Madeleine E. Robins's Blog: Madeleine Robins: Journal

Raised in a Barn: Bats

My mother standing in what would become the living room of the Barn.

When I was a kid my parents bought a barn. Actually, they bought a farm, complete with 180 acres of land, a saggy Edwardian-era farmhouse, multiple very saggy outbuildings, and two staunch barns that had been built together (one in the early-mid 1800s, the other about 60 years later). My parents didn’t care about the outbuildings: they–my father, mostly, but my mother as well–wanted a place they could turn into a kind of funky,...

Making My Plan

In the last election there was a brief, comic video by then-Vice President Joe Biden about making a plan to vote. Things don’t feel so comic now (although Biden really has a nice light touch, and no fear of mocking himself, and isn’t that pleasant?) but the essential message is still important. Make a plan to vote.

In those far off days of 2016 that meant relatively simple things like “where do I vote,” and “can I walk/Lyft/drive/take the bus there.” These days… oy. So many complicating factors....

Planned Obsolescence

This post appeared at Bookview Cafe in 2014.

A billion years ago (actually 24) I worked as a ghost-writer for a psychiatrist whose specialties were 1) working with women with serious psychiatric disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar depression, etc.) who were the mothers of infants, and 2) infant depression (you will be unsurprised to know that they are frequently linked). About the time my older daughter was six months old, I quit–having my nose that deep into psychiatric dysfunction in infancy mea...

It’s Good to be the Queen

Dramatis Personae: Me and Emily the Dog. Place: our sunroom, where my favorite arm chair for working is located. Local temperature: 54 degrees. I am sitting in the arm chair (squishy brown leather, able to hold two adults, tightly, or one adult and one child, or two children, or one human and one dog).

Me (shivering): Brrrrr.

Emily (moseying into the room): Hey, let’s cuddle. (Lopes up into chair, shoulders her way into 3/4 of the space) That’s better.

Me: Hey, I was sitting here. Share.

Emily (...

Death and Fantasy

This post was originally published at Bookview Cafe in 2014.

There’s been a ripple of dismay in the fantasy and SF corner of the fiction-verse over an interview with Russell Banks in The New York Times Book Review from last Sunday.  The whole piece is interesting (a person who cannot read in bed, or on trains, planes, or buses without falling “instantly to sleep” is so directly opposite to me and my reading habits as to be intriguing) but the subhead on the piece explains the kerfuffle:

The auth...

Today Flows from Yesterday, Without Labels

This post was originally published on the Bookview Cafe blog in 2013.

We humans love our boundaries.  Between nations, between states, between property.  So important to know where you end and I begin, not?

But in history, maybe not so useful.  When I was taking history classes, there was a tendency to teach historical periods and eras, as if the Plantagenets filed out in an orderly fashion one day, the Tudors clocked in, and everything–clothes, art, technology, politics–changed right then.  But...

Xeno’s Ending

So there I was, working on a short story that took over my brain, right when I ought to be working on the book that took over my brain when I was supposed to be working on the new Sarah Tolerance book.  (For those following along at home: 1) Sarah Tolerance Book

So I want to finish this story. When its finished I can go back to #2, so I can return to #1. In aid of these goals, I’ve been writing on the train home from work. Because that means I’m writing by hand, it also means there are gaps.  T...

The Things I Know, The Things You Know

Many writers (I won’t say all writers, because I don’t know them all, but at this point I think I have a pretty decent random sample) know a bunch of different weird things.  Many writers (see above caveat) were probably the sorts of kids who stored up random factoids, or had deep pools of info about odd things, or could list all the kings of England from Edward the Confessor onward (that used to be one of my parlor tricks, along with reciting the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales).  Many writer...

“How Feminism Killed Cooking”

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar.  The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past.  In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make...

Tell Me

I have a friend I don’t see very often.  When I do, and we’re catching up, she launches into stories about her life that are interlarded with names and events of which I know nothing.  It means that I feel both bewildered and shut out.  I think she believes that because she knows all these things I, as her friend, must know them too.  But it frustrates me, and I’m pretty sure that’s not her intent.

There are books like that, too.

I love twisty stories that demand my full attention.  I love findi...