Thoughts about writing, and the universe.
A tension has been on my mind for a while, between the stories we tell in fiction and the question of meaning. It was on my mind in September 2020, then again two years later, December 2022. It seems that perhaps every year in autumn I find myself thinking about this theme. Here I am... Continue Reading →
The school year began with two weeks of rain. We bustled to class under umbrellas, hiked through spattering mist, scraped mud from our boots and ran the shoe-drier nonstop. "Summer's over," we said. The moment we returned to Norway, fall began. But somehow the last week of August, the sky cleared. The mist that always... Continue Reading →
Before departing school for the summer, I stopped by the book storage room. A small and musty room of bookshelves adjoining one of the English classrooms, far too many books for the space, piled three deep on the shelves so that you have to shift great tottering piles in order to see what is stacked... Continue Reading →
Some stories seem to move more slowly than drying paint. They elongate scene after scene of a bland character sitting, contemplating, staring at walls. Whole novels can go by without the character doing much more than taking a sip of their watered-down beer as they contemplate the vagaries of their universes. How often do I... Continue Reading →
Over the last year, I have been reading parts of Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia. Gray traces the food traditions of rural people along Europe's Mediterranean coast, interspersed with stories of the people she met and learned from while she was living in each... Continue Reading →
Spurred on by an IB Extended Essay I am supervising, a couple of months ago I waded precipitously into Gayatri Spivak's 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In this vitally important essay on the West's erasure of non-Western women, Spivak makes the case that colonial ideology stops Westerners from knowing anything about the most disenfranchised... Continue Reading →
Yesterday evening, students gathered together for the annual Poetry Slam event. It isn't really a poetry slam. It's something brilliant and beautiful in a different way. Our students come from about ninety countries, and the vast majority have learned English as an additional language. Unfortunately in an English-medium school, the staggering linguistic diversity of our... Continue Reading →
In my first few years of teaching English, when people asked why I had chosen this career, I liked to say that I had chosen it because they paid me to talk about love. This was horribly simplified, delightfully whimsical, and ultimately self-indulgent, I can see now, but it is not entirely untrue. The language... Continue Reading →
I return today to a question that has arisen frequently on this blog, that nagging issue in fiction I've not yet been satisfied with my own answers to, that I feel like this week I've stumbled haphazard into a new idea about--today, let's circle back to that question of conflict. When I taught high school... Continue Reading →
Following the example of the ancient priest who is said to have travelled thousands of miles caring naught for his provisions and attaining the state of sheer ecstasy under the pure beams of the moon, I left my broken house on the River Sumida in the August of the first year of Jyลkyล among the... Continue Reading →
Words like trees 