Welcome to Navel Gazing

a place for nonfiction of all sorts

Hello lovely subscribers/friends/excellent humans! I am currently hard at work on my book revisions, so you won’t be seeing too much from me until the new year, but I wanted to pop in and share some upcoming changes to this newsletter (they’re good, I promise).

A NEW NAME AND A REFINED PURPOSE

Since this newsletter’s inception, I’ve changed its name several times (I’ve also changed MY name a couple times, but that’s another story for another day). From Gathering to Hermitage to The Writer to Socially Awkward to Assembling Remnants…none of these names have felt like they fully fit the newsletter. I think this is partially because this newsletter covers a lot of ground— cultural criticism, personal essays, film, and literature (to name a few subjects).

When I changed my newsletter’s name to Assembling Remnants my intention was to make this space more academic: to focus primarily on archives and literature. But I kept writing personal essays! And I kept noticing that my readers (you!) responded more to my personal essays than to anything else I wrote, and that when I wrote about other things, my writing always retained an element of the personal perspective. Although I am technically an academic, I come from a working class background (and continue to have a working class income). Since I began writing as a child, I’ve always written in ways that translate the world through my own personal lens. I am not an academic writer, and I am not fully embedded into the academy, nor will I ever be. Over time I’ve learned that I will never be fully invested in a singular culture or criterion. It’s not my nature.

So, in thinking of a name, I began to ponder how personal essays and memoir have historically been culturally received. I thought about how memoir and personal writing by queer folks, women, and trans folks has often been coded as frivolous, self-centered, or superficial. Even autofiction gets more cultural applause when it’s written by straight white men.

It’s taken me a long time to accept that personal writing is a valuable pursuit.

I’ve learned that, in writing about myself, what I’ve been through and what I’m struggling with, and interpreting the world through my particular perspective, I’m able to more authentically connect to others.

My favorite writers and writing always employ elements of memoir— along with a philosophical bent that can be read as confessional while defying the categorization of “confessional” by employing a radical acceptance of one’s experience; an embedded assertion that one’s experiences are worthy enough to be written about.

I started to think about how so many voices have been sidelined and silenced by the larger literary establishment with one particular phrase: navel gazing. The implication has been that writing too much about the self is somehow selfish. If one wants to be a Serious Writer, one must look beyond one’s own perspective.

But, in my opinion, objectivity is, well, a farce. No human being can be completely objective, and any writing claiming absolute objectivity is inevitably artificial.

I have often felt that my primary aim as a human is intertwined with my aims as a writer: I want the truth. I want to be ruthlessly honest with myself as a human and with my readers as a writer. I want to accept myself fully as I am in any moment while also working to unearth and expose the ways I’ve learned to survive, in order to find new ways to trust myself and the world. As a writer, this means trusting that my readers will find me, and join me on my journey. As a writer, this means that who I am on the page is no different than who I am. Period. No performance. Only self-investigation.

For me, literature of all kinds is a means of self-exploration. In reading widely I can understand the worlds of others. How they perceive themselves and are perceived, and the inevitable gap that exists between self-perception and cultural perception. I imagine the expansion of our worlds and selves. I gravitate towards writers who want something better for themselves and the world. I think there’s incredible power in voicing our experiences; whether we’re writers or not. When we fully understand and accept ourselves, we’re capable of creating new paradigms.

Writing about the self is not navel gazing. Writing about the self inevitably leads us to reflect on the discrepancies between who the world says we are and who we really are. To me, that’s revolutionary.

But.

I really love the term navel gazing.

In the spirit of flipping cultural meaning on its head, I’ve decided to name this newsletter navel gazing.

I make this decision with both my middle fingers up, a big F U to a culture that has shamed me and many other writers and artists away from telling our stories.

Yep, that’s the new logo I’ve created for navel gazing, which is what this newsletter will be called starting on January 1, 2024!

I invite you, readers and writers and wonderful humans, into this space with my arms open, ready to receive your stories as well, because hearing your stories has been an unexpected and profound healing element in sharing my own. By sharing my stories and hearing your reflections, confirmations, as well as feeling your warmth and kindness, I’ve learned that I’m not alone. Not even a little bit alone. None of us are.

I’d love to hear what you think about this name change and what I’ve written here, especially as we wade into a new year while the world seizes with violence and climate disruption.

How do the stories of others help you navigate the world? How do you perceive personal writing? And what would you love to see more of here? Tell me in the comments.

My intention is to engage with more film, literature, and nature in this space, and I feel more free to do that because this name change and refining of purpose feels like it can hold everything. I don’t need to be an academic. I can write about everything in a way that has always felt natural to me.

Thank you for being here. I’m excited for what’s possible in this little space.