#27 Micaela Brinsley, writer

'Picking a mug is also a really important moment (...)a kind of aspirational choice for the creative vibe of the day.'

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Micaela Brinsley is a writer, editor, and erstwhile theatre director. Her work lives at the intersection of artistic forms though recently, she’s been focusing primarily on lengthy projects of fragmented prose. A graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts in new play development and critical theory, she's worked for a number of theatres across the United States and is an independent researcher of art history. An essayist for A Women's Thing and a co-editor-in-chief of the arts & literary magazine La Piccioletta Barca, she recently lived in Amsterdam, is currently based in Los Angeles, and will soon be moving to Buenos Aires. You can find her on Instagram.

Where do you write?
Ideally, a desk. Though not always, as my desk is sometimes too chaotically organized to leave free space for my computer or notebook. Usually, part of what I do in the morning is clear the clutter left behind from the night before. Or, I give up and write somewhere else. 

Though strangely, I must confess my best writing has always shown up mid-walk—which, as I’m sure you can imagine, is always massively inconvenient. 

What can we always find on your desk?
Truly anything: old notebooks, artbooks—currently, one about Marc Chagall’s process of painting the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris and the entirety of Charlotte Salomon’s life work, Life? or Theatre?—as well as a pile of LIST OF BOOKS I’M READING, and then a separate LIST OF BOOKS I’VE FINISHED. It’s nice to have stashes of both. 

Also: unpaid bills, Redvines, lactase pills, half-melted candles, a picture of my mother and me when I was a baby, matches, a hairclip, a phone charger, a mug or two…

Morning writer or late-night words?
I try for the morning, always. But during the summer, that’s harder for me to do. Recently I’ve found myself slipping into writing late at night, as I’m doing right now. 

Coffee, tea, nibbles?
Coffee until five in the afternoon and peppermint tea after. No food, or else I can’t focus.

What's your most tempting distraction?
The possibility that a good friend or lover has written a really baggy text message or left me a voice memo. I love hearing from people, even if I’m sometimes an inconsistent responder. 

I turn my phone to aeroplane mode during the borders of the day—at night when I’m winding down, and I leave it off until I’ve been creative in the morning, even if just for a short while. If I don’t do that, I would read messages first thing in the morning and collapse, whatever space I woke up with that day in my brain. Once I pass that threshold, I can’t really write until the late afternoon, until dusk or so. 

Also, hunger.

What's that we hear on the speakers?
A recording of the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet, with Maria Callas in the title role. 

Or, the song ‘Lift You Up’ by LÉON on repeat, for hours—for some inexplicable reason, I’ve listened to it thousands of times and I’m still not sick of it. I have a habit of listening to the same song over and over, but I usually get bored of it by the fiftieth time, which hasn’t yet happened with this one. It’s not too fast, not too slow, sort of bouncy but also fluid. It must be the tempo of my heartbeat or something.

Have you got any pre-writing rituals?
If it’s the morning, I make a cup of coffee using my moka pot. Picking a mug is also a really important moment—I like that, in a way, it’s a kind of aspirational choice I’m making, for the creative vibe of the day. Once it’s been selected, I tap ground cinnamon into the empty cup, pour in the coffee, and add oat milk. Once I’m at my desk, I tend to sit with my hands clasped around my mug for a few moments and breathe. Then listen to ‘Lift You Up’ one way through—and I go.

Perfect bookshop to hide on a rainy day?
My favourite one in Los Angeles is North Figueroa Bookshop in Highland Park—the folks who work there are so fantastic and the selection’s gorgeously curated. But then I’d probably walk down in the rain with my new book to Checker Hall. It’s a bar connected to the Lodge Room, a music venue I adore, mostly because I saw the singer-songwriter and guitarist, Madison Cunningham, play live there once.

But I really miss spending afternoons at Scheltema in Amsterdam, where I used to live—they have a café within the bookstore too. I once spent a great rainy few hours reading the entirety of Valeria Luiselli’s book Faces in the Crowd (Christina MacSweeney’s translation) and then responding to emails while drinking tea.

What's your most treasured book?
I don’t think I can pick one! Honestly, whatever I’m reading at the moment, as I’ve become better at not finishing books I’m not enjoying (though it’s taken me a while to get there). At the moment, it’s Final Judgements by Joan Fuster, a lovely and hilarious book riffing on the aphoristic tradition. It’s a translation by Mary Ann Newman from Catalan, and published by the amazing Fum d’Estampa Press.

Favourite word in the English language?
Texture.

Dream writing location?
On sand, sitting against rocks, on the shore of the sea—but it would never work. I wouldn’t be able to focus on writing because of the beauty of the sea, nor on the writing, for fear I’d lose all sense of reality and end up ruining my notebook or computer. So… Back to the desk or a walk I go.

Three writers (dead or alive) to have dinner with?
Clarice Lispector, Leonora Carrington, and Natalia Ginzburg.

There’d be lots of arguing, charged silences, and gesticulations when they’d suddenly start to talk over each other again. I’d love to participate in it, but also observe it as an outsider too—they’re all very naughty, but in such different, specific ways. I think it would be so fun.

One poem that has changed your life:
Not a poem, but this fragment from Lispector’s book A Breath of Life, translated into English by Johnny Lorenz, changed my life completely as it named exactly what writing and reading means to me, the feeling it can unravel and reform. The book is structured as a dialectic between an unnamed fictitious author, a man, and his artistic creation, named Angela Pralini. 

Angela: But something broke in me and left me with a nerve split in two. In the beginning the extremities linked to the cut hurt me so badly that I paled in pain and perplexity. However the split places gradually scarred over. Until coldly, I no longer hurt. I changed, without planning to. I used to look at you from my inside outward and from the inside of you, which because of love, I could guess. After the scarring I started to look at you from the outside in. And also to see myself from the outside in: I had transformed myself into a heap of facts and actions whose only root was in the domain of logic. At first I couldn’t associate me with myself. Where am I? I wondered. And the one who answered was a stranger who told me coldly and categorically: you are yourself. Slowly, as I stopped looking for myself I ended up distracted and without purpose. I’m good at theorizing. I, who empirically live. I dialogue with myself: I expose and wonder what was exposed, I expose and refute, I pose questions to an invisible audience and they spur me on with their replies. When I look at myself from the outside in I am the bark of a tree and not the tree. I didn’t feel pleasure. After I recovered my contact with myself I impregnated myself and the result was the agitated birth of a pleasure completely different from what they call pleasure.

cc: Elizabeth Ward