My big news this month is that an audio deal for The Bone Brides has sold to Tantor! This is something I’d really been hoping for, both for accessibility reasons and because I know many readers these days enjoy or even prefer audio. If you are such a reader, then good news: the audiobook for The Bone Brides will be releasing around the same time as the hardcover and e-book!

(And now...very, very quietly...I will tell you from within the safety of parentheses that I am at long last diving into work on a new book. It’s one I actually started a few years back in a workshop led by the amazing Nova Ren Suma, but which I then set aside to revise The Bone Brides. I am both very excited and very anxious once again to be exploring a new world and meeting new characters, rather than refining ones I already know so well. It’s been a long time. Wish me luck!)

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday—which means that if I were still in high school, I would be dressed in a monk’s robe, spending my lunch period calligraphing sonnets by candlelight. I’m not joking. I dedicated three years of my life to my school’s poetry program—at the time, the only public high school creative writing program devoted solely to poetry—which was run by a teacher as passionate as she was eccentric. She had a fearsome reputation as the strictest teacher in our school and was known for making students (including, once, in the middle of a presentation I was giving on Robert Frost, me) cry. Oh, and she believed herself to be the reincarnation of Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith. She would’ve fit beautifully into some of the dark academia novels that are so popular today...and Teenage Marley would’ve loved that because, as one of her students, it means I would’ve fit into those novels, too.

Today is Shakespeare’s birthday—and no, I am not dressed up as a monk, nor will I be calligraphing any sonnets. I will, however, be reading poetry, lots and lots of poetry. April is National Poetry Month, and although I no longer am tasked with posting a laminated rainbow of poems all up and down school corridors, it is still a month when I try more than ever to slow myself down and drink in poetry’s beauty. Especially this April, as we watch so much of what makes us human be chewed up and regurgitated into senseless potpourri by generative AI. Especially now, when the world is crashing down around us, when our government is murdering innocents both abroad and at home, when illness is rampant and tech is devouring our humanity... Poetry is my touchstone. It is the grass that I touch to remember that I am human and that I am surrounded by humans. A good poem, more so even than a good book, reminds me that the world is still mostly beautiful. A good poem makes me to take a breath, look at a tree—really look at it—and remember that, wow, yeah, it’s pretty amazing that I get to exist side-by-side with something as glorious as a tree. And that, for centuries, other humans have thought so, too.

Here is a small sampling of my favorite poems. Share a few of your favorites, too?

“Walking Home from Oak-head,” by Mary Oliver

“The Listeners,” by Walter de la Mare

“Feeding the Worms,” by Danusha Laméris

“Wraith,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Today Means Amen,” by Sierra DeMulder

“Dancing Toward Bethlehem,” by Billy Collins

“Sometimes the Sky’s Too Bright,” by Dylan Thomas

Matzo haters, skip to the next section. You and I will never see eye-to-eye.

April is matzo season! As a kid, one of my absolute favorite meals was matzo ball soup; it’s still what I want when I’m sick (and also when I’m not). I’ve tried what feels like a bajillion different “fancy” recipes, but I have to admit that the best stuff is simply the Manischewitz-brand boxed soup mix. (I’m also a Manischewitz girl when it comes to matzo boards—sorry, Yehuda! Some day, I do aspire to make my own matzo from scratch, but it’s not something I’ve gotten up the gumption yet to try.) While it’s true that matzo is sold year-round, my mother has always claimed (and who am I to argue?) that the “kosher for Passover” stuff tastes best; thus, every April we buy giant flats of boxes to last us the whole year. I love it plain. I love it even more smeared with a bit of margarine. I thought I didn’t like it covered in chocolate until I had it covered in salted caramel and chocolate, and that was a game-changer. And then, a few years back, we discovered this recipe, which is always a hit at Passover:

Savory Mushroom Matzo Kugel
(by Bonnie Frumkin Morales for Bon Appétit, 2021; minor edits—mostly for brevity—by me)

3 cups mushroom stock
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, divided
13 matzo boards
5 eggs
1 cup crème fraîche
1 cup cream or half-and-half
salt
1 large bunch Swiss chard, coarsely chopped
10oz shiitake mushrooms, sliced 1/4" thick
8oz maitake mushrooms, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 medium onion, finely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 300°. Butter a 13x9" baking dish. Break matzo into 3" pieces; place in a large bowl. Pour 2 cups stock over and gently toss to coat; set remaining 1 cup stock aside. Let sit until matzo is soaked and breakable but still holds its shape, about 30 minutes.

