Abigail Oswald

@abigailoswald.bsky.social

1645 Followers 308 Following

detective investigating life | Lost/Found editor at Split/Lip Press | abigailwashere.com/links

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a zine called "the project is your life" rests on a ledge against a brick wall
a zine called CLUE LOG rests before a row of yellow Nancy Drew books; its back cover reads: "THE DETECTIVE'S GLOSSARY: DISCOVER OBSERVE DOCUMENT MAGNIFY INVESTIGATE QUESTION CONNECT ARCHIVE"
three zines titled FOLLOW THE CLUES form a mysterious line leading deeper into a green forest
"Most of all, Ellen woke me up to the idea that everything I make can be a love letter. To the reader, to art, to possibility. It can be hard sometimes to remember this, but it's people like Ellen who convince me, now than ever, in the importance of art, creativity, and love in spite of it all. As Ellen says in her final video: Be good to one another. Increase love every day. Love those who make you the angriest most. The world is going to get harder, scarier, crazier, faster. And if you’re here, it’s because you can handle it. If you’re here, it’s because you were designed to help make it better. So make it better. Make it better with love. Love is the only option; love is the only way. And I know you know that’s true."
Ellen's artwork on a blue background: a tiny box that reads "Ellen's Pack o' Petite Portraits!" with hand-drawn images on little notecards spilling out around it
a zine resting on a bench in an art museum
a zine titled "Begin at the Library" rests on a library shelf, with a line of books visible behind it
accompanying art by Sirin Thada, featuring two sisters walking down a city street under the light of a full moon. their shadows look like wolves!
a green zine called Zines That Never Existed
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Alive in My Heart! I remember reading Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead for a high school English class and being absolutely floored by it. By revisiting the events of Shakespeare’s Hamlet through the eyes of two minor characters, Stoppard made me realize that every story is a springboard for a thousand more stories like it. That play in particular opened up the possibilities of fiction for me in a new way. I’m still captivated by the idea that every single character has their own unique arc, regardless of the role they play in the one I happen to be reading. Stories that embrace this truth are stronger for it. And life’s kinda like that, too — empathy often stems from the realization that every stranger you meet has an entire history that led them to the single solitary moment of your interaction. RIP Rosencrantz & Guildenstern!
an autumnal fall scene featuring the sun shining across a tree is visible through a square viewfinder cut out of the page of a zine called Pocket Viewfinder
A book’s pages are littered with mysterious old photographs of people, cats, a fountain, humans carrying a box containing a skeleton. The scans also feature a mysterious letter, scraps of mail, and a lock of hair.
the cover of Cameron Crowe's memoir, titled The Uncool, featuring a photo of a young man with long hair making a silly face
the contents of McSweeney's 80, including a catalog, a sketchbook, and other assorted ephemera, which are all attached to the trapper keeper via binder rings—the "new school year" nostalgia is PALPABLE
an absolutely GORGEOUS PERFECT trapper keeper featuring shimmery dolphins and cute lil fish swimming through some sort of undersea ruin, labeled "McSweeney's 80"
"I am so glad you've gotten even."
Dead Poets Society still of Keating at the front of the classroom, telling the class, "No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world."
"Also, distance yourself from the logic of unlimited consumption within a culture industry based on incessant rotation and disappearance, excess publication and destruction, propaganda and the promotion of phenomena. Reread, lend, exchange, sell, give away, even reuse these printed materials in your publishing process. If possible, choose artisan publishing products and writings that are made with more care and in a finer way, that have a higher work density, are made by your peers, by small artisan publishing houses or by independent small-industrial publishers that are openly supportive within the biblio-system that we all inhabit."
Robin Williams' Keating in Dead Poets Society asking his students: "What will your verse be?"
When considering genre, I'm reminded that our stories are far from static. And if life is always shifting, change is always possible—in the good times, yes, but also in the bad. And there's hope in that, right? Change can be devastating, but change is also the only way to heal. Your story's not over yet. If nothing else, remember: every night holds within it the inevitability of day.
