The Assemblage Newsletter #64
Welcome to this week’s newsletter from Assemblage. These newsletters go out every Friday to highlight some of the top works from the past week. We hope these links (all friend links, so anyone can view them) find you planning a weekend of rest, relaxation, and recharging. You can also view all of our previous letters via the Letters tab on our homepage.
“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” — Buddha
How will you make your world look this week?
Featured Writer
Each week we feature one of our writers and up to six of their essays or poems on the homepage underneath the Featured Essays and Featured Poems section. This week our Featured Writer is Tania Caan. Tania is a mum and a writer who loves short stories and poems. Tania published 5 poems in Assemblage in 2020.
Collection
Collections are groupings of stories or poems with an overall theme. You can find Collections on the home page underneath the Featured Stories, Featured Poetry, and Featured Writer sections.
On Communication features 8 different essays or poems from 8 different writers all revolving around communication. This section is a great way to get acquainted with multiple works around one theme, as well as to find writers you haven’t read before or ones you shouldn’t miss. Take a look at our Collection this week and see what you may have missed.
On Communication features one work each from Vanessa Torre, Jonathan Greene, A Singular Story, Aspen Blue, Greg Frankson, Russ W, Megan Minutillo, Pamela J. Nikodem, M.S.Ed.
Essays and Poems From Last Week
Police and Thieves by Greg Frankson
“all i can hear is the astonishment
see the despair and read the admonishment
of the most obvious and dishonest monument
to the cooperative collaborative acknowledgment”
The Life Lessons A Break From Social Media Taught Me by Chloe Cuthbert
“Do we have the capacity to care about so many people who don’t even realize when we’re not around? Staying connected to those we love is important, but do we need to know what John Q. Public had for dinner every night this week?”
Reflections on Modern Life by Jonathan Greene
“This self-serving, faux motivational, hustle and grind, extremist culture where we can’t even debate properly. Where ethics are an afterthought and the pungent desperation of online begging has become the new forced window washing on a street corner.”
Why You Can’t Get Over Someone You Never Dated by Melissa Kerman
“You feel stupid, like that rom-com movie character for whom no one feels pity. How can you ache over someone you weren’t in a relationship with? You remind yourself each time you reminisce and the pain resurges, when you feel silly because you have no reason to feel such hurt. However, that’s the reason you feel such hurt.”
Everybody Wants a Piece of Me, but Nobody Wants All by Arlene Ambrose
“They don’t want my coldness. They don’t want my moody. They don’t want my intensity. They don’t want my love. They don’t want my wild. They don’t want my passion. They don’t want my tears. They don’t want my fears. They don’t want my insecurities.”
Whose Thoughts Are You Thinking? by Lance Baker
“And while callouses are sometimes good for strength and durability, they can also inhibit our ability to feel the delicate contours of a fragile system. We lose the ability to sense the cracks that have formed in our fellow human beings.”
Sometimes I Think I Could Be Anyone by Em Unravelling
“That’s what I wanted to hear. I was cheerfully satisfied with his response and immediately happy to resume the brown-and-beige film. He’d given exactly the sort of reply, the half-sighed but resignedly good-humored riposte, that I needed to hear to prove how well he really does know me and that I’m not just anyone.”
“You’re still here — despite the hurt
and the heartache and the gaping
whole that’s within your chest.”
I’m Sober by Jennifer Cowie King
“So, I’m going to take this moment and feel it. Feel the wonder. Feel the sheer boredom, feel everything — the what-ifs, the what-was. Because right now? Right now, I am a sober middle-aged woman with a full life still to be lived. And, I’m not going to poison it by numbing myself with a good drink.”
When Love Reaches Beyond Itself by Deborah McNamara — her debut in Assemblage
“Just smile when you feel it
deep in the bones.
Receive the gift
when you are graced
with a moment
of that holy mystery.”
Weekly Note
“I never see what has been done; I only see what remains to be done.” — Buddha
What are you going to do?
