Reading Naomi Novak's A Deadly Education to my 6th grade daughter has been one of my favorite recent reading experiences. (I am also hoping that I will never have to give up reading to my daughter.) ↗
A short video of me reading from my story "You," part of an Alaska Quarterly Review benefit reading series ↗
In the Anchorage Daily News, there is a lovely write-up of the entire current issue of AQR, including a review of my memoir play "Dialogue Box" -- "Despite the dark nature of this 'memoir as drama,' the totality is a weirdly satisfying mix of comedy and tragedy as the writer, director, and reviewer act out and contemplate the large and small, real and imagined, fair and biased dramas of our lives." ↗
"The books and films that I keep mentioning, the essays you probably read, they all have an ending. The whole point of beginning is to lead to a climax and conclusion. The Butcher Baker Murders wraps up like you would expect a film about a serial killer to wrap up. Everything wraps up. That’s how stories work. Unfortunately, I don’t have the same resolution for this essay, if there is any resolution at all." - from "The Man and the Adaptations," an excellent, excellent essay about trauma and the shortcomings of the essay form, among other things. Published on Terrain.org↗
I have a play which is also a memoir which is also experimental in the latest issue of The Alaska Quarterly Review!↗
All of Anna Ridler's work looks fascinating, but in particular I was intrigued by this description of a work in progress - "Commission for Salford University Art Collection exploring non human ways of telling time"!!!↗
“Who are we, when no one is looking? Who are we, without what once both held us back and held us up? Whom do we wish to be?” - Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, from her essay “Defining Gender When No One Is Looking” ↗
Congrats to GPT-3, OpenAI's Language AI, for being named one of MIT's 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2021!↗
"We found that for a subset of women, 'going flat' is a desired and intentional option, which should be supported by the treatment team and should not imply that women who forgo reconstruction are not concerned with their post-operative appearance." - Dr. Deanna Attai, assistant clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and senior author of a new study about going flat after a mastectomy↗
New England Review's new issue is out - I have a story in there!↗
"The night invaded them once more; they were wet and numbed and maundering on towards a furious autumnal midnight, among cracking mountains, lost in a world of black water; they were sitting crazily behind two lamps that showed nothing but a streaming track, the flashing of the rain, and the gulf beyond." - Benighted, J.B. Priestley. How I do love the old dark house stories! ↗
“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?"↗