The Gift is a free newsletter that delivers short essays to spark reflection and curiosity. The essays are experiments with form. My focus usually concerns some aspect of daily life—such as habits, events, or encounters—and you. (Sometimes I use the second person, you, to mean myself. Sometimes I mean, you, the reader. And sometimes who or what the you indexes is ambiguous.)
The Gift is informed by, and in conversation with, ideas from my academic training in the fields of media studies, feminist theory, queer theory, and science & technology studies, as well as my independent study of creativity, esotericism, and spirituality.
In addition to an essay, each publication may include a book review, a recipe, and news & information about services I’m offering, recommending, or cross-promoting.
I call my approach to The Gift, “the divine in your everyday,” to signal how seeing your quotidian at an angle, from the side, can be a vital, beautiful effort to make meaning. It is my hope these words inspire you to pause and reflect, too.
Will you join me?
Why The Gift?
The name of this newsletter is a homage to Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. Hyde’s book questions how, and when, art—and creativity—is a labor of gratitude. It’s a powerful book for anyone who desires to make something, to create living works of art, within our challenging and power-laden commercial system(s) of valuation. Margaret Atwood has described gifts, and Hyde’s The Gift, as essential for artists and also as “slippery and ambiguous.” Gifts involve movement, involve knots.[1] Hyde’s book shifted my relationship to the labor of creation, it opened me up to surrender. This was unexpected and has been totally delightful, in spite of everything! Gifts transform. And you transform in the service of your gifts.
What's your bio?
I write, teach, work, and live in Shoreline, Washington, U.S.A. the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. While I grew up in the rain and moss, I spent most of my twenties and some of my thirties in Central Europe and San Diego. I work or have worked as a university lecturer, program manager, researcher, and writer in higher education, big tech, open-access movements, libraries, and the arts. I'm married and a parent to two wonderful children.
www.monikasjones.com
Reference
[1] Atwood, Margaret. “The Gift of Lewis Hyde’s ‘The Gift’” (September 16, 2019) The Paris Review. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/09/16/the-gift-of-lewis-hydes-the-gift/
