Hi and welcome to the Storyteller!
I don’t know about you, but I love the symmetry of a new month starting on a Sunday or a Monday. This makes it feel somehow “easier” to start afresh, or begin something new, create new habits—I know, I know, time is abstract, but let’s not get into that today.
Speaking of today, starting now, free subscribers of this newsletter will hear from me on the first and last Sunday of every month (you’ll also get emails when I start publishing paid-subscriber-only posts, with sneak peeks into parts of it, and options to sign up to read them in full). If you missed reading last Sunday’s issue, it has more details, as does the post below from my Instagram—and, of course, you know where to find me in case you have questions!
Before we get to the focal point of this issue—happy Women’s Super League Day to those who celebrate! The top-tier English league for women’s football is back later today, and I’m excited to welcome back my Arsenal Women.
Also, how cool is this historic bespoke Stella-McCartney-designed away kit!
Arseblog’s coverage of AWFC has been my go-to for years (and not only because for so long they’ve been the only outlet to feature them) for the consistent quality of their coverage led by Tim Stillman, one of the many lovely people, now friends, I’m grateful to Twitter (yes, Twitter) for bringing into my life.
Whether you’re new to the women’s game (or football in general) and would like to get better acquainted, or are searching for somewhere to start your foundation, or you’re, like me, a long-time fan who can’t get enough of quality content, the hyperlink above is where you should start. And once you’ve done that, subscribe to the new newsletter below, which will be a weekly offering of writing that goes beyond the coverage on the website.
Speaking of the Twitter football community, Poorly Drawn Arsenal aka the wonderful Jacob aka the animated walrus not only has his second illustrated book coming out this month based on the Invincibles (the book is written by one of my earliest and dearest Arsenal friends, Dave Seager who has five wonderful Arsenal-related books under his belt, including the first illustrated collaboration with Jacob back in 2018), but he has also been recently shortlisted for the Best Artist category in this year’s Football Content Awards (you can vote for him here).
Dave and Jacob are doing two launch events for the new book—NYC and London folks, see if this is of any interest 😊 I’m planning a bonus issue at some point featuring a chat with the two gents, so keep an eye out!
Now, who’s ready for another writer spotlight?
Let me savor this stillness. It’s a day made for listening and writing. I recommend we take time to do both.—SC
My first experience with Sandra Cisneros was in Igualada in the fall of 2014, when I’d just moved there for the next nine months. My host family helped me set up a user card for the town’s library which had a small but well-curated collection of English-language books. The House on Mango Street immediately caught my interest and I devoured it then and there, sitting at a side-table next to the English section. It even inspired the ‘Fear’ micro that eventually made it into my published 55 Words collection.
The House on Mango Street is a collection of vignettes from the point of view of Esperanza Cordero, a young girl growing up in a Latin neighbourhood in Chicago. It deals with family, growing up, identity, love, friends, dancing, music, dreams, and much more—but, most importantly, it is about a young girl whose name means hope coming into her own power and agency.
She thinks stories are about beauty. Beauty that is there to be admired by anyone, like a herd of clouds grazing overhead. She thinks people who are busy working for a living deserve beautiful little stories, because they don’t have much and are often tired. She has in mind a book that can be opened at any page and will still make sense to the reader who doesn’t know what came before or comes after.—Sandra Cisneros in the book’s introduction
Since then, despite reading some of Cisneros’ other work (Caramelo, Woman Hollering Creek and some essays from A House of my Own) I have returned to this one collection on multiple occasions, gaining comfort and illumination in new measure. I even bought the Spanish translation of it in 2021, in a bid to keep up with the language that had crept into my heart and mind, and onto my tongue during those nine months spent around it.
So, when I spied a gorgeously produced bilingual copy (thank you, Vintage!) of her latest on the shelves of the Harvard Bookstore last summer, how could I resist?
Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo began back in the early 90’s but was abandoned by Cisneros for the necessity of the long view, which arrived only decades later.
