In this much-beloved feature launched for the very final time, our editors and contributors each respond to a single cultural question.
As always, please, no wagering.
Five years later, what Weeklings essay has stuck with you the most?
Ashley Perez
My introduction to The Weeklings came about when then-editor Antonia Crane introduced a feature called Welcome Kink, an essay series that featured the good, bad, and amazing on kinky sex and kink culture. She worked with me for six months to get my essay ready for the series, as well as a lot of other talented writers. One of my favorite essays from that series is Seth Fischer’s essay, “The Skinner Box”, which brings together kinky sex, bisexuality, masturbating, and psychology. What more could you ask for? I think this is what The Weeklings can be most proud of; fearlessly bringing the best writing on every topic to a wide audience.
Janet Steen
I don’t know how to pick the Weeklings essay that has stayed with me the most from these past four years. So many still spark in my brain: pieces by Jennifer Kabat, Lawrence Benner, Sean Beaudoin, Henry Cherry, Jana Martin, Greg Olear, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, Sean Murphy, Derek Bardowell, Barbara Mansfield, Deirdre Day, Robert Burke Warren, and others. But I will complete my assignment by choosing one that resonates with me especially in these days of catastrophic news and foreboding election coverage: Nathaniel Missildine’s essay “Catching Us at a Bad Time.” It’s a perfect example of the sort of essay I wanted to see at The Weeklings: nimble, questioning, unpredictable, baffled. Missildine tries to parse the strange, nonsensical texts his young daughter is sending him while also absorbing the horrible news of the day: beheadings of journalists and aid workers, murderous cops who escape indictment, school shooting rampages. And all of this from his bucolic expat life in France. It’s a piece that has questions but no easy answers, and that captures the feeling that this world is fucked up beyond understanding right now. “I don’t know where we go from here,” Missildine writes at one point. That line sticks with me in these strange days.
Kurt Baumeister
“Top GOP Excuses for Romney Being a Loser,” by Elissa Schappell. The qualities I most admire about Elissa Schappell’s writing are her style and wit. From her short stories and journalism to her Facebook posts and Twitter tweets Schappell’s work embodies something I like to call “savage urbanity”, an acid wit (barely) contained by her eloquence. This rare quality is fully on display in Schappell’s short post mortem on the 2012 election. From “Lord Mittens” to “panda jerky” and “Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman Who Doesn’t Want the Government in her Vagina” this piece shows Elissa at her best. And it points to one of the greatest attributes of The Weeklings as an endeavor: Freedom. People on the outside may not realize it but there was a lot of freedom in the content The Weeklings produced, a lot of room for individualism. There are other sites and magazines where this exists, to be sure; but in a sense The Weeklings was a little like an asylum run by the inmates, something any lunatic in his right mind can appreciate, something that will be missed. Beyond its content, this piece is memorable for me because Elissa is one of the first new (to me, at least) writers I admired when I began to pursue publication a few years ago. The fact that she was one of The Weeklings original contributors is, more or less, why I wanted to write for The Weeklings in the first place. And I’m very happy I did.
Hank Cherry
Rather than pick one essay, I offer one each by the four founders of The Weeklings. I’ve been reading Sean Beaudoin’s written work since we sat next to each other in Philosophy class back in college, me the younger student, him the wizened bulb ready to enter society and bend it to his will. Check out his excellent meditation on the Newtown school shootings, “Going Home.” Jennifer Kabat always directed light and diligent intelligence with particular concern for the arts, from her pieces came conversations that lasted long after reading. Read her brilliant “My Favorite Marxist” essay. Greg Olear presented a firm grasp of word-smithing but always with a particular zest, daring anyone to rob him of his love for Billy Joel while still remaining remarkably credible. And of course, Janet Steen offered real clarity of concept in her pieces while cloaking each essay with incisive poetry. Her offering, “The Gravity of the Situation,” will make you a better, smarter person. From them, others sprouted: Joe Daly, Sean Murphy, Michael Gonzalez, my friend Antonia Crane, along with many others (Bob Devine!!!). But if you’re here reading, it’s because of Janet, Greg, Jen and Sean. So l thank them now for giving us all the room to move. I, for one, am much, much better for the opportunity. And if you need something else, check out Hank Cherry’s sublime “Soul Seduction – The Bar-Kays” for an indelibly raw and vibrant commitment to musical appreciation. It should have been a contender! The Weeklings are dead! Long live the Weeklings!
