The Issue With Love
An anniversary anthology, featuring some friends
The Sunday Letter #52
Fifty-two weeks ago, after a longtime obsession with newsletters like Maybe Baby, Internet Princess, Hung Up, and so many more, I decided to commit to a weekly newsletter of my own. I had very few expectations for Solitary Daughter, but I hoped it would serve as a creative outlet and archive of my interests over time. Needless to say, I couldn’t have imagined the incredible community of readers and writers that I would find as a result of this weird little fever dream.
So, to celebrate one year of Sunday Letters, I’ve compiled an anthology issue featuring a few of my favourite writers in the world—seriously, I am in love with everyone on this list. Their only creative prompt was “love, whatever that may mean to you.” They responded with poetry, flash fiction, and essays that touch on everything from grief and loss to love born anew; from music and connection to envy and doubt; from loving in every language and liminal dreams to freedom and self-destruction and everything in between. I hope this issue is as much a treat to read as it was to compile. Also, how stunning is the cover art from Rowen Dinsmore? Ugh!
Lastly, I promised to send a Solitary care package to one subscriber, and the winner is Amrita! Thank you again to every single person who has read and shared this newsletter over the past year. It’s meant the entire world. ❤️
Lily de Mellow-Orr
Lily de Mellow-Orr is a writer and poet based in Ireland. She posts personal essays on her Substack Wooing of Étaín and is currently writing a book on the death of John Keats. In her spare time, she enjoys instant gratification, maladaptive daydreaming, and walking around with untied shoelaces.
Turning, I knock over the smattering of tealights around the bathtub with my tote bag, kicking up rose petals and an unnamed feeling that has split out onto the floor. Disgust, maybe, and what the Germans call Sehnsucht – an awareness of absence, a recognition of something missing that one can never hope to attain. I’m privy to it all: candles and flowers and giggling in the shower and kissing in the hallway outside my bedroom door; I wish I could disappear. I am not yearning. I am not jealous. But I am angry that I’ll never mean as much to my friends as a man ever could. That I allow myself to be someone so easy to forget. That I have only known love as something that takes from me.
I have spent the winter despising the smallness of my own existence, shuttling between my rented room in the city and my parents’ house by the sea. I’ve suddenly found the time again to read articles and watch films and learn French, enough to begin translating a second-hand copy of Milan Kundera’s La valse aux adieux – a useless endeavour, considering an English version was published in 1987. Sometimes I go so long without speaking I almost forget how to do it in either language, voice creaking like floorboards when the Oxfam bookstore cashier asks me parlez-vous le français? But I cannot seem too eager. I’ve spent the last decade becoming well-versed in fortress-building, at locking my desires up inside myself like Bukowski’s bluebird, terrified to be seen as something delicate or breakable. The truth is, if you touch me I’ll bruise. I have always been a lighthouse shaped like a girl.
As a teenager, I believed that if I shrivelled up enough nothing bad would ever happen to me. This, of course, was not true. Like a piece of paper, one can only fold themselves over so many times before they spring back open again. The way the black hole, mid-destruction, remembers the star. One day, maybe, I shall return to burning blue.
Adele Zeynep Walton
Adele Zeynep Walton is a Turkish British journalist specialising in digital technology, inequality and social change. She is currently writing her first non-fiction book, which publishes in 2025. You can find Adele on TikTok and Instagram.
“When you treat yourself well is when you realise you have a place on earth” these words were found etched into my sister’s journal after she passed in 2022. Soon after, I had them etched onto my body as a tattoo. It’s been almost a year and a half now, and the words come to me often as a reminder of the simplicity of self love - treating yourself well. Not optimising yourself, not pressuring yourself, not wishing more of yourself or buying things for yourself. Of course those can be symptoms of treating yourself well (or not), but fundamentally, treating yourself well is simply all we need. Releasing the critical inner voice and allowing ourselves to receive love. It’s no easy feat in a world that pressures us to be more and do more, to view ourselves as lacking and others as competition. But this scarcity is an illusion, and one that our survival depends on abandoning. Love is intrinsic to survival, and loving ourselves by being kinder inwards holds revolutionary power. Thank you Aimee for teaching me that.
Abby Lacelle
Abby is a feminist researcher and writer located in Toronto, Ontario. Their work centres reproductive justice and motherhood. All of their love is reserved for their dear partner, Aidan, and their darling dog, Otto. Follow them on Instagram and Substack.
