#Bloomsbury Academic

[garadinervi]

Salam Darwazah Mir, Transnational Literature of Resistance. Guyana and Palestine, 1950s-1980s, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, NY, 2024

Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Beach in Georgetown, Guyana, 2020 [© Luis Acosta / AFP / Getty Images]

[thegirlwiththelantern]

Yet More 2024 Nonfiction Books

As the third of these posts focused on nonfiction titles, it is a little bit less organised than its predecessors. There’s a more hands on book, for instance, and some which fall more under autobiography. Living Latin: Everyday Language and Popular Culture by Charlie Kerrigan | 08 / 02 / 24 – Bloomsbury Academic What kind of language is Latin, and who is it for? Contrary to most accounts, this…

[greased-tea]

Secret History but real

[hussyknee]

17/12/23 this masterlist has been completely revamped with free access to all material. It will be updated and edited periodically so please click on my username and reblog the current version directly from me if you're able.

14/8/24 reboosting this post with How to Help Palestine updated. Please scroll to the bottom to donate or boost the links.

Palestine: The Big Damn List

(Yes, it's a lot. Just choose your preferred medium and then pick ONE.)

Podcasts

Backgrounders and Quick Facts

Interactive Maps

Teach-Out Resources

Reading Material (free)

Films and Documentaries (free)

Non-Governmental Organizations

Social Media

How You Can Help <- URGENT!!!

Podcasts

Cocktails & Capitalism: The Story of Palestine Part 1, Part 3

It Could Happen Here: The Cheapest Land is Bought with Blood, Part 2, The Balfour Declaration

Citations Needed: Media narratives and consent manufacturing around Israel-Palestine and the Gaza Siege

The Deprogram: Free Palestine, ft. decolonizatepalestine.com.

Backgrounders and Quick Facts

The Palestine Academy: Palestine 101

Institute for Middle East Understanding: Explainers and Quick Facts

Interactive Maps

Visualizing Palestine

Teach-Out Resources

1) Cambridge UCU and Pal Society

Palestine 101

Intro to Palestine Film + Art + Literature

Resources for Organising and Facilitating)

2) The Jadaliya YouTube Channel of the Arab Studies Institute

Gaza in Context Teach-in series

War on Palestine podcast

Updates and Discussions of news with co-editors Noura Erakat and Mouin Rabbani.

3) The Palestine Directory

History (virtual tours, digital archives, The Palestine Oral History Project, Documenting Palestine, Queering Palestine)

Cultural History (Palestine Open Maps, Overdue Books Zine, Palestine Poster Project)

Contemporary Voices in the Arts

Get Involved: NGOs and campaigns to help and support.

3) PalQuest Interactive Encyclopedia of the Palestine Question.

4) The Palestine Remix by Al Jazeera

Books and Articles

Free reading material

My Gdrive of Palestine/Decolonization Literature (nearly all the books recommended below + books from other recommended lists)

Five free eBooks by Verso

Three Free eBooks on Palestine by Haymarket

LGBT Activist Scott Long's Google Drive of Palestine Freedom Struggle Resources

Recommended Reading List

Academic Books

Edward Said (1979) The Question of Palestine, Random House

Ilan Pappé (2002)(ed) The Israel/Palestine Question, Routledge

Ilan Pappé (2006) The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, OneWorld Publications

Ilan Pappé (2011) The Forgotten Palestinians: A History of the Palestinians in Israel, Yale University Press

Ilan Pappé (2015) The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge, Verso Books

Ilan Pappé (2017) The Biggest Prison On Earth: A History Of The Occupied Territories, OneWorld Publications

Ilan Pappé (2022) A History of Modern Palestine, Cambridge University Press

Rosemary Sayigh (2007) The Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries, Bloomsbury

Andrew Ross (2019) Stone Men: the Palestinians who Built Israel, Verso Books

Rashid Khalidi (2020) The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917–2017

Ariella Azoulay (2011) From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950, Pluto Press

Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir (2012) The One-State Condition: Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Stanford University Press.

Jeff Halper (2010) An Israeli in Palestine: Resisting Dispossession, Redeeming Israel, Pluto Press

Jeff Halper (2015) War Against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification

Jeff Halper (2021) Decolonizing Israel, Liberating Palestine: Zionism, Settler Colonialism, and the Case for One Democratic State, Pluto Press

Anthony Loewenstein (2023) The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel exports the Technology of Occupation around the World

Noura Erakat (2019) Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Stanford University Press

Neve Gordon (2008) Israel’s Occupation, University of California Press

Joseph Massad (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Routledge

Memoirs

Edward Said (1986) After the Last Sky: Palestine Lives, Columbia University PEdward Saidress

Edward Said (2000) Out of Place; A Memoir, First Vintage Books

Mourid Barghouti (2005) I saw Ramallah, Bloomsbury

Hatim Kanaaneh (2008) A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel, Pluto Press

