Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 110

The Haunted Girl--A conversation with Lisa Bradley

Last year, two friends had poetry and short-story collections come out in Aqueduct Press's Conversation Pieces series. One is Lisa Bradley (The Haunted Girl), whose works have appeared in Strange Horizons, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium, among other venues, and who's been anthologized in Rose Lemberg's The Moment of Change and Sylvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey's Fungi, among other collections. I got to know her work through her poem-a-day on LJ. Those entries are mainly locked, but here...

Epic eruptions, dramatic pies

Yesterday at the blog The Blue and Green House, they talked about the year without a summer--1816, the year following the massive eruption of Mt. Tambora. In my neck of the woods, snow fell as late as June and as early as August--across Europe there were famine conditions from failed crops. Wikipedia says that there was so much aerosolized material in the atmosphere that sunspots were visible to the naked eye.

Later in the day, out of the blue, wakanomori started telling me about one of the mo...

found items, small things ... and a question about dystopia

I have three books I'm reading right now. Two are ebooks (Partner, by Lia Silver, and The Worth of a Shell, by M.C.A. Hogarth), so I can read them at my desk. I don't have a portable ereader, though, so I like a physical book for when I'm standing around stirring a pot in the kitchen. That book had been The Night Circus, but after giving up on it, I had to pick something else, so I got The Bees, by Laline Paull. The worldbuilding--the sense of actually being a bee and living in a hive--is won...

Giving up on a book

Sometimes it happens. I just gave up reading The Night Circus. Several people thought it would be a surefire winner with me, but while I was initially enchanted by the feats of magic that get performed at the circus, eventually I just found myself drowning in them. I needed more to happen; I needed the characters and their lives to matter more; I needed more sense of urgency. There was supposedly urgency and threat, but there was so much fabulosity and ethereal beauty all over the place--such...

sunlight

I took a photo this morning of the sunlight that was shining into the kitchen, falling like a layer of bright, bright snow on the bench and the floor, prompting this imagined conversation:

"How much sunlight has accumulated this morning?"
"Not much; less than an inch."

And when I took the photo off my camera, I discovered my last three photos, from the past few days, were all about light, too.

This morning's accumulation of light




Small stone, sunbathing


Old snow, sparkling


Tree branches being a ne...

willows

A boy took home some twigs from a snow-broken marsh willow because of the soft, silver-white catkins. He stuck them in a jar on the kitchen table.

And they sprouted roots that filled the jar like a mass of tangled hair, and the silver catkins exploded into goldgreen caterpillar garlands, dusty with pollen, and the boy's mother said, do something about this mess--

--so the boy threw the twigs back into the marsh, and they stuck in the mud, and their roots wiggled and threaded and pushed their wa...

we're empowered

So here's the jail story that I've been meaning to tell.

The clock in the room where I do essay tutoring hadn't been changed for daylight savings time. It hadn't been changed the previous week, either. J--, one of the women I was working with, made a remark about things never getting done there, but R--, the other woman said, "Oh, but Ms. H-- changed the clock in the kitchen. I guess it's just that no one's gotten around to changing it in this room."

All three of us looked at the clock. It was...

a quest

Last week was the tall one's birthday. Between pizza and cake, I sent him and his girlfriend on a quest. Find me a feather, I said. They searched the woods, but reported there were no feathers to be found. They brought me these beauties instead:



But then the other day I was walking, after the rain had thinned the snow somewhat, and behold, feathers everywhere. They were hiding just below the surface of the snow, maybe, waiting to be revealed? Or was there a scuffle after the rain fell?

Snow waves cresting

There's always something to see, if I go for a walk. These were snow waves I saw around 6 pm, after I finished with work.

In my wanderings

I was a vagrant yesterday, and in my wanderings, I came to the media lab where Little Springtime works, and where the hedgehog from last entry was printed. Verily I say unto you, we live in the future.

Here is a ukelele, made with a 3D printer



And here is a lampshade:



Here are the banks of printers. Their brand is "makerbot replicator." Alas, if I say "Earl Grey, hot!" they are not yet able to produce an aromatic drink.



For a drink, you have to go here:



Very futuristic, right? The scene reminds...