Love is a heuristic. My father once told me his love for me is conditional and I wonder if it still would be if he could imagine love shooting out from between his legs. Because I became inside my mother and she says she’d kill for me; and she means it. There aren’t conditions to that kind of love because she opened herself up to me and felt the (psychic and physical) pain of letting me back out. How could you condition that kind of closeness, sameness? The patriarchy keeps us from true eros.
The heart is an inadequate icon for love; it’s too fixed an organ. It doesn’t really grow, it doesn’t make space. It isn’t an open system. A uterus holds us all; it’s constantly destroying and remaking its landscape. And, what’s more, I know you can love from your womb even without one, but some people are afraid to feel that way. Uterine-thinking is counterintuitive; too bloody, too intimate, too androgynous, too aporetic. It is at once deeply sensuous, (a)sexual, generative, hostile, and indiscriminately inhabitable.
Love cycles yet is constant. It has stages and phases, it sheds and reproduces. When I tell you I love you, what I mean is I would carry you, I would care for you, I would let you share my body, I would give to you from my body. I would help you into and through this world. I will help you become. I love you from a deep, wet, gooey place. Not emanating from my chest, the locus is lower. Not from inside my heart, but behind my abdomen; you’re in my guts.
Terry Nguyen
Terry Nguyen is an essayist, critic, and poet from Garden Grove, CA. She writes Vague Blue, a notebook-in-newsletters.
I struggle with movies where the form feels fixed, where the happy ending is written from the first glance. This is common with rom-coms and romantic dramas, but on a recent rewatch of Before Sunrise (1995), the Richard Linklater film that has set my standard for romance since I first saw it at fourteen, I realized that its script does something quite rare: It imposes limits on the love story, forecasting its end before it even begins.
Before Sunrise is a meet-cute with no realistic future. On a train to Vienna, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets Celine, a French student (Julie Delpy) traveling to Paris. They spend the rest of the ride talking, and Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna. Jesse has to catch a US-bound flight there the next morning and, with no money for a hotel, was planning to wander around the city for the night. "If I turn out to be a psycho, you can bail out anytime and get back on the next train, right?" The stakes are low. And once the limits of this dynamic are established — that Jesse and Celine's time together will be the romantic equivalent of a one-night stand — the film derives its momentum from their chemistry-laden dialogue. We are enraptured by what happens between their meeting and departure though we are, of course, quietly rooting for that Hollywood happy ending.
My favorite scene takes place near the end of the night. The two are sitting on a bench, talking. Celine says: “I really believe that if there’s any kind of god, he wouldn’t be in any one of us — not you, not me — but just this space in between. If there’s some magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone else, sharing something, even if it’s almost impossible to succeed. But who cares: the answer must be in the attempt.” And that, to me, is love. It is not a lifetime, but the moment, the attempt at love that feels so precious and tragic and true. I love Before Sunrise because it treasures the liminality of loving. The answer is in each breath we take; love begins anew in every attempt.
Akosua Adasi
Akosua Adasi is a doctorate student and writer living in Brooklyn. She is also the mastermind behind Consumption Report, a semi-regular letter on the media and ideas that she consumes and that consume her.
The philosopher Agnes Callard has said that she thinks of beauty as a gesture. What she meant by that was that beauty wasn’t a tangible, concrete characteristic or experience but rather a signal towards other affects—happiness, enlightenment, etc. I think that love, a form of beauty, is also a gesture. Love is a gesture, love gestures to. In Berman’s “Self Portrait at 28,” love is the gesture of turning one’s head over your shoulder, as if to depart without an expression of love—”love you!”—is to sever without repair. The “love you”, sans the “I”, tossed towards another’s retreating back. An indirect gesture that shifts the atmosphere.
Love gestures to: trust; laughter; tears; long dinner parties; sledding on fresh snow; blood; presence; time; absence; grief; a song.
Love is a gesture, love gestures to.
Sara Jin Li
Sara Jin Li is an award-winning & losing essayist, playwright, and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. She is also the founder of Heretics Club, a literary salon for creative writers.
in loving memory
What’s another way to say ‘I love you’?
I remember.
The way you take your coffee. What you said last week. To call. Your birthday. Why you hate your father. Your childhood pet. Where you left your keys. How you got the scar on your hip. The last thing your sister said to you. What street you grew up on. How you met her. The secret you swore us to secrecy on. Your safe space. Your favorite drink. Your heart on your sleeve (I love the way it looks there).
