I am reading Helen Adam’s Ghosts and Grinning Shadows -from the back blurb: “her main interest in writing is the weird and the uncanny, on which the witch stories in this book concentrate.” This collage of her bat-lady is one of my favourites. A piece about her collages by Alison Fraser:
A couple of weeks ago my friend Penni sent me this link to a long Joy Williams interview in the Paris Review, and I loved so much of it. Her non-tech-y ways, the space she allows her imagination, her commitment to respecting the non-human.
“What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think.”
Here is a transcript of her essay ‘Cabin Cabin’ which anthropomorphises the Unabomber’s cabin in the woods.
I loved this interview with YA author A.S. King on young people, mental health, writing and representation. “Mental illness is not a plot point.”
Kate Zambreno loves researching and writing but hates publishing and I am with her
Mona Simpson: After fifty, we write, hauling a sack of failures over our shoulder. The shine has worn off childish ambitions. But that is when the work becomes interesting.
and
No one wants to be canceled. But we don’t want to be tepid either.
also
Reading. Friends. My dog. Walks. Birds. Kindness. A garden. I have two children, who are joys and redemptions. I’ve fallen in love in what used to be thought of as old age. I feel grateful to share work with friends whose work I admire, to teach books I love to students, from whom I learn about being young in the twenty-first century.
all from this interview
Unhinged Women in fiction! - An incomplete list (add your favourites in the comments!)
“Research by Leyshon has begun to tease out how young people make their own identities, sense of belonging and histories of life through a process of producing memories of place via repeated contacts and experiences. These contacts and experiences are then narrated back to create a logical sense of self. This understanding of youth hinges on the idea that the relationship between identity, memory and place is dependent on an accumulation of experiences, including complex social interactions, both with and within places.” - The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in the countryside by Mark Leyshon (2011)
Z. Bauman - Life in Fragments (1995)
That time I got a bit obsessed with dead poet Weldon Kees.
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Love the bat-lady! (Everyone will notice, but no-one will say anything.)