The sound of thunder never stops on the glacier.

Before our ship reached Hubbard Glacier, assumed it would be silent there. I am long accustomed to the wonderful quiet of snow and cold places, and beyond the sound of the wind and maybe seabirds, I assumed the glacier (as a mass of packed snow itself) would be a soundless place. 

I was wrong. 

Sometimes you can see it and sometimes you can't. The glacier is always crumpling in on itself. Little peaks in the middle drop in and disappear. Arches that shouldn't stand keep standing. The edges erode into the sea. The sound is thunder and a full ice cube tray clattering to a stone floor and the roar around your ears when you dive into a pool, all of if happening at once and never pausing, even a little. 

It wasn't silent, but it was restorative in the same way. The chaos of this cold blue place was different enough for the chaos in the hot blue mirror in my pocket that I felt renewed. If you ever get a chance to see a glacier, you should do it. 

I read a lot of good things in July. There's a list of them here. There's also a very good short story by A. Merc Rustad about hired killers and the paranoia of authority over at Apex Magazine that I think you will like. The story is also about identity, because all stories are about identity. Anyone who tells you differently is gonna die mad that somebody else is happy. 
 
I'm going to be at Shipwreck at the Booksmith tomorrow night, and we're writing hideous, unthinkable porn about Winnie the Pooh. I hope to see you there. 

I was on a podcast where drunk people talk about their favorite animals, and I was in the right place. Here's me being as witty as I know how, talking with megahost Maggie Tokuda-Hall about New Zealand glowworms. 

Cliterary Salon is going strong and selling out every month! If you'd like to see what we're about for the low low price of nothing, watch us on YouTube! If you want to join us in the flesh, get tickets as soon as you can. August's show is going to be Beach Bodies and I want to see your beach body there. (By 'there,' I mean an actual illegal speakeasy in San Francisco. Its days are numbered. You will want to be able to say you were in it at least once.) If you really want to come and are too broke, email me. I'll comp you. 

I'm teaching a class on world-building with Catapult online. I'm working all the time, and teaching gives me a little variation in what kind of work I do. I enjoy it, and I get to see people who are just beginning their journey toward writing work that other people will read. That's more satisfying than I ever would have expected. 

Last month, I had one of the best nights of my life. I got to read at SFinSF; a San Francisco event series featuring science fiction authors. I read with Lucy Jane Bledsoe and Ellen Klages, and I performed an excerpt from the forthcoming Book of Flora. If you want a sneak peek, here it is. 

I keep thinking about the glacier, though it was over a month ago that I was there. The movement where I expected stillness. The arrhythmic thunder where I expected silence. I think of people like that; made up of the compressed layers of their experiences. Solid, but not really. Fixed, but always building and always melting. Never the same from moment to moment, never exactly as we expect. 

It feels good to give myself the space to crumble and crash and reform myself. It feels good to let others do the same. It's restorative; it is born in every second and it dies at the same rate. It is comforting and terrible to know that we are doing the same. 

Let's move like ice. 

Meg