THE UNFORGIVABLE AND OTHER WRITINGS by Cristina Campo (tr. Alex Andriesse) for #NYRBWomen26 & A WORLD OF LIGHT by May Sarton for #SundaySarton
This week has been WAY TOO BUSY, but I wanted to remind anyone who’s interested that April’s #NYRBWomen26 & #SundaySarton both start this weekend!!! We’re reading Cristina Campo (starting Sat) & A WORLD OF LIGHT (starting Sun). Page guides to come soon!! 💫
Blue and purple swirling glazed vase with fresh cut flowers including white iris and purple tipped carnations
"Clutter is what silts up exactly like silt in a flowing stream when the current, the free flow of the mind, is held up by an obstruction...In the end what kills is not agony (for agony at least asks something of the soul) but everyday life." #SundaySarton
#SundaySarton “…it is time the warm nurturing powers, usually taken for granted in women, now be called out of men in equal measure.” — May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude, 1973
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
#SundaySarton “Afterward Marjorie drove me out to see Frank Lloyd Wright’s Greek church, round-domed, shaped like a Greek cross inside. It had a peaceful airy wholeness that seemed the architectural equivalent of the sunrise, all serenity and amplitude.” (p120)
Woman Holding a Balance, c. 1664, Johannes Vermeer
Woman and Child in a Courtyard, 1658/1660, Pieter de Hooch
#SundaySarton “I can spend hours in the National Gallery … the Flemish painters are in my blood. It is the combination of the restless skies & the homely interiors, the way light moves about the Dutch rooms … they represent all that I hope to do in the novels and in the poems.” (p111)
"It is harder than it used to be because everything has become speeded up and overcrowded. So everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow cycles of nature, is a help." May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude, #SundaySarton
"Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and some pure foolishness." May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude, #SundaySarton
#SundaySarton “… life enhancement: a cat sitting on a table to look out, a bowl of flowering bulbs, books scattered about.” P.123 Journal of a Solitude
We’re reading one nonfiction book per month & posting along the way using the #SundaySarton hashtag. I’m planning to host a couple zoom calls as well & will be coordinating our first very soon. More info can also be found here so please join anytime! www.joiedevivre9.com/sundaysarton...
Painting: Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Iris, 1926
Painting: Thomas Eakins, Susan Hannah MacDowell Eakins, 1899
Black & white photo of the poet Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
Book cover: CARRINGTON: LETTERS AND EXTRACTS FROM HER DIARIES, Edited by David Garnett
The Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1970 (p60): access-ok.okeeffemuseum.org/exhibition/1...
Paintings by Thomas Eakins (p60)
Poetry by Louise Bogan
A book of Dora Carrington’s letters (p76)
#SundaySarton
“I always forget how important the empty days are […] The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room, not try to be or do anything whatever.” (p89) #SundaySarton
+ a few rabbit holes 🧵⬇️
“I have been thinking about the fact that, however terrible the storms may be, if one’s life has a sufficiently stable and fruitful structure, one is helped to withstand their devastating aftereffects.” (p84) #SundaySarton
JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE by May Sarton
#SundaySarton page guide for JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE by May Sarton
“We are one, the house and I, and I am happy to be alone – time to think, time to be. This kind of open-ended time is the only luxury that really counts and I feel stupendously rich to have it.” (p81) #SundaySarton
#SundaySarton “I am grateful to all the crazies out there in the Women’s Liberation; we need them as outrageous mythical characters to make our hostilities and dilemmas really visible.” Journal of a Solitude p.72
#SundaySarton
"I wonder whether it is possible at nearly sixty to change oneself radically."
"...clutching is the surest way to murder love..."
"It is comforting to know there are lighthouse keepers on rocky islands along the coast."
"Perhaps it is that prose is earned and poetry given."
#SundaySarton
"Perhaps because the poem is primarily a dialogue with the self and the novel a dialogue with others. They come from entirely different modes of being. I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.'
Little Lazarus by Michael Bible Instead of a Letter by Diana Athill Lili is Crying by Hélène Bessette (tr. Kate Briggs) Iris and the Dead by Miranda Schreiber The Other Girl by Annie Ernaux (tr. Alison L. Strayer) Orlanda by Jacqueline Harpman (tr. Ros Schwartz) Vaim by Jon Fosse (tr. Damion Searls) Little World by Josephine Rowe Plant Dreaming Deep by May Sarton Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers Gertrude Stein by Francesca Wade Art Work by Sally Mann
Here are the books I finished in February. I recommitted to reading 1hr each morning before starting work & it was just the reset I needed. Bessette & Sarton were both rereads. 4 are from the @usrofc.bsky.social longlist. I loved the entire stack! #AContinuation #SundaySarton #NYRBWomen26
#SundaySarton “How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. “By thinking.”
#SundaySarton
September 21st
"Here the inner person is the outer person. It is what I want, but that does not make me any less absurd."
#SundaySarton
Journal of a Solitude
"We can do anything, or almost, but how balanced, magnanimous, and modest one has to be to do anything! And also how patient. It is as true in the arts as anywhere else."
JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE by May Sarton
Page guide for JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE by May Sarton
2026 Schedule for SundaySarton
Happy March! 🌼 #SundaySarton It’s time to begin May Sarton’s third book of nonfiction, JOURNAL OF A SOLITUDE. This is one of my favorites & I’m excited to reread it!
PLANT DREAMING DEEP by May Sarton
“Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, toward…pure joy…” (p128) #SundaySarton
May Sarton painted by Albert Duvall "Quig" Quigley
Albert Duvall "Quig" Quigley
#SundaySarton
"I am, I think, more of a poet than I was before I knew him (Albert "Quig" Quigley), if to be a poet means allowing life to flow through one rather than forcing it to a mold the will has shaped; if it means learning to let the day shape the work, not the work, the day..."
