Eleanor Glewwe's Blog, page 9

The Boundary Waters 2020

My family spent last week in the Boundary Waters. It was my seventh (!) trip, fifteen years after my first, and my family’s fifth trip together. The last time we went was in 2016, when we canoed and camped on Isabella Lake. This year, we returned to Seagull Outfitters at the end of the Gunflint Trail, where we’d gone in 2015.

We drove up on Monday, stopping in Duluth to pick up sandwiches for lunch from Northern Waters Smokehaus. We used to plan our Boundary Waters drives around meals at the Ne...

The Best of Uncanny, Part II

Two weeks ago I highlighted some of my favorite stories from the first half of The Best of Uncanny. Now that I’ve finished this behemoth, I wanted to follow up with some personal standouts from the second half. I’m not going to use the words “favorites” this time because it actually doesn’t quite seem to fit. Poring over the table of contents again, I’m struck more by distinct impressions particular stories left on me than any kind of obvious ranking among the pieces. So consider this a collecti...

The Best of Uncanny, Part I

The blog has been quiet lately in part because I’ve been staying home, as one does during a pandemic, and not having any notable adventures. But I have been slowly reading my way through a doorstopper of an anthology, and since I’m just past the halfway point, I thought I could share some of my favorites thus far.

The collection is The Best of Uncanny, which brings together some of the best short stories (and poems) published in Uncanny Magazine, a dream market of mine. The book came out in 201...

Contrepoint and The Braided Path

Content warning: CSA

While I was in France, I read yet another short story collection, this one in French. Entitled Contrepoint, it was edited by Laurent Gidon, published by ActuSF, and distributed for free with the purchase of other books from the publisher. The idea behind the anthology was to showcase stories without conflict. That is, “stories in which there is neither war, nor conflict, nor violence” (my translation). When I first read this, I wondered about the editor’s definition of confl...

Return from France

I returned to Minnesota this week after spending nearly 90 days in France. If you’d asked me in the winter how I thought my spring was going to go, I could not have envisioned what actually came to pass! But I feel very lucky to have gotten to spend the entire French confinement, as well as the first phase and a bit of the déconfinement, with Isabelle and Olivier outside of Paris.

A walk in the Forêt de Meudon

Writing-wise, I ultimately had a very good confinement. (This is not to promote any ki...

Conservation of Shadows

Im still reading collections of short fiction, and the latest one I finished was Yoon Ha Lees Conservation of Shadows. I bought Lees first novel, Ninefox Gambit, from Small World Books in Venice a few years ago and really liked it. Ive also read the next book in the Machineries of Empire trilogy, Raven Stratagem, and I regret that Ive yet to read the third book, Revenant Gun. But the first two installments were enough to make me a Yoon Ha Lee fan, so when I saw Conservation of Shadows on...

The Powers of Music

Ive long enjoyed reading restaurant reviews and recipe articles in The New York Times food section, but since much of the world began locking down, there have been no Hungry City reviews of New Yorks under-the-radar ethnic food joints or measured evaluations by Pete Wells. Instead, I keep stumbling upon Sam Siftons What to Cook newsletter, whose tone of late I feel can be summed up by sometimes you just want to eat meatballs/mac and cheese/insert comfort food here, and you know what, thats...

What I’ve Been Reading: Confinement Edition

I arrived in France with Philip Pullmans The Secret Commonwealth (a library book), which I read with great pleasure. Pullman is such a good writer. Before the volumes of The Book of Dust, his new trilogy, started coming out, I hadnt read him in many years, but each time Ive picked up one of these new books, set in a beloved world, Ive felt like Im in such good hands. I remember being twelve or so and finishing His Dark Materials and simply being in awe. I was convinced I would never write...

Making Xiànbǐng

Recently Isabelle decided on a whim to make 餡餅 (xiànbǐng) for one of our confinement lunches. First, we made a dough out of just flour and water. Then we formed the dough into a log, sliced it into discs, and rolled each disc out into a circle, trying to keep the center thicker than the edges.

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We spooned some fillingtofu, zucchini, and shallotsinto each wrapper.

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Then we pinched the edges of the wrapper together to form a bao.

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Tada!

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Here are a whole bunch. They reminded me of Georgian ...

Drypoint

These are strange, scary times, and I have little to say that others arent already saying with more thoughtfulness, eloquence, and authority. So Im not going to wade into those waters. Suffice it to say that I am well, I feel lucky, and Im currently confined with Isabelle and Olivier.

Back in the early days of the confinement, Isabelle let me make a print from her most recent drypoint plate. Drypoint is the latest printmaking technique shes picked up (see our earlier adventures in linocut, ...