A poem reminded me of you. So did the sun. I find you everywhere. Or I’ll sit in the park and draw your name in the grass. Look, there you are, too. This is how I love. If I loved you any less, I’d forget.
Namah
crying on the subway
on the streetcar before, I felt the tremors of the schism. and on the scheduled bus after, I clinically digressed to paroxysm… felt less sure when it happened some more. perhaps a funeral rite for something that I couldn’t name or hold. underground, burrowed below, eight thirty four is an appropriate time to mourn. there is a man wailing into the automatic doors that open and close as if to respond yes or no (but mostly no) and while my grief has no name or face, a crop circle seems to have set into place; no one wants to sit by the hysterical woman or the screaming man. at Old Mill, the sunlight glides across the streaks on my cheek and I return to stone. this time, when the doors open it seems as though the wailing man has somewhere to go.
Nic | bookbinch
Nic is a writer and fast-walker based in Montreal. He can be found online @bookbinch, where he peddles his queer book recommendations and shares his journey as a debut novelista. He also writes a bi-weekly newsletter called Milking It.
On My Sleeve
All’s fair in love and denim
My mother handed me a folded heap of denim and said, “Amuses-toi mon coeur.” The jacket fit perfectly around my shoulders and fell right above my hips–thank heavens for the oversized craze of the 80s.
It was worn, supple, not like its stiff modern counterparts, and it smelled like her. When I wore it, I was wrapped in J’adore Dior with hints of patchouli, butterfly kisses and lavender. The cloud that follows you when you wear a hand-me-down can feel like love.
Over time the jacket molded to my arms, creased with my sleeve rolls, had an unfortunate run-in with a glass of wine, but it never quite lost her… Until–
He yanked a folded heap of denim from my closet and asked, “J’peux te l’emprunter?” My prized possession in the hands of a man I loved. I never imagined parting with it, but I couldn’t say no to his eyes of emerald green–back then I didn’t know Jolene was a cautionary tale.
My jacket flew to Greece. It spent a summer wrapped around my boyfriend’s waist, basking in the sun, and getting trampled by his European dalliances.
He gave it back to me when we broke up shortly thereafter. The poor thing was blue, limp and now reeked of him. Love can feel like spending months filling your nostrils with sweat, Tide (Cold Wash Original), prom night confessions and Old Spice remnants, hoping your tears don’t wash him out… Until–
I pluck the hanging heap of denim from a hook and ask, “Est-ce qu’il fait froid?” The jacket holds past lives of Dior and Tide in its tight weave, but in the present it smells like me.
Friends laughing, long hugs, sandalwood, held hands–now that’s love. And sometimes, a jean jacket is just a heap of denim… Until–
Amani Hope
Amani Hope writes the two newsletters Read Like Mad and Bad Recipes and is currently writing a novel about love in the warm chair of an Oakland café. She went to the Academy of Art University for screenwriting, and more recently completed the Certificate in Writing program with UC Berkeley Extension to study the craft of the novel and the personal essay.
How I Met a Boy at a House Party
Maya: Who is the guy who just came in?
Cat: lol what? why r u texting me I’m in the living room
Cat: and btw bring another bottle of champagne the party is running out
Cat: it’s in the fridge next to the cake
Maya: Who is the new guy, he was checking out my books.
Cat: lmao are you shy?! come over here
Maya: No. You come here.
Cat: omg
Cat: idk where you are
Cat: too many people in our apartment
Maya: Who is he? He’s tall with freckles.
Maya: And you can tell he smiles a lot.
Cat: omg are you in love already?!
Maya: Look he’s right by the window.
Maya: I first noticed him when he was standing at my bookshelf
Maya: Cuz he pulled out my short stories by Anaïs Nin. The kind of stories which end in sex and mess. So embarrassing.
Maya: He found my bookmark and read for a long time. Do you think I should talk to him about it? I feel like he’s seen me naked.
Maya: Hold on he’s waving at somebody.
Maya: Wait, it’s you he’s waving at! He’s hugging you.
Maya: Cat Cat Cat.
Maya: Where did you go? Who was that?
Cat: hey sorry
Cat: oh shit are you talking about Takami?
Cat: idk if this is right
Cat: why r u asking?
Maya: Can you introduce us? How do you know him?