Raja Shehadeh (2008) Palestinian Walks: Into a Vanishing Landscape, Profile Books

Ghada Karmi (2009) In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story, Verso Books

Vittorio Arrigoni (2010) Gaza Stay Human, Kube Publishing

Ramzy Baroud (2010) My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story, Pluto Press

Izzeldin Abuelaish (2011) I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity, Bloomsbury

Atef Abu Saif (2015) The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary, Beacon Press

Anthologies

Voices from Gaza - Insaniyyat (The Society of Palestinian Anthropologists)

Letters From Gaza • Protean Magazine

Salma Khadra Jayyusi (1992) Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, Columbia University Press

ASHTAR Theatre (2010) The Gaza Monologues

Refaat Alreer (ed) (2014) Gaza Writes Back, Just World Books

Refaat Alreer, Laila El-Haddad (eds) (2015) Gaza Unsilenced, Just World Books

Cate Malek and Mateo Hoke (eds)(2015) Palestine Speaks: Narrative of Life under Occupation, Verso Books

Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing (eds) (2022) Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, Haymarket Books

Short Story Collections

Ghassan Kanafani, Hilary Kilpatrick (trans) (1968) Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, Lynne Rienner Publishers

Ghassan Kanafani, Barbara Harlow, Karen E. Riley (trans) (2000) Palestine’s Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, Lynne Rienner Publishers

Atef Abu Saif (2014) The Book of Gaza: A City in Short Fiction, Comma Press

Samira Azzam, Ranya Abdelrahman (trans) (2022) Out Of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam

Sonia Sulaiman (2023) Muneera and the Moon; Stories Inspired by Palestinian Folklore

Essay Collections

Edward W. Said (2000) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press

Salim Tamari (2008) Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture, University of California Press

Fatma Kassem (2011) Palestinian Women: Narratives, histories and gendered memory, Bloombsbury

Ramzy Baroud (2019) These Chains Will Be Broken: Palestinian Stories of Struggle and Defiance in Israeli Prisons, Clarity Press

Novels

Sahar Khalifeh (1976) Wild Thorns, Saqi Books

Liyana Badr (1993) A Balcony over the Fakihani, Interlink Books

Hala Alyan (2017) Salt Houses, Harper Books

Susan Abulhawa (2011) Mornings in Jenin, Bloomsbury

Susan Abulhawa (2020) Against the Loveless World, Bloomsbury

Graphic novels

Joe Sacco (2001) Palestine

Joe Sacco (2010) Footnotes in Gaza

Naji al-Ali (2009) A Child in Palestine, Verso Books

Mohammad Sabaaneh (2021) Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine, Street Noise Book*

Poetry

Fady Joudah (2008) The Earth in the Attic, Sheridan Books,

Ghassan Zaqtan, Fady Joudah (trans) (2012) Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me and Other Poems, Yale University Press

Hala Alyan (2013) Atrium: Poems, Three Rooms Press*

Mohammed El-Kurd (2021) Rifqa, Haymarket Books

Mosab Abu Toha (2022) Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, City Lights Publishers

Tawfiq Zayyad (2023) We Are Here to Stay, Smokestack Books*

The Works of Mahmoud Darwish

Poems

Rafeef Ziadah (2011) We Teach Life, Sir

Nasser Rabah (2022) In the Endless War

Refaat Alareer (2011) If I Must Die

Hiba Abu Nada (2023) I Grant You Refuge/ Not Just Passing

[All books except the ones starred are available in my gdrive. I'm adding more each day. But please try and buy whatever you're able or borrow from the library. Most should be available in the discounted Free Palestine Reading List by Pluto Press, Verso and Haymarket Books.]

Human Rights Reports & Documents

Information on current International Court of Justice case on ‘Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem’

UN Commission of Inquiry Report 2022

UN Special Rapporteur Report on Apartheid 2022

Amnesty International Report on Apartheid 2022

Human Rights Watch Report on Apartheid 2021

Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ 2009 (‘The Goldstone Report’)

Advisory Opinion on the Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, International Court of Justice, 9 July 2004

Films

Documentaries

Jenin, Jenin (2003) dir. Mohammed Bakri

Massacre (2005) dir. Monica Borgmann, Lokman Slim, Hermann Theissen

Slingshot HipHop (2008) dir. Jackie Reem Salloum

Waltz with Bashir (2008) dir. Ari Folman † (also on Amazon Prime)

Tears of Gaza (2010) dir. Vibeke Løkkeberg (also on Amazon Prime)

5 Broken Cameras (2011) dir. Emad Burnat (also on Amazon Prime)

The Gatekeepers (2012) dir. Dror Moreh (also on Amazon Prime)

The Great Book Robbery (2012) | Al Jazeera English

Al Nakba (2013) | Al Jazeera (5-episode docu-series)

The Village Under the Forest (2013) dir. Mark J. Kaplan

Where Should The Birds Fly (2013) dir. Fida Qishta

Naila and the Uprising (2017) (also on Amazon Prime)

