2020 may have been a dumpster fire but I managed a major personal victory: I rediscovered a love of reading and read more than I have in the rest of my adult life. I'm very proud of that, and I am much the better for having read some amazing literature. Below, I share my list… Continue reading My 2020 Book List
On Stargazing
Last weekend we drove out East, through towns that we’d never heard of, some of which could barely be called towns so much as little crops of houses that looked like they sprang up from the ground like groves of trees in the expanse of plains and farmland, brown and fallow. I wanted to see… Continue reading On Stargazing
Warnings and Testimonies
The warnings and news articles issued this week about Hurricane Laura have shifted in tone over this week in a familiar way. What starts as clinical meteorological jargon about trajectories and fronts and currents and wind speeds, when the destructive power finally emerges or when the path veers to the left, evolves into dire warnings,… Continue reading Warnings and Testimonies
I still don’t know what it is about ‘folklore’
“I love her. And true love lasts a lifetime. Joni Mitchell is the woman who taught your cold English wife how to feel,” intones Emma Thompson’s character during the first act of Love Actually before delivering a wordless, heartbreaking scene to the melancholy wisdom of ‘Both Sides Now’ in the third. In the scene, she… Continue reading I still don’t know what it is about ‘folklore’
On Good Rest
I vacillated on whether and when to take time off this summer and, when it became clear I was running out of time to decide, finally swallowed my anxiety and did it. I am always anxious about taking time away from work because I worry about losing time on projects and social capital by not… Continue reading On Good Rest
An Education in Self Care
I nursed the soreness on the right side of my mouth, massaging my jaw with my hand, and swallowed two Ibuprofen with a gulp of water. I applied numbing gel to the place where a new tooth was intruding through tender gums. This made eating tolerable. I was first referred to an oral surgeon for… Continue reading An Education in Self Care
Liminal Spaces
The other day I noticed my cat sitting in the doorway between my bedroom and the hall. I am superstitious out of habit and old comfort. I don’t like lingering in in-between spaces. My old penchant for fairy tales taught me that those were the places where spirits passed back and forth and where bad… Continue reading Liminal Spaces
Permission
I do not have to write about what I said I was going to write when I woke up this morning. I do not have to write about what I was writing about yesterday. I am allowed to not finish what I start. I am allowed to keep something in a draft for years before… Continue reading Permission
July 4 and Invisible Onlys and Alsos
Saturday was July 4 and I am unsure how I was supposed to celebrate it without at least ambivalence, if not outright cynicism. Links to Douglass’ ‘What to the slave is the Fourth of July?’ filled my timeline. Racial inequality, white supremacy, and American hypocrisy are more collectively salient than they have perhaps ever been,… Continue reading July 4 and Invisible Onlys and Alsos
Shaughnessy Conley Speirs 