"This story encapsulates my feelings about the internet, today, as someone who’s experienced life both before and after the introduction of a world expanding technology. As a teenager, access to that early internet was exciting, promising; it allowed me to see beyond the stifling myopia of my suburban upbringing. But as is essentially always the case when capitalism enters the scene, what once seemed promising proved disappointing, and what once felt exciting has begun to feel routine, limiting, even oppressive. To be online in 2025 feels like being at work, and there’s often a felt obligation to *produce*, hustle, brand and rebrand. Of course, it’s true that people still discover new bands, new interests, new people and new experiences, but today that’s mostly *despite* the way the internet works, not *because* of it."
A movie poster for The Descent depicts mostly darkness, with a small shaft of light illuminating creepy faces and finally a woman's face at the bottom of the image. Tagline: Face your deepest fear.
"...find things beautiful as much as you can, most people find too little beautiful." - To Theo Van Gogh, London, January 1874
Revisiting this story months after first writing it, I’m unsure what it really is about. I’m unsure if I knew at the time, when I first wrote it, and have since forgotten; or maybe I was always unsure and I wrote that sentence as something of a reminder to figure it out at some point during revisions; or maybe I was unsure, but I was ok with that, and I wrote the sentence just because I liked the sound and feel and idea of it. I’m leaving it now. I like the sound and feel and idea of it. And what it’s really about isn’t really up to me, anyway. That’s for you. To decide, or to decide that it isn’t up to you either and that it doesn’t really matter. That’s ok, too.
a black-and-white photo of outdoor foliage bathed in sunlight
Somewhere along the line I made the decision to live with the perspective that every work of art might hold the potential to change my life. (Even—or maybe especially—some words on a page.) If you buy into the idea that art can change you, rewire you as a person, send you down a different path, it means taking little risks every day. Each story you start offers one more what-if. Every time you walk into the movie theater becomes a chance to change your life. The world can change you, and maybe if you pick up a pen, you can change it back. It can be a little scary, opening yourself to that unrelenting possibility. But to live a life shaped irrevocably by art—isn’t that kind of magic?
Opening of my essay, "See Tom Run": "I have now seen every Tom Cruise movie thanks to Covid-19. I am a person who gives myself projects—or, as I see it, mild distractions from pervasive existential dread—and a global pandemic that forced us all inside our homes as the world shuddered to a unified halt called for one mighty distraction indeed. Mine, as it turned out, just so happened to take the form of a movie star."
"I myself have difficulty looking back at my earlier published work, returning to the old obsessions with new eyes. Perhaps we are all leaving a trail of ourselves, our evolutions not just as writers but as people, and this is part of the point-not saying what we want to say with perfect clarity, but depicting a process of creative evolution. Like shedding husks digitally, a trail across the internet marking iterations of our earlier selves."
INTERVIEWER You seem to have been open to a variety of influences. BRADBURY A conglomerate heap of trash, that's what I am. But it burns with a high flame. I've had my "literary" loves, too. I like to think of myself on a train going across America at midnight, conversing with my favorite authors, and on that train would be people like George Bernard Shaw, who was interested in the fiction of ideas. He himself on occasion wrote things that could be dubbed science fiction. We'd sit up late into the night turning over ideas and saying, Well, if this is true about women in 1900, what is it going to be in the year 2050?
"Life imitated the movie which imitates life," Crowe said of Elizabethtown's critical reception. Maybe Crowe wrote the story he himself would later need: a blueprint for perseverance. "You want to be really great?" Claire asks Drew while he's miring in self-pity. "Then have the courage to fail big and stick around. Make 'em wonder why you're still smiling!" I've heard many writers say that we sometimes write the stories we needed when we were younger. I like to think that there are times we write for future versions of ourselves, too.