GAZA (2019) dir. Andrew McConnell and Garry Keane

Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) dir. Abby Martin

Little Palestine: Diary Of A Siege (2021) dir. Abdallah Al Khatib 

Palestine 1920: The Other Side of the Palestinian Story (2021) | Al Jazeera World Documentary

Gaza Fights Back (2021) | MintPress News Original Documentary | dir. Dan Cohen

Innocence (2022) dir. Guy Davidi

Short Films

Fatenah (2009) dir. Ahmad Habash

Gaza-London (2009) dir. Dina Hamdan

Condom Lead (2013) dir. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser

OBAIDA (2019) | Defence for Children Palestine

Theatrical Films

Divine Intervention (2002) | dir. Elia Suleiman (also on Netflix)

Paradise Now (2005) dir Hany Abu-Assad (also on Amazon Prime)

Lemon Tree (2008) (choose auto translate for English subs) (also on Amazon Prime)

It Must Be Heaven (2009) | dir. Elia Suleiman †

The Promise (2010) mini-series dir. Peter Kosminsky (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

Habibi (2011)* dir. Susan Youssef

Omar (2013)* dir. Hany Abu-Assad †

3000 Nights (2015)* dir. Mai Masri

Foxtrot (2017) dir. Samuel Maoz (also on Amazon Prime)

The Time that Remains (2019) dir. Elia Suleiman †

Gaza Mon Amour (2020) dir. Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser †

The Viewing Booth (2020) dir. Ra'anan Alexandrowicz (on Amazon Prime and Apple TV)

Farha (2021)* | dir. Darin J. Sallam

Palestine Film Institute Archive

All links are for free viewing. The ones marked with a star (*) can be found on Netflix, while the ones marked † can be downloaded for free from my Mega account.

If you find Guy Davidi's Innocence anywhere please let me know, I can't find it for streaming or download even to rent or buy.

In 2018, BDS urged Netflix to dump Fauda, a series created by former members of IOF death squads that legitimizes and promotes racist violence and war crimes, to no avail. Please warn others to not give this series any views. BDS has not called for a boycott of Netflix. ]

NGOs

The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Movement

Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor

UNRWA

Palestine Defence for Children International

Palestinian Feminist Collective

Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network

Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

Institute for Palestine Studies

Al Haq

Artists for Palestine

The Palestine Museum

Jewish Currents

B’Tselem

DAWN

Social Media

Palestnians on Tumblr

@el-shab-hussein

@killyfromblame

@apollos-olives

@fairuzfan

@palipunk

@sar-soor

@nabulsi

@wearenotjustnumbers2

@90-ghost

@tamarrud

@northgazaupdates

Allies and advocates (not Palestinian)

@bloglikeanegyptian beautiful posts that read like op-eds

@vyorei daily news roundups

@luthienne resistance through prose

@decolonize-the-left scoop on the US political plans and impacts

@feluka

@anneemay

(Please don't expect any of these blogs to be completely devoted to Palestine allyship; they do post regularly about it but they're still personal blogs and post whatever else they feel like. Do not harrass them.)

Gaza journalists

Motaz Azaiza IG: @motaz_azaiza | Twitter: @azaizamotaz9 | TikTok: _motaz.azaiza (left Gaza as of Jan 23)

Bisan Owda IG and TikTok: wizard_bisan1 | Twitter: @wizardbisan

Saleh Aljafarawi IG: @saleh_aljafarawi | Twitter: @S_Aljafarawi | TikTok: @saleh_aljafarawi97

Plestia Alaqad IG: @byplestia | TikTok: @plestiaaqad (left Gaza)

Wael Al-Dahdouh IG: @wael_eldahdouh | Twitter: @WaelDahdouh (left Gaza as of Jan 13)

Hind Khoudary IG: @hindkhoudary | Twitter: @Hind_Gaza

Ismail Jood IG and TikTok: @ismail.jood (announced end of coverage on Jan 25)

Yara Eid IG: @eid_yara | Twitter: @yaraeid_

Eye on Palestine IG: @eye.on.palestine | Twitter: @EyeonPalestine | TikTok: @eyes.on.palestine

Muhammad Shehada Twitter: @muhammadshehad2

(Edit: even though some journos have evacuated, the footage up to the end of their reporting is up on their social media, and they're also doing urgent fundraisers to get their families and friends to safety. Please donate or share their posts.)

