Leah Petersen

I read the most amazing book last weekend.

Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman.

It’s heart-breakingly beautiful and one of the very, very few novels that’s ever brought me to tears.

I tweet.

Follow me on Twitter.

username: @LeahPetersen

…amazing things happen.

Year Zero. Go there. Now.

Just look at their manifesto:

The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.

YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.

Pushing the boundaries of substance through new technologies, YEAR ZERØ provides prose just as addictive, in many cases just as toxic, but with a powerful, instant high that will stay with you for life.

YEAR ZERØ is not an industry. YEAR ZERØ is not a group of writers. YEAR ZERØ is not a set of beliefs. YEAR ZERØ is an approach to culture.

- Culture is the breath we suck from each others’ lips.

- Culture is not alive. Culture is life.

- Readers and writers, like all producers and consumers of culture, cannot exist apart from each other. They exist only insomuch as literature flows between them. Inasmuch as The Factory exists to separate readers from writers it exists only to bring death, to create ghosts and hollow men.

- Culture speculates; culture takes risks; culture hijacks every human artifice and structure in the name of life.

YEAR ZERØ exists as a conduit for this process.

We are not YEAR ZERØ. We are some of its voices. You are its heart

And man do they deliver. If you don’t check out this blog you’re missing something amazing.

I want you out!  How am I supposed to sleep with you in here? You’re too big.  Too old.  It’s a two person bed and you’re the third.  You’ve wormed your way into the middle, so you might have each of us, to claim as your own by right of birth.

Because you are my daughter and I used to put you here, in our bed, between us.  And I gave you my breast and the warm, sweet milk that made me part of you and you part of me.  Your smell, addictive, new and fresh and life itself.  Your cheeks so round and squishy, your fat little thighs and the dimples at each knuckle when your tiny hands clutched me.  Your skin like silk beneath my fingers and on my lips and I needed you as much as you needed me.

You were my everything.  In the intoxicating nights of your infancy, you and I were one and the same and there was no one else.  And I was drunk on you and you claimed me and I surrendered.

You are so big now.  I watch you, my baby person, and you no longer toddle or lisp.  You read, and write, and tell me things I didn’t teach you.  You ask questions I don’t know the answers to.

I catch glimpses of that baby, of that me, but your face is lean and your eyes are full of the person you are and all you know that is more than milk and scent and the sound of my heartbeat.

In the night you climb into my bed and you sleep like the very devil.  You kick the covers off of us, as you always did, but now I groan and gripe and wish you would go back to your own bed in your own room because you are six now and you are so long.  And you grind your teeth as you did even before you had teeth and it sounds like nails on a chalkboard and I say ugh, would you stop that, though you are asleep and won’t hear.  And you roll about and somehow take up more than a third of the bed though you’re the smallest one in it.

Any minute now, I will get up and carry you back to your bed and I’ll sleep without being assaulted.

Except I won’t.  I’ll curl around your too-big body and breathe in the scent of you and feel your still-soft cheek against my lips as I did those nights when your whole body slotted neatly into the space of my torso as if you were still inside me.  I’ll whisper, I love you.

I won’t send you away tonight.  I won’t let you go this night.

That day will come.  Soon, too soon, my daughter, my precious, my angel, my life.  But stay tonight, and you can dig your foot into my stomach and bully me nearly off the bed, and I’ll be grateful.

On of my favorite blogs in my blogroll is Write Way, Wrong Way by Gerald D. Johnston.

Not only has he written a fabulous book, Dropcloth Angels, (title under renovation, please excuse our mess) but his blog is a great resource and entertaining besides.

Take a moment to stop by and say hi. http://geralddjohnston.com/