Ten hours smiling at potential donors to the Temporal Branching Lab, and two more tour groups to go, but my snack stash held only a box of crumbs, without even a fleck of chocolate. The other graduate students had left some milk and a few wrinkled apples in the break room fridge, but stealing those […]
I’ve been investing more time into short stories, essays, and articles, and with a nice bump of success, too, as I finish a novel and conclude a massive historical project. It’s been great fun, for the most part, and I’ve tried to improve the quality and quantity of my shorter material. This weekend, I carved […]
The diseases that pop up these days–they say that they’re just stand-ins. Metaphors for real illnesses. Like, the world got so fed up with comas and Alzheimer’s that reality decided to rewrite itself and give us sleeping-beauty disorder and zombieism instead. He’s not really undead, they keep saying. She’s not really a werewolf. It’s all something else–those “real” illnesses […]
On Navarino Island off the coast of Chile, Marta mops outside the tyrannosaurus habitat as the tourists press in to see the dinosaurs. They come with their reluctant children in tow. They weave their fingers through chicken-wire fences and gaze down into open pits while the kids tug at their legs and demand ice cream. […]
On a personal level, this has been a challenging year. It’s not something I like to talk about. Or even want to talk about, much less share the details in an editorial. I learned a lot about sadness and regret, but ultimately I learned the most about what hope feels like. It didn’t come in […]
When the Queen of Faerie orders you to do something, you don’t refuse. The lands are filled with the remnants of her commands, for sometimes – make me a boat of dead men’s nails – her creatures die from exhaustion or accident before their duty is done. We have a lot of ruins here. Her […]