Welcome to Saturday Mournings: a new weekly series I am offering to my paying subscribers. Delivered to inboxes every Saturday morning, this series will explore memory and loss through personal essay and memoir—topics and forms that are not new for this newsletter, but will have a more expansive focus. In other words, I will seldom be writing about the grief that I feel for my mother, but will instead be focusing on the myriad ways a person can lose something. Or miss something. Or experience countless little deaths as a consequence of being alive.
Before the essay, a little foreword:
When I first decided to relaunch this newsletter, I did so because I had become fatigued by my own writing practice—that for nearly a decade, I had written almost exclusively about my mother as a form of bereavement—and that it had left me feeling emptied and uninspired. It wasn’t so much that I found myself with nothing to write about (grief is a lifelong journey, etc), but that the personal bereavement narratives that I had been so focused on no longer represented what I was most interested in writing about. If you read my first Process Diary, then you know how important I find my previous work to be, but after ten years of doing so, I was ready for a pivot, and Dog-Eared—with its focus on literature and philosophy—was my solution. However, I realized that I am of two minds—that I enjoy writing research papers as much as I do creative pieces—but my desire to shift from grief narratives to more academic ones inadvertently took from me my first true love: the personal essay.
In relaunching Dog-Eared, I didn’t intend to completely abandon my usual writing style, but I found it difficult to write in a way that seamlessly weaved together Research Brain and Creative Brain. And while this is most certainly possible (every successful writer must research for their writing), I realized that what I needed most was to practice! I am excited by the prospect of tapping into various narrative styles to convey various styles of narratives. And part of this practice will be to write every single day, without pause, so I can establish what this new voice will be. How I see Dog-Eared facilitating this work is simple:
Every other Sunday: Free newsletter that discusses a major theme related to memory, loss, grief, and metaphysics with research/literature being the main focus. Think The New York Review of Books or The Yale Review.
Every Saturday: Paywalled personal essays that deal with memory, loss, grief, and metaphysics. They will be about my life, which is why they are paywalled—the intention being that paid subscriptions allow me to work on my book and my writing while also sharing my more vulnerable pieces with supportive readers.
Every Wednesday: A free reading recommendation for everyone followed by a paywalled Process Diary for paying subscribers. Process Diaries will be craft-focused and will primarily offer those who are interested a glimpse into how I hone and practice my skills, particularly as they relate to my book, but also in how I develop these skills by studying other practiced writers.
I look forward to keeping up with this new schedule, and if you haven’t already upgraded your subscripton, you can do so below. Thank you for your support—you can’t imagine how much it means to me that I can now call myself a working writer. Being able to sit at my desk, draft a schedule, and write every day is a gift, and I hope to continue doing so forever. Anyway, here is this week’s first Saturday Mourning, “Some Things You Never Forget,” which free subscribers can read most of below as a little taste for what’s to come:
Saturday Mourning: Some Things You Never Forget
Nine years ago, in a bookstore somewhere in California, I picked up a semi-autobiographical picture novella about a man’s obsessive search for the work of a forgotten cartoon artist. The writer, Seth, was looking for the artist, Kalo, in what would become a two-year hunt to find out anything—if anything even existed—about a bygone era of cartooning and illustration. He drove from town to town all across Canada, where he met new lovers and old friends, and hoped that by the end of it, he might understand a little more about himself, too.
At the time, my brother and I were driving down US 101 from Seattle to Las Vegas on our first vacation together—a road trip we later dubbed as “The Klein Sibling Bonding Road Trip”—as it had an unintended, but unwavering rule: no parents. Part of this was practical. My brother, who was eight years older at twenty-six, had extended an olive branch while I was away at college—offering up his tax return as penance for not remembering my age (a joke) and hoping that a trip might bring us closer together. Had our father joined us, my brother and I would have likely taken to our usual posts as young sister/older brother, and any genuine bonding would have taken a back seat so as to maintain a healthy amount of peace.
But the other more cynical and perhaps too on-the-nose part of our “no parents” rule for our road trip was that our mother had died the year before—making “no parents” a somewhat self-deprecating jab at our circumstances. If we had gone from Seattle to Las Vegas as a family of three, it might have made all of us lean further into sentimentality than we were comfortable with, and what I wanted—and what I can only imagine what my brother wanted, too—was to define for ourselves what it meant to love one another even when neither of our parents could be with us. And because I was so much younger, it would take ten years for either Matthew or I to be at a place where we could talk about it, truly and genuinely, without needing to rely on sarcasm or making “she would hate this” jokes whenever we were somewhere beautiful, but buggy and outside—two things she actually really did hate. Having a sibling doesn’t necessarily mean instantaneous comradery, which is even more true in the event of a family tragedy, but my brother and I wanted to make it work in our own way. Memories arrive at their own pace, and the pace my brother and I were going at the time was 85mph down the Pacific Coast Highway—the ocean like a never-ending slab of lapis just outside our window—with no real goal except to keep going.
So that is why, in a bookstore somewhere in California, I picked up Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. The title felt prophetic, and what I would later find out was that The Klein Sibling Bonding Road Trip was a trip not entirely suitable for the weak. Seven days, two dozen Voodoo doughnuts, an overnight stay in the Hooters Casino Bar & Hotel, three Denny’s Grand Slam breakfasts, and one viewing of Mad Max: Fury Road —these were just a few of the landmark events that peppered our weeklong vacation. Matthew even once, in his attempt to teach me the ways of gambling, fed a chili-themed slot machine a few dollars (“It’s important to find a slot machine that speaks to you”) only to lose and then lose again. We did things like drive to San Francisco just to see the Full House house and walk around Los Angeles just to spend a lot of money in comic book stores and on overly priced coffees. The whole trip was scored by a soundtrack of pop-punk, hip-hop, and the occasional podcast, and we stopped for gas only three times—having made the mature decision to rent a Prius hatchback from the Seattle Avis and not the canary yellow Hummer SUV we thought would be funnier. It wasn’t so much that we were avoiding talking about Mom, but choosing instead to live in the space that formed around it.
“The thing is, you never know what tiny event might become a potent memory, lingering in your mind, taking on more and more significance with each passing year.”—Seth
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Dog-Eared by Rachel Joan Klein to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.