Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 13

feedback

I got a story rejection, and the editor said if I wanted feedback, he could give it--because he was always bummed to send stories in someplace and then just get a no--but he didn't want to force it on me if I didn't want it.

My first instinct was to say thanks-very-much-but-no-thanks, but then I thought, What the heck? This is a story that has had only three readers--or rather, only three readers who talked to me about it (it's been out on submission to other places and gotten form rejections). H...

in the key of C Major

For the daily prompt thing I'm doing, I ended up going down a rabbit hole about windmill sails and came across this story of a miller who restored the last of what used to be many windmills--"the highest concentration of windmills in the Iberian peninsula"--on a mountain in Portugal. Here he is with his windmill in 2019:

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Photo by Maria Rebelo Photography; resized from the image at the blog post

He's using the mill to grind ancient wheat grains; he says ants prefer wheat grains that don't have pest...

"A Turtle in Love, Singing," by Tara Campbell

I read this sweet, weird, hilarious story yesterday, and now I want to become a traveling doctor, using this story as my patent medicine. "Lifts moods and births laughter, guaranteed to leave you feeling better than you started." It's "A Turtle in Love, Singing," by Tara Campbell, in Bourbon Penn, a new-to-me zine.

The story is in the form of police reports from the hapless Green Lake Police, who deal with a string of odd encounters, beginning with a disgruntled pelican or perhaps pelicans, sight...

touch moss, release spores

Where I am, at this time of year it's the moss that comes back to life first, intense green. It sends up the thinnest straight green things--they look like thin, tiny blades of grass but really they're called setae: they're the stalks for the moss's spore cases, which form on the ends. These then ripen and, when they're ready, they release their spores.

Yesterday I was in the woods, and I came to a big puddle, and by the puddle was a rock, and on the rock was a quantity of moss. This moss:



See how...

Wednesday reading--wildly disparate!

I'm nearly done with Betsy-Tacy and Tib, which continues to be delightful. It's not just that the things the girls get up to are both very believable and amusing, but also the way it's told, the way Maud Hart Lovelace lets in the parents' perspective or the baby siblings', and how events flow one into the next kind of like a picaresque novel, but they're not traveling; they're just living their lives.

They want to cut off locks of hair to give to each other as keepsakes in case one of them dies-...

temporary versus permanent

Elsewhere on the interwebs, I follow Glenn Shepherd, an ethnobotanist who works in ... guess where? (If you guessed the Amazon, you (a) are correct and (b) have been reading this blog for more than two entries.) He wrote about an ergot-related fungus on a certain sedge which is used medicinally by the Matsigenka people.

One time when Shepherd had a headache, he was treated with some of this sedge. The headache disappeared almost instantly ... and he gained a temporary ability to juggle. He write...

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z"

"Alphabet Soup: How Picture Books Are Made, from A to Z" is an exhibition running currently at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, one of my favorite museums that I happen to live right near. MAN that place has great exhibitions.

This particular exhibition draws on the museum's permanent collection to illustrate all the stages of picture-book creation, with each letter of the alphabet standing for something--B is for book dummy, E is for endpapers, I is for india ink, etc., followed by ill...

Tikuna update: genders

The Tikuna language has five genders (these aren't genders like people having genders; these are just linguistic genders--like how French and Spanish have two and German has three. Speaking of, it's fascinating to me when Spanish and Portuguese genders don't agree, like for "computer," which is masculine in Portuguese but feminine in Spanish. And "tree" is the opposite: masculine in Spanish but feminine in Portuguese.)

Anyway, Ticuna's five genders are feminine, masculine, neuter, salient, and no...

Amazonian cacao for your Valentine's Day

Apparently I never shared these pictures here! But what better day than Valentine's Day, when people give chocolate to one another.

As you no doubt know, a lot of chocolate is produced using cacao that's obtained and grown in ways that are exploitative and bad for the environment. What I saw, though, was small family production--probably just for local consumption.

Like coffee, cacao *can* be a very beneficial crop to cultivate because it can grow in the shade of larger trees. It can be a forest-p...

Snow Hachiko

Many people know the story of faithful Hachiko, the dog who always went to Shibuya station in Tokyo to greet his master after work, and who continued to go there every day to wait for him for nine years after the man died. There's a bronze statue of Hachiko by Shibuya station now.

Well, on February 5, Tokyo got snow that--unusually for Tokyo--stuck. And in Shibuya station, someone made a friend for Hachiko:

Photo by Tokyo photographer 清水哲朗; gobiguma on Twitter (original tweet here )
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This photo cour...