Hey there!
My name is Tara. Welcome to the Wreck Room. Since I’m new at this, I’ll get some housekeeping things out of the way:
1. Who are you?
I’m twenty-five years old, and I’m a born & raised New Yorker. I’m currently revising my first novel and working on some poetry collections (hoping to share more soon!)
2. Why start a newsletter?
Because I’m a grown up and a writer, and it seemed like the thing to do.
3. What are you going to talk about on here?
I’ll talk anything and everything writing: craft, storytelling, some literary theory, my own stuff, other writers’s stuff, books I really love, maybe books I really don’t love. I’ll also definitely veer into music, TV/film, and petty cultural theory.
I want to get fun with form: expect some poetry, lyrical essays, musings, reflections, commentary. Shopping lists, probably, what the hell.
4. Why “the Wreck Room?”
Partly because I really love a good pun, and partly because it’s what I plan on doing here.
I have a few rules for myself in writing & in life. Here’s the first one:
“I must be in constant & relentless pursuit of the truth, whatever that might entail, at any and every cost.”
This might sound a little woo. I don’t mean it in the sense of, like, pursuing the truth about how the pyramids were built or whatever. I mean pursuing the truth of the heart of things: the religions / neuroses / loves of people, the soul-matter of locales, the way systems move. To me, it means making a conscious effort to meet the world where it’s at and to interpret it fully & faithfully. But the most terrifying of these joys by far is pursuing the truth of the self.
Try it. Park yourself in front of a mirror and stare at yourself until you can’t stand it anymore. You’ll probably find that you’re uglier than you’d like to admit, or that you’re annoyed by the sound of your own breathing, or that you’ve had spinach in your teeth since lunch and had been beaming at strangers all day, or maybe you can’t even focus long enough to notice any of this. Wrecking yourself is doing exactly that, & doing it every single moment of the day, & still having the guts to carry on, & documenting it as best as you can; you become a poet of your own embarrassment.
This is a type of self-flagellation I’ve come to refer to as “wrecking yourself.” It’s supremely uncomfortable, but I believe it’s a necessary undertaking to become a half-decent writer / person—otherwise you stand for nothing, and you risk moving through life with the moxie of a boiled carrot.
Earlier this year I got a fortune from a Cantonese place in Sacramento: “adversity is the parent of virtue.” I usually have crummy luck with fortune cookies, so this one really stuck with me, so much so that I ended up keeping it.
I’m coming off of what was hands-down the worst year of my life. I’ve wrecked (& been wrecked) more than I can say—I’ve messed up plenty, been betrayed more than once, hemorrhaged money & time & love and lost pretty much everything. Now, I’m faced with exactly two options: I can either squish myself down into a flower pot and stay there until I die, or I can rebuild from square one. Rebuilding sounds harder, but significantly more fun.
I think that’s the real benefit of wrecking yourself: when you tear yourself apart, you get to figure out how you’re built, and once you find those truths, you can start rebuilding. With any luck, the adversity of reconstruction will birth the virtue of truth, and you’ll be all the better for it. Hence the Wreck Room.
I still carry that fortune around with me everywhere I go.
5. Where else are you?
With the imminent heat-death of TikTok, I’m not sure which corner of the Internet I’ll be spending the most time in (which is probably for the best.) Regardless, I can be found here:
IG / Threads: @taramaggs.writes
Twitter: @taramaggswrites
BlueSky: @taramaggswrites.bksy.social
TikTok (for now) / Lemon8 (what even is this???): @taramaggs.writes
Website: coming soon!
6. Anything else?
Not really, no. It feels sort of mortifying to admit that I’m starting an email list, but I am really excited about this. I’m excited about a lot of things. I can’t afford not to be. Thanks for reading—we’ll have fun here, I promise.
Go wreck yourself,
Tara