Among the latest reports: Journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe's THE UNCOOL, about the author's formative years in rock and roll and Hollywood, bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, including the real-life events that became Almost Famous; and an untitled, fully illustrated collection of journalism in which the author re-interviews the subjects of his most meaningful profiles, decades after the fact.
the red cover of Lauren W. Westerfield's DEPTH CONTROL, subtitled "Essays and Autofictions"
Maybe I'm just mad at the context, I feel like making art has been simultaneously undervalued and yet cordoned off as a luxury activity. You are expected to do so much work for free in the arts, there are times when I can't pay the bills, I have to scramble, ask for help, do some side thing, compromise. And every time I have to do that, I doubt that my art is real, that I can even call myself an artist. How can the essence of human culture-art, song, dance, story, what we do to express ourselves, to communicate, to understand our world be considered a luxury only available to a privileged few? That makes me angry. Art belongs to all of us. It's a language. It's worth supporting the people who make it.
Is It You? Or Is It Just Me?: Versions of the Self in Personal Shopper by Abigail Oswald “I’m always aware on some level when fantasy is being used to sell me things; I know when I’m being manipulated. Yet at the same time, I’ve always been a sucker for new beginnings. I can’t help but wonder how many selves I’ve brushed up against in department store fitting rooms. How many different people have I almost become?” Bright Wall/Dark Room
a room with colorful paintings of women and flowers and nature projected onto the walls
So, you're not just a multi-disciplinary artist that does different things but you find ways of bringing it all together? Maybe my practice is a process of layering -- of gathering fragments from different places, voices, and times, and allowing them to interweave. At the core, it's about listening: not only to the sounds around us but also to the voices, memories, and stories embedded in places beyond the most visible dominant layer. When I compose music, I think about how sound can be both singular and collective; each note or rhythm contributes to a larger, shared soundscape. It's similar to writing. I don't see my novel, for instance, as a solitary expression; it's informed by collective voices, by dialogues with other artists and writers, by landscapes, and by the histories they carry.
Val Kilmer, holding a camera up to the mirror
Nicolas Cage, Anton Yelchin, Nicolas Winding Refn, and Paul Schrader wearing t-shirts that say "No publicity issued by artist or lender, whether personal publicity or otherwise, shall contain derogatory mention of company, the picture, or the services of artist others connected with the picture." The words "derogatory" and "picture" are notably highlighted.
the cover of Erin Dorney's YES I AM HUMAN I KNOW YOU WERE WONDERING from Autofocus Books
From Aaron Burch's Year of the Buffalo: "Mr. Isaacson?" Both brothers turned to look at someone neither had seen approaching. "Sorry, the guy not-quite-stammered. "Scott? Scott Isaacson? Mr. Bison?" Scott gave a little wave, like here, like it wasn't obvious which of the two men was Mr. Bison. "Mr. Burch at Grantland was asking if he could have a few minutes. For an interview?" Scott shot his brother a quick look, then turned to the guy. "Sure," Mr. Bison answered, all smile, no hint of Scott's frustration, barely any hint of Scott at all.
"Most mysteries in life do not have solutions. We don't know why we live. We don't know why we die. In LA, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow-we're back on fire watch again. The whole city might burn down. We don't know. So it's nice to have this break from that, where you are going to get an answer. You are going to get a solution." - Sara Gran for Write or Die Magazine
Shawshank Redemption quote: “There’s something inside that they can’t get to, that they can’t touch. It’s yours. Hope.”
1: "Tell me how the penguin died." "No, son, I shall tell you how the penguin lived." 2: "going to tell my grand kids this is the lord of the rings." 3: "this video actually makes me think he's one of the few penguins that was sending a message to all but the audience don't understand it" 4: "That is the most beautiful display of individualism and freedom of choice. This is not to be mocked but to be respected."
a page from Keri Smith's WRECK THIS JOURNAL: "fill in this page when you are really ANGRY."
Wings of Desire still: Peter Falk telling Bruno Ganz "There's so many good things."
Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight by Sara Gran - "If you love mysteries, and wonder why, this book is for you."
book cover of Hanif Abdurraqib's THEY CAN'T KILL US UNTIL THEY KILL US: white text above a wolf wearing a red jacket on a blue background
"I’m learning that I write to understand—to figure out what I think, what I believe. There’s that persistent impulse to dig meaning out of tragedy, to investigate our fear. Some might approach fear or grief as something we can 'solve.' And sometimes I do write to solve mysteries, even just for myself. But sometimes the answers evade you. Sometimes there’s no answer at all."