Cat: um yeah so
Cat: [deleted message]
Cat: [deleted message]
Cat: actually I totally think you should talk to him
Cat: in the way you want to like about your book
Cat: or whatever
Cat: he’s a childhood friend
Cat: I wouldn’t have survived high school without him
Cat: you’re my best friend Maya
Cat: and I’d do anything for you
Cat: you’d love each other
Cat: […]
Brendon Holder
Brendon Holder is a Canadian writer living in New York and the author of the cultural commentary newsletter LOOSEY. His writing can be found in The Globe & Mail, Electric Literature, The Drift, and elsewhere.
One morning, on my twenty-seventh listen of Shania Twain’s ‘You’re Still The One,’ it dawned on me: this just might be the ‘struggle love’ anthem of our time. For years, I mindlessly listened to the song believing it depicted an idyllic, Hallmarkian love, one without strife and compromise. But, upon further examination, it’s more representative of a relationship of perseverance than peace.
For years, I would tell friends that I didn’t want a ‘struggle love,’ that no love is worth significant labour but Twain’s songwriting convincingly details an adoration at the end of the hero’s journey rather than in the laborious middle. Whereas other ‘struggle love’ songs — Lana Del Rey’s ‘Cinnamon Girl,’ Sade’s ‘Is It A Crime?’ and SZA’s ‘Supermodel’ to name a few — transplant you amid the hardship, the real work, ‘You’re Still The One’ locks onto the perspective of someone who has surmounted the doubt and emerged as the victor, their histories softened by time.
Obviously, there are limits. There is a love and kindness in knowing when to call it, in acknowledging when something truly isn’t it for you any longer. New York Times bestselling author and marriage therapist Katherine Woodward Thomas clocks that not all struggle can be romanticized as “organizing around the weakest parts of others is ultimately not to anyone’s benefit,” the others included. But, beyond that, all love is work — romantic love, friendship, love of self. By denying this, I was lazy and potentially a tad delulu.
In closing, bell hooks teaches us that love isn’t a declaration, it’s an action and, through ‘You’re Still The One,’ Twain reminds us that some things are worth acting upon, continuously working for, and holding on to.
Tara Monjazeb
Tara Monjazeb (she/her) is an Iranian-American writer based in London. She is the author of Devotions, a poetry-centred essay newsletter, and is currently writing her first novel.
Like most immigrant children, I grew up with an unconditional idea of love. More than feeling, it was partnership and sacrifice. My dad says that I love you is the strongest phrase in the English language, and should be reserved for your most intimate moments. I was in the passenger seat of his car in late July, driving down a dark tree-lined parkway away from the city. It’s where we’ve always had our most important conversations, where he warned me not to trust blindly, to be careful with the love I hold and to give it away cautiously. At that moment, under the gliding yellow of the passing streetlights, it felt like I saw through him for the first time. I always say I love you when I hang up the phone, even if he never says it back. I want him to believe that every time, I mean it.
I don’t believe the love I have is limited. It’s produced in the same way carbon dioxide is when I breathe. I pass a bush full of flowers, and smell the aroma of the honeysuckles, and the feeling develops then and there. The moment I met my now-boyfriend, the love began to bubble. It was unlike any love I’d ever felt, though it comes from the same place as my love for my friends, my family, or the lavender bush on my street. It grew, seemingly out of nothing, and I held those words in my mouth, like something sacred, until they fell out. I use them often. Every time, they still feel holy.
I wish I could say I moved abroad for love. In some ways, I did. I escaped the monotony of the American suburbs, searching for the kind of distance and isolation that would peel me raw and make me feel everything, deeply, like a sensitive wound in the breeze. It’s not painful. It feels nice. Like freedom.
Tia Glista
Tia Glista writes film and literary criticism about gender for The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Document Journal, and elsewhere. She is a PhD student in English at the University of Toronto where her research investigates the social, political, and interpretive demands of gesture and posture in feminist cultural production of the 20th and 21st centuries.
For DASH, knowing that words fail
When I found out my dog died, I wailed. I wailed “no.” I wailed for hours. I thought I might never be able to stop, that this was it now: grief. But also—it couldn’t be happening: it was just a dream, wasn’t it? I could still hear him scratching the door to go outside when I sat in the kitchen. His crate was still in my room, his bed was still inside and it smelled like him.
