“Hell hath no fury like a stationer scorned.” - Lisa Krowinski, Sapling Press↗
"Traditionally, bird song has been viewed as primarily a male trait and female song has been thought of as rare and anomalous. Research shows, however, that female song occurs in many songbird species. Also, it likely existed in the ancestors of all modern songbirds. So, female songbirds have been singing for millions of years. It’s time we start listening!" - The Female Bird Song Project↗
iNaturalist is so cool! There is nature EVERYWHERE! I have hammered shield lichen in my backyard! And it is beautiful, especially when viewed with a Belomo 10x loupe ↗
"A sound as of the beating of distant drums—a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead." From Ambrose Bierce, "The Death of Halpin Frayser," 1891, from American Supernatural Tales. A confusing gem of a story. Even after two reads I am still unclear who or what exactly killed Halpin, but I have my theories... ↗
"Earnshaw wasn’t an ocean and she wasn’t a tower. She was a ruin – inert and broken, the pieces of her mind lying in overlapping layers that hardly seemed to move or change. The trail that Jess and Alex had followed tasted of fury and violence and belligerence, but the ruin had none of those things. Emotionally, it was empty. Burned out." - from Fellside, in which M.R. Carey creates a physical alternate night world made of people's dreams, abstract emotions and mental states - amazing. ↗
Define "lucky." - Anne Panning in a lovely BRCA1+ essay!↗
"Each moment is brilliant and charged with shadow. Everything that appears in my eyes is too bright and too clear. I felt not that I was watching the landscape but that I was being watched by it. Seen by each of the daffodils, dandelions, the butterbur flowers, the spring starflowers—" Tokyo Ueno Station, Yu Miri. I am in love with this book.
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"Their story made me sad--but I also had this overwhelming urge to meet them before they were gone. If humanity was going to destroy a whole category of being, I figured the least we could do was understand what we were destroying." - Sam Anderson on writing "The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth; What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die?"↗
From Mary Ruefle's lovely essay on menopause: "If you are young and you are reading this, perhaps you will understand the gleam in the eye of any woman who is sixty, seventy, eight, or ninety: they cannot take you seriously (sorry) for you are just a girl to them, despite your babies and shoes and lovemaking and all of that. You are just a girl playing at life." ↗
The new Best American Experimental Writing 2020 (containing one of my stories!) is out! The whole anthology is great and inspiring. ↗
One of my most vibrant reading memories from grade school is reading Ray Bradbury for the first time ("All Summer In A Day" - so heartbreaking!- and "The Veldt") in the Junior Great Books anthology...so I'm really, really excited that my speculative story "You" has been included in the Junior Great Books grade 8 curriculum. I'm in there right along with Katherine Mansfield and John Steinbeck (!!).↗
"Humans must keep doing what they have been doing, hating and fighting each other. I will sit in the background, and let them do their thing." - essay written by Open AI's GPT-3↗
"The summits will remain wedged between a deep trough to the west and a broad ridge to the east. A return flow around the ridge will continue to pump warm, moist air northeast over the forecast." Ryan Knapp, meteorologist, Mount Washington Observatory. The beauty of weather writing! I'm somewhat hooked on these Mount Washington forecasts.↗
"Bodies lie in the bright grass and some are murdered and some are picnicking." Jenny Holzer. There is a great exhibit of hers at MassMoca right now!↗
“Blow now like you mean it, my love,” Captain Jane said and I blew, harder and harder, and the ground itself lit and the trees beyond and the air of the night and the night itself, it seemed, and I knew that Captain Jane had stopped blowing, that it was just me, that I was at the ending of my own great tale, that I had lit the world with its telling and that we would soon burn along with it and make of ourselves a burning, blazing suffix to the sun." - Laird Hunt, In the House in the Dark of the Woods - I am in love with this book↗
"As time has passed, I’ve come to understand what deep influence shaping a narrative has. Stories inspire our actions. They frame for us existences that are and are not possible, delineate tracks we can or cannot travel. They choose who we can find empathy for and who we cannot. What we have fellow feeling for, we protect. What we objectify and commodify, we eventually destroy." - Brilliant Brit Marling essay from the New York Times on creating a new (and non-masculine) narrative structure ↗
"Somehow the shock of separateness flooded me with relief. The world does not center on me or on my species. The casual center of the natural world is a place that humans had no part in making. Life transcends us. it directs our gaze outward." - David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen, a stunning and meditative book. Like Marlen Haushofer's The Wall but with less of the human in it. Plot as nature and the seasons.↗