Hi! Last week, we shared the cover for TV SUMMER: GIRLHOOD, which you can check out on our IG, if you missed it. We’re entering production now, with the issue itself slated to ship the first half of August, which will coincide with online publication. From then on, we’ll be in crunch mode for fall/winter. Lots of TV promo coming in the next six months, but also, lots of great work.
On deck, we’ve got 4-5 essays, three short stories, three poems, and maybe a brand new Q&A, as well as book reviews. Pre-orders (discounted to $10!) will run through most of July, so make sure to get yours early! This biz plan, as ever, is to sell enough of these so that, in combination with Substack subscriptions, we can keep the website live and keep paying our writers. And we like doing that!
This week, I’m sharing a small review of Alan Murrin’s THE COAST ROAD, which was lovely and Irish and 90’s and, if you’re a Derry Girls fan, probably right up your alley.
If you’re thinking about submitting to TV:FALL or TV:WINTER, hold tight, because theme announcements are coming very soon.
Some essay recs:
Aside from Talk Vomit and my own writing, I’m starting to work on updating/developing syllabi for the writing classes I’m teaching in the fall. This coming semester, I’m teaching fiction, nonfiction, and freshman comp to undergrads, and I thought I’d share three non-recent pieces on my radar this week:
Essay - ‘Push Play’ by Chris Dennis for Guernica, published in 2020 | This one’s a reflection on childhood origin stories, as well as the desire/disinterest/harm in trying to balance one’s interests (and sexuality) with wanting to fit in
Essay - ‘Let’s Talk About Shredded Romain Lettuce’ by Wendy Rawlings for Places, published in 2014 | This piece is cheeky in tone but heavy in content. The author toggles between a child sick with gastro problems and the dehumanizing & dangerous environments produce pickers and iPad manufacturers work in (the child is ostensibly sick from eating contaminated food and relying on her tablet to get her through her illness).
Essay - ‘Joy’ by Zadie Smith for The New York Review of Books, published in 2013 | This reminds me of Jia Tolentino’s essay about ecstasy, except shorter and more concerned with the difference between pleasure and joy. Favorite quote: “Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily.”
For our writers: All of these pieces, by the way, are the kinds of essays I would jump at in our submission pile. ‘Push Play’ is a particularly great example of a narrative essay that connects the writer’s life to a wider socio-cultural context without relying on tropes or pandering.
If you like these recs, I’m happy to continue sharing them as I build out and refine my syllabi. It’s hard to dig through literary magazines when there are so, so many of us floating around! Thanks, as always, for supporting us. Let’s talk a little bit more about that Irish novel I mentioned earlier.
xoxo
Monica
When I first began reading The Coast Road by Alan Murrin, I thought the descriptions of dulcet, desperate motherhood were seducing me. A woman who just wants to see her sons! A woman balancing parenting differences with her husband! But the further I read, the more I understood this small-town Irish drama was subtly outlining a feeling even more full of familiarity and fear than motherhood: claustrophobia. One could very well argue these labels are different names for the same thing, or at least, for parenting as an antecedent, because what’s more binding than being trapped inside one’s love and the responsibilities that come out of it?
Published in the U.S. on June 4, The Coast Road follows two women in a small community immediately before Ireland legalized divorce in 1995. One woman, Colette, a poet, has returned head-hung to town after having left her husband and three sons; the other, curious Izzy, is in an unhappy marriage with an elected member of government. The two strike up an unexpected friendship: one carries the stigma of having left her family, the other wants to leave hers.
Although the chatty, occasionally eccentric townsfolk want to litigate the moral rectitude of Colette’s departure and subsequent return to grovel for access to her children, the story isn’t so much about passing judgment as it is about what happens to people — women — placed in impossible situations. It asks: how does one survive with her hands tied behind her back?
For Colette, some of this survival is literal — how safe is the rented winter cottage owned by a leering serial adulterer? In other ways, it’s more existential — what is a mother who isn’t allowed to see her children?
Neither Colette nor Izzy can be with their husbands, yet neither one can legally leave. What becomes of them is the novel’s heartbeat.
It’s heavy subject matter, but Murrin offers relief through a deep sense of atmosphere (darkly lit pubs, an ocean reverberating in the background, woodfires in seaside cottages) and also through a shifting POV that brings everyone from the landlord’s wronged wife to the local parish priest in on the conversation. This book was comp’d to Big Little Lies and it’s easy, just a few pages in, to see why.