Notes from a Residency ❤️ 🥐 🌳

Unpacking a month in France 🥐

Hello dear reader,

This is the longest gap I’ve taken from the newsletter, and I’ve felt its absence like a silence I didn’t know I needed. Today, weeks after the solstice, felt like the right day to return to myself. To return to this space, and to everything it continues to mean to me.

I was in France through May for a month-long residency at the Maison de la Poésie de Nantes. It was my first time living alone in a city where I didn’t quite speak the language. I had my first public reading of my own poems, which were translated into French, and led my first international poetry workshop! I’m forever grateful to Villa Swagatam and Institut Français India for the opportunity.

This new way of holding space for myself, for strangers, was humbling, strange, and beautiful all at once. It meant days of deep solitude. I learned what it feels like to be othered. Of feeling invisible and visible in uncomfortable ways. To be looked at and not seen.

And all that while, the world continued to burn. The weight of war, of the news from Gaza and closer to home, was never far from mind. And I questioned my place in it all. What does it mean to be a poet in times like these? What is the role of softness, or reflection, when so much around us is burning?

It made me question how to show up: to care without burning out. To respond rather than react. And so, I stepped away from the noise. I stayed mostly off social media. I let the poems arrive unannounced. I let the meaning come slowly. I paid attention. I let myself feel.

I’m sharing some photographs from these travels, paired with poems that have kept me company on long train rides, in apartments that smelled like lavender.

Thank you, as always, for being here to receive these fragments.

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Poems that feel like rituals

1. Forgotten in an Old Notebook​ by Franz Wright
   Outside the leaves are quiet
   as their shadows. Hidden
   in the leaves a bird is waiting
   for it to get dark
   to try its goodnight voice.
   I have just looked in the mirror
   and come and sat down at the table.
   What happens to our faces?

   

2. Windows and Mirrors​ by Rudy Francisco
   There was a moment in my life
   when I couldn't tell the difference
   between a window and a mirror.
   
   I cold look into both
   and see everything
   but myself.

   

3. Voyager by Mary Ruefle
   I have become an orchid
   washed in on the salt white beach.
   Memory,
   what can I make of it now
   that might please you—
   this life, already wasted
   and still strewn with
   miracles?

   

4. There Are Mornings by Lisel Mueller
   Even now, when the plot
   calls for me to turn to stone,
   the sun intervenes. Some mornings
   in summer I step outside
   and the sky opens
   and pours itself into me
   as if I were a saint
   about to die. But the plot
   calls for me to live,
   be ordinary, say nothing
   to anyone. Inside the house
   the mirrors burn when I pass.

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Curious Finds

• Wake Up Calls by Cosmo Sheldrake was created over a nine year period, using recordings of bird song featured on the red and amber lists of endangered British birds (with the exception of a Robin and a Blackbird, which aren’t endangered – yet).

• 30 minutes with a stranger by alvin chang

• This book can be read only when it’s wet

• Forgotten Words

• ways to feel sentimental w your phone started by Lai Yi Ohlsen

• Big fan of Tala Rae Schlossberg’s work!

  talaschlossberg

  

  A post shared by @talaschlossberg

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Comforting Words

Jean Jullien in Nantes

• “I have been thinking about living like the lilies that blows in the fields.”
  — Mary Oliver, Lilies
  

• “Finding joy in small things and working all day without seeing anyone. There is no greater happiness than that. As I write, some part of my mind is also occupied with the sounds that drift all the way up to my desk, the chirping birds, the barking dogs. I savor the green, orange, yellow light, the color of the sea I can glimpse in the distance, feeling its presence there.”
  — Orhan Pamuk, Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022, translated by Ekin Oklap
  

• “Art can’t win an election or bring down a president. It can’t stop the climate crisis, cure a virus or raise the dead. What it can do is serve as an antidote to times of chaos. It can be a route to clarity, and it can be a force of resistance and repair, providing new registers, new languages in which to think.”
  — Olivia Laing, How art can help in an emergency
  

• “I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my prevailing feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written…Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
  — Oliver Sacks, My Own Life
  

• “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
  — Zora Neale Hurston

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Big news! :’)

Memories on a Plate has won First Place in the Food Writing category at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2024. 🏆

What began as a labour of love between two collaborators collecting food memories from 100 Indian kitchens has become something far bigger than we ever imagined.

To everyone who’s held this book close, this win is ours. This is for every contributor who trusted us with their tender, generous stories. For every reader who found home in these pages. For every mother and grandmother who taught us that food is love, and love is meant to be shared. We’re so deeply grateful.

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Sending this out into the world with a cup of coffee in my hand while soaking in the chilly Bangalore monsoons.💛

With tenderness,
Rohini