late summer

I've started to write a general newsletter several times, this summer. Several, meaning more than twice. In the S Tier letters, which double as a creative writing class, I've sketched out a little bit detailing why exactly I've been hanging back. I'm in some strange channel, at the moment, hesitating at the blocks of text I am writing about my own life. Not deleting them, but abandoning them, half built. The method by which I feel the most comfortable communicating lately seems to be videos of my cat with small snippets of text superimposed over them. The act of making posts is a kind of writing, sure, but it's not the real work. It's not the kind of communication I want to be doing, but it soothes some weird need I have to be read, while offering a kind of formal buffer. Low stakes. No risk.

Every time I have sat down to start telling you about my summer, I have stopped myself. I don't know when I became so unsure of how to write: so convinced that the telling of the story of my my life or talking about things that I like is despicable at worst, or cringe at best. I loved doing these newsletters, in spring, and I'm determined to get back to that feeling. This summer has felt like a very defined period in my life: it's been a long time since I could point at a May and say, 'There. I started feeling happier there.' I have travelled a fair amount these last few months, but I am still thinking about those journeys mostly in a quiet kind of way, and I don't think I'm ready to write about them yet. In one unfinished newsletter, I began to detail all the things I didn't take photos of in Japan - the vignettes, or people, or animals, or landscapes that my camera couldn't capture, either out of circumstance or respect. I kept this list in my notes app on my phone, and revisit it often as though it was a photograph in itself. In facing this hesitancy, it's hard not to think about my twenties, and how free-flowing my writing was. How willing I was to talk about my life, my emotional experiences. Somewhere on the way between here and there, this fluency left me. Some of it is that I'm a slow burn: it takes me ages to know how I feel about anything. Some is experience, giving me pause. Either way, I'm working on it! So, all of this goes to say, thank you for being here, and sticking around, and reading, while I'm shaking out some strangeness, while I'm making dispatches from a kind of creative chasm.

This in mind, rather than giving a blow-by-blow portrait of my last few months and the things I've consumed and places I've been, I'd like to start by talking about something consistent I've been doing all summer, between the peaks and the meetings and the e-mails and the flights and the walks with my dog and swims in the sea and episodes of The Bear Season 2.

I mean, it's playing video games. Obviously.

I've written about my longstanding love of The Legend of Zelda across different publications before: both fancy literary journals and video game publications and newspapers. I've had a little cry about it on podcasts. During the huge wave of press and hype for The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom at the start of this summer, I wanted to hop on the train, squeeze a couple of bylines out of the launch, get my two cents in. It felt surreal watching the release get covered with absolute enthusiasm and sincerity in May by the New Yorker, and the New York Times - a tipping point, perhaps, in how video games are recieved as cultural text, or cultural moment, beyond just being toys. This toy-text duality is something I think about a lot: as I sit on the couch in a little ball guiding Link through the caves and underworlds of Hyrule, I playing, am I reading, am I a secret third thing? What is happening to me, when I play? Further - what is happening to us, a generation of people? Or more succinctly, as is my vested interest, what happens to women when we play?

Regularly, an episode of Sentimental Garbage I appeared on to discuss women and video games gets brought up to me via DM or sometimes, even in person. Caroline and I sat in a tiny room and talked about what it is to be a woman who plays - what does it mean to us? I love talking to women about video games: about the deep interest and study we hold of fictional worlds, about the details we delight in and the abiding peace that comes from play itself. A sense of exit: I have left reality, I am somewhere else. I am in my Sims' Mojo Dojo Casa House. I am on my Animal Crossing Island. I am in Hyrule. I am not here. I am not available to consume, to work, to perform care tasks. I am playing.

I really do think escapism is something that isn't really permitted amongst women, in our adulthood. To say that you want to escape is to admit that you find that there is something to escape from around you. It is to point to a low tolerance, or something, or an immaturity. I wouldn't go so far as to describe the experience of play being meditative, but I do find my head sort of, clears, when I'm sitting in the evenings playing games, or commentating with CB when he plays. That clear headed feeling is what I'm looking for. A quiet. A peace.

Even in writing a newsletter about playing video games all summer, like I'm trying to now, I feel like I'm skating on something thin. There was me thinking I was going to start writing about Zelda Girl Summer and just be all cheerful about it, rather than putting my hands in behind my ribcage to pull out something serious. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been where I have spent my summer nights, this year, when I'm not travelling for one thing or another, when I'm not fighting with this manuscript. Having been raised with Zelda, I have a University Challenge grade level of totally useless understanding of the world of the games, and therefore, even the names of the lakes and mountain ranges on the world map give me something to be happy about. I grew up playing in a pixellated, simple iteration of Hyrule, and year by year, watched it become more clearly drawn as the consoles' technology developed. That's a powerful thing: witnessing something your imagination created at a distance from simple illustrations suddenly blown up, realistic.

