Reading mrissa Improves My Life

[jesse_the_k]

Marissa Lingen MarissaLingen writes really lovely short stories — more than a hundred so far. She's disabled and her fiction generally includes the mundanity and creativity of disabled living. She lives in the Twin Cities. She's funny. She studied math and physics before turning to full-time writing — as of this writing she’s got 20 stories published in NATURE.

She’s an internet old — her blog https://marissalingen.com began before Livejournal and is now mirrored on DW: mrissa

She also posts a monthly newsletter — you can preview and subscribe at https://tinyletter.com/MarissaLingen/archive

I've got three recs:

Uncanny published an eerily prescient horror story from 2018, "This Will Not Happen to You":

Because you have never been sick and you have never been too late and you have never been permanently damaged and you have never been through two prior generations of prosthetics for all the things that the newfangled tech, slipping in along the fungus-damaged neurons, can’t quite do for you. The last set, the set that lets you walk and see and breathe evenly, it will not keep you cold at every moment. You will not have a flask of tea like a lifeline. You will not wear a ski vest in May, a cardigan in July.

https://uncannymagazine.com/article/this-will-not-happen-to-you/

"Flow," in Fireside, breaks my heart every time I reread it. She wrote it as her own Dad was dying. I love that her character’s atypical body movement becomes the link to fairyland (and as you know Bob, I'm not big on fantasy).

I am two and a half years old. The half is important at this age. I have gone from staggering along like a miniature tipsy sailor to having my own real person walk—you can see it in family videos.

My own real person walk is my dad’s walk writ small.

I am fifteen, and I have walked into the woods by myself to try to stop being angry at the world. There is a stream that isn’t too choked with leaves, even this time of the year. I sit by it and give in to the temptation to stick my fingers in, even though it’s prematurely cold, much colder than the autumn air. The chill distracts me from my anger. I only pull my fingers out when they’re numb.

https://firesidefiction.com/flow

She’s also written poetry I can understand(!) about the pandemic https://mrissa.dreamwidth.org/tag/covid+poems

Here's the first one, recognizing how COVID closing libraries alters the rhythm of readers' lives

What Remains: the COVID Checkouts Mar. 18th, 2020 06:31 pm

Give and take is the way of the library
Now a breath held, a moment frozen,
And I remain with this: mosquitos,
Bulgaria, the poems of Jane Kenyon.
An awkward freeze-frame, mid-conversation,
Not the self-portrait I'd have chosen.
But here we are together, mosquitos.
It's you and me now, Jane.
We're gonna do this together, Bulgaria.
Last week I could dip into fancy,
Ponder another in a series,
Reject what didn't suit, on a whim;
Now you share my distance, Bulgaria,
Jane--even you, mosquitos.
I clutch your binding close and wonder
What I'll have learned by your pages' end.