writer | editor | artist
What have I been up to lately? Here’s a list of a few recent publications … ‘Night Drive’ (a poem) in Verity La. ‘The Beautiful Husband’ (a short story) in Social Alternatives (Volume 36, no 3) A Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge ‘review’ of Dickens’s David Copperfield at Going Down Swinging. I co-edited a special issue…
Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham: pay particular attention to my pets, the grasses. — by Lorine Niedecker (1940). This semester, I’m teaching a poetry course for third year undergraduates. I’ve never been one to divide a semester into the usual kind of weeks (week one: line, week two: stanza, week three: metre and metonymy ……
For Rebecca Jessen Once upon a time I promised to tell you a story about the past (you are going to write about the future). At the film screening, a woman says that this film will never be shown again. It is showing signs of magenta drift. In the future, it will not be (though…
‘Libussa’ is one of the tales related/retold by Johann Karl August Musäus, and first translated into English by Thomas Carlyle. It was published in Carlyle’s three-volume publication Translations from the German (1827). The tale below is a transcription of Carlyle’s translation (not one of my own translations). The tale was part of Musäus’s 1728 collection Volksmärchen der Deutschen (German folktales). Musäus drew heavily…
In my 2013 speculative fiction novel, Rupetta (2013), Henri, a history student, completes a small thesis after undertaking research into the lives of a pair of women know as the Salt Lane Witches. This post provides a few little tidbits of the intertextual backstory that went into the (re)writing of those characters and their (fairy) tale. The ‘Salt Lane Witches’ name…
At a recent conference on excess and desire in twentieth- and twenty-first century women’s writing, one of the presenters quoted from Natalie Kon-Yu’s 2016 essay, in Overland, ‘A testicular hit-list of literary big cats‘. In particular, she quoted from the section in which Kon-Yu describes the depiction of Jake Whyte’s gender in Evie Wyld’s Miles…
Recently, I posted my personal mixtape of fairytale and folklore selections: an eccentric list of fairy tales, folktales and other works, inspired (in the collating) by the eccentric collecting and publishing strategies of Andrew Lang. The list includes the poem/song below, which was included in The Wishing Bone Cycle: Narrative Poems from the Swampy Cree Indians. Norman…
Recently, Gyspy Thornton blogged about the notion of fairy-tale mixtapes, an idea borrowed from Adam Hoffman’s discussion of Andrew Lang, and how to conceptualise the eccentric array of works pulled together in Lang’s coloured fairy tale collections. The always sparkly and scholarly Rebecca-Anne do Rozario blogged her fairy-tale mixtape here. The idea is to take inspiration from…
Our father coming in from the garden, or us going out to stand in the weedy patch of rhubarb and watch him cut, with a knife we were sure grew bloodier with each cut, the long pink stalks. The exact gesture with which he gathered the poisonous leaves in one hand and cut with the…
The parable of the ten virgins (also known as the parable of the wise and foolish virgins) was enormously popular during the Middle Ages. There are sculptures of the virgins in many French and German cathedrals, including the Notre Dame de Paris and Strasbourg Cathedral. Bach’s chorale cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme (Awake, the voice calls…