News organisations

The Electronic Intifada Twitter: @intifada | IG: @electronicintifada

Quds News Network Twitter and Telegram: @QudsNen | IG: @qudsn (Arabic)

Times of Gaza IG: @timesofgaza | Twitter: @Timesofgaza | Telegram: @TIMESOFGAZA

The Palestine Chronicle Twitter: @PalestineChron | IG: @palestinechron | @palestinechronicle

Al-Jazeera Twitter: @AJEnglish | IG and TikTok: @aljazeeraenglish, @ajplus

Middle East Eye IG and TikTok: @middleeasteye | Twitter: @MiddleEastEye

Democracy Now Twitter and IG: @democracynow TikTok: @democracynow.org

Mondoweiss IG and TikTok: @mondoweiss | Twitter: @Mondoweiss

The Intercept Twitter and IG: @theintercept

MintPress Twitter: @MintPressNews | IG: mintpress

Novara Media Twitter and IG: @novaramedia

Truthout Twitter and IG: @truthout

Palestnians on Other Social Media

Noura Erakat: Legal scholar, human rights attorney, specialising in Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Twitter: @4noura | IG: @nouraerakat | (http://www.nouraerakat.com/)

Hebh Jamal: Journalist in Germany. IG and Twitter: @hebh_jamal

Taleed El Sabawi: Assistant professor of law and researcher in public health. Twitter: @el_sabawi | IG

Lexi Alexander: Filmmaker and activist. Twitter: @LexiAlex | IG: @lexialexander1

Mariam Barghouti: Writer, blogger, researcher, and journalist. Twitter: @MariamBarghouti | IG: @mariambarghouti

Rasha Abdulhadi: Queer poet, author and cultural organizer. Twitter: @rashaabdulhadi

Mohammed el-Kurd: Writer and activist from Jerusalem. IG: @mohammedelkurd | Twitter: @m7mdkurd

Ramy Abdu: Founder and Chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor. Twitter: @RamyAbdu

Subhi: Founder of The Palestine Academy website. IG: @sbeih.jpg |TikTok @iamsbeih | Twitter: @iamsbeih

‼️How You Can Help Palestine‼️

Click for Palestine (Please reblog!!)

Masterlist of donation links by @sulfurcosmos (Please reblog!!)

Water for Gaza: Donate directly to the Gaza Municipality

Gazafunds (vetted and spotlighted GFMs)

The Butterfly Effect Project (spreadsheet of vetted GFMs)

Operation Olive Branch has been removed in light of new revelations of unethical behaviour.

Spreadsheet of Gaza fundraisers vetted by @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi

If any links are broken let me know. Or pull up the current post to check whether it's fixed.

"Knowledge is Israel's worst enemy. Awareness is Israel's most hated and feared foe. That's why Israel bombs a university: it wants to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism."

— Dr. Refaat Alareer, (martyred Dec 6, 2023)

From River To The Sea Palestine Will Be Free 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

-----

Edit 1: took the first video down because turns out the animator is a terf and it links to her blog. Really sorry for any distress.

Edit 2: All recommended readings + Haymarket recommendations + essential decolonization texts have been uploaded to my linked gdrive. I will adding more periodically. Please do buy or check them out from the library if possible, but this post was made for and by poor and gatekept Global South bitches like me.

Some have complained about the memes being disrespectful. You're actually legally obligated to make fun of Israeli propaganda and Zionists. I don't make the rules.

Edit 3: "The river to the sea" does not mean the expulsion of Jews from Palestine. Believing that is genocide apologia.

Edit 4: Gazans have specifically asked us to put every effort into pushing for a ceasefire instead of donations. "Raising humanitarian aid" is a grift Western governments are pushing right now to deflect from the fact that they're sending billions to Israel to keep carpet bombing Gazans. As long as the blockades are still in place there will never be enough aid for two million people. (UPDATE: PLEASE DONATE to the Gazan's GoFundMe fundraisers to help them buy food and get out of Rafah into Egypt. E-SIMs, food and medical supplies are also essential. Please donate to the orgs linked in the How You Can Help. Go on the strikes. DO NOT STOP PROTESTING.)

Edit 5: Google drive link for academic books folder has been fixed. Also have added a ton of resources to all the other folders so please check them out.

Edit 6: Added interactive maps, Jadaliya channel, and masterlists of donation links and protest support and of factsheets.

The twitter accounts I reposted as it was given to me and I just now realized it had too many Israeli voices and almost none of the Palestinians I'm following, so it's being edited. (Update: done!) also removed sources like Jewish Voices of Peace and Breaking the Silence that do good work but have come under fair criticism from Palestinians.

Edit 7: Complete reformatting

Edit 8: Complete revamping of the social media section. It now reflects my own following list.

Edit 9: removed some more problematic people from the allies list. Remember that the 2SS is a grift that's used to normalize violence and occupation, kids. Supporting the one-state solution is lowest possible bar for allyship. It's "Free Palestine" not "Free half of Palestine and hope Israel doesn't go right back to killing them".

Edit 10: added The Palestine Directory + Al Jazeera documentary + Addameer. This "100 links per post" thing sucks.

Edit 11: more documentaries and films

Edit 12: reformatted reading list

Edit 13: had to remove @palipunk's masterlist to add another podcast. It's their pinned post and has more resources Palestinian culture and crafts if you want to check it out

Edit 14 6th May '24: I've stopped updating this masterlist so some things, like journalists still left in Gaza and how to support the student protests are missing. I've had to take a step back and am no longer able to track these things down on my own, and I've hit the '100 links per post' limit, but if you can leave suggestions for updates along with links in either the replies or my asks I will try and add them.