Litsa Dremousis
Choosing my favorite Weeklings essay is like choosing my favorite Top Pot donut or picking the cutest kitten in the box: damned near impossible. That said, I’m particularly drawn to Janine Canty’s “Don’t Blame Yourself”: A beautiful, blunt, bloody look at grief and the ways in which life seemingly targets each of us again and again. So vivid that reading it is like watching a film. And while, from a technical standpoint, Canty’s sentences occasionally need polishing, that’s one of the things I love about her work: she’s not precious and she’s true to her voice. Sometimes publishing feels like a round-robin, circle jerk, echo chamber where all of us know all of us know all of us. Canty, a nurse in northern Maine, knocked down the damned door with the weight of her talent and we’re each the better for it. She’s not one more MFA darling spending a paragraph describing a tree. (Seriously, guys: call it “a maple” and then move on. You’re not writing for Martians: we know what a fucking tree looks like.) I’ve never met Canty in person, but when I read her essays, I feel like I’m reading a supremely gifted friend. As for the end of The Weeklings, I guessed it was coming because all of us on the masthead and all the regular contributors are fortunate and tenacious enough to be supremely busy. Which doesn’t mean I won’t miss it. Writing for The Weeklings has been one of the favorite parts of my career. To a person, the aforementioned are not only superb writers, but kind and trustworthy. Goodbye, Weeklings. You were the meal AND the dessert and I always licked my plate clean.
Jamie Blaine
It’s difficult to pick from all the fifty greatest band names and drug-addled albums, from riffs on Bowie, Prince and GNR but I have to give it to Robert Burke Warren’s coming-of-age tale of lazy eyes, metal groups named Ickee Phudj and forming a punk-funk band with RuPaul called Wee Wee Pole. Sweet and nostalgic with a lot of soul — everything I love in good writing. For example, this line, when a reluctantly-grown-up Burke found himself playing songs at his son’s preschool. “And I always told them, to their astonishment, that skin, bones, and hearts are stronger when they heal.” Also that time Questlove played his song “Elephant in the Room” on Jimmy Fallon was pretty darn cool.
Jen Kabat
I have four essays, not one, and death is truly what unites them. The first is Judy Juanita— a former Black Panther’s take on guns today. The Panthers took up arms; they armed others. They believed in their right to bear arms. And, Judy carried a gun in her purse. In a world where black men were being sacrificed in Vietnam, and doing-anything-while-black could be called a crime (to this day), the Panthers armed for defense and offense. Here she writes about her own gun and the power of guns, their poetic and psychic strength as well as their sheer horror. Her essay is as lyrical as it is nuanced and angry. To say I am proud of it isn’t nearly enough. It begins and ends with Trayvon Martin. The week I write this that essay seems ever more timely and urgent. And, then there is Sean Beaudoin’s essay also on guns and the inane/insane shooting at Newtown, CT where he went to elementary school and how to make sense of loss. I still don’t know how to make sense of it, or any other. Finally as meditations on death that also try to comprehend loss and the unaccountable calculous violence leaves there is Nelly Reifler’s “Blue Spark.”