Dash died when I was away at summer camp, and so I never had the chance to say good-bye. He had had cancer, and in his final years, being away from any of us always stressed him so much that his symptoms augmented. My brother and I were both away that summer and we didn’t know what was happening while we were gone, while my parents tried to hold it together and take care of our beautiful, sweet lapdog. That was more than eleven years ago—people ask why we never got another dog to replace him (as if that were possible), but the truth is that he just hasn’t left yet. I still know viscerally the weight of his chin resting on my knee and just how soft his fur was. I can still feel these things. He’s still here and I hope he never leaves, or that we never let him.
I had been a scrappy kid who lived in my head, and when we got Dash, I found something to care about that was real. Nothing has entered my life since then that has been worth loving as much as he was. A good dog will do that to you—they will melt your heart, but you will always feel inadequate to the task of showing them that you love them as much as they love you. I don’t know if he knew that and I will always wish I…
…That is the torturous thing about love—not so much that it ends, because it doesn’t (not really), but that there is never any assurance that you have made others understand they are as loved as they are. To acknowledge this total and utter fallibility of language is strange for a writer (my professor, the late Mari Ruti, once described writing as “the scene of surviving my own inadequacy”). But that is all I can say about love: that it is big enough to exhaust your capacities of explanation and therein lies the problem. It is impossible to make known, the scale of it is nothing that makes sense.
Briana Soler
Briana Soler is a writer and photographer in Houston, TX. She has been published with Paloma Mag and Mortal Mag and has a forthcoming piece with The Afterpast Review. You can find her writing essays on Substack, or you can find her on Instagram sharing her photos and musings.
UNENDING TRACE
Like someone in love, he said he met me in a dream. I smiled and didn't believe him. What would I be doing in any of his dreams? But then he wrote it in a song and the words became scripture. Snow makes me think of him, but then so does grapes, and the moonlight, and the hums of jazz. Love is fatal friends always told me. Perhaps the fatality they meant is that my life before him is dead. Life began anew when we met. Don’t get too attached ma would say. How can you love and not be attached? I asked. She raised her eyebrows at me like she always did when she thought I knew better. But it was too late. I already knew I was in love with him when he stayed up at night in his parent's kitchen making me laugh until the sides of my stomach felt like they might bleed. Life felt like a waltz. It has been a decade and then a year later since making that silly choice of letting myself fall in love. The love has changed and grown bigger than I could imagine. Loved stripped us of our layers and made us see more clearly. It shed layers of what I knew to be true about love. But love is a paradox because it also made everything more complicated because now life was shared in two. Love is fatal still rings in my head all these years later. My entire world takes the shape of him. Isn’t that what love is? We make ourselves powerless, weak in the knees over kisses and sweet words. You’re my best friend he tells me one cloudy day as we are eating in the kitchen. I scan his face and see all of me inside his smile lines and frown lines, I see us in the speckles of his eyes. I think of Cy Twombly’s splatters of red and pink on canvas–an explosion of feeling, inspiration embedded in the threads–creation. I do not know where I begin and he ends, and I have no intention of untangling us to find out.
Arbela Capas
Arbela is a writer and editor based out of Cleveland, Ohio. She loves to gab about fashion, culture and tastemaking for her Substack, The Changing Room and her podcast by the same name. When she's not writing, she enjoys watching '90s rom-coms, re-reading Mary Oliver poems and hosting theme parties with friends.
Holding Onto Tulips
On Valentine’s day, my mother got me flowers. A bushel of cranberry-hued tulips with their petals beginning to spread out. “I’m so glad the store had them,” she said. “Because I know they’re your favorite.” This sentiment, catching me in the midst of a low week, almost brought me to tears.
Because tulips are, in fact, my favorite and they have been, for as long as I can remember. It’s one of those things that have kept repeating over and over with every physical and mental phase of my life. My limbs have stretched, my eyesight blurred and my skin pigmented. And still, tulips remained my favorite.
With time, I’ve acquired more favorite things — as well as a desire to acquire more. In the tornado of everything that I consume, I feel myself struggling to keep up with what my taste should be. Sometimes, I wish I wasn't so predictable with my interests. Yes, my favorite flowers are tulips but I’m almost 30, shouldn’t I have a new favorite flower? Something less ordinary? Less predictable? It can’t be tulips all the time, can it?
But maybe some things don’t need refinement. Sometimes — it’s just tulips. It’s just the color lavender. It’s just the movie, My Best Friend’s Wedding that I continue to eagerly blurt out when asked, “What’s your favorite movie?” These are the objects of affection I’ve always returned to. The things I loved and continue to love, without hesitation. And more importantly, they’re the things I give away, freely, earnestly to others.
