Worms Best Reads of May 2023

PIERCE ELDRIDGE

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta is one of my favourite reads. I always come back to this book when I’m feeling a need to slow down, reconnect, and take pause to find gratitude and reverence in my work. The most earnest thing I’ve found within the book is witnessing my own lineages of culture in complete parallel with those inscribed here by Tyson; that is to say, western culture seems to feel its way through the world without systems of interdependence or focus on symbiotic relations and their self-organising design. Whilst being very aware of that, this book then offers me a chance to renegotiate how to—in what I want to achieve and do, be that in any creative or written outcome—embed this thinking with active listening, mutual respect, and building (or, layering) onto what others have to say rather than working in opposition and contradiction; also known as the protocols of ‘yarning’ that Tyson shares in the book. By becoming aware of these ways, I feel Tyson offers me a gentle guidance to fracture my understanding of time, asking me to renegotiate my relationships with places, ecosystems, people and things so that I’m most tenderly being with those rather than imposing upon or extracting from them. The result of reading this book has left me in subtle contemplation.

CAITLIN Mcloughlin

Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker by Jason McBride

I haven’t been doing loads of reading this month, but I’ve been enjoying reading this slowly and soaking up all the gossip. Leafing through the pages and disappearing into this world of 1970’s San Francisco and New York, where every writer and artist you’ve ever heard of seemed to either know each other or be fucking. McBride handles Kathy like a younger sibling, equal parts love, protectiveness and a melodramatic eye roll, constructing an incomplete picture of an insanely creative, troubled, kind, bratty, anxious, tenacious, vulnerable, neurotic, selfish, prolific, wild and gentle person. She seemed to perform a different self to different people, sometimes warm and cuddly, sometimes manipulative and callous – it’s clear that in her work and life she always divided opinion.