Eleanor Glewwe's Blog

New Story: Limue’s Alphabet

I’m excited to announce that I recently published another short story! At 10,000 words, it’s technically a novelette. “Limue’s Alphabet” is free to read now in Issue 74 of The Future Fire. This is my second appearance in The Future Fire; they published my short story “Mijara’s Freedom” in 2020. Pieces in The Future Fire are illustrated, and “Limue’s Alphabet” features art by Barbara Candiotti.

This story is one of my favorite things I’ve written. I finished it a little over a year ago. I don’t r...

The Boundary Waters 2025

About a week after I came back from , my family and I went on our roughly annual trip to the Boundary Waters. We returned once again to Lake One, a BWCA entry I previously wrote about here. Like last time, we drove north from the Twin Cities on a Friday, but instead of heading straight toward Ely we took our more usual route to Duluth and the New Scenic Café just up the road along the shores of Lake Superior so we could enjoy a fancy dinner before several days of camping rations. Duluth wa...

Église Saint-Eustache and clinamen at the Bourse de Commerce

Earlier this month, I went to France to visit Isabelle. Unusually, I was there for Bastille Day–not sure I ever have been before. From Isabelle’s apartment in Meudon, I glimpsed military planes flying low over Paris during the morning parade (one flew over our building afterwards!) and the spectacular fireworks and drone show around the Eiffel Tower at 11:00pm. But this post is really about Isabelle’s and my Paris outing a couple of days later.

First, we had lunch at Kiwamiya Ramen in Boulogne-B...

Adieu du village

It’s been a while since I’ve treated this like a French Canadian music blog, hasn’t it? Today I bring you another post about musical connections (or really, textual connections) among songs, this time all by the Québécois group Le Vent du Nord. Specifically, I’m interested in the song “Adieu du village” (Goodbye from the village) and how its text has little snatches of overlap with other songs. I should warn you that a couple of the songs discussed in this post are violent and gruesome.

In “Adi...

CLS 61 and ACAL 56: A Tale of Two Conferences

This was the academic year I returned to in-person conferences. After attending the Annual Meeting on Phonology in the fall, I closed out the spring semester with back-to-back conferences in May (one at the end of the last week of classes and the other at the end of finals week–this is why I was grading till the night before grades were due!). Both were conferences I had attended in the past–Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) and the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL)–and it was fun t...

The 19th Annual Iowa All-Day Singing

Since moving to Iowa almost six (!) years ago, I’ve had fewer opportunities for shape note singing. When I’m in Minnesota, I can go singing once a week, and back in Los Angeles I had access to a monthly singing and the occasional all-day or convention (or even shape note singing at the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest!). But while there are shape note singers scattered across Iowa, regular singings are few and far between. Possibly there were none that were active when I first arrived in the state; ...

Adventures in Iowa

I hope you’re all hanging in there. Spring is coming. May it bring renewal.

As usual, I’m very behind in my chronicling, but I wanted to recount the loveliest days of January, when Isabelle came to visit me in Iowa for the very first time. I’ve visited her in the Paris region most summers since we finished at UCLA, but she hadn’t been back to the States since and so had never seen where I live now.

One of our primary goals was to make of her visit a relaxing vacation for both of us, so we didn’t...

New Story: The Otter Woman’s Daughter

Happy February! I’m delighted to share that I have a new short story out in the world. “The Otter Woman’s Daughter” came out on Sunday in Cast of Wonders. I’ve been calling it a classical music-inflected selkie story set in Minnesota (mostly in the Boundary Waters, in fact, but it starts in the Twin Cities). Also, Cast of Wonders is a podcast, so you can listen to my story instead of reading it on their website. I don’t listen to podcasts, so I’m not sure how to direct you, but the audio version...

The Books I Read in 2024

I read 57 books in 2024. Still reading fewer and fewer each year, yikes! I had a feeling this would happen this year, though, because I felt like I was reading very little/very slowly. Life was so busy! I hope I can reverse the trend in 2025, though.

This was my fourth and final year on the Kids All Iowa Reads committee; I officially rotated off after we made our selection this fall. So my middle grade reading may drop off next year. We’ll see!

Here are the books I read in 2024, rereads bolded, ...

2024 in Review

Happy New Year’s Eve! Does anyone else feel like 2024 was a year of tremendous political upheaval? I’m thinking about the U.S., France, the U.K., Bangladesh, Georgia, South Korea, Syria, and Germany, and those are just the cases where I was paying attention. I’m not really sure what to anticipate in 2025 (2025?! How did we get here?), but I hope we will see more peace and more justice.

For my part, I had an excellent 2024, especially on the professional front (one of my professions, at least!). ...