Francesca Forrest's Blog

shoes for an offering

wakanomori ran in the Cape Cod Marathon over the weekend--in the teeth of an approaching nor'easter! While he was slogging it out, I wandered the coast, nibbling rose hips and admiring plants like this one, with soft, enticing seed heads. I fount out it's called "groundsel bush," also sea-myrtle or saltbush (Baccharis halimifolia)



These patent leather shoes grabbed my attention, tucked just so on the other side of the wall separating the beach from the sidewalk. No one was walking barefoot on t...

Ursa Major and Ursa Minor

The plaque beside this painting says that it was created by students at Easthampton High School in 2019.

Nice job, students! Very evocative painting you've made.

The stars that were seen as bears in parts of Eurasia were also seen as bears among North American and Siberian peoples, and the brightest stars in the Great Bear have also been seen as a ladle (or dipper), a plough, a wagon, a rudder, a shrimp, and a crocodile, among other things. (These facts brought to you courtesy of Wikipedia .)

An ear...

Cow facts

A couple of weekends ago was the B'town fair. I didn't get to see the parade, but I did seize some time to go to the exhibit hall and the 4-H tent. The theme for the fair this year was "Shake, Cattle, and Roll" (lots of good entrants for the brochure cover contest...), and inside the hall was this poster with cow** facts:



(You can click through to see it bigger)

These are amazing! Cows only sleep three hours a day? They are great swimmers and can swim for miles? I had no idea ...

Though ... it gi...

Wednesday reading

Thanks to osprey_archer 's Newbery project, I got out The Flying Winged Girl of Knossos (thanks for catching that light_of_summer !) originally published in 1933 and reissued in 2017 by Betsy Bird, who's served on the Newbery Committee, reviewed books for Kirkus, blogs about children's literature, and has in fact written her own middle grade novel (Long Road to the Circus --I haven't read it).

It's easy to see why Betsy Bird and osprey_archer loved this story: it's great fun and excellently told. ...

Saint Death's Daughter

What a breathtaking book Saint Death’s Daughter is. Truly magnificent in all respects: its exciting, imaginative story, its absorbing, immersive worldbuilding, its soaring writing, and its sharp, compassionate observations about human nature. I loved it completely.

It’s been a long time since I walked into a book and lost myself so entirely in it, so much so that I wanted to bring pieces of it back with me into this world. Can we have sothaín meditations, please? Can we have these twelve gods? … ...

Not One of Us issue 84

I have a flash story in the current issue of Not One of Us, and what a great issue to be in! I'm sharing the table of contents with Patricia Russo, Sonya Taaffe, and Jeannelle Ferreira--all writers I've loved for a long time--along with Devan Barlow, whose work I've only gotten to know recently, but I enjoy, and others whose work is totally new to me but whose literary acquaintance I'm pleased to make, like Zary Fekete.

Let me share a little (and then a lot!) about my own story first, and then so...

taking a little time

Yesterday I was responsible to get R to a first English class, only I was late.

(  go slow  )

Any time we can slow stuff down and humanize it, even if it's only for a little bit, it feels like a victory.

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Not a lemonade stand

This past weekend I was doing errands, and there were a bunch of kids, maybe four, ages about nine to twelve, at a T-junction of a road into a development and the more general-use road. They were waving and gesticulating at passing cars the way high school kids do when they're trying to get you to come to their fundraiser car wash, but there was no place to wash cars, and these kids were definitely younger than high school age.

So maybe they were selling lemonade? Or cookies? Or --?

I came back a...

Joyce Carol Thomas

I just found out that Joyce Carol Thomas, the author of Journey, which I just finished reading thanks to rachelmanija 's review, is no longer with us! This is too bad because I wanted to write her a note telling her how much I loved her use of language and that she includes so many beings and perspectives beyond the human, and one very sweet interaction between the protagonist and a boy who likes her.

It was a kind of a strange story--there were a lot of observations from different characters' poi...

The cardinals' tea party

There is a cardinal pair in our yard, and I love them very much. I drew them having a cup of tea.

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A mi me enseño a cantar la calandria y el cenzontle,
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal
la calandría y el cenzontle y el pájaro cardenal

--Biomigrant & El Monte Adentro: "Voz emplumada del monte"
calandría = chalk-browed mockingbird (Mimus saturninus)
cenzontle = northern mockingbird (Mimus polyglottus)
pájaro cardenal = northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis)

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