[{"id":277029,"date":"2026-09-21T05:08:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277029"},"modified":"2026-09-20T06:40:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T10:40:12","slug":"on-finding-the-beauty-in-a-block-of-stone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/on-finding-the-beauty-in-a-block-of-stone\/","title":{"rendered":"On Finding the Beauty in a Block of Stone"},"content":{"rendered":"

The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31\u2014the only one that went to the World\u2019s End and passed through some of the most varied and vibrant parts of the city. Starting in Camden High Street outside the World\u2019s End pub, it headed up past Camden Lock to the old railway marshaling yards and the Roundhouse that had just become a cool music venue and then on round the strangely kitsch Swiss Cottage. It swung south down the hill past Abbey Road to cross the Kilburn High Road and on through Notting Hill Gate.<\/p>\n

Pausing for the lights at the bottom of Kensington Church Street, you could peer out at the lovely reliefs of 1930s airplanes and steam engines carved on to the facade of Barkers in High Street Kensington before you turned west past the neo-gothic charm of St Mary Abbots and south again through avenues of peeling bedsits in Earls Court towards the wrong end of the King\u2019s Road in Chelsea. There the conductor would shout, “All change,” because it had not just reached the end of the line but also another World\u2019s End pub in the King\u2019s Road. A quick stop for a cuppa in the transport caf\u00e9 and then back north again, day after day, from World\u2019s End to World\u2019s End.<\/p>\n

The approved method for catching the bus was to jump on when it was still moving by grabbing the white pole and swinging in, earning both the respect of your school friends and a furious tirade from the conductor. I would run upstairs into the smoky gloom of the top deck and try to get the front seats, where, if you opened the top windows with the little steel handle, most of the cigarette smoke would get blown to the back and you could sit with fresh London air streaming in. Eventually the conductor would work his way through the passengers, glaring at me accusingly as I ordered a half fare to Westbourne Grove with wide-eyed innocence. He would vigorously turn the knobs and handles on the intriguing steel ticket machine and out would come a faint strip of paper ticket, with its numbers and symbols printed in purple ink. Clutching this in my grubby hand, I would lean forward and enjoy one of the best views in London.<\/p>\n

I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place.<\/p>\n

It was the late 1960s, and London was still pretty patchy. It was more than 20 years since the end of the war, but there were plenty of areas that had not recovered from the Blitz. Neighborhoods like St. John\u2019s Wood and Belsize Park were clean and prosperous, but then a few hundred yards down the road there was Kilburn. Damp houses with moldy plaster and broken windows lined streets between terrifying schools with grimy kids gazing forlornly through lethal wire fencing around the playgrounds. At the time, it was a downtrodden area favored by Irish immigrants, and it was little more than a slum. I used to look fearfully through the first-floor windows of the houses from my vantage point on the top deck into bare rooms with peeling wallpaper, cold and unfurnished, sad and empty. Then the bus would cross the Grand Union Canal, and we would head south along lovely streets with terraced houses, each with a well-kept little garden in front of it as we moved through the growing prosperity of Notting Hill and Kensington.<\/p>\n

The contrast baffled and saddened me. It seemed so wrong that one could travel through such extremes\u2014from poverty to wealth, from pain to comfort\u2014all on a single smudged ticket. The abandoned and decaying buildings in Kilburn were no different from the houses in Camden or Notting Hill; it was just that they needed to be repaired, restored, cleaned up and loved, after which they would be every bit as beautiful and comfortable as the house that we lived in. There was clearly a link between beauty and well-being, but the developers and planners had other ideas. Before long they knocked down huge swathes of the Victorian houses so they could modernize the area, transforming the streets into their vision of an urban utopia, with brutalist high-rise blocks and car parks, with metal swings and slides for the children.<\/p>\n

I looked at all this from the top deck and instinctively knew that something was wrong. Why would anyone want to destroy lovely old houses, the same houses that made Kensington so desirable, and replace them with buildings that resembled a pile of washing machines 30 floors high? How could this be right? I was not to know then but this passion for caring for beauty, and what was later to be defined as heritage, was to carry me to the ends of the world, far beyond the polar limits of Chelsea and Camden Town.<\/p>\n

