“I grew up a few hours from the scrapyard my namesake, Ida Novey, started in 1906. Nobody suggested a trip to see what had come of the still-operating Novey scrapyard, and I never asked. I have no material connection to what is now over a century of Novey recyclers,” writes author Idra Novey in her essay “Monstrous Hybrids and the Conjuring of Legacy,” published in the Yale Review, which chronicles a visit to a scrapyard owned by her family for generations. Novey discusses the nature of material versus linguistic inheritance, as she traces her connection to the ancestors who began this scrapyard a century before. This week consider your own sense of inheritance, whether material or otherwise, and write an essay that connects you to this history.
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