The Dancing Writer
Hey! I just got here! I’m kind of embarrassed. Wanna dance?
This piece is part of “Day of the ___ Writer” an open collab on the daily experiences behind our writing. Post on your pub about your day, and check out our growing mosaic of many lives.
This project asks each writer to share something about how they exist and persist as a writer. I toyed with other concepts: the insomniac writer, the hopeful writer, the writer with a pit in their stomach. None hit right. Telling you about my day does not allow you to feel what any of this means with me, and that’s what matters to me as a writer. I want to let the weird painful parts of myself sing and hear the weird painful parts in others singing back.
So I’m skipping the introductions, extending a clammy hand, and asking you to dance.
What follows is a short playlist with my takes on why these songs help me exist and persist, and suggestions for how you could join me.
I hope you try listening and moving with me. Out of sync, but bound by our choice to experience something together. I hope you come up with some magical moves and tell me about it. However you choose to engage, may it connect you with yourself and with the part of you that dances even when all you want to do is scream.
If you’ve ever regretted not joining someone dancing on their own, or always hugged the wall at school dances, this is your chance.
Giants - Pete Josef (feat. Marie Lister)
I’m fucking furious most of the time. Scared, frustrated and disappointed. Aren’t you? The world has to change, and we’re going to need that energy, but we can’t explode before we get there.
So come all ye pissed and all ye goddamn over it, let the soul and movement of this deeply human anthem flow through you. Embrace its spirit of warm and joyful protest. Time to get moving – we are not alone, and we have work to do.
Let’s hit the ground: Dance along to the horns. Do a move you call “the showstopper”. You decide what that entails.
Illegal Hit (Edit) - Joshua Idehen, Yttling Jazz & Saturday, Monday
This song is the thesis statement of this playlist. Just play the song, you’ll get it deep in your bones.
Let’s fix our step: I shimmy off!
Struggle with the Beast - Anna von Hausswolff
Joshua says rhythm is the weapon, Anna says here’s a mad build up of textures and energy to speed your Valkyric flight into battle.
What is your beast? Mine is a sense that I am only allowed to live within the measly confines set for all real people by a class of megalomaniac bad hangs. It’s the fear that the only way out of these constraints is nuking my spirit to hustle every moment, and see every person or event as an opportunity to leverage for my own advancement. Start some business I pretend to care about until I sell it. My beast gets on my back until my knees buckle and I’m on the floor in a long-term freeze.
By the end of this song, we’ll be riding our beasts. Even if we fall off later, we’ll know how to get back on.
Let’s struggle: Someone has basted you in thick silver paint while you slept. To break free you need to shake off every last metallic flake. Go supernova, be a glitterbomb. Get it all off you. It’s going to take every plane and tempo available to your fragile human body. Buck and wiggle, shimmy and flounce, don’t care about where it lands.
Disco Snails - Vulfmon and Zachary Barker
In response to the paucity of taste, compassion, and sense in the world, why not get absurd? Get funky, weird, stinky, mockable, cringe, unmarketable. Refuse to make sense so they don’t know how to sell you or sell to you.
We’re already in this song. These super freaks of nature love to seek out funky hobbies so we might as well get down.
Sometimes the light that comes through that crack in everything Leonard Cohen was talking about is bouncing off a disco ball.
Let’s boogie: Do every clichéd disco move you can think of, but as a snail. SHAKE YOUR SHELL OFF.
Jynweythek - Aphex Twin
A brief respite to catch our breath.
Let’s dream: Move your body as articulately as a tongue wrapping around the name of this song. Returning students can do this while imagining that they are fairies posing as paper dolls, posing as fairies in Cottingley circa 1917.
Det som aldrig förändras / Diarabi - Goat
I believe this translates to something like “that which never changes”. This track is the coda, the conclusion, to an album you have not been listening to. You have been dancing to this playlist, because I asked you to and I thank you for that. While I hope you try the album sometime, don’t go now.
Stay here with me.
Maybe we need accept that we are in fact too late. We have all missed out on a lot, and we’ll miss out on more. Most days, life feels equal parts crushing uncertainty and spoilers.
I didn’t make it to this Day of the Writer party on time. I sauntered in here with a boombox (and an empty Substack) and embarrassed myself. I may be too late to enjoy myself or express myself the way that the people who arrived earlier can. So are you, at least in the case of this song.
It will seem an interminable jam for about 5 minutes and then something epic will hit you. Something that you can tell is picking up from somewhere, but somewhere you haven’t been. A callback to a joke you didn’t hear. Just stay with it. Stay with me. This is still meant for us.
Let it out: Freeform jam until the giant riff hits. When that riff kicks you in the gut, kick it back. Be huge. Be late. Call every shy and dying part of you back into being. Stomp, headbang. Celebrate finally getting here, wherever here is. Move in ways you’ve only imagined. Expand and scare yourself a little.
And now? Maybe I can write. Maybe you can do the thing that matters to you. And when the beast does return, we can do it all over again, hit the ground and change the mindset.