In my early teens I was taught to carve stone and wood by an eccentric genius called Don Potter. He was an artist and master craftsman who not only made great sculptures but also restored the old barn in which he and his family lived, fashioning the furniture and making all the plates and pots in his kitchen while his wife Mary wove the carpets and made the curtains. He was a hard taskmaster, like all good craftsmen, and frequently physically kicked boys out of the workshop for shoddy work or just being annoying. I was 13 when he taught me to cut stone for the first time, to struggle with the material and to fight the despair of breaking a piece off by mistake. He taught us that to make a good sculpture we just had to remove everything that was not required.<\/p>\n

I later learned that Michelangelo had said the same thing, but I never found out whether Don knew this or whether it is just what every carver feels. As I developed from an apprentice to a master mason I shared my experiences with people around the world from stonemasons working on the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela to Syrian refugees from Aleppo and Homs. They too looked at me the same way I had looked at Don, with a mixture of respect and incomprehension. I recognized this quizzical look in their eyes and knew that they would eventually understand and come to feel the same way\u2014the madness of masons is clearly contagious.<\/p>\n

Cutting stone and conjuring beauty from a rock gives a sense of satisfaction that is hard to describe, but there is no doubt that every carver on the planet and throughout the millennia has felt the same as they stand back and see how something smooth and refined has emerged from the chaos of the rock that it was before. How they have created art and order from geology. I worked in Kosovo with one of the greatest Italian art restorers, Carlo Giantomassi, who had worked on Lorenzo Lottos, Raphaels and Caravaggios. As the viciously strong rakia<\/i> got lower in the bottle, we animatedly discussed our different work. He, the paintings conservator, and me, the stone conservator. He told me he couldn\u2019t get inspired by stone because it was so sadly monochrome and that it was color that creates depth and life. His love and his world-wide experience of working with painted art was unparalleled, but for me it was missing a dimension\u2014we stone people have three, and like Pygmalion, the Greek sculptor who fell in love with his own sculptures, we have a special relationship.<\/p>\n

I went on to university to study history, but it did not take long for me to realize that I was no academic. I would sit in the library staring forlornly out of the window, dreaming of carving and creating. I studied Renaissance history at the University of Warwick, and the main reason for doing so was that we were sent to study in Venice for a term. We would have seminars and lectures in the Palazzo Fortuny, but our greatest learning took place exploring the hidden little taverns known as bacari<\/i>, where we tasted the exquisite classic Venetian salt cod on tiny slices of toast or baby octopus waving their little pink legs at us. Known locally as cicchetti<\/i>, these are the Venetian equivalent of tapas, and you could find them down the sinister back alleys if you managed to elbow your way through the eclectic mix of bargees and lawyers. We would stare with hopeless longing at the effortlessly chic Venetian girls of our age sipping spritzes at the tables outside with a natural elegance and sophistication that was a world away from our grey Anglo-Saxon lives.<\/p>\n

One afternoon I was walking along the Riva degli Schiavoni, and as I crossed the Ponte della Paglia, the bridge over the canal that leads to the Bridge of Sighs where all the tour groups stop to listen to guides and get their pockets picked, I saw a young stonemason working on one of the finials that decorate the balustrades. Silently, I watched him work and realized that this was what I wanted to do. This was history and stone carving\u2014I needed to be part of it. After a while I plucked up the courage to ask him for advice. He told me he had been to a restoration school right here in Venice\u2014he pointed out across the basin of San Marco towards one of the islands in the lagoon beyond San Giorgio Maggiore called San Servolo.<\/p>\n

I left university with a mediocre degree and immediately headed back to Venice in the romantic belief that if I presented myself and showed willing, they would somehow let me work on the art. Unsurprisingly, this was not the case, but I stayed and survived by working various peculiar jobs that at least paid the rent. One of these was as an extra in a huge film production about Marco Polo that they were shooting on the Lido, which is the beach area that hems in the lagoon and has a series of fancy hotels and modern apartment blocks. In order to fill the gaps between the stars, they needed people who looked vaguely Italian but spoke English. That was pretty much the extent of my CV at the time, and before long I was shivering on the edge of the Lido dressed in a hessian smock with a terrible haircut.<\/p>\n

