Hello and welcome to another edition of Substack Reads!
Substack writers use a rich palette of styles to experiment, inspire, tutor, and eulogize. From memoirist Elissa Altman remembering a food blogger immortalized in celluloid, Julie Powell, to the phone-recorded journal entries of New York poet Alex Dimitrov, to British coastal runner Elise Downing sharing a checklist for solo adventurers. Step into November with this great set of writers and their work.
As ever, please share your recommended reads, listens, and chats in the comments section below.
2023 might just be the year Alex Dimitrov becomes a new person, so says the notes he takes on his phone, before lunchtime, when sadness sets in and the banker hasn’t texted and second-guessing starts…
7:00 p.m. So I write this weird thing on the Q train that’s maybe a poem, which is annoying because I’m working on prose and I just really want to stop writing poems, but anyway—I’m going to drinks even though I told myself Mon-Wed no drinking!! This guy is kind of hot. My first Raya date. Is he actually hot, though? I’m only saying that from the photos. We’ve been texting and he thinks I’m super mysterious or something but really I’m kind of bored by his questions. But would hit it. So I go. Duh.
7:48 p.m. I’m like 18 minutes late lol. Oops. I tell him poets are bad with time. Even though time is all I think about. Whatever! He loves it. He is SO good-looking I kind of hate it because he’s hotter than me. But it makes me stay too. He works in banking. Okay! I knew that but like. Yes. I have student loans, baby. I basically put myself through everything, so. A boy’s gotta do what a boy’s gotta do.
9:30 p.m. We change bars. We’re in the West Village. That usually means a guy wants to bang. Just like offering to take you to another bar. But it’s Monday. Omg. I said I wouldn’t drink.
10:00 p.m. Asking me so many questions about being a poet. It’s kind of dull. Even when I’m drunk. Like okay, I know banking is boring but. Can we talk about Sofia Coppola. Or like who hurt you in childhood. Or like, can you buy me this John Elliott sweater I want.
There’s no room for an ego in the outdoors. Knowing when to turn around is one of the most important skills. Sometimes you read about mountaineers calling it mere metres from the summit—but if you’re not certain you can get back safely, you shouldn’t continue.
If I’m doing something on the edge of my ability physically, I like to have an escape route. A few weeks ago I set out to have a go at the Mamores 10, which, as it says on the tin, really, takes in all ten of the Munros in the Mamores range in one loop. It’s a big day out, with 3,500 metres of elevation gain and lots of technical terrain. As we head into autumn, daylight hours are restricted and I wasn’t certain I could get around before it got dark, but I felt okay having a go because I knew that there were several places I could bail early and shorten the route. And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. I thought I could probably get round in time, but I wasn’t certain and ‘probably’ didn’t feel good enough.
It’s November. And apple season. And when Thanksgiving, which could be called PieGiving, is just around the corner, cookbook author and baker Dorie Greenspan is thinking about all-American pies and all-butter piecrusts
For years I made a crust that had both butter and shortening. It was a delicious crust and it had great texture, but sometimes it lost its flutes and sometimes it flopped over in the oven. It took a long time for me to give up the crust, but once I made this all-butter one, I didn’t have room in my heart for any other. As I wrote in Baking with Dorie: This is my pie dough. Period.
Apple pandowdy from Baking with Dorie (Photo by Mark Weinberg)
It’s not only all-butter, it’s pretty much all-purpose. It makes open-faced pies, slab pies, and double-crusted ones. It can even be used for galettes. It’s happy to hold just about any filling. It rolls without fuss—such a big deal! And it’s great for first-time or tentative crusters, for crust scaredy-cats, too: Even if you’ve never made a piecrust before, you can ace this one.
Memoirist Elissa Altman met the writer behind The Julie/Julia Project, who died last week at 49, and reflects on their time together and the movie that came from her popular food blog
Writer Julie Powell at the Julie & Julia premiere in 2009 (photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)
Julie and I first started communicating in 2008, when my beloved cousin Harris Wulfson took his own life; Julie was a year behind Harris at Amherst College and remembered him to me as an otherworldly musician, always with an instrument in his hand. This is what broke the ice of conversation for us: a commonality, a weird sort of safety born of unthinkable loss. We didn’t talk much about Julie & Julia (the blog) at first but did go back and forth a lot about her book based on the blog, later adapted for a movie that she was hugely excited about but ultimately less than thrilled by. I don’t yet know if this is a thing—if it’s par for the course that authors of big, adapted books become disgruntled when they’re not involved as script consultants or screenwriters—but I suppose that it is key to be able to let go of what you can’t control, which is a very hard thing for a creative to do. For any of us to do. I remember telling her that it was in the best creative hands possible, and I still believe it was.
