Clare Fisher

Image of seven of my books with Haymarket, Hope in the Dark (black), Whose Story Is This (violet), Men Explain Things to Me (blue), Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, coedited with Thelma Young Lutunatabua and including 20 amazing writers from around the world (green), No Straight Road Takes You There (yellow), The Mother of All Questions (orange), and Call Them By Their True Names (red).

Happy Valentine's Day, especially to anyone who might identify with one of the letters in LGBTQ, particularly the day after someone Trumpy stripped the letter T and then the letter Q from the National Park Service website for Stonewall in New York City.

He is indeed . (Also 'let me bite you at 3am tiger', and 'loves to eat apple' tiger 🤷‍♀️)

Dofu insists on helping me with my work this afternoon. He has Thoughts...

👌

Omg yes! One of the best writers on the writing process imo (and none of the wankiness or medium that can come with the territory...)

Definitely. Have you read The End of the Story? It's great and I feel the urge to reread every few years. Great piece :)

Heartily agree. Can't wait to read the rest of the piece, but also, it has prompted me to return to Davis after too long.

I’ve admired Lydia Davis’s writing for many years, and keep a copy of her Collected Stories on my desk. She reminds me there are always new ways into things: her unexpected approaches turn the most mundane material into something complex and surprising. For a long time, though, her formal innovations and often dispassionate tone held me at a respectful distance. I considered her more a writer of the head than the heart. Lately, while going through a difficult time, I found myself unable to read novels. Something about their scale or point of view kept emphasising how stuck I was in myself. Condemned instead to scrolling online, I came across Davis’s micro-story, ‘Head, Heart’. The first time I read it years ago, I’d been left a bit cold by its simplicity—it struck me as reductive and naive. But encountering it again from a place of crisis, I saw the story was in fact a tiny, precious gift: it perfectly understood the inevitability and ordinariness of sadness as well as its extraordinary intensity and reach. I immediately returned to her other stories and was astonished to see myself everywhere: in a lost button, the girl who imagines a little man at night, the old woman whose house is falling down around her. It felt like magic that these words—which I’d already read!—were waiting there to come alive for me at just the right moment. One of Davis’s collections is called Varieties of Disturbance and I think this title gestures at what she does best: recognising that peace is a precarious state, but also that we are never truly alone in our disquiet.

I wrote this a couple of years ago for @stingingfly.bsky.social about the great solace I found (and continue to find) in Lydia Davis's work. Re-posting here in case anyone else needs some Lydia in their life.

Same here 😂

Just finished Johanna Hedva's new novel, out now w @andotherstories.bsky.social , and wow, I'm not sure what to say...a gripping, uncomfortable, thoughtful meditation on love, art, race, class, creation and (self)destruction.

There is a lovely cold bracing wind. However it does not brace me.

Well, hello! I tried for ages to upload a profile pic without a cat but it wouldn't let me, so cats it is!🐈