I was to be Friend of Marco 2<\/i>, and, as luck would have it, the mother of Friend of Marco 1<\/i> was head of the UNESCO bureau in Venice, and he suggested we meet. The ‘Baronessa’ was Venetian aristocracy and lived in a vast rococo palace with Guardis and Canalettos in the drawing room. She recommended that I go down to Rome to meet a British architect who was director general of an institution I had never heard of called ICCROM (International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property which confusingly is not an acronym). I was to find out that it is an intergovernmental organization that is part of the UN family and which promotes the conservation and restor\u00adation of cultural heritage all over the world.<\/p>\n

Masons, carvers and conservators all work towards the preservation and enhancement and even creation of heritage, but as experience and knowledge grows so a gradual almost imperceptible transition occurs.<\/p>\n

With the innocent enthusiasm of youth, I left the canals of Venice, boarded the train at Santa Lucia and headed down the peninsula past Padua, Bologna and Florence to meet Sir Bernard Feilden. When I arrived at ICCROM, the porter ushered me into a clunky iron lift, and I headed up to the director general\u2019s office, where a kindly looking Englishman smiled and sat me down on a chair in front of his large wooden desk.<\/p>\n

He asked me how he could help, and I told him that I wanted to work on the restoration of stone and ancient buildings. He glanced at my letter of recommendation and looked up again.<\/p>\n

“You studied Renaissance history?”<\/p>\n

“I did.”<\/p>\n

“So, what do you think defined the Renaissance? What made it so different?”<\/p>\n

I gulped and suggested that the real difference was that the patrons, aristocrats, popes and kings started to treat the artists as artists rather than mere decorators. That in the Middle Ages scant credit was given to artists, and they were thought of as little more than builders, decorators and masons. Then, in the Renaissance, the first great stars of art and archi\u00adtecture appeared\u2014Mantegna, Raphael, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo\u2014and the dynamic shifted; the patrons had to compete to persuade the artists to work for them, and their pay packets increased radically.<\/p>\n

There was a long pause, and I thought maybe I had missed the point. Then he looked at me again and said, “Yes, you are right. And I will tell you another thing. Today there is a similar rift in our field: there are too many people in white coats who think they know it all and too many blue-collar artisans who are excluded from the process except as labor. If you can get trained as a mason, you will have a foot in both camps, and that will be a unique position. You have your degree, now go and get yourself trained as a mason.” This sage advice was to define my professional life.<\/p>\n

With the innocent enthusiasm of youth, I applied to the Building Crafts Training School in Great Titchfield Street in London. Miraculously, I was accepted to start training as a stonemason.<\/p>\n

We were taught by a gruff cockney called Fred Waring, who had participated in the D-Day landings in a regiment that had fought its way across Europe towards Berlin and liberated the concentration camp at Belsen. Not surprisingly, he stood for no nonsense and taught us as every mason has been taught before: the hard way. We had to start from a rough rock and square it up by hand, which took us a month. I had done sculpture with Don, but never had I had to work with the precision required by a mason, and the feeling of achievement when I cut my first straight draft along the side of a block was a completely different type of satisfaction. I had created precise order from nature.<\/p>\n

We had to continue to work each side flat and square so that we could apply a template and start to carve a baluster which would have made up part of a balcony or balustrade. I was working the last side of a rectangular stone and had placed it on two wooden blocks to raise it up, so I didn\u2019t have to bend down to work it. After a few hours of working my way down the block, it cracked in half. I looked up, devastated, and Fred walked over.<\/p>\n

“I have been waiting for you to do that for two days now, you pillock.”<\/p>\n

“Seriously?”<\/p>\n

“Yes, you have the natural beds across the block and they are weak point, and you are hitting it with a hammer and punch\u2014of course it\u2019s going to break.”<\/p>\n