This beautifully designed little book contains an essay split into seven sections, such as "Upon Watching a Google Photo Montage of Myself on My Wife's Phone" and "Upon Watching an Unboxing Video of a Writer I Don't Follow on Twitter." How do our relationships to art and technology affect our experience of the world around us? Whether his setting is a classroom or a social media feed, Wheaton's writing brims with shrewd perspective on his experience of living a mediated life. I especially love the idea of a montage or unboxing video as a lens through which we can view ourselves differently. We're surrounded by unlimited avenues for self-discovery, if we only look closely enough.
There's nothing I love more than when a writer leads me to see something in a whole new way. Through Larson's eyes, The Long Hallway offers a compelling argument for reading the opening of Halloween as a coming-out story. As an avid Carpenter fan myself, I deeply appreciated the opportunity to return to a familiar film and find something new in it. Larson's writing reaffirmed one of my favorite truths about art-because every single person brings their own unique experience to a film or a painting or a novel, there's always something left to discover. The art you love can continue to open itself up to you in perpetuity, if you let it.
One of my favorite things about Art Monster is Kosut's frank references to the drafts, feedback, and revision that allowed the work to become what you're holding in your hands. I was reminded that art is not simply about arriving at a final product-it's about the journey, everything that led up to it. As a result, Art Monster feels alive-almost as if you're reading something that's still in the process of evolving. At one point Kosut astutely observes, "A book is an accumulation of the self over time," and those words have lingered with me ever since.
a graphic displaying three book covers: Marin Kosut's ART MONSTER (purple font on black background), Richard Scott Larson's THE LONG HALLWAY (a red and orange photograph of a door cracked open), + Michael Wheaton's HOME MOVIES (colorful stripes on a white background)
We have to tell stories, and we have to tell them in the best possible way we can, in our moment in history. And so I was like, OK, fine. I'll serve the gods of literature in whatever way I need to, even if that means that I produce something that I couldn't imagine myself producing 10 years ago. But that's good. I have to change. We have to change. I love that. Yeah. Then maybe that's what our social responsibility is, because I definitely don't think it's our responsibility as writers to show people what's right. I don't know that what I'm talking about is even a political responsibility. It's not. It's to keep writing and to write well and to be true to whatever that invisible dream force is that drives you to do it is, as opposed to the one that says, make as much money as you can and then die.
Finally, I asked last week about the books you're reading or recommending to others this season, and Abigail Oswald wrote to say this: Two 2024 books I'd highly recommend to other writers: Sofia Samatar's Opacities, an intimate portrait of writer's life that deftly explores the differences between writing and publishing, + Stacey D'Erasmo's The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, a book-length answer to the question, "How do we keep making art?"
How has the role of the critic changed in recent years? Receiving and consuming art, letting yourself be changed by art is such a messy, human process. Criticism is inherently an intellectual exercise, a cerebral activity. When I was coming up, it was more antagonistic. There was this sense of objective authority threaded into the critic's voice. There less of a tolerance for that now. Part of that has gone away with the idea of critics being purely gatekeepers of information. Now you can learn everything about a band in five minutes. That's a good change. It makes criticism more complicated and exciting when it hinges less upon some grand qualitative judgment of good or bad. This place where criticism is moving, where it's occupying this stranger, more fraught, fruitful, middle ground, it's a good thing. Looking at different ways of writing about music that aren't so plainly judgmental while making sure judgment is a small piece of it. That needs to remain in the mix a bit.
Marc Fischer's "Library Excavations: Chicago's Filed Artists" features a stack of folders in a library archive
Joshua James Amberson's Basic Paper Airplane: The Cassette Tape issue features a drawing of a cassette tape on a blue and white background
A cozy little hobbit hole with an intricate eye-shaped design on the green door
promotional poster for The Black Cauldron