Feb. 8, 2025, 11:56 a.m.

Wow, what a year.

Ficx

A Newsletter from Joanne Merriam

Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy saying,
Evergreen joke.

Recently on my website: Some current events/stuff to do on my website, with some non-news fun, like Rita Moreno & Animal doing “Fever.” Also, Dave and I really leaned into the Canuckistan activities by attending the Dartmouth Ice Sculpture Festival.

Currently reading: Just finished Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles, a fun golden age detective story, aside from one jarring single-paragraph reminder of racist colonialist thought.

Currently writing: I’m 36,000 words into a ghost/vampire novel that’s also a meditation on loneliness. I’ve been spending some of my spare time playing with erasure poems, the physicality of which feel like a rebellion against the gen-AI slop being forced on us. Also, an acceptance from Enchanted Garden Haiku for April.

Recommended reading: “Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole” by Isabel J. Kim.

Comments: Click “view this email online” below and scroll to the bottom, and you can comment! Everything is publicly viewable so take appropriate precautions if you want to say wildly intemperate things about our new god emperor. I think you have to use the email you subscribed under. (If you reply by email, it goes to a place I’ll check eventually.)

Thanks for being here with me, friend!

You just read issue #2 of Ficx. You can also browse the full archives of this newsletter.

Read more:

  • I’ve asked the undertaker/to press glow-in-the-dark stars inside the lid.

    Yoooo. Thanks for signing up for my newsletter! I’ll try to keep these relatively short and useful. Recent publication: “Easy Bake” at The Baltimore Review....

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