Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 10

Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor@Grinnell

Earlier this month I attended the Writers@Grinnell afternoon roundtable with novelists Garth Greenwell and Brandon Taylor. Greenwells latest novel is Cleanness, and Taylors debut novel is Real Life. I first saw Greenwell last fall in conversation with Carmen Maria Machado at her reading at Praire Lights in Iowa City.

I took notes at the event, but I dont have them with me now, so this will be from memory, and not entirely chronological. The roundtable began with Greenwell and Taylor asking...

Writers@Grinnell

After I blogged about a number of the fall Writers@Grinnell events, Dean Bakopoulos of the English Department invited me to do my own Writers@Grinnell event. It took place last month in the Mears Cottage Living Room. I was quite surprised–pleasantly so!–by the turnout. There were so many people that some of them had to sit on the floor behind the sofa where I was seated. There were a lot of students, most of whom I didn’t know (I did have one former student and one current student in...

Honolulu

Earlier this month I took a brief trip to Hawai’i, specifically to Honolulu, on the island of O’ahu. Almost exactly three years earlier, I’d visited Maui, which was the first time I’d been to Hawai’i. I enjoyed getting to go back, to a different part this time.

The weather was warm and sunny throughout my stay. I did a lot of clumsy stalking of birds, including zebra doves, spotted doves, cattle egrets, red-crested cardinals, common mynas, feral chickens and some adorable chicks, and a...

My First Iowa Caucus

Iowa is, of course, famous for its first-in-the-nation caucuses, the subject of intense attention on the part of candidates and the media in presidential election years when multiple contenders are vying for a party’s nomination. Last year, when I accepted my current job at Grinnell, I realized I’d be an Iowan for the 2020 caucuses. And more generally, I’d be living in Iowa for the remainder of the presidential race.

Many candidates made campaign stops in Grinnell (and many downtown...

Dangerous Instruments

Last Friday I went to the opening reception of the Stewart Gallery exhibit “Dangerous Instruments.” The Stewart Gallery, run by the Grinnell Area Arts Council, is inside the old Stewart library, now the Grinnell Arts Center, next door to the post office. The Arts Council runs all sorts of interesting activities that would probably be worth checking out. There’s even a pipe band. As in Scottish bagpipes. Am I missing my chance to realize my childhood ambition of learning to play the bagpipes?...

New Story: Yet a Youth

My short story “Yet a Youth” came out on Monday in Issue 80 of Youth Imagination. You can read it here! This story actually originally appeared in almost identical form in the Spring 2010 issue of Small Craft Warnings, Swarthmore College’s oldest literary magazine (of which I was also an editor). So this story is at least ten years old! I’m still fond of it, though.

“Yet a Youth” is one of the rare stories I’ve written that has no elements of fantasy. Maybe I could even say it’s not...

San Francisco III

I’m not sure, but of all the places I haven’t lived, San Francisco and the Bay Area may be the city/region I’ve visited the most. I like San Francisco a lot and hope I will have chances to return.

Soon after New Year’s Day, I joined my mother in Palo Alto, where she and my father are staying for the first part of his sabbatical. We spent several days exploring new places, and I also met up with a few friends. Upon flying into San Francisco, I went straight to Berkeley to hang out with Andrew....

The Books I Read in 2019

In 2019, I read 93 books, 19 more than in 2018 and the most books I’ve read in a year since 2015. I know this increase was driven by Isabelle’s and my coping strategy for the throes of late grad school: binge reading graphic novels, comics, and even picture books (we will never forget Trevor’s immortal line, “This is nice”) in between dissertation-writing sessions. I regret nothing. (I also continued to read SFF short fiction, and these days I usually tweet about stories I really liked.)

Here...

2019 in Review

2019 was also a big year, though I did not travel as far as in 2018. On Twitter (which I have now joined), I’ve seen people reflecting on the whole decade since we’re about to enter the new 20s (how weird–I think “the 20s” still evokes flappers and Prohibition to me, though the pull of the 20th century feels weaker than for “the 60s,” say). It hadn’t occurred to me to look back on the decade till I started seeing those tweets. I don’t think I much noticed the dawn of the last decade; I was...

What I’ve Been Reading: Christmas Edition

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Merry Christmas! It’s the last Wednesday of the year, so if I was going to get in any more blog posts in 2019, it was going to have to be today. Here are a few things I’ve read and loved recently:

“Away With the Wolves” by Sarah Gailey: This short story in Uncanny features a beautiful, tender, already established best friendship between two girls who understand each other and look out for each other in large and small ways and love each other deeply. Its triumphant ending shows how sometimes...