“But why didn\u2019t you tell me before?”<\/p>\n

He laughed. “Well, you\u2019re not going to do it again, are you? There are more blocks in the store.”<\/p>\n

He was right\u2014four decades later, I am still going on about it. This is how masons learn. When I was teaching in Lebanon, I yelled the same things at my students and pushed them in the same way, the way it has been done for millennia. They hated it, but before long they loved me for it too, the same way as I grudgingly loved my teachers.<\/p>\n

I was starting to join the ancient community of people who have cut beauty and order from rock, and I knew that I was in the right place. My early feelings of sorrow at the loss of beauty that I felt on the number 31 bus developed, with the help of many formidable professionals in the field, as well as many horny-handed masons and builders, into an awareness of the issues, methods and materials that are required to actually do something about it, and to play a role in preserving\u00a0 the beauty that has been created over the centuries in order that we may pass it on to our children in all its authenticity.<\/p>\n

Over time I have moved from the role of artisan and craftsman to that of teacher. Masons, carvers and conservators all work towards the preservation and enhancement and even creation of heritage, but as experience and knowledge grows so a gradual almost imperceptible transition occurs, and the conservator of materials becomes a conservator and custodian of knowledge and tradition that when passed on becomes even more important than the hands-on activity.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Monumental: A Stonemason\u2019s Tale<\/a> by Simon Warrack. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Simon Warrack. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best way to observe London, with all its charm and beauty, oddity and idiosyncrasy, is from the top of a bus, and mine was the 31\u2014the only one that went to the World\u2019s End and passed through some of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32210,"featured_media":277291,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43096,6,43101,43103,43092],"tags":[109096,54982,51391,112277,22037,112278,112276,12598],"class_list":["post-277029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art-and-photography","category-features","category-history","category-memoir","category-newsandculture","tag-art-conservation","tag-craftsmanship","tag-cultural-preservation","tag-monumental-a-stonemasons-tale","tag-restoration","tag-simon-warrack","tag-stonemasonry","tag-w-w-norton-and-company","story-type-craftsmanship"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a4d","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/italian-archways.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277029\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276799,"date":"2026-09-21T05:07:05","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276799"},"modified":"2026-09-20T06:40:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T10:40:58","slug":"the-archive-talks-back-eight-books-that-wrest-humanity-from-the-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-archive-talks-back-eight-books-that-wrest-humanity-from-the-record\/","title":{"rendered":"The Archive Talks Back: Eight Books That Wrest Humanity From the Record"},"content":{"rendered":"

Genre-bending books\u00a0 have greatly influenced my own work. I\u2019ve written about my mother\u2019s self completed death in a new memoir called O Mother<\/a>, <\/i>out with McSweeney’s on September 1. In it, I used the diagnostic material about my mom I\u2019d found after her death, my own diagnostic material that was filtered in with hers\u2013ADHD, Autism, CPTSD, Ehlers Danlos, all of it we shared\u2013as well as pieces of ephemera, notes about her arrest preceding her death, and my baby book, which was a journal of her being my mom that I was meant to open only when she was no longer here. I just never thought it would be so soon. The language of bureaucracy often is the language that speaks for our most marginalized.\u00a0 The books on this list are all ones that wrest humanity back from this language. I hope my book does the same.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Whitemud Walking<\/i><\/a> by Matthew James Weigel<\/strong><\/p>\n

Weigel, a Dene\/M\u00e9tis writer writes within and between treaty documents, land scrip records and his grandmother\u2019s enfranchisement file in order to fulfill this purpose: \u201cThis book began as thoughts on treaty and my obligations to the land in this time. But it spiraled outward into a journey of understanding of all my relations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Nox<\/i><\/a> by Anne Carson<\/strong><\/p>\n

