Exit, Pursued by a Bear

News

No major news this time, just a few reminders! I'll be leading a workshop on urban fantasy at the Once & Future Fantasies conference next month, so if you'll be there, keep an eye out on social media; I'll share the Eventbrite link when available.

I'll also be presenting on Nietzsche, American ghosts, and Libba Bray's The Diviners at the International Gothic Association's conference in Dublin, later in July. It'll be my first conference paper, which is both exciting and nerve-wracking! Bray has done some exciting work in young adult fiction, and I'm looking forward to talking about it.

What I've really taken away from brushing up on my Nietzsche (who I swore never to read again after finishing my freshman-year philosophy class) is that this meme is, in fact, accurate:


(Although I've also been told that Nietzsche isn't actually a nihilist, so maybe not.)
 

Recommendations

Remember when I thought I'd have more time to read for fun after the semester was over? Haha. Turns out finishing a thesis makes it hard to read for fun. I've mostly been rewatching comedies (Our Flag Means Death, three or four times; What We Do in the Shadows, to get hyped for season four) and D&D shows (I'm nearly done with the first season of Fantasy High and losing my mind at the great storytelling. It's also very funny.)

But I did manage to finish one book for fun over the past three months. Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver has been on my to-read list for years now, and I loved it as much as I hoped I would. It's a clever, inventive, and evocative fairy tale, paying a lot of attention to Jewish history and the everyday concerns of its characters. I cannot recommend it highly enough if you're looking for good historical fantasy.

I also read Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land, an essay collection recommended to me for thesis reasons. Biss's essays largely deal with race in the US, weaving together archival research, social commentary, and personal narrative, which combine in a nuanced discussion of a difficult topic. It's not easy reading, but it is very, very good, and Biss makes space for hope without sugarcoating.

On a similar note, I've nearly finished reading Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, which traces a history of activism and social change since the fall of the Berlin Wall. I bought it after seeing her speak in Edinburgh last week, on the same day that Roe v Wade was overturned in the US. In one essay, Solnit quotes Vaclav Havel, an imprisoned playwright (and later, first democratically-elected president) in the then-Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, speaking in the 1980s:

"The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world. Either we have hope within us or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul; it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."

This helped me. I quote it now in the hope that it might help you, too.
 

Creative Corner

For today, a poem which I've been tinkering with since last spring.
 

Scientists Say That Bears Have a Sense of Beauty

or so claims the headline, pasted below a photograph
of grizzly mother and cubs bedding in a bank of bluebonnets.
I have tried to wring the poem out for months, like water
from the washing, but I’ll be honest with you:
There was no peer-review. I can’t vouch
for their methods or measure their bias. I have seen bears
in their summer hungers, ripping grass from root,
and perhaps the cub’s bright eyes fixed
on petals before downing it in one,
crunch drowning the camera click.
 
My bear country boots now trudge to Tesco and the bank and back
in endless lockdown loops, through litterfall of vomit and cigarette ends,
thin plastic biscuit packets, past muddied masks and new cafes scuttling
into shells of the old. I never leave the flat at night now or eat
in window-fogged pubs, and I glance sideways at groups
of men on the pavement to be sure they do not watch me.
The purr of the cat on the hot car roof is like benediction, the last
living thing I touched, already a months-old memory.
 
If bears have a sense of beauty
despite the cold growl of winter sleep,
there must be something worth waking for:
the riverbank in cold July,
 
the fresh water smell and pungent moss,
the bristling leaves and birdsong, listening
for huffing breath from leathery nose. If bears have
 
a sense of beauty, perhaps they write poems
in the splash of salmon streams. Or perhaps
it’s merely this: The bears come to the water
for baptism, so they might capture
one small, scaled shiver of light.

--

With love,
Siobhan