The Assemblage Newsletter #72
Welcome to this week’s newsletter from Assemblage. These newsletters usually go out every Friday to highlight some of the top works from the past week, but this week we had to delay it until Saturday. We hope these links (all friend links, so anyone can view them) find you lost in a landscape, fictional, or in real life.
“Life is like a landscape. You live in the midst of it but can describe it only from the vantage point of distance.” — Charles Lindbergh
We are living in the midst of our own personal landscapes every day, but our words about it are what determine its meaning to us. Use your words to life yourself 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 sections. This week our Featured Writer is Cecil Adkins. Cecil is a recovering retail manager with thoughts on leadership, family, and writing. Read 6 of his personal essays on our homepage this week.
Collection
Collections are groupings of essays 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 Fear features 11 different works from 11different writers all with a nod to fear. 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 Fear features one work each from Thomas Plummer, Em Unravelling, Blithe Anderson, Aspen Blue, Jonathan Greene, Michelle Elizabeth, Anna I. Smith, Stacy (Wurz) Alamond, Megan Minutillo, Carrie Wynn, and Niki Marinis.
Essays and Poems From Last Week
How Growing Up “Ghetto” Redefined What Success Looks Like For Me by Jasmine Freeman — her debut in Assemblage
“This was the breeding grounds for vastly conflicting emotions to arise simultaneously within the skin of a little, bruised body. To hate your dad and feel guilt for hating him? I went to bed many nights praying for forgiveness for hating him so much. Then I’d ask the god I prayed to what I was doing that made it difficult for my papa to love me.”
Why Your Not-Racism Means the Racists are Winning by Greg Frankson
“The not-racist is really a person who is not actively racist, which is about as uninspiring in the real world as it is for you to read on your screen. To be not actively racist is literally the absence of any action on the issue whatsoever.”
Meghan Markle and I Have Something in Common by Em Unravelling
“But I would have liked some humanity. I’d have liked a connection. Some kind of recognition would have meant the world to me, that day. The lack of any empathy at all was like a vacuum; I felt hollowed-out and dry, like an empty avocado skin, by the time I put my baby back in the car and drove away.”
Change the Way You See Yourself by Jeff Barton
“But in reality, it hasn’t kept me safe at all; it’s kept me isolated, mostly alone, and beating myself up for all my perceived flaws. I’ve internalized everything negative while ignoring all aspects of the positive. I’ve held on to my right to remain miserable, and dearly. I’ve needed to be saved from myself.”
Maybe You’re Still Waiting Because Not Everyone Has the Eyes to See You by Arlene Ambrose
“You were a heat they never felt before, you harassed their demons, made them uncomfortable. In your presence, they had to look at themselves and they hated what they saw. You were a reminder of what they wanted but couldn’t be.”
“dissolving matter slower than the speed of light,
but poetry stirs the sauce eaten in remote silence,
peppered, platonic words, still simmering,
mind-blowing, within earshot of my cerebral cortexed explosion.”
When I Learned What It Means To Be Cool by Melissa Kerman
“Olivia’s confidence mesmerized me in a way the popular girls’ didn’t. It’s easy to be confident when everyone likes you. Olivia’s confidence hinged upon her liking herself, even if nobody else did. She didn’t fit in our school’s hierarchy because she was too cool for it. She couldn’t be classified above nor below anyone. Olivia was cool, because she simply didn’t care.”
The Whole World Is Our Sky by Simran Kankas
“we know every road
we have studied the dust
we know where to go
they just don’t know it yet”
Weekly Note
“There is an eternal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.” — Josephine Hart
What are you still searching for within? And what are you hoping to find?
