In recent Januaries, Bill @ The Australian Legend has been hosting weeks dedicated to Australian women writers for so long that he finally invited the fellas to have a week too. My own interest in Australia was initially sparked in the fourth grade when I was assigned the Platypus
Midway through 2024, I enthused about Casey Plett’s On Community which includes a discussion of how Plett often feels the term is too slippery but it’s hard to find a suitable replacement. Sometimes I feel as though it means the opposite of what I want it to mean, or
It happened: it snowed. The small lakes are still mostly open water, but you can see where people have thrown bits of snow near the shorelines, to gauge how the freezing is progressing around their edges (i.e. not very far). The creeks seem frozen through, and the dog bowls
When I think about novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, I recall Poulomi Sanyal’s Colour Me Confounded (2017) and Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars (2023), their settings soaked with the ambiance of their main characters’ workplaces, whether a boardroom or a diner. And I think about Helen deWitt’s The English Understand Wool
Can you believe this is the last check-in of this year’s MARM? The temperatures have steadily dropped all month and just the past two mornings, instead of waking up to a layer of frost there has been a skitter (a dusting) of snow, so December is just around the
