make up for the lost light in the spark that burns inside us."

If Winter is a time you love for its memories and traditions, if you love writing that takes your breath away with lyrical leaps across time and space, Winter Solstice is an unforgettable book you'll cherish.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[romanticbroadcast]

I was too much. I was too much for anyone to bear. It was the most terrible thing, to horrify a person into paralysis, to know, with every encounter, that I am a monster too frightening for anyone to see, or touch, or love.

— Nina MacLaughlin, Wake, Siren: Ovid Resung

[libraryleopard]

used bookstores my beloved 🥰

books from top to bottom:

wake, siren by nina maclaughlin

interior chinatown by charles yu

johnny appleseed by joshua whitehead

a safe girl to love by casey plett

for thy great pain have mercy on my little pain by victoria mackenzie