Edit 15 10th August: added to Palestinian allies list and reworked the Help for Palestine section. There's been a racist harrassment campaign against the Palestinian Tumblrs that vetted the Gaza fundraisers based off one mistake made by a Gazan who doesn't understand English. If you're an ally, shut that shit down. Even if you donate to a scam GFM, you're only out some coffee money; if everyone stops donating to all the GFMs in fear of scams, those families die.

Edit 16: removed entire section of allied accounts since the liberation of Syria because apparently leftists in the West are unable to both be against the Israel's genocide of Palestinians and Assad's genocide of Syrians. I should have treated the use of "Axis of Resistance" as the Tankie dog whistle it was.

Edit 17: Removed the Uncommitted Movement to pressure the Harris Presidential Campaign for obvious reasons.

Edit 18: Operation Olive Branch has come under fire for their lack of transparency, unethical behaviour and reporting their own volunteers to the FBI. Always be wary of white people spearheading anything to do with liberatory movements, from conversations to organizations.

[tastesoftamriel]

Just so it's clear, I do not debate topics like politics and cultural appropriation with bad faith actors who do not meet my academic qualifications. I hold two degrees in social anthropology, both of which I graduated with first class honours and a distinction respectively. I am a published academic author, including an upcoming publication with Bloomsbury. Oh yeah, and I'm doing my PhD at one of the country's best universities. I also charge for academic services, so if you want to rant about me being a coloniser (lmao) that'll be £30 for the hour.

Catch up to me in higher education or don't bother. If you're genuinely curious and have questions I am more than happy to have a chat, but if you're here to troll...I'm not the least bit sorry that I'm hot and educated.

[bestiarium]

Nocnitsa, the night hag [Slavic mythology]:

Nocnitsa is a hag or witch from Slavic folklore who inhabits woods and forests. She is heavily associated with night and darkness, and as such, she mainly targets sleeping children at night. A deeply evil creature, Nocnitsa usually bestows nightmares onto her victims, but she other ways of inflicting suffering: sometimes she shows up at night to breastfeed infants, but her milk is highly poisonous and will cause the child to fall ill.

In this aspect, she is associated with the Rusalka, another supernatural female monster that kills with her breasts. Sometimes, the breasts of a Rusalka were said to be made of iron or stone, and she would crush her victims to death with them.

To appease Nocnitsa, people would make offerings of bread (sometimes also salt), which would then be rubbed on the child. There are also certain charms or rituals to ward off the witch and cure a child’s insomnia. Alternatively, young children could be protected against Nocnitsa with a protective circle or by simply placing a knife under the cradle.

She is also called Nochnitsy (or a variation), Kriksy (meaning “scream”) and Plaksy (“the sniveler”, “one who snivels”), sometimes combined into the name ‘Kriksa-Plaksa’. In Belarus, Nochnitsy were a group of tiny spirits instead of a witch, but the principle remained the same. The Nochnitsy caused children to sleep badly, but they were deeply afraid of fire. To cure an infant cursed by the Nochnitsy, parents would make them sleep in front of the fireplace, or sometimes put onto a large tray or shovel and put in an oven for a short while (note: a smoldering warm oven, not a burning one. Please do not put babies in burning ovens).

Interestingly, Nochnitsa (if it is indeed the same character) plays a minor role in the Slavic story of Pizamar, a mortal woman who fell in love with the god Svarozhich. Unfortunately, the gods forbade love between mortals and deities, so Pizamar tried to take her own life. She walked towards a cliff at night, but right before she could jump off, Nochnitsa cast a sleep spell on her.

Every time she tried to commit suicide, Nochnitsa put her to sleep. Lada and Chors, two goddesses, watched this scenario unfold several times before taking pity on Pizamar. They stole divine mead of immortality from the other gods and gave it to her, turning her immortal. Pizamar then became the entertainer of the gods, dancing and singing for them, which she did with such passion and talent that she eventually became the goddess of the arts.

Sources: Rose, C., 1996, Spirits, Fairies, Gnomes and Goblins: An Encyclopedia of the Little People, Bloomsbury Academic, 370 pp., p. 130, p. 186. Bane, T., 2013, Encyclopedia of Fairies in World Folklore and Mythology, McFarland, 428 pp., p. 277. Kliauz, V., 2001, Video-Recording Ritual Incantations and Folk Cures (1), Institute of World Literature, Moscow, SEEFA Journal, VI (2), 28-34. Bane, T., 2016, Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore, McFarland, 428 pp., p. 241. Valodzina Tatyana, 2006, ‘Unchristened Flesh’: the Woman’s Breast and Breastfeeding in Traditional Slavic Culture, with Especial Reference to Belorussian, Forum for Antropology and Culture, No3, 168-192. Monaghan, P., 2014, Encyclopedia of Goddesses and Heroines, New World Library, 448 pp., p. 306. Min’ko, L. I., 1973, Magical Curing (Its Sources and Character and the Causes of its Prevalence, Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, 12:1, 3-33. (image source 1: Vasilyna Holod on Artstation) (image source 2: Alexandru Munteanu on Artstation)

[androgynemj]

Academic Works on Michael Jackson: A Reading List

Books

General:

Amisu, E. (2017). The Dangerous Philosophies of Michael Jackson : His Music, His Persona, and His Artistic Afterlife. Greenwood.

