Welcome to Bread: A Newsletter! This newsletter will not be about bread (well except for this one). Much like a loaf that lasts you all week down to its stale nub, my hope is that it will be a form of sustenance. Every-other Sunday morning you can expect to find part personal essay, part reading recommendation, part whatever else this decides to be. Stretching my arm out into the ether to thank you for reading.
Bread To Me
I started making bread three years ago. It was after a break-up and I was in the stage of grief where I felt the need to take control, to make sure I was still there. I took a sourdough class down the street from my old house in Oakland. The teacher wore a blue linen apron that crossed behind her back, her hair pulled into a loose twist on top of her head. She had an effortless way of taking us through the steps: feed, fold, shape, bake. After the class, I started making a loaf a week. I liked how the dough felt on my hands: sticky and loose and then just before you bake it, something akin to skin. How feeding the starter was like caring for a pet I didn’t have. How I could make something that fed people and be the kind of girl who made her own bread.
I started comparing making bread with writing because they felt inherently different. Making bread was something I did that brought me out of my head when writing felt abstract, solipsistic. But when I broke down bread and writing to their components: flour and water/ idea and language, I saw a lot of sameness between them. How with time and revision, bread and writing take shape.
Since I was young, I would write in a journal before I went to sleep: FACTS and FEELINGS I wrote in bold letters, making two columns on the page. In FACTS I wrote down what happened that day, in FEELINGS, how I felt about them. I could always change how I felt about something. This was especially true when I wrote it down. Writing became a way of not just processing my reality but also transforming it, controlling it.
Zadie Smith in her essay “Peonies” writes about a moment early in quarantine when she is struck by a patch of newly bloomed tulips on her block. She describes the flowers as garish: bright pink with orange highlights, how she wishes they were peonies. She writes, “Writing is routinely described as ‘creative’—this has never struck me as the correct word. Planting a tulip is creative. To plant a bulb is to participate in some small way in the cyclical miracle of creation. Writing is control . . . In my story, they are, they will be, they were and will forever be peonies.”
Despite an old friend in college once calling me a “chill girl” —a facade I keep up well—I’ve always been someone who thrives with a list. And making bread, at first, did feel like a medium to control: the exactness of instruction, how precise the proportions of salt and water and flour are down to the gram. How the last step, which satisfyingly reads “slash the loaf with purpose,” if done right, causes the loaf to rise in a perfect seam. But if you’re wary about it, the slash wiggles and the loaf is misshapen.
I also found that bread has a powerful way of reflecting what’s going on in the present: the moisture in the air, the temperature of your oven, the invisible sugars of the yeast. The art of it seems to lie less in what you can control and more what you can’t.
Something I keep reminding myself while sheltering in place is how little control I have. How I’m happiest when I’m focusing on the present moment— the future undeterminable and the past, painful to remember in its sweetness (dancing with friends in the dark red light of a bar, hugging my parents, seeing the full faces of strangers).
It makes sense that in a time of uncertainty, people have turned to bread: a symbol of comfort but also a physical embodiment of the present, a way of reminding us that we’re still here.
And so, here is my first loaf: another embodiment of memory, another way of marking time.
Things I Read & Recommend
Leslie Jamison’s short essay Is It Strange To Say I Miss the Bodies of Strangers? which I included because a friend who edited this newsletter said she loved how it was about skin and I hadn’t realized it but she was right. If you haven’t read Leslie Jamison’s work before her collection of essays The Empathy Exams is extraordinary and something I return to a lot.
Jazmine Hughe’s essay in SSENSE Summer of No Fear on learning to skateboard:
“Everybody loves a Black girl with a skateboard, especially one as cute as me. People call out after me as I walk down the street, board in hand: “Hey, are you any good on that thing?” (“NO!” I yell back, triumphantly.) More than one stranger asks me if they can get on and try. Everyone asks if I should be wearing knee pads. I look brand new, like the way you can clock a freshman on sight, not trusting myself to divert all my weight to a single foot. Cornily, when I can't strike my balance, I try to be a flamingo, or Mia Thermopolis saying she wants kisses to make her foot pop. I am imagined grace—a version of myself who is meeting this summer with a measure of fiction.”
The novel Luster by Raven Leilani is as stunning and absorbing as everyone says it is. Also this review of it by Lovia Gyarkye in Atlantic.
Another novel I’m reading next because everyone I love loves it: Indelicacy by Amina Cain.
Window Swap, is not something to read but something to peer out of: a site where you can swipe to view someone else’s window anywhere in the world.
Did you read Fuck the Bread by Sabrina Orah Mark when it came out early this summer? I just want to make sure because I think about it all the time. Orah Mark writes about what it means to want something, arbitrariness and giving up on making bread:
“I send my sons on a scavenger hunt because it’s day fifty-eight of homeschooling, and I’m all out of ideas. I give them a checklist: a rock, soil, a berry, something soft, a red leaf, a brown leaf, something alive, something dead, an example of erosion, something that looks happy, a dead branch on a living tree. They come back with two canvas totes filled with nature. I can’t pinpoint what this lesson is exactly. Something about identification and possession. Something about buying time. As I empty the bags and touch the moss, and the leaves, and the twigs, and the berries, and a robin-blue eggshell, I consider how much we depend on useless, arbitrary tasks to prove ourselves. I consider how much we depend on these tasks so we can say, at the very end, we succeeded.”
This interview in Garage with Michaela Coel on writing the series I May Destroy you. I’ve been thinking about Coel’s definition of “deadheading” and how it relates to trauma: “[Deadheading means] removing old blooms. It involves cutting just above the leaf node on the stem. You dispose of those dead bits to get the rose bush to focus on giving its energy to flowering.”
This poem brd by Anthony Cody that I didn’t so much as read but feel what was missing, you’ll see.
That’s it for this week. Thank you for being here. See you next next Sunday.
Love, Natalie