A unique elegy: fragments, poems, family photos, torn letters, and stamps, accordion out from a box that\u2019s meant to hold Carson\u2019s grief for her late brother. Anyone who\u2019s grieved knows these boxes. I relate so deeply to the process of going through <\/i>the printed matter of a loved one. It\u2019s very cool that Carson manifests this.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals<\/i><\/a> by Saidiya Hartman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hartman turns to the case files, court records, and photographs used to surveil and criminalize Black women in early-twentieth-century Philadelphia and New York and then writes against those records’ intentions. Through what she calls “critical fabulation,” she imagines these women’s interior lives in vivid, speculative detail, powerfully refusing the flattening logic of the archive that recorded them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Zong!<\/i><\/a> by M. NourbeSe Philip<\/strong><\/p>\n

Philip’s book length poem is a tremendous feat. Built entirely from the language of Gregson v. Gilbert<\/i>, a one-page legal document from a 1783 case that dryly records the tossing over of cargo for insurance money, the \u201ccargo\u201d is human people, enslaved Africans who were murdered. She fractures and scatters the document’s legal language across the page in an act of art and prayer, nothing less than an ancestral evocation. I couldn\u2019t recommend more highly attending a reading of Zong!<\/em> with M. NourbeSe Philip if ever possible.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bough Down<\/i><\/a> by Karen Green<\/strong><\/p>\n

Written after the death of her husband, David Foster Wallace, by self-completed death, Green’s book moves in short prose-poem fragments interspersed with collage, piecing together grief in real time rather than narrating it after the fact. It’s an intimate, unsparing record of the ordinary and unbearable details that follow a sudden loss, pill bottles, static, half-finished sentences, are assembled the way memory actually works.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field<\/i><\/a> by Billy Ray Belcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

Belcourt’s poems catalog the strategies, irony, sex, tenderness, theory, humor, that make survival possible under ongoing settler colonial violence. The collection reads like a living archive of what it takes to keep a queer Indigenous life liveable, refusing both despair and easy resolution.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems<\/i><\/a> by Robin Coste Lewis<\/strong><\/p>\n

The collection’s centerpiece, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” is a found poem stitched entirely from the titles, catalog entries, and museum descriptions of Western artworks in which a Black female figure is marked present, spanning tens of thousands of years of art history. Lewis upends the language of representation collected from the cataloging of the Black body, and refuses to land or hold down what it surfaces.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Mausoleum of Lovers<\/i><\/a> by Herv\u00e9 Guibert<\/strong><\/p>\n

Drawn from over twenty years of Guibert’s private diaries, this book moves through desire, friendship, illness, and mortality with startling candor, written with no thought of eventual publication. Its fragmentary, undated entries resist the shaping hand of memoir, offering instead something more raw: a private archive of a life, left open for the reader to enter uninvited.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

O Mother<\/a> by Emerson Whitney is available from McSweeney’s.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Genre-bending books\u00a0 have greatly influenced my own work. I\u2019ve written about my mother\u2019s self completed death in a new memoir called O Mother, out with McSweeney’s on September 1. In it, I used the diagnostic material about my mom I\u2019d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32154,"featured_media":276858,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[43069,6,43070,43135],"tags":[9217,58158,112231,55462,112232,94509,70083,407,112233,38755,112228,338,4832,49547,112234,112230,112229,99030],"class_list":["post-276799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-craftandcriticism","category-features","category-literary-criticism","category-readinglists","tag-anne-carson","tag-billy-ray-belcourt","tag-bough-down","tag-emerson-whitney","tag-karen-green","tag-m-nourbese-philip","tag-matthew-james-weigel","tag-mcsweeneys","tag-ndn-coping-mechanisms-notes-from-the-field","tag-nox","tag-o-mother","tag-reading-list","tag-robin-coste-lewis","tag-saidiya-hartman","tag-voyage-of-the-sable-venus-and-other-poems","tag-wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-intimate-histories-of-riotous-black-girls-troublesome-women-and-queer-radicals","tag-whitemud-walking","tag-zong","story-type-reading-lists"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a0v","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/box-1.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32154"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276858"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276957,"date":"2026-09-21T05:05:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:05:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276957"},"modified":"2026-09-16T11:14:40","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T15:14:40","slug":"teaching-speech-a-poem-by-laura-kolbe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/teaching-speech-a-poem-by-laura-kolbe\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cTeaching Speech,\u201d a Poem by Laura Kolbe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Saying yes to no and yes to yes to
\nthe baby boy so many times a day
\nit\u2019s like a people\u2019s protest chant gone non-
\nelectric harboring a claim belonged
\nto everyone who cares, we care, we crawl
\noutside and spy more life to point and yes
\nat with a name. What do you call the fence
\naround\u00a0a tree? Who is the life you seek
\nwhen indexing the noon moon\u2019s matte navel,
\ngray and nervous, and tell her wait for night?
\nTo mother is a power ever to be
\nrepeating, peat-cut to provide a weight
\nof burnable goods by eons replaced,
\na turf, a moniker, another yes.<\/p>\n

