Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 5

2022 in Review

Happy New Year’s Eve! I am not judging the “goodness” of years anymore, and anyway, you probably don’t come to this blog for news of the world. I’m sure you have at least some idea of what is happening, both good and bad, in various corners of the globe (can a globe have corners?). I hope your winter holidays, breaks, and vacations have been and are filled with warmth, light, and good company.

My 2022 was pretty good. Here is what the year looked like for me:

I taught my first three-course seme...

Star of the North: Minnesota English Country Dance Weekend

Star of the North is an English country dance weekend held in Minnesota. (What is English country dancing? It’s the kind of social dancing you see in Jane Austen films. That said, the tradition now includes tunes and dances written by contemporary composers and choreographers, and dancing can vary in style and energy, so if you think the dancing in the movies looks slow and staid, well, it’s not necessarily like that.) I may have attended a Star of the North dance or ball back when I was in t...

Malinda Lo and Andrew Karre at Red Balloon

My fall break happily coincided with the St. Paul stop on Malinda Lo’s book tour for her just-released YA novel, A Scatter of Light. (It’s set in 2013–does that make it contemporary or historical? :P) When I learned she was coming to Red Balloon Bookshop (where I had my release parties) and would be in conversation with her editor, Andrew Karre, I reserved my spot, well, on the spot. I’ve read nearly all of Lo’s books (which encompass fantasy and science fiction, contemporary and historical), an...

Trip to Chicago

This past weekend I took a mini road trip to Chicago to visit my first and oldest friend. Hana is a professor of history and Asian American studies on the East Coast (check out Campu, her podcast on Japanese American incarceration!), but she’s spending the month doing archival research in Chicago, which is not so very far from central Iowa. I left Grinnell on Friday afternoon and drove east on I-80 (it was only my second time doing so; the first was on my single visit to Iowa City). At one po...

New Story: Maghda’s Song

Happy September! This is a special Thursday blog post brought to you by my newest short story publication. “Maghda’s Song” came out yesterday in the August issue of Anathema. Although my short fiction is less consistently musical than my novels, music, as the title suggests, features heavily in this story. There is also a cat, if you need that in your life.

Fun facts: “Maghda’s Song” is set in the same world, but in a later era, as another story I wrote first and for which I have yet to find a h...

L’Aquarium de Paris

I’m behind on my Paris posts, but this is the last one! Toward the end of my visit, Isabelle, Olivier, and I took the bus and the metro to Trocadéro and crossed the plaza in the middle of the Palais de Chaillot, which was full of tourists milling about and taking pictures of the Eiffel Tower across the Seine. We wended our way downhill within the Jardins du Trocadéro. Our destination was the Aquarium de Paris and, specifically, Hanami, the temporary outdoor Japanese street food café the aquarium...

L’Hôtel de la Marine

In early July, while I was still in Meudon, Isabelle, Olivier, and I went to l’Hôtel de la Marine on the Place de la Concorde in Paris to see the exhibit “Gulbenkian par lui-même” (“Gulbenkian through himself”). Calouste Gulbenkian was an Armenian born in the Ottoman Empire who became a fabulously wealthy oil magnate and an art collector with a dazzling collection. When Isabelle and I were in Lisbon, she (but not I) went to the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum and saw some of his treasures, which was ...

À la rencontre du petit prince

I’m visiting Isabelle in Meudon again, and at the end of June, we went to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris to see the exhibit “À la rencontre du petit prince” (“An encounter with the little prince”). The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is right by the Louvre, but I had never been there before. We actually caught the last day of the exhibit (although Isabelle and Olivier had gone before).

English first edition of The Little Prince with a dedication by the author in French to Annabella Power

Accor...

Michelle Zauner at Grinnell

Back in May, the Grinnell Asian American Association hosted a reading and Q & A by Michelle Zauner, the author of the bestselling memoir Crying in H Mart. Zauner was also on campus to perform with her band, Japanese Breakfast, which I personally did not know of but which seems to be kind of a big deal? I had heard of Crying in H Mart, though pandemic time being what it is, I somehow thought it had come out before the pandemic rather than in April 2021. I wasn’t originally planning to attend t...

A Harpsichord Lecture Recital

Toward the end of April, I attended an unusual concert at Grinnell. Technically speaking, it was a lecture recital, which was not a genre I was familiar with but is basically exactly what it sounds like. The speaker and musician was Dr. Heidi Tsai, a Taiwanese-born keyboardist who lives in France and has taught and performed extensively on both sides of the Pyréneées. (She has a doctorate in historical keyboards–how cool does that sound?) The lecture recital was described thusly on the program: ...