@rlunday.bsky.social
Author of Mad Flights (Ashland PP, 2002), Gnome (Black Sun Lit, 2017), and Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness (University of New Mexico Press, 2023). In pursuit of Missingness Studies (theories of missing persons across all disciplines).
WHEN WE TALK OF STOLEN SISTERS
This multi-award-winning collection of Jessica Doe’s poetry call our attention to the disappearance of Indigenous women, the cultural genocide that continues, and the courageous survive.
Learn more and find links here: bit.ly/DoeSis
From the preface to the 1988 edition of his 1982 "All That is Solid Melts Into Air," an important book by the late Marshall Berman; posted here ironically, but also hopefully -- that Americans (and others) overall will reject this crisis of today that is much older than Trumpism.
Sometimes the NYT still does good work; read the comments as well, for a good example of social-media integration -- co-authors and editors and readers continuing the story, politely.
www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/w...
Including work by the late Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, among many others: poetry by descendants of those forced into internment camps during WWII.
www.thegateofmemory.com
Robert McBrearty's new collection is due out in March 2025. He's one of our funniest writers of short fiction, but also one of the most compassionate; I encourage all to buy and read! bookshop.org/p/books/the-...
Listen to my conversation with Christi Cassidy on disappearance, living abroad, and various intersecting topics: movingalongpodcast.com/robert-lunda...
The recording of our discussion at Brown Bag Lit is now available! tinyurl.com/3ed67vax
Listen to Maggie Messitt, me, moderators Chloe Yelena Miller and Shasta Grant, and our participants talk about the ways we write about disappearance.
Join us to hear Robert Lunday and Maggie Messitt on Monday, Sept. 9, from 12 – 1 pm EST.
Writing the Missing: A Conversation on Family, Disappearance, and Creative Investigations
Register for the free Zoom link (and consider leaving us a tip to cover administrative costs?)
tinyurl.com/mr4d5arj
Join us to hear Robert Lunday and Maggie Messitt on Monday, Sept. 9, from 12 – 1 pm EST.
Writing the Missing: A Conversation on Family, Disappearance, and Creative Investigations
Register (consider leaving us a tip to cover administrative costs?)
www.brownbaglit.com/events/writi...
Anticipating the publication of Point Zero by Seicho Matsumoto -- having just seen the wonderful 1962 film version ("Zero Focus") by Yoshitara Nomura.
bookshop.org/p/books/poin...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Fo...
Regarding the trending "Tortured Poets Department":
www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/tahir...
and
www.npr.org/2023/08/05/1...
Check out the other authors in Sweet Lit's Connections series:
sweetlit.org/sweet-connec...
Houston Missing Persons Day, 2/3/24:
The answer to Earhart's and Noonan's fate has been an asymptote (a curve ever closer, never arriving) for many years. Maybe one of these days something else will end the mystery -- or give it a final bracket despite several unknown details about the journey itself.
www.npr.org/2024/01/29/1...
A couple years back, the book and then TV show THE LEFTOVERS explored the global psychological devastation wrought by a sudden and bizarre disappearance of 2% of the population. After COVID and Gaza, that idea seems quaint now. Turns out the world just doesn’t give a shit 😡
![Franz Kafka: By Atelier Schlosser & Wenisch - Otto Schlosser (1880-1942) & Max Wenisch (1876–?)[1] - Franz Kafka: Pictures of a Life by Klaus Wagenbach (1984), p. 89; sourced to Klaus Wagenbach Archiv, Berlin, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27147733](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:f3mfe7wjorg6fwztk5lzhtuy/bafkreicx5ocuir5vnzzep32g4tjyf5dnkwjxn7akmia7y3ftfgn6zdutxe)
Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action. -- Franz Kafka, "Letter to His Father"
Place and non-place are rather like opposed polarities: the first is never completely erased, the second never totally completed; they are like palimpsests on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is ceaselessly rewritten. -- Marc Augé, "Non-Places"
If you missed it, here's a piece in the Guardian two days ago that reinforces your second point quite nicely:
www.theguardian.com/books/2023/n...
...I’ll be lost in the between, in the emptiness of the between, with the threats and the moments of radiant danger, the perfect days, the oases, the furious whisper of the night wind in the trees, the happiness, my fears, the imminent dawn. --Jane Mendelsohn, "I Was Amelia Earhart"
"We have unlearned the art of disappearance (art as such has always been a powerful lever of disappearance -- power of illusion and of a denegration of the real)."
- The Ecstasy of Communication
My updated bibliography for the Literature of Disappearance: robertlunday.com/the-literatu...
NamUs FYIs: Transgender and Indigenous missing / unidentified / unclaimed questions and answers. Even if wheels of govt. move slowly, they sometimes move progressively. (NamUs is the NIJ/DOJ-run database for missing and UID people in the US).
"If I can see the world after the point of my disappearance, that means I am immortal."
- The Perfect Crime
This one's on order, too -- I am reading Lynn Emanuel's latest book currently --
Thanks to Stalina Villarreal for telling me about Sara Uribe's "Antígona González," poetry about drug-trafficking violence and disappearance in Mexico-- I've ordered from bookshop.org, and listened to this talk with Uribe and translator John Pluecker:
libraryguides.bennington.edu/hybridgenre/...
This seems obvious:
www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/...
I haven't seen (and can't judge) Scorsese's film yet, but might he have based it on Linda Hogan's novel?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Sp...
Wind River is another recent film that could have focused on, and empowered, the Indigenous characters.
Can't get enough of this early 20th century news!
Here's a link to a version of the hybrid personal/scholarly essay I presented at the 2023 conference for the creative/scholarly ALSCW earlier this month -- "Mystery and Missingness: The Literature of Disappearance” --
robertlunday.com/alscw-paper-...
Among other themes, I'm exploring missingness "lore": story-cycles, fictional and non-fictional, that seem to demand reiteration. A few: Kafka and the Doll, the Vanishing Hotel Room (including Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes), and the tale of Martin Guerre. Any others?