____________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

From<\/em> The Decadent Movement<\/a> by Laura Kolbe. Copyright \u00a9 2026. Available from University of Pittsburgh Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saying yes to no and yes to yes to the baby boy so many times a day it\u2019s like a people\u2019s protest chant gone non- electric harboring a claim belonged to everyone who cares, we care, we crawl outside and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32178,"featured_media":277137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,43074,43077],"tags":[16860,17544,212,112266,112265,4328],"class_list":["post-276957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-fictionandpoetry","category-poem","tag-laura-kolbe","tag-poem","tag-poetry","tag-teaching-speech","tag-the-decadent-movement","tag-university-of-pittsburgh-press","story-type-poem"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-1a33","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/daytime-moon.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276957","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32178"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276957"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276957\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276957"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276957"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276957"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":276017,"date":"2026-09-21T04:47:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T08:47:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=276017"},"modified":"2026-09-20T06:47:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T10:47:56","slug":"the-newer-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/the-newer-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The Newer World"},"content":{"rendered":"

My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was an awkward suit in West Tennessee. His own father was a man called Germain Bouguereau that spoke French and owned a big sugarcane farm ten miles out from New Orleans, and his mother was a woman from Madagascar but her name has long fallen away. I remember my mother talking about her though, when we were little, not that she could have known a thing about her. It was all just pretty legend. If Germain asked a by-your-leave of my grandmother then I\u2019m a Frenchman too.<\/p>\n

He had a sort of is-he-isn\u2019t-he look to him, my father. But he was charming as all get-out, and lots of folk loved him. My mother said old man Bouguereau had let <\/em>him go. But who knows? Maybe that was just part of his story, when he sneaked up to Tennessee. Germain Bouguereau never sent a hunter or set a notice so maybe it was so.<\/p>\n

He had a long shining face, my mother said. And he was fortunate in his trade as a blacksmith, fixing ploughs and wheels and shoeing horses, that he had learned as a trusted Creole man.<\/p>\n

He had found himself able to earn decent money in Louisiana \u2013 and, having made his dangerous move, in Tennessee.<\/p>\n

The reason he felt bound to make that journey he never made clear. Stupid folk that didn\u2019t know said he was too handsome for Louisiana and too clever. He wasn\u2019t long suiting himself out to be a king on Sundays, and he had an open laughing manner which was why people took to him and the patrollers let him be for the most part. No man was free to a patroller. And West Tennessee was not big on the notion of free in general. There was no going into the town of Paris just as he liked. He\u2019d be whipped and worse if he tried that, just like today. He had to have a bona fide docket from someone, saying he needed iron or whatever. He made nails and horseshoes with his furnace and his blacksmith\u2019s anvil. He brought that anvil all the way up the country, pulling a little wheeled cart behind him \u2013 no Mississippi river for him. That took four weeks. He settled in a shack at the edge of the Littlefair place, because of his obvious usefulness to them. He brought the bounty of his skill everywhere.<\/p>\n

That was the legend of my pa.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