Cashmore, E. (2022). The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson. Bloomsbury.

Race, Racial Politics, and Blackness:

Pinder, S. O. (2021). Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity. State University of New York Press.

Manning, H. J. (2016). Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask. Routledge.

Anthropology:

Ostaszewska, A. (2021). Michael Jackson as a Mythological Hero. Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.

Articles/Essays

Gender and Queerness:

Izod, J. (1995). Androgyny and Stardom: Cultural Meanings of Michael Jackson. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 14(3), 63–74.

Vogel, J. (2018). Freaks in the Reagan Era: Androgyny and the American Ideal of Manhood. In James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era (pp. 49–68). University of Illinois Press.

Fast, S. (2010). Difference that Exceeded Understanding: Remembering Michael Jackson (1958–2009). Popular Music & Society, 33(2), 259–266.

Fast, S. (2012). Michael Jackson’s Queer Musical Belongings. Popular Music and Society, 35(2), 281–300.

Manning, H. J. (2016). The Burden of Ambiguity. In Michael Jackson and the Blackface Mask (pp. 137-165). Routledge.

Bruhm, S. (2009). Michael Jackson’s Queer Funk. In W. Hughes & A. Smith (Ed.), Queering the Gothic (pp. 158-176). Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Race, Racial Politics, and Blackness:

Amisu, E. (2017). Recontextualizing Michael Jackson’s Blackness. In The Dangerous Philosophies of Michael Jackson : His Music, His Persona, and His Artistic Afterlife (pp. 87-94). Greenwood.

Pinder, S. O. (2021). Michael Jackson and Racial Identification. In Michael Jackson and the Quandary of a Black Identity (pp. 63-89). State University of New York Press.

Pochmara, A. & Wierzchowska, J. (2017). Nobody Knows My Name: The Masquerade of Mourning in the Early 1980s Artistic Productions of Michael Jackson and Prince. Open Cultural Studies, 1(1), 628-645.

Wallace, M. (1989). Michael Jackson, Black Modernisms, and ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. Third Text, 3(7), 11–22.

Cultural Criticism:

Silberman, S. C. (2007). Presenting Michael Jackson™. Social Semiotics, 17(4), 417–440.

Juan, D. D. (1996). The Celebrity Freak: Michael Jackson's ‘Grotesque Glory’. In Thomson, R.G. (Ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (pp. 368-384). New York University Press.

Kooijman, J. (2013). We Are the World: America’s Dominance in Global Pop Culture. In Fabricating the Absolute Fake: America in Contemporary Pop Culture - Revised Edition (pp. 23–42). Amsterdam University Press.

Musicology:

Stegner-Petitjean, I. (2011). ‘The Voice in the Mirror’: Michael Jackson: From a Vocal Identity to its Double in Sound. Volume!, 8(2), 222-253.

Amisu, E. (2017). “Instrument of Nature”: The Voice of Michael Jackson. In The Dangerous Philosophies of Michael Jackson : His Music, His Persona, and His Artistic Afterlife (pp. 59-65). Greenwood.

Roberts, M. (2011). Michael Jackson’s Kingdom: Music, Race, and the Sound of the Mainstream. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 23(1), 19-39.

Amisu, E. (2017). Narrative in Michael Jackson’s ‘Bad’. In The Dangerous Philosophies of Michael Jackson : His Music, His Persona, and His Artistic Afterlife (pp. 31-39). Greenwood.

Performance Studies:

Hamera, J. (2012). The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and Dancing Work. PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 127(4), 751–765.

Media Studies:

Mercer, K. (1986). Monster Metaphors: Notes on Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’. Screen, 27(1), 26-43.

[incorrect-koh-posts]

I was today years old when I learned that there exists an Old French poem called Ordene de Chevalerie (c. 1220), in which Hugh of Tiberias, the eldest of Raymond's stepsons who was captured in a skirmish in 1179, teaches Salah ad-Din (!!!) how to be a knight fashion whore. I can't even.

Source: Sarah-Grace Heller, A Cultural History of Dress and Fashion in the Medieval Age (800-1450). Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, p. 103.