2. Whisk eggs, crème fraîche, and cream in a medium bowl to combine; season with salt.

3. Heat 2 Tbsp butter in a large skillet over medium-high. As soon as butter is foaming, add shiitake and maitake mushrooms and cook, stirring, until liquid is released and mushrooms are reduced by half in size, about 5 minutes. Transfer to a medium bowl.

4. Reduce heat to medium. Heat remaining 2 Tbsp butter in same skillet. Add onion and a pinch of salt and cook, stirring occasionally, until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add Swiss chard, increase heat to medium-high, and cook, stirring, until onion is golden brown and chard is completely wilted, about 10 minutes. Add to mushrooms, season whole mixture with salt, and let cool 10 minutes.

5. Add mushroom mixture to bowl with matzo. Stir in egg mixture. If kugel looks dry, add more reserved stock ¼ cup at a time until moist but not watery. Carefully pour into prepared dish; bake until top is golden brown and kugel is set, 55–65 minutes. Let cool slightly before serving.

I know some people get up in arms about the idea of using books for arts and crafts (“If you really loved books, you’d never cut them up!” etc), but I am not among them. Books are constantly being weeded from library collections or tossed into bins to be forgotten, and while I would never cut up a special edition of something old and precious, I think it is a form of loving books to allow those that would otherwise end up in dumpsters to take on new lives. I made my wedding bouquet, centerpieces, and table runners all from pages of Shakespeare that I’d collected from various library sales for 25 cents a pop; every October, my former work-wife and I make book page papier-mâché pumpkins out of copies of books we used to teach.

So I got pretty excited when, browsing my local library, I stumbled across The Repurposed Library: 33 Craft Projects that Give Old Books New Life, by Lisa Occhipinti. It’s filled with ideas I hadn’t seen before, many of which I’m eager to try! I thought, though, that I’d start with something simple: book page light-switch plates. It’s the small kind of detail I love that really brings character to a home.

Step 1: Choose your book pages! Choosing pages was actually harder than I’d anticipated, partially because all but one of the light switches in our house are paddle-style, which means the switch takes up much more real estate than on toggle-style plates, leaving only edges free for the book page. I wanted to choose pages where that little bit of surrounding text would be interesting on its own. I found that beginnings of chapters often fit the bill, but I didn’t want to do too many of those for fear it would look monotonous. The other tricky thing was that most of our switches are doubles, so the book pages had to be wide enough to accommodate.

Ultimately, I used three books: spare copies of The Last Unicorn and The Book of Three that I’d picked up at a library book sale and a Hamlet leftover from my old wedding supplies. I knew that for my one quadruple switch plate I’d have to use a two-page spread, and I found that the text of a play looked better for that than prose did.

Step 2: Use Mod Podge (goodness do I love Mod Podge) to attach the book page to the front of the switch plate. Hopefully you’ll be far cleverer than I and won’t accidentally do a few upside down before realizing your mistake and having to start over.

Step 3: Trim the book page to be just ½" larger than the switch plate, cutting off the corners at a diagonal. Wrap the paper around the edges of the plate, securing with more Mod Podge.

Step 4: Coat the whole front in Mod Podge. Let dry completely.

Step 5: Cut an X through the hole for the switch. Peel back the triangles, trim if necessary, and secure to the back with Mod Podge.

Step 6: Pierce holes for the screws (I used the end of a small paintbrush). Ta-da!

Did you know that Barilla uses 3D pasta printers to make specialty pasta shapes (mostly to be sold to restaurants/caterers)? Neither did I! They even hold a contest each year to design new shapes! There are a handful of these specialty shapes the average citizen technically can buy...but they cost a good $15-$19 per a mere dozen pieces of pasta. Anyhow, this sent me down a whole fancy-food-3D-printing rabbit hole.

Always,
Marley