The wonderful Zeg Storytelling Festival in Tbilisi has already become the highlight of my summer for many reasons: I met an incredible and diverse group of people, ate delicious food, discovered Georgian wine, learned and absorbed at a pace that I’m still recovering from. Finally, I remembered the reason I fell in love with journalism: it helps me get out of my head and grow in the company of interesting people.
What felt different this time, post my two-year hiatus from reporting and long immersion in design, illustration and movement, was that I could be excited without the feeling I associated most with my life as a reporter —
of being a hamster on a wheel.
Like many, many reporters and friends have discovered in recent years, that feeling inevitably leads to burnout. At Zeg, I was also reminded of what burnout and my subsequent hiatus from journalism taught me: to engage deeply with the world, learn to switch off. I love people and stories, I find new ways of seeing through conversation. I also need time alone. Without silence, I lose my center.
More notes on Zeg, plus some excellent recommendations on what to read here. As of this month, I will be writing, editing and doing design things for the very cool Coda Story, and if you like you can read more from them here.
This week I (finally) watched Priscilla, a film I was curious about because I have enjoyed Sofia Ford Coppola’s films in the past, and because the film promised to explore the power dynamic between Elvis and his longtime partner, whom he met when she was fourteen (Elvis was 24 at the time). But apart from highlighting this difference visually (Jacob Elordi as Elvis towers over his co-star Cailee Spaeny), the film did little to make either character believable as a multi-dimensional human being. Priscilla obeys Elvis when he asks her to come meet him, to take drugs, to leave her parents’ home and live with him in Graceland — but why does she really do any of it? What does he mean to her, apart from being a famous dude on the radio? Why does she stay, even though life grows ever-bleaker in his golden cage? Why, for that matter, do her parents agree to let their teenage daughter go live with a random celebrity? I hoped Coppola would show us Elvis and the world as seen through the eyes of a teenager – i.e. filled with heightened emotion, intense love, a longing for freedom riven with self-doubt, the stuff of being fourteen, basically. Sadly, the film offered nothing.
I did find a deeply satisfying heroine in C.E. McGill’s debut book, Our Hideous Progeny. A modern sequel to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the book’s protagonist Mary is the niece of Victor Frankenstein, who spends her days as a scientific illustrator and as the wife of a mediocre thinker. Desperate to be taken seriously by the scientific community, Mary finds her uncle’s research notes on making the Creature, and sets out to make one of her own. I will not say more except if you enjoyed Madeline Miller’s Circe, you are likely to enjoy this story about love, daring and queerness.
Wherever you are, I hope you have fun at the party and even more fun when you’re spending time by yourself.
Nish
I just posted on Instagram a couple of days ago about how much I loved Circe, and Claire North's Ithaca, and want more retellings. Wishlisting Our Hideous Progeny!