[specialagentartemis]

hi artemis! a friend I made during artfight who doesn't have a tumblr account asked me to pass a question on to you!

they're wondering if you know of any good resources for researching more modern history. This is what they were interested in specifically:

"i am trying to think of somewhere i could find information about when cars started appearing in songs and i am absolutely blanking on how i could find things about this

i know the library of congress has a LOT of stuff [and a really good system for filtering the search results] but… i don't even know what i would enter into the search bar sjdhgj. cars?? songs?? the spread of motor vehicles??"

i know this isn't your specific area of expertise but i thought you might still have some thoughts, or be able to point them to someone else who could help. also, they asked me to tell you that you're very cool and they like your posts :) (i concur)

Aww, thanks! <3

Hmm unfortunately, this is not really a topic I know anything about. This is a combination topic/time period I don't study, and a method (corpus analysis) I haven't really done.

But I can talk about how I would go about it, because starting research from scratch is a specialized skill and it is Daunting.

First, I go to Wikipedia on my topic--let's try the Wikipedia page for "Lyrics." The "Academic Study" subheading has no references--pity. Ignoring most of the article text, I scroll down to the references. Scanning them, they're not that helpful, but "Further Reading" suggests Moore, Allan F. (2003). Analyzing Popular Music. That looks potentially useful! File that away.

All right, now I go to academic databases. My own university's library database and JSTOR are my first options. Let's try some keywords--technology in popular music. Hm, no, that's mostly turning back books and articles about the technology used to make and disseminate popular music, not references to technology in the lyrics. Wrong tack. Try technology popular music lyrics. Little bit better--it turns back The Bloomsbury Handbook of Rock Music Research, that sounds promising. The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, sounds like it could be a useful reference too. Still, this turns back a wide variety of things, none of them about cars. All right, "technology" was too broad a concept. We want to know about cars. Try cars popular music lyrics and automobiles popular music lyrics.

Aha! Here's some good stuff! "Sentiment analysis of popular-music references to automobiles, 1950s to 2010s" (Wu et al. 2022); "Experience economy in the making: Hedonism, play and coolhunting in automotive song lyrics" (Askegaard 2010); Driving Identities: At the Intersection of Popular Music and Automotive Culture (McLeod 2020); "Communicating cars: television, popular music and everyday life" (Alam 2020, a chapter within the book Race, Taste, Class and Cars). Now this is what we're talking about!

And reducing my search terms to cars in popular music, I turned up a book called Popular Music and Automobiles. Jackpot!

Tbh research is trying various keyword strings, and then sifting through a dozen irrelevant result for every relevant one. Identifying relevant-looking books and articles from titles and abstracts is also a skill. JSTOR is good but arbitrarily limited; Google Scholar is pretty good; Library of Congress has records of nearly everything but is in my experience kind of overwhelming unless you know precisely what you're looking for. University library databases are the best, if you have access to any.

However, once you've hit on something specific, the LOC is really, really good in this way: you can go to the page for the book you found--here's "Popular Music and Automobiles"--and then look at the subject tags. Automobiles--Songs and music--History and criticism is its own subject tag! You can see what other books have that subject tag!

... looks like, including Popular Music and Automobiles, it's only four. (and one of those is also McCloud's "Driving Identities," lol.) But, hey. That's two more books about the topic you didn't know about before!

These are the tactics I use when I want to research something new! Hope some of this was helpful.

[painthropologist]

Calling all writers! Proofreading and copy editing services are back!

If you are a writer who is looking to improve and refine your work, I can help! I have been editing professionally since 2021, and have experience with editing fiction, nonfiction, and academic work. Whether it's an article, essay, novel, or even fanfic, my skills as an editor are varied. I am also a published academic author, and most recently contributed to the upcoming anthology, "Germanic and Slavic Paganisms: Security Threats and Resiliency" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).

I have previously worked with The Three Little Sisters publishing house (USA) and have also had the pleasure of editing freelance for numerous authors of all skill levels over the years.

If you are interested in joining forces and getting your writing in shape, DM for inquiries. Rates start at £14 per hour for students and £20 per hour for everyone else. If you have a big project like a novel, get in touch and I'd be happy to negotiate a quote for you. Looking forward to working with you!

[mybarrelgnome]

Blog Post 2: An Introduction to Poetry

Reflections on Meaning, Talent, and What It Means to Be a Poet

I took this photo in Florence during the climb to the top of the Duomo in June. To me, it tells three stories from three perspectives: the constrained view from inside the staircase, the midway image of the ionic column's rigidity, and the far-off vista of the city meeting the vast sky. Maybe a poem can be something like this picture, offering a glimpse of more than one viewpoint.

When I read a poem, I often look for meaning. When I write a poem, I always start with meaning. Reading Huey and Kaneko has given me a more nuanced understanding of meaning in poetry. First of all, poems can have many meanings which might even contradict one another. And while poems are open to many interpretations, they should always pursue bringing the poet’s concepts to the reader. To Huey and Kaneko, “A poem that can mean anything is a poem that says nothing” (Huey 9). Secondly, while meaning is central to writing poetry, it may not be the most important thing that a poem delivers. Instead of its meanings, it may be the experience of reading a poem, surfacing multiple thoughts and emotions, that resonates with readers. I’ll try to keep this in mind as I work this semester.