By his own account, he happened on my mother one day. Love loves an accidental sighting, and that was how it was with him. He knew no better than to fall for her. I believe in her extreme youth she was the best-looking girl in Paris. Small, shaped nicely, and with a sweet, trusting nature. She told me this, and I can believe it. My father set eyes on her and the die was cast. Alea<\/em>iacta est<\/em>, as Caesar said. She was walking between the fields and the house, with a red kerchief at her waist full of biscuit. It wasn\u2019t his fault that he put down his sack of tools and politely enquired who she was. She told him. Well. But what could he do? He was smitten. She was a house-girl on the Littlefair place, which was a big enterprise of tobacco, and also honeybees, and acres and acres of wheat, and often had urgent cause to call a blacksmith. That\u2019s why he had situated himself there, we may suppose. He was a free person but he knew what it was to be her. Louisiana had slaves too, plenty. And every day that summer he made it his business to walk her way, and in the great enthusiasm of love he won her heart. Not that she had two free minutes in a day to have it won, but he managed to cram in the courtship. And although he was in a poor position to seek her hand, he was that sort of man \u2013 he went down to see Colonel Littlefair. And he went in as bold as anyone ever did that task. The big old house with its wide wooden floors, and the clattering sound that his hobnail boots made, didn\u2019t daunt him. There were old leather books everywhere that the colonel\u2019s father must have bought to give it a bit of a face. Sticks of gleaming furniture. Chandeliers with their trapped bits of sunlight.<\/p>\n

He had taken care to don his best shoes and trimmest trousers.<\/p>\n

And he went in to Littlefair, who was stretched nearly flat in a big leather chair, because of his stiff high boots, and his round stomach, and asked for my mother, who was only eighteen years old and had great value.<\/p>\n

\u2018Well, Colonel,\u2019 he said, \u2018my name is Chas Bouguereau and you may know me from my little house at the border of the trees.<\/p>\n

And I have done a devil of a lot of work for you and I am in love with Cissy, your number-two house-girl, I believe that is the case, and I wonder will you part with her?\u2019<\/p>\n

There may have been a lot more talk before it got to this point but I\u2019m packing it a bit tighter.<\/p>\n

\u2018I will,\u2019 said the colonel, who, if he was powerful, which he was, was also very small in stature, the Littlefairs being nearly dwarves, some of the men, \u2018if you pay me one thousand dollars.\u2019 At this he shifted in the old chair, making it creak. Or maybe it was the colonel himself creaked.<\/p>\n

\u2018Hmm, that\u2019s a tidy sum of money,\u2019 said my father. His name was really Charles, but Chas did him fine.<\/p>\n

\u2018It has not escaped my notice,\u2019 said the colonel, with a horrible wink, \u2018that she\u2019s been bred, so I could charge you for the child, but I won\u2019t do that, as I am in God\u2019s truth a fair man.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018Heavens, mercy,\u2019 said my father, blushing rose red. And true enough, one fine day earlier in the summer, when the heat had sat on everything, my father had lain down in the farthest meadow with my beautiful mother and there were no prizes for guessing the result. Which was part of my father\u2019s anxiety to marry her. So the colonel would have been charging him for his own child. Or children. My mother used to say the old colonel was a romantic sort of man and owned many lovelorn paintings, and was a follower of the poet Tennyson with his weepy poems, and that was why he made an effort to help \u2013 a very small effort, it was true. The colonel was also known to be a murderer.<\/p>\n

There was also the fact that he was probably my mother\u2019s father.<\/p>\n

\u2018Could I work it off in blacksmithing, how would that strike you?\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I think,\u2019 said the colonel, \u2018ready bills will meet the day.\u2019<\/p>\n

My father didn\u2019t even see Cecilia Littlefair in all this. She was deep in her duties somewhere in the old house. He went off then. He was trying to see how he could get a hold of a thousand dollars, considering that was about seven years\u2019 wages or more.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

At this time of course my father was well known where he was living, so he took the precaution of going some hundred miles west of Paris, making his way tree by tree through the thick forest, keeping clear of bears, and found a quiet little bank there, wherever it was, I forget the name of the town. One of those little cities that made whiskey. I can see him in my mind\u2019s eye stepping out from the trees. With his best trousers and his hardened blacksmith\u2019s look.<\/p>\n

He went in with a short gun, a bit bigger than a se\u00f1orita gun \u2013 he just walked in. It might have been better to have a bigger plan than that. And a bigger gun. There was a clerk there, as he described it to my mother later, with a cloud of white hair, and beside him was a young coloured girl who cleaned the bank-notes. In farming country banknotes would get very dirty.<\/p>\n