It's this power that I think of as I watch Barbie Summer turn the world pink around me. I was, of course, a Barbie kid. I'm not here to do more half-baked analysis of the Barbie movie, more to point to something that I think is fulfilling: whatever is happening with culture at the moment siezing in on shared objects of childhood nostalgia and capitalizing on them, it is that same sensation of, 'You dreamed this once, and now it is real. Barbie is Margot Robbie. You are Barbie too.'

I think the guiding around of an ambiguously gendered blonde in a fantasy world is a sort of funny little link (Link, see what I did there) between Tears of the Kingdom-play and Barbie-play. I mean. The sheer quantity of outfits available to unlock and utilize in Tears of the Kingdom would put any Dreamhouse to shame. To sort of vaguely connect them, the common theme in both acts of fantasy - I am Barbie, I am Link - is freedom. Barbies can be whatever we want them to be. Link can go wherever we want him to go. The world is ours. The limits are only that of our imagination. What a fantasy, right? What a hope.

I think, that's the kind of summer I've been having. One on my own terms, quietly pursuing a kind of freedom, both here at home and out in the world, that I'd been prohibiting myself from due to trying to slot myself into uncomfortable, ill-fitting expectations. And while August brings heavy rain and the autumn is so close I can feel the crunch of leaves just past my fingertips, I hope I can carry that sense of adventure, and possibility, out of Zelda Girl Summer and into the rest of the year. Maybe next year, too. Maybe more play, ahead.

You try not to write something bleeding-heart and deep and end up doing it anyway, eh? Video games forever!

Right. Do you want to write something, now? Let's do that.

In my S Tier newsletter, I talk a little about how I'm getting on with my own craft, and my own writing, then share something I've found that I think might generate inspiration. Poems, texts, pictures, music. Something that has snagged my interest in the last few weeks, or something I've been sort of, holding onto for a while.

I like to start with a smaller, warm-up prompt, where I invite the reader/participant/you to respond in five minutes to something. This quick-response piece is like, the stretches you do before you exercise. Don't worry too hard about it, but do use it to put yourself comfortably into a space where you can write. Don't worry about the method you use to write: by hand, on a laptop, into your notes app - though I always and absolutely prefer by hand myself. I find it easier to connect to whatever it is that's going on with me when I use a pen: there's something more clinical about typing, I feel. So, let's do a warm up. This is a page from Lynda Barry's What It Is, an art handbook. Regular readers will know I really love Barry's approach to teaching creative practice, as well as her style. I think this page asks an appropriate question to this newsletter: as well as some important sub-questions. Answer as many of them as you can, but answer from the heart. Give yourself five minutes, don't hesitate, just get your interior monologue out. Then stop when that time is up. Here is the image. Off you go.

How was that? I love Barry. She asks very blunt, very large questions sometimes, ones that sort of stop me in my tracks. Now, speaking of being stopped in my tracks, here's the real thing.

I've spoken a little on social media, and on our Show & Tell Episode of Juvenalia, about Taro Okamoto's Tower of the Sun. The story of how I came upon it is a kind of weird one, and I am sort of, working out how I'd like to write some serious nonfiction about the impact witnessing the sulpture had on me. Until then, I'd like to share Tower with you here, and use it as a source for our six-question-writing-prompt.

Taro Okamoto designed the Tower of the Sun for a huge, World's Fair-style Expo just outside Osaka, in 1970. It is just about 230 feet tall, and in the shape of a creature with three external face, and one face hidden in the chamber inside its' belly. The pronoun I lean towards for the Tower is he, so I'll use that from here, not because it's factually accurate or anything, just on vibe. Witnessing it in person was one of the most profound artistic experiences of my life, so much so that I'm still trying to work out how to talk about it clearly, and not in a way that just sounds slightly stupefied. I'm not sure when the last time was that words completely escaped me, even months after an event. Here's some more pictures, for scale. As you can see, the Tower has a white face on his belly, a face at the top of his neck, behind a golden mask, and a face on his back.

The day we visited the park he lives in was grey, and the sky felt shallow, like paper.

The inside of the Tower was a strange, red, bodily cathedral space, with a long sculptural spinal cord in the middle of the chamber. We walked up three flights of stairs, staring at what unfolded - I'm not able to describe it correctly, yet, I think. Maybe that's for another piece of writing. It's enough to say, here, I think, that Taro achieved something truly uncanny with it. Something that feels like it is alive. Something that looks like exactly nothing else, both on the outside, and within.