I take it for granted: the simple tenderness of someone remembering something about me. In a way, it feels like they’re taking a load off me. Because it sometimes feels heavy to carry ourselves — and everything attached — around each day.
Similar to the future, our past is never ending, stretching, disappearing. And sometimes, I wonder: Where should I put it all so that it’s not lost forever? But the truth is, I’m unloading these things all the time. And the proof of that is in the phrase; “I’ll always remember that about you.”
So if one day I forget — even for a moment — that tulips are my favorite flower, I hope someone I love reminds me. Because I’ll believe them.
Rachel Soo Thow
Currently residing in New Zealand, Rachel works full time as a Beauty Development Executive by day and a Bookstagrammer by the name of The Lit List at night. Rachel lives with her boyfriend who works in skate and their little darling pug Henry, and she has a TBR as long as her book reviews. Avid lover of all things carbs, the colour black and beauty and literature. You can also find Rachel on Substack.
As children we are taught to fear strangers, to look out for the unknown, to keep our eyes on the unfamiliar. But more often than not, the ones we fear the most and the ones most likely to do us harm are the ones closest to us. If I think back to my younger 13-year-old self, I felt like I was waking up every day having been introduced to the tragedies and comedies of life. The what-not-to-do’s, the achievements, and the confined space to which every day seemed like a haphazard compilation of love, loss, failure and art. Remember the first time you fell in love? That spectatorial gaze and the daydreams. This sort of enchanted concept that would take us to new emotional heights and elusive lows. Love at first sight. The butterflies that at one point I dismissed as a fundamental flaw in the concept of love – then again, was I just skeptical because I wasn’t in a relationship that was inherently stable? Perhaps.
I remember running around the rectangular wooden sandbox in kindergarten chasing after a boy that would soon also find himself at my primary school and then at the boy’s college round the corner for Intermediate. It was one of those things where our parents lived within the proximity of locals built on highlighting the compatibility of personalities – ‘oh she likes to read too!’, ‘his parents are nice, what is he up to today?’. As a shy young girl, I hated these comments. I felt like I was slipping into a cave smothered in superficial attraction and meddling neighbors. So, you can only imagine that my safe space was to avoid him at all costs – I’m sure he cringed about it all too. We never talked about it, but it seemed to be a general look of understanding of a ‘love that most certainly won’t blossom’ due to unstable meddling.
I found myself fearing the unknown, longing for genuine connection and a relationship that would thrive. Is it any wonder that the 80’s and 90’s served rom-com’s that followed that ‘Head Over Heels’ formula? – fleeting moments of infatuation thrown into a pool of accidental compatibility. It continued to serve as a poignant reminder that there were plenty of fish in the sea, but when you’ve been burned too many times, that term just fails irrespective of how the Hollywood scenes depicted it should be. Having to protect yourself from the person you willingly let in. A crack in the formula. One minute I was being embraced by my other half listening to the concrete crunch beneath our footsteps; the next, I was throwing everything into the boot of my car as tears streamed down my face. Paralyzed by hope and fear, I wanted that same feeling of the initial embrace back in my life again. I wanted to be sought after. To have that almost decade-long relationship matter. I was stubborn. And I hated the fact that I was told that they loved me so much that they had to set me free. It was a total copout.
What motivates us to love and to love so deeply? How do we love? And do we love with intention? I sometimes feel myself spending hours recalling those moments where that sense of romanticism made me feel safe. Wanted. Things aren’t the same as they once were, and things will never be the same now. Instead, I am but floating in the unfamiliar.
Art by Rowen Dinsmore
Rowen Dinsmore is an emerging artist and a Bachelor of Fine Arts Honours graduate from the University of Saskatchewan. Using a variety of mediums, including painting, printmaking, and video, the artist explores the topic of self-portraiture as a means to investigate identity and the self. She uses these mediums to develop layers that abstract and complicate the portrait. Influenced by social media and art history, Dinsmore studies what it means to be a woman in the modern era through an artistic lens, often approaching topics of spectatorship, the gaze, and the feminine form. Her work offers both a critique and an embrace of these aspects of the female experience in a post-internet world.
Wow! Just got done reading through it all and am so incredibly floored by all the talent here. Congrats on one year Raquel!! It has been such a privilege to see your newsletter grow and to get to read great work every week. The future is bright! Thank you for including my prose piece in this anthology! 🫶🏼
Honoured to have been included! Congrats on the one year <3