Sean Beaudoin
Well, if I were to get technical about it, the essay that has “stuck with me” the most is one that I still get regular hate mail about, even four years later. Who knew Beach Boys fans were so sensitive? Or I could pick all two years worth of Hank Cherry’s classic “Sunday Light & Word.” I’ll admit to being enamored with Vince Navy’s take on the moral legislation against having an opinion about Caitlyn Jenner that fails to be cloyingly positive. I also loved Jamie Blaine’s elgiac “Tuesday’s Gone, Ride On,” but in terms of most affecting as a piece of prose, I’m going to go with Bob Devine’s “Delmark Records 1965.” I solicited it, as Bob was college professor of mine and in-between lectures would sometimes tell cryptic little tales about his years interacting with iconic blues personalities, some of whom were my heroes, both then and now. It’s a great piece that sets you firmly in a very specific time and place that can never and will never come again. But it’s also a document, a story that might not have been told. If nothing else, in five years at The Weeklings I’m proud to have been a part of something whose greatest purpose might have been to give a platform to obscure voices, and archive stories that might otherwise have just disappeared.
Greg Olear
We’ve run a staggering 1,320 pieces (!) since April of 2012. I just now scrolled through the list of titles, which runs to 64 pages, and it’s amazing to me how much good stuff we published. I wish Diana Spechler wrote more. I wish James Greer wrote more. I wish Whitney Collins wrote more. I wish I wrote less. I wish Big Ron Dantomine had taken off. I wish I knew why some pieces got a lot of hits, even if they didn’t deserve it, while other really great ones died on the vine. I wish we’d had a real budget, so we could have paid everybody and/or promoted the site more. As for which post has stuck with me, I’ll go with Lawrence Benner’s “The Island of Apples.” One of my favorite writers, Larry tends to write about weird, obscure stuff, or else come at current events at a particularly peculiar angle. But this post is about something so real, and so inherently sad, that I didn’t take it at face value until I was several paragraphs in. Just a sublime piece of writing.
Sean Murphy
When I first met Sean Beaudoin, which is to say when I first met his writing, it was love at first sight. I suspect I’m not alone in this, but as a writer it makes my love, well, complicated. We read, often without reward, hoping to encounter that rare piece that will both inspire us and reinvigorate our passion for why we do what we do in the first place, despite the rejection, obscurity and annoying groupies (okay, mostly the first two). So it’s a tad awkward when you find yourself hating a writer a little bit because they are so good at what you try to do. Yes, it’s useful and refreshing and all that crap, but it’s also a reminder that we ultimately must measure ourselves not by clicks and likes but by our peers. However, all of these mixed emotions are forever redeemed by the first piece of his I read, “Ronald Reagan, The Greatest President Who Ever Lived.” It contains all the elements that make Sean’s writing so memorable and satisfying: humor, erudition, just the right amount of cynicism (easy to attempt, near impossible to pull off in an essay) and, most importantly, he did heavy lifting for those of us who wanted, no needed to write an essay exactly like this. Thank you, Brother Beaudoin, for writing this so I didn’t have to. On a personal note, the essay that will stick to me is this one, since it led to a note from Julie Newmar, and what guy doesn’t have a message from Catwoman on his bucket list?
Lawrence Benner
The Weeklings changed my life. I had been writing for thirty years off and on—(early years) sad shitty poems on cocktail napkins, (middle years) sad shitty unfinished novels, (later years) sad shitty screenplays—but when Sean invited me to contribute to The Weeklings I was terrified, because there were so many REAL writers on there, people who would instantly recognize how uneducated and naïve and mediocre I was, and they would undoubtedly laugh at me. But I encountered nothing but good will and acceptance and encouragement from all involved. It has been a great era, and I will miss it. Some of my favorites are: Greg Olear’s interview with Kate Arnoldi about the crisis at the border crossings, Janet Steen’s speculations about a homeless man on the roadside, Sean Beaudoin’s memories of a youth spent knitting, and Jennifer Kabat in Scotland talking whiskey. Also, Hank Cherry’s Sunday Sermon was a weekly favorite, also Jose Padua’s If the River was a Confederate Flag, and everything by Jana Martin, and Whitney Collins, and Nat Missildine.
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