TinyLetter of the Month: Brandon Taylor, “Hours”

Each month we’ll feature a new TinyLetter writer, chat with them about their newsletter, and republish one of their recent issues. (Feel free to recommend your favorite newsletters to us in the comments!)  This month we're lucky to feature writer, biochemistry Ph.D. candidate, and Electric Literature assistant editor Brandon Taylor, whose essay “Spectator” was published by Catapult back in November.

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To stop a spinning wheel, you squeeze it. If you are eight and unwise, testing the fluidity of your new bike chain, you press your palm to your spinning wheel as you pump the pedal, whipping the black rubber around and around until the treads are invisible. There is a moment when the fluttery tips of the treads slap your fingers before your hand rests completely on the wheel. The wheel grinds against your hand, burning up your skin, but if you are steady enough, still enough, the wheel will eventually give way and come to a stop. If you press too hard too fast, your hand might get snatched along and dragged into the chain. You might lose a finger or a nail or a knuckle.

If you’re eight and unwise, sometimes you’re the hand and life is the wheel.

Cars are not bikes, but the principle is much the same. The part that squeezes the wheel to bring it to a stop is called a brake shoe. You have probably never given the origin of your brake shoe very much thought. You have probably never thought about a brake shoe at all. My mom worked in a factory making brake shoes. She left our house at 3PM and came home sometime deep into the night, smelling like dust, like smoke, like oil. She came into the house like a greasefire, the scent of her spreading everywhere, seeping into everything. She had her own set of towels. She had her own soap. My dad got up early each morning to rinse out the tub after she had left it so that I wouldn’t have to bathe in the residue of her factory life. She left behind bits of black grit wherever she went in the house, and on her pillow, there was a halo of it, fine and dark like chipping paint.

During those years, we lived in a white house on the edge of a great gully that held a sea of kudzu. When the wind blew, that vast green expanse of flat leaves swayed, rippling across the deep walls of the valley. There were three or four pine trees growing there, and with the kudzu wrapped thickly around them, they resembled, to me then, dinosaurs or dark creatures ready to snatch me up and eat me. I wasn’t allowed to play in the gully because there were snakes everywhere, hiding beneath the leaves, waiting for tiny ankles. I played outside by myself most of the time, wandering into the woods where I could see the ground and watch out for snakes. I played with sticks and rocks, made up all sorts of games and stories to keep myself occupied because I wasn’t allowed to walk the road by myself and so couldn’t go play with my cousins who, just half a mile down the way, were separate from me for the first time in our lives.

I spent the day in school or with my dad. My mom was not around because she worked. When she wasn’t working, she was sleeping and was inaccessible to me. When she woke up on weekends sometime in the afternoon, she’d sit on the porch drinking, slapping at mosquitos. And I played with my toys down in the little garden my dad had fenced off with cinderblocks. I didn’t have the illusion that she was watching me or enjoying the sight of me playing, but it was nice to be with my mom, I think, to be near her. She yelled at me a lot, and for things that I had no control over. For example, when I turned ten and started to sweat and smell like a boy, she taught me with great cruelty that this was a thing to be ashamed of. The necessity of hygiene was communicated to me via an embarrassing incident in which she pulled hairs from my arms in front of company, smelled them, and then told me that I smelled like a polecat, like something wild and foul. She was a hard person.

But there were moments when she was not cruel or unkind to me. When she came home from work in the middle of the night, I climbed over my brother’s sleeping body and crept out into the living room to see her. I hung shyly near the couch, watching her, pretending that I was only getting up for water or to use the bathroom. She saw through me. She saw everything about me. She knew everything about me. I think she knew things then that I’m only now starting to realize about myself, and so maybe she was so angry at me then because she had no patience for my stupidity. Maybe she was tired of waiting for me to figure myself out. There is such impatience in my family, in me, an impatience for farce, for playacting, for pretending not to see, and yet, pretending not to see was how one got by. She watched me without saying anything as I poured the water and drank it as slowly as possible, trying to draw an invitation out of her. I knew even then that I needed an invitation to stay up with her, that I wasn’t, simply by virtue of being her child, allowed to occupy the same space as her. She knew that she could, with just one word, make my whole day or cast me out.

She never said, “Stay up with me.” Instead, she said, “Make yourself useful. Get me a beer.” Or, “Put on Booty Call.” We watched the same movies over and over. We ate chips and salsa. She made me sandwiches and eggs. She let me sit on the same couch as her. On pay day, she’d let me climb into the backseat as she and my uncle went to Walmart to cash her check. She let me pick out one thing, usually a bag of chips or a soda or a cake. And then we went home, and we did what we always did, watched some terrible movie and then to bed.

A labmate and I were in lab very late recently. It must have been about midnight. She said, “Aren’t you sleepy? Aren’t you tired?”

And I said, without thinking, “Oh, no. I’m so used to this. I love it. I used to stay up with my mom.” I said it with a smile, with happiness.

I work weird hours now. Graduate school is demanding. My schedule is messy, chaotic. I’m at lab until two in the morning, sometimes, I work for twenty-four hours in a row. It’s nothing to work that way, deep into the night, until the sky goes dark and then soft gray. I’ve been staying up since I was little. Time means little to me, gets away from me easily.

Before I said that to my labmate, it had never occurred to me that my working habits now paralleled those of my mother. It’s another incident of accidental symmetry, the ways our lives mirror those of our parents without realizing it. We’re repeating the patterns, echoing our pasts. It’s strange to consider that despite all of the ways in which my life has been so weird or difficult, in all the ways that my relationship with my mom and my dad has been wild and unpredictable, there are some things that just are.

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A chat with Brandon Taylor about his TinyLetter, Virgin Wool:

When did you begin writing your newsletter? How often do you send it out?

I started writing my newsletter in December 2016, but I guess I started thinking about it much earlier in the year. I try to send them out on Friday evenings.

Your TinyLetter is called "Virgin Wool." What's that about?

Well, virgin wool is either wool taken from a lamb’s first shearing, or it can refer to wool that has yet to be processed or used. When I was trying to think of a name for my letter, I wanted it to feel very much of a kind with the things I often tweet or write about: nature, knitwear, a kind of rustic romanticism.

I think Virgin Wool stood out to me right away not only because of its charm, but also because I wanted my letter to be a space for generating and processing things that I’ve maybe been avoiding in my life. I wanted it to be a space for self-discovery and the kind of honesty that self-discovery brings.

So I called it Virgin Wool. It felt very on-brand, and I like to think that it keeps me honest about what the letter is doing for me as I write it.

What do you like best about the TinyLetter format, and how does it help your other writing projects (or does it)?

I like that there aren’t any constraints on form. I like that there is no real pressure for it to be “good writing.” I can be as imperfect and messy as I need to be to grapple with what it is I’m writing about. TinyLetter, to me, feels both very much like a journal and very much like a letter written to a dear friend; it’s at once public and personal, epistolary and confessional.

There’s such flexibility in a TinyLetter. You can make it as long as you want, or as short. You can add images where words fail you. You can be repetitive. You can be creative. You letter really can assume the shape that is most suited to what it is you’re trying to say, and I think that’s so important.

Please recommend some of your favorite TinyLetters.

Helena Fitzgerald’s Grief Bacon is so incredibly good. I also love the brilliant work that Monet P. Thomas is doing with her While You Were Sleeping. And Alvin Park’s aspirin and honey often moves me to tears. 

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