His aesthetic statement for the work was in some ways, quite straightforward - though, admittedly, it is hard to find information about Taro in English. I bought a book in the gift shop in his home in Tokyo, and a documentary about the Tower that I have been saving for a day when I really need it. But, what we are told about the work is that the golden face of the Tower represents the future, the white mask at the belly represents the present, and the blue mask at the back represents the past. Inside the body of the Tower, (the 'womb' of the space, as it is occasionally referred to there) there is another mask, which seems to represent the mystery of being alive. I think a lot about this set of faces, their expressions, their design. The hope of the golden bird, the focus of the central mask, the empty, almost distant gaze of the mask facing the past. I don't know why it has lodged in me, like this. I expect I will be writing about it for quite some time, trying to approach what it did to me. I think, what I'm getting at here, is that I've never seen or experienced anything like it, and how many times in our adult lives can we say that we have felt something totally and completely new? Something beyond our language, our experience?

I also want to show you this image, from the corridor that leads into the belly of the Tower.

This is an illustration that Taro made of the Tower, on a piece of hotel stationary. In visiting his home, a gallery space, I saw that he had been envisioning creatures and faces that look just like the Tower for many years - that it was the culmination of a fascination. But this sketch did something to me behind my ribs. How so much starts as just a mark. How a set of biro designs could become a creature, a building, a Tower, and there I was, standing inside of it, staring at the conception point. A closed loop.

Now. Before I get too carried away working all of this out, let's do some writing, shall we? For those of you not in the S Tier, the way this works is that I lay out six questions. There's a reason for six - it comes from my zine making, as the size of zines I write generally have six interior pages. If you can answer each question in a paragraph or so, you have enough work to make a zine. That was the thesis behind the six, initially, but what else they do is give you room to anwer one of them, two of them, or all of them, in your own way. It gives the participant in the creative writing exercise, or class, a chance to choose their level of engagement.

So if you'd like to write, find the most comfortable way for you to write. Notebook and pen, or into a doc, or into a text to a friend, or into your notes app. Wherever works, wherever feels easiest. I prefer the oldschool route myself, though I am also admittedly a huge notes app user, too. Let it come out in the medium that feels the most comfortable, most organic. Prose, poetry, somewhere in between. I also use the title TELL ME THIS for each of the S Tier newsletters, generally, because I often find (in the way that Frank O'Hara worked) that addressing someone in the work, even privately, is a really good way to bring the sentences alive on the page. Thinking of someone, or working within the tone of conversation, or addressing someone, can help you start, even if it isn't where you finish. If you can't think of anyone, talk back to me.

So here are six questions, brought to you by The Tower of the Sun, and whatever the hell happened to me out there.

1. When was the last time you saw something for the very first time? A weather phenomenon, a piece of art, a kind of food - can you think of a recent experience you had with absolute newness? Tell me about it.
2. Can you tell me about a time you had an experience with something significantly larger than you? A building, a sculptire, a thing from the natural world? A particularly impressive supermarket? I want you to think about scale. Tell me about how it feels to look up at something huge.
3. Can you tell me about three faces that you show to the world? In the way of the Tower, with the past, present and future worn on his body - what are three facets of yourself that you let people see?
4. What, then, is something, like the fourth face of the Tower, that you keep inside of yourself, reserved only for people who know you well?
5. Can you tell me about a time, or an event, or a project, or a situation, that you brought from sketch up into bold, real life? What was the thing that you brought from tiny line drawing, to fully fledged reality?
6. If you were to build a monument, for people to come and witness, and maybe even walk inside of, what would it be? What would it look like? Where would you place it - in a park, or in a city, or at sea? Tell me what your Tower would be like, what it would represent.

Alright friends. That was a long one. I know I've been overdue. I'm going to get back into practice, open up, chill out. Thank you for being here. To S Tier, thank you for staying with me. To regular subscribers, if you like the layout of the creative writing prompts and would like to hear some slightly more personal, more art-related things from me, please do hop in. The fiver a month is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, but it adds up, goes a long way! If you like what I do, please tell a pal, or give a snippet of the letter a share. Word of mouth, in the world of the algorithm, is actually the most powerful force there is, you know? A person vouching for you is, in fact, the strongest force in a saturated internet, a saturated writing industry - I believe in that, more than anything else.

Right. I'll head off. Thank you for reading, and thank you for writing - if you wrote something in response to the Six Questions, let me know! Drop it in the comments, or post it and tag me, I'd love to see.

Take care of yourselves, out there,

Griff x

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Please forgive any spelling or grammar errors - I'm fighting for my life out here! I will fix them in the archive, I promise.