Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 102

Sirens post, part 2

Saturday was as full of interesting panels as Friday, and I hosted a roundtable, too. Unfortunately my notes are much more sketchy.


The Great Big Interfaith Dialogue
The panel was made up of s e smith, a social justice blogger, speaking on behalf of atheism; Gillian Chisholm, a grad student in history, who was speaking on behalf of Christianity; Kate Elliott, speaking on behalf of Judaism; and Shveta Thakrar, speaking on behalf of Hinduism.

The conversation was very respectful all around and foc...

Sirens post, part 1

I'm going to share the notes that I took, fairly haphazardly, at Sirens. The first thing I took out my pen for was a panel with the three guests of honor: Kate Elliott, Yoon Ha Lee, and Rae Carson, on Friday morning.



The guests of honor were asked, "What is a fantasy work that you think is revolutionary?"

Kate Elliott said Tanith Lee's short-story collection Red as Blood, because it dealt with women and sexuality, because women were allowed to be angry, because it included details like menstru...

Dream eater

I'm aaaaaalllmost ready to do an actual Sirens post. But before then, I'm going to share some photos from Morrison, Colorado, which amaebi kindly took me to so that I could be **in** the landscape of this beautiful mountainous state as opposed to just looking at the mountains painted on the sky, backdrop style.

She told me it's a little bit of a hippy town. This guy seems to go along with that. He looks to me like a tapir, which in Japanese is baku, which in Japanese is also the word for a myt...

The cat's bowl

The night before I left for Sirens, wakanomori had the pleasant job of introducing a Japanese storyteller who was performing at the local university. She does traditional rakugo storytelling, plus original stories, in English. I asked Wakanomori what they were like, and he told me one of the traditional ones she'd told. It was so entertaining I thought I'd share it here. I listened to a couple of Japanese versions of the story, so what you're getting is Motoko-Wakanomori transmission, influen...

In time for Reading Wednesday: A review of Archivist Wasp

(I finished this on the plane on the way to Sirens.)



Reading Archivist Wasp is like navigating an intense, harrowing nightmare in the company of a true friend. Wasp, the young heroine, is the true friend, though she doesn’t know it. Her role—as recorder of ghosts and their ways, and (more importantly for her town) an executioner of them—means she’s a friendless outcast. She achieved her position by killing the last archivist, and three times a year, other young girls try to do the same to her....

stained-glass autumn

Posted with comments off because I just wanted you to see.

Acorn whistle

A friend's son has recently mastered the art of whistling with an acorn cap. When she told me this, I remembered how my daughters used to make acorn whistles with the nut part of the acorn. They gouged the nutmeat out, leaving the shell, with a neat, round, opening up top, and they decorated the outside with patterns in nail polish. They were beautiful, and they made a clear, shrill whistle.

I thought I'd make one for my friend's son--whom I met recently, in Colorado, where I went for the Sire...

Old Sturbridge Village, Sirens

Tomorrow, in the small hours in the morning--the 3:00 am hour, to be precise, I get in the car and drive two hours to the airport, on my way to the Sirens Conference, which this year is on the theme of spies and revolutionaries (awesome). I have some excellent roommates, and will be meeting some LJ friends in person for the first time and other old friends whom I haven't seen since summer--very excited for that.

... I've been even more scarce than I thought I would be, these days. I've gotten...

scarce for next two weeks

Guests from England arrive today, staying two weeks--during which period, also, I'll be going to Sirens Conference. I don't have a laptop or other Internet-enabled mobile device, so between family obligations and traveling, I'm liable to be scarce for a while. I'm hoping to dip in each day to try to read some of my friends list, and maybe to post some photos and things, but my overall presence will probably be thin.

leaving the stove on

It should be all right to leave the stove on if I'm going to just step out into the front yard to pick some basil, probably all right to not even turn the burner to low, because it's a matter of seven long strides (if that) to the corner of the yard, where, in daytime, the basil grows, and logic and experience dictates that it will still be there even in night, even though my eyes are not adjusting that fast to the thick, thick darkness that's gotten everywhere. I can just about see the birch...