Tags: Ernest Hemingway, life, literary life, literature, quote
Yiasou!
Stephanie Nikolopoulos is a writer, editor, writing teacher, and speaker based in New York City.
She is the coauthor, with Paul Maher Jr., of "Burning Furiously Beautiful: The True Story of Jack Kerouac's 'On the Road.'"
You can email her at stephanie_701 {@} yahoo.com
Through mid-January 2022, The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, is showing “Her Story: A Century of Women Writers.” The exhibit shows in art form — mainly photographs but some paintings, sculptures, and cartoons — 24 women writers, including Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker, Anne Sexton, and Maxine Hong Kingston. It made me wonder how much of our knowledge of a writer — where she grew up, the color of her skin, her religion or philosophy, her personality — enhances and clouds our perception of her writing. While the accompanying biographies were fine, I would’ve liked to see more quotes from the writers themselves paired with each portrait and an explanation from the artists as to their approach for each portrait and any memories they had of what the experience of working with the writer was like.
A good way to think of memoir, whether you’re a reader or a writer. Born in Washington, DC, Rion Amilcar Scott grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and won the PEN Prize for “Insurrections.”
“It’s the Hoboken of DC,” my friend told me when I said I was heading to Silver Spring, Maryland. My family and I were planning a reunion, and we had needed to find an AirBnB big enough to accommodate three families. My siblings and I live on two separate continents, and we hadn’t seen each other in more than two years, when we had last met down South. While we had considered staying in a hotel with a pool in downtown DC, an AirBnB outside of the city would afford us greater organic time together. The type of time that was more like our childhood. Lazy mornings sprawled out on the couch in the living room just talking. Evenings with the tv on in the background while we ate Doritos and ice cream. And the return of the cicadas, which I have distinct memories of descending on our childhood home in New Jersey one summer. We were together again, but it wasn’t really like our childhood at all anymore. Now, there were kids and spouses and careers and conversations about retirement funds. When the cicadas return in another seventeen years, where will we be? How will we have changed? What memories will we be looking back on?
Ugh. Ain’t that the truth?
A little whimsy can transform the day.
Did you catch Nightbirde’s performance on “America’s Got Talent”? I don’t watch the show but an ad for it popped up on Instagram while I was scrolling, and in the ad the singer began sharing her song, sharing her story, sharing her heart. You can find the performance on YouTube. These words stuck out to me. These words made me cry. It’s been a long week. As I posted a few days ago, someone I know passed. Then yesterday a family member had to go to the hospital and needed surgery today. I know there’s talk these days of toxic positivity, and I do believe that we need to truly deal with our emotions and circumstances and seek help when needed. Going through a rough day, a rough week, a rough season happens. There is no shame in that. There is still room for Hope, though. Still room for a Peace that surpassed understanding. Still room for Joy. I choose to be happy. It doesn’t change reality. It doesn’t fix everything. It’s not a denial of feelings of grief, fear, and being overwhelmed. Yet I still choose to be happy. I choose to celebrate a person’s life. I choose to deepen my relationship with those I love. I choose to be there for others. I choose to use the life I’ve been given to do what I love.
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