You are about to read the thirteenth edition of Close Reading, a dispatch of literary obsessions, published by Woolgather. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”. It’s like internet bookmarking, IRL. This edition is by Neha Kale, a writer of criticism, journalism, and other non-fiction.
Neha Kale is a widely-published writer whose work on art, culture and society has appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald, ArtReview, Vogue, The Guardian, Griffith Review and BBC, among many others. Her first book, Foreign Return: On Art and Inhabitation, a work of literary nonfiction blending memoir and art criticism, is published by NewSouth Books.
Kale is editor-at-large at Art Guide Australia and previously edited VAULT magazine from 2015 to 2018. Her reporting for The Guardian’s Broken Justice series received a mid-year Walkley nomination, and she has received a Faber Scholarship for Creative Nonfiction and residencies at Bundanon and Varuna.
She was born in Mumbai, grew up in Perth/Boorloo, and lives and works on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney.
In this edition, Neha shares words of purpose, meaning, humanity, and gardening.
Illustration by Lachlan Conn
One Word …
Dignity
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the word dignity. It’s a strange, old-fashioned kind of word, that doesn’t really seem to have much of a place in contemporary life. But I’m increasingly interested as a writer and as a person in what that word means–a sense of inherent worth that you don’t have to earn, that belongs to you just because you are human. I feel like writing and reading are magical acts that respect the landscapes of the self, our inner life, our dreams and feelings in a world that is constantly trying to erode or extract or reduce them. We are shaped by forces, I think, that tell us that our interiority is made up of data, that we are first and always consumers. I hope to write in a way that preserves and recognises my dignity, and the readers’ too.
One Quote …
from James Baldwin
There are quotes by writers that I love that are imprinted in my memory. There’s the obvious: “We tell ourselves stories to live” by Joan Didion, often misinterpreted as a tribute to storytelling, when it evokes the delusions we need to sustain ourselves. But when I was writing my first book Foreign Return, I turned to James Baldwin, who shares with Didion, the kind of incantatory syntax and rhythm that you can never unhear.
Baldwin wrote, in 1962, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.” During these last years of writing, I memorised this line, scribbled it down in my notebook. I’ve always been drawn to art and writing that is animated by a sense of searching, where there is a sense that the artist or writer is grappling with the unknown, with their most intensely private questions and desires rather than arriving at a conclusion fully formed. If there’s a better quote for this age of certainty, I’m yet to hear it.
One Poem …
Dead Stars
I hate the idea of literature as something rarefied. I think that anything and everything is worthy of writing, reveals something if we look at it closely enough. Lately, on deadline, I walk around our neighbourhood, past a ramshackle house with so many kittens napping in the driveway. There’s a lady that feeds pigeons across from the 7/11 and I think about what brought her to her balcony. I’m obsessed with the notion that the ordinary can be transcendent, that we are all so lucky to be here. Since I was introduced it in a workshop run by the wonderful writer Sarah Sentilles, I have become obsessed with a poem by Ada Limón from her 2018 book The carrying called Dead Stars.
There are so many lines I adore in this poem: Look, we are not unspectacular things/We’ve come this far, survived this much.
And: What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain for the safety of others, for earth
But my favourite is:
We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
the trash, the rolling containers/ a song of suburban thunder.
I hear it on repeat in my head when I’m going about my day, doing something mundane, caught up in the muck of living. It reminds me not to focus so much on myself, on my small little life, but to look up and outwards.
One Book …
Lucy by the Sea
I never thought I would be an Elizabeth Strout fan, somehow put off by her books’ covers and marketing. But I have been delighted and absorbed by her novel about a divorced couple that relocate during the pandemic to coastal Maine, called Lucy by the Sea. There’s something about the plainspoken nature of her observations, the clarity of her language, her ability to convey the ache of psychic distance from the people you love that is so clear and precise I almost forget that I am reading. It’s the kind of experience I’ve craved from books since I was a child, that I’m happy to report is just as good.
One Other Thing …
Growing herbs from seed
So much about writing for me is about honing a certain patience and quality of attention, about tending to something over the months and years and for the first time in my life, I’ve been able to grow herbs in my balcony garden from seed. There’s something that I really enjoy about watering in the evening and checking the soil each morning. Often nothing is happening. But then, a day later, you notice movement in the dirt, and then tiny sprigs of mint or sage or parsley and although there is no dopamine involved, it feels so rewarding.
💙
Apples, Eden- can the good fruit fall further from the tree? I believe it can with loving attention and rewards for life