He brought us some mush to fry

The Anonymous Diary, an essay in The Paris Review by Kathryn Scanlan is a kind of confession about using someone else’s story in your own — and how that guilt can be alleviated by trying to reconnect the stranger to your reality.

The essay wanders through the use of this diary in Kathryn’s own work, and her attempts to find the owner of the diary or her family — and the odd corner of the internet she ends up in to find this connection.

Last year I saved some of my great grandmother’s diaries — all of them A7 size and filled with her tiny handwriting, usually with the year in gold writing on the front. They ran from1939 onwards, and reported the comings and goings of my grandfather to and from the navy during WW2 mixed with a lot of plum picking. It’s strange to see someone you remember reference entirely unknown people. The essay comes round to this idea too — that there’s no way to reattach the meaning the writer had for those people, and how it is impossible to write something from it which really belongs to them.

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco’s work in FOLDER this month is a huge and sprawling collection. It moves tautologically through definitions, shifting one meaning to lean against the next in a kind of domino effect.

Thanks for reading Etch to their Own, a newsletter that shrinks, week by week. I have driven to Wales again, so we can blame that for the short letter this week. I enjoyed this van. Feelings: / oh, I have those; they / govern me.