Hey Story Made fans, happy Friday and welcome back to another edition of The Rabbit Hole. It's a mini-blog in which I share my favorite gems from newsletters, social media feeds, bowels of the internet, and even real life. Here's the first post if you missed it. We're going to try doing this thing weekly! Here are this week's links:
#1 New York Times best-selling author Susan Cain shares how a bittersweet, melancholic outlook makes emotional room for beauty, creativity, and love (and dark chocolate). I've been meaning to read her book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for a while now, and now I've got a new one added to the list! This was a lovely conversation.
The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Dig for the “Submerged Sunrise of Wonder”(The Marginalian)
"There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life — as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics — which predate us and will postdate us and made us — meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life."
Writer Mary Gaitskill on the hidden life of stories. You may not see it, but you feel it. (via Austin Kleon's excellent newsletter of which TRH is a direct rip-off!)
Have you ever stumbled across a book that feels written specifically for you? I did this week, and it's called Marcel's Letters. The writer, Carolyn Porter, is a freelance graphic designer in Minnesota who decides to create a font based on the handwriting in some letters she finds at an antique store. But these aren't just any letters: They are in French. They are from Berlin. They were written in the 1940s. What started as a font project for Porter turns into a quest to learn as much as she can about Marcel and the circumstances of his letters. Typography! Letters! World history told through the lens of the personal! This book has it all.
Exquisite Corpse: Collage Edition
I'm a big fan of collage! While making one today I had an idea for a collage game reminiscent of drawing game Exquisite Corpse (except you can play mine alone and don't need to make a body). Here are the "rules":
Start with a single page—book, magazine, newspaper, doesn't matter—rip it up into a bunch of pieces.
Place one piece at a time. Alternate between people if there is more than one of you.
Here's the key: before moving to the next piece, you must stick the previous piece down. You gotta commit before moving on!
Don't plan your overall composition. Each piece in this collage is a response to the previous one and what is already glued down.
The result will be a spontaneous, puzzle-like collage! It doesn't have to look good (and probably won't), but it's a fun and freeing exercise to start thinking creatively. Here's a rough one I made using the title page to a vintage novel:
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!