In the second of a two-part special, historical fiction author Allison Epstein digs up the explosive story of Lord Darnley, or a “16th-century dickbiscuit getting his just deserts”
It was 1566, and Lord Darnley and Mary Stuart—co-rulers of Scotland and strong contenders for the country’s Most Unhappy Married Couple—had just welcomed their first and only child. For the first eight months of lil James’s life, Darnley continued being as useless as he had ever been. He whined. He got into fights. He refused to attend his son’s baptism. All kinds of great, A+ father-of-the-year behavior.
There is not a SINGLE PORTRAIT of Darnley in which he does not look like a dick.
But Mary?? Our schemey queen?? Had had enough. And that’s how we segue into the final and most satisfying portion of this story…
Hormones and neurotransmitters are absolutely essential to our existence. Not having any would be as practical as not having a heart. Most people are aware of the four so-called happy hormones: serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, and endorphins, respectively considered the source of pleasure, happiness, love, and that awesome buzz you only get from exercise. There’s over 60 of them, though. Some of them aren’t a laugh. Acetylcholine enables learning and information retention. Without it, you won’t be able to remember how to wipe your bottom, or put a fork in your mouth, or type, for example. Life will get messy with low levels of acetylcholine. Erythropoietin is essential to red blood cell production; low levels cause anaemia.
In reading about Mesoamerica and the Spanish colonial period, writer and historian Geraldo Cadava finds a new perspective for the field of Latino history
[Camilla] Townsend is not a Latino historian, and her book is not Latino history, per se. Yet what she has to say about the Aztecs has important consequences for Mexican American history in particular, but also Latino history overall. It revises the stories we’ve told about Mexican American origins and should reshape how we think and talk about Mexican American and Latino history going forward.
Some of Townsend’s colleagues in the field of colonial Latin American history have denied that the colonial period should even be considered part of Latino history. It’s just too far back in the past, and bears little relation to Latino history today; it’s a foreign world. Yet despite their quibbling, Latinos for more than a century have continued to think of the Spanish colonial period as the beginning of Latino history. As long as this remains true, Latino historians need to be in conversation with, get up to speed with, and ponder how stories about the colonial period make their way into the histories we write about Latinos in later eras.
Do needlepoint, read Flaubert, but be pleased with your life—Mason Currey finds some of the best writer’s block advice from a woman who never overcame it
While researching Daily Rituals: Women at Work, I ran across a touching story about the poet Louise Bogan (that ultimately didn’t make it into the book). Bogan had a dreadful experience of writer’s block: After her book Poems and New Poems appeared in 1941, she didn’t write another poem for seven years. But that didn’t stop her from helping other writers avoid the same fate. In the 1930s, she befriended the younger writer (and New Yorker editor) William Maxwell and became a generous and proactive mentor as he struggled to finish his third novel.
Life’s Toolbox by Marcus Bridgewater: The author of How to Grow: Nurture Your Garden, Nurture Yourself, and CEO and founder Marcus Bridgewater shares “unbelievable” life experiences and what he’s learned from them.
The Flavor Files by Nik Sharma: A molecular biologist turned culinary author and cook, Nik Sharma brings his newsletter from Bulletin to Substack with a refreshed outlook: applying science to cooking for more flavorful meals.
Coming soon
Congratulations to the following writer celebrating offline publication this week:
Substack Reads is a weekly roundup of writing, ideas, art, and audio from the world of Substack. Posts are recommended by staff and readers, and curated and edited from Substack’s U.K. outpost by Hannah Ray.
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I'm terrible at self promotion. I just want to keep writing, but my Substack now has 350 (unpaid) subscribers. I'm encouraged. Here's a humorous piece about an unanticipated COVID effect. https://douglasg.substack.com/p/a-pandemic-close-shave-9a3
Such great recommendations! I love everything Mason Currey writes, and now I've got a few more exciting newsletters to subscribe to.
I'm terrible at self promotion. I just want to keep writing, but my Substack now has 350 (unpaid) subscribers. I'm encouraged. Here's a humorous piece about an unanticipated COVID effect. https://douglasg.substack.com/p/a-pandemic-close-shave-9a3