I bought it in July 2022, but picked it up almost a year later. I’m yet to make my way through the Spanish translation by award-winning poet and acclaimed Spanish translator Liliana Valenzuela, but I enjoyed the English version; the fleeting urgency of it, the fragmented nature of the story fed to us through letters and recollections many years later that end as quickly as they begin.
Publisher’s blurb:
As a young woman, Corina leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her dream of becoming a writer in the cafes of Paris. Instead, she spends her brief time in the City of Light running out of money and lining up with other immigrants to call home from a broken pay phone. But her months of befriending panhandling artists in the subway, sleeping on crowded attic floors, and dancing the tango at underground parties are given a lasting glow by her intense friendships with Martita and Paola. Over the years the three women disperse to three continents, falling out of touch and out of mind—until a letter unearthed in a closet brings Corina’s days in Paris back with breathtaking immediacy.
Told with intimacy and searing tenderness, this tribute to the life-changing power of youthful friendship is Cisneros at her vintage best, in a beautiful dual-language edition.
Cisneros says this in the acknowledgements:
My Martita is based on all the women who rescued me during my years as a cloud and ever after, just as Corina is all the women whose lives have touched my own. I do not know why some lives resonate so ineffably within me that they oblige me to sit and stare at dust motes. Each is a note humming beyond the range of human hearing but whose reverberation enriches my being.
There is Marta from Buenos Aires, with a profile like “half of an algebraic parenthesis” and “a scribble of auburn curls hiding a face flecked with freckles, eyes transparent as pearl onions” who tells Corina in a letter after they’ve all left Paris that she doesn’t have a good memory but remembers emotions—and she remembers how it felt in their friendship, in that special shared intimacy only possible in those early, independent, reckless days of youth.
There is Paola, a northern Italian with “the river Po in her eyes, woolen greens and muddy browns speckled with amber” who writes in a letter years later that she is cork, “when others drown, I float.”
And there is Corina—settled in a Chicago she’d sworn she would rather die than return to; with two young daughters and a steady husband she loves and knows will never leave her but she isn’t in love with—who stumbles upon a long-forgotten letter and remembers the past with a rush of immediacy.
And it’s as if we’re talking to each other, still, after all this time, Martita.
The days in a distant Paris with dreams of being a writer, waiting for a letter from an arts foundation in the Côte d'Azur that never comes. Waiting “just a little more time, just a little…Just a little more time. Just a little”. All of them “waiting for something to happen…waiting for something bigger than their lives” because it’d taken all of their courage to get there, to their then present moment.
In the now present, Corina recalls the past, recalls the letters after, continuing for many years until they stopped—“Those letters between us, pebbles tossed into water. The rings growing wide and wider”—and tries to remember where she left Puffina, the pet name they’d called her—”So much has happened since then. I don't call myself a writer anymore, but I console myself with books, with reading.”
In this present, Corina whispers her wishes for her old friends, releases them into the universe—“I imagine you are getting ready to have lunch in Buenos Aires. I imagine Paola is in Rome, coming home from work. I imagine you each reading a book, bringing a glass to your lips, walking down the street, lingering at the arabesque of a gate, or pausing at a bakery, or dipping bread in coffee.”
In turn urging us to do the same, perhaps. Some fond remembrance, some indulgent nostalgia, a wish released into the universe for old dreams and the people we used to be, for the present and what’s to come. And, mostly, just to remember, and be remembered.
This is a short but impactful experimental novella merging an epistolary narrative, non-linear memoir, and prose poetry with Sandra Cisneros’ trademark evocative language and voice. I wished to know more about these three women, but it was still enough to know that at least Corina was finally in a place to appreciate, cherish, and curate “those little things that make for such big happinesses”.
Te recuerdo, Martita. I remember you…Don’t forget me.
Are you a multilingual reader? I’d love to read about your stories and experiences about the same.
As always, please feel free send in recommendations—books, movie, TV shows, authors to interview, ideas of what you’d like me to write on, rants/ramblings/excited monologues, GIFs and memes (especially them) and more. Just drop me a line and turn this into a conversation, even if just to say hi and let me know what you thought of the latest issue 😊 Or share this with someone you think might enjoy it.
Take care and I’ll see you on October 29th!
Anu
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