My father levelled the little gun at the clerk and asked for money. He must have said it very nicely because for some reason the clerk wasn\u2019t too alarmed.<\/p>\n

\u2018We don\u2019t get many coloured bank robbers in here,\u2019 he said. \u2018In fact, I don\u2019t believe we ever had even one, do you say so, Maisie?\u2019<\/p>\n

Maisie was the girl that washed the notes. She said nothing.<\/p>\n

She wasn\u2019t so relaxed about the gun, maybe.<\/p>\n

\u2018Anyhow,\u2019 said the clerk, \u2018we don\u2019t have much money here most times and all the distillery wages have gone out last evening and we don\u2019t hold gold or notes.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018I only need one thousand dollars,\u2019 my father said in his most reasonable tone.<\/p>\n

\u2018One thousand dollars,\u2019 said the teller. \u2018That\u2019s a proper fortune. And we don\u2019t have it anyhow.\u2019 Then he jutted out his chin and scratched at it with his left hand. \u2018Oh, but that\u2019s a very precise amount. How come you need just that?\u2019 His head was cocked sideways with interest.<\/p>\n

\u2018I could tell you,\u2019 said my father, in his version of all this, just before he died, \u2018but it wouldn\u2019t advance your understanding.\u2019<\/p>\n

I suppose he couldn\u2019t just say: I need it to buy a wife I have my hopes set on. Because then he\u2019d be drawn into the complicated details.<\/p>\n

Then two beardy boys came in from the sheriff \u2019s office next door and my father was wise enough not to shoot anyone and they took him roughly and locked him in the jail. I believe they broke his jaw. When the visiting time for the assizes judge came round he tried my father, bruises and all, and they were going to send him east to Nashville to hold him in the big prison there, but a bunch of the townspeople broke in and wanted to serve justice on my father as they saw fit. This didn\u2019t disturb the judge much either. Sometime in the two nervous days he was in the cell, Maisie, the little note-washer girl, who had heard the full affecting story, and of course was a coloured girl herself, went and got my mother. My mother was already big in the stomach even though she wasn\u2019t far along \u2013 which was the first inkling it might be twins. Which is to say, myself and Rosalee my sister, who are therefore both in this story, if inside the skin of our mother.<\/p>\n

The judge was kind enough to give them a blessing of sorts which my mother always termed as a proper marriage, but how could it have been? Though she could be very persuasive, that was true. That\u2019s certainly my memory of her. And then, having sort of married them, but likely not, he turned my father back over to the townspeople and they hung him off a black-nut tree.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

From <\/em>The Newer World<\/a>\u00a0by Sebastian Barry, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright \u00a9 2026 by Sebastian Barry<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My father Chas Bouguereau upped sticks some sixty years ago and left Louisiana and settled himself in Paris, a small town in Tennessee. It was 1840. A wiser man would have pushed on to the Ohio. A free skin was<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":63,"featured_media":276018,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25508,3,43074,43076,26764],"tags":[23633,111895],"class_list":["post-276017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-daily-fiction","category-excerpts","category-fictionandpoetry","category-from-the-novel","category-novels","tag-sebastian-barry","tag-the-newer-world","story-type-daily-fiction"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5rKFr-19NT","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/9780593654613.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/63"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276017\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/276018"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":277257,"date":"2026-09-19T06:30:59","date_gmt":"2026-09-19T10:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/?p=277257"},"modified":"2026-09-18T13:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-18T17:14:08","slug":"lit-hub-weekly-september-14-18-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lithub.com\/lit-hub-weekly-september-14-18-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Lit Hub Weekly: September 14 – 18, 2026"},"content":{"rendered":" TODAY: In 1956, The First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists meets at the Sorbonne in Paris; organized by the publishing house Pr\u00e9sence africaine<\/i>, the Congress features speakers Richard Wright, L\u00e9opold Senghor, Aim\u00e9 C\u00e9saire, and Frantz Fanon. <\/span>\n