Another idea I’ll need to keep centered is that all good poets have demonstrated courage. They have developed their talent with words. And to develop talent, bravery is required. A new poet has to be willing to write and put their babies out into the world. This is something I struggle to do. It’s hard to be that vulnerable. However, without subjecting poems to daylight, without allowing them to be poked and prodded in uncomfortable ways, poetic growth is impossible.

Poets live in a world of contradictions. Huey and Kaneko point out that poets are loners who should seek out community, that their work means everything and nothing, they they can be themselves and also other people, and that they should be both citizens and activists. I feel the truth in their statement, “Civilians don’t think like writers, so they don’t always understand how the world is always offering up poems to be written. But you do” (23). I think most don’t people understand the gift and the burden of needing to write a poem. Some writers are uncomfortable with poetry. One published fiction writer told me, “poets are weird.” Maybe so, but more so than other writers, they are adept at finding and using the beautiful music of words to create worlds that hit us in the solar plexus, grab our imaginations, rip us from complacency, inspire us, and change us. Usually with a much lower word count.

Huey, Amorak, and W. Todd Kaneko. Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. Bloomsbury Academic, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018.

[gorimbaudandgojohnnygo]

The Raincoats’ protagonists, who are also its authors, are young female mavericks alone in the city. They wander many miles of concrete streets and still more in the solitude of their minds. The scrappiness of life rumbles and tumbles along. They gaze at tube platforms and dream. With its defiantly shy temperament, The Raincoats is introversion as punk—a celebration of the female interior life. This is why its 34 minutes of clattering feminist outsider art have become spiritual music for so many generations of women, and medicine for the quietest, cast-out kids, odes to outsiders among outsiders in perpetuity. It is an ultimate loner album.

Released at the magic hour of the anti-genre we now call post-punk, The Raincoats captures the band with a fleeting but crucial all-female lineup. They lasted in this formation for only eight months, playing 28 shows together by the summer of ’79’s end. The Raincoats is the intuitive music of four people who were totally honest in reflecting the conditions of their lives as women. Four distinct and disparate personalities are harmonizing. In drawing on the various worlds from which they came—England, Spain, and Portugal among them—the Raincoats shaped their own.

In the late ’70s, many punks masqueraded as untrained musicians. But the original Raincoats actually did find their way in public, embracing the mistakes as part of their idiosyncratic art. (The band would rather call them “deviations” from the norm than “mistakes.”) The Raincoats audibly comes from bodies and rooms, each song like a performed installation. On this record you can hear punk in practice, oddity in motion, women in the act of becoming.

“We always felt like we played a bit beyond our ability,” Gina says. “We always tried to play things that were a bit harder than we were actually competent to do.” Or as she put it to New York Rocker in 1980: “Everyone is attempting to play in a way that will stretch us, rather than just strumming along.” The Raincoats found poetry in the vulnerability of this reach. “Basically,” violinist Vicki Aspinall said then, “we try to do something which possibly we can’t achieve … that’s why we may sound a bit shaky.”

On The Raincoats, minimal sounds are intricately woven together, like a piece of knitting. The album was recorded live with copious open space and few overdubs, and this space adds a crucial dimension: you can hear the instruments entwining, and this shines a light on their process. Like jazz, The Raincoats was collectively composed through improv and intuition. As in dub, parts slide in and out of the raw mix. The Raincoats thus contains an ensemble texture. Each instrument is a character, singing. The melodic bass, a trickster; the scratchy violin, a dramatist. The serrated noise guitar is lawless. The wandering drums dance.

In The Raincoats’ songs, imperfections become virtues—antidotes to the world’s pervasive perfectionism, which can be so lethal. The Raincoats’ ad hoc girl-gang chants become incantations. Its screeched strings and brittle chords become sacred. Together, this “scratchy-collapsy” sound suggests a disarming truth. A flubbed note is not just a flubbed note. Rather, it is a reflection of reality—because life requires mistakes. Punk albums, unpretty and unpolished as they are, prove this with their joyful noise—that in order to really live, sometimes you have to be wrong.

—Jenn Pelly, from The Raincoats' The Raincoats (33 1/3) (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)

[thegirlwiththelantern]

More 2024 Nonfiction Books

I wasn’t certain that there would be enough memoir and biographies of interest to separate them out from the wider categories of nonfiction. An error was made with Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang. It was included in 2024 literary fiction but it is nonfiction. Mondo Tokyo: Dispatches from a Secret Japan by Patrick Macias | 23 / 01 / 24 (US/CAN) – Sutherland House…

[scotianostra]

On July 6th the Scottish author Kenneth Grahame died.

Remembered for his children’s classic, The Wind in the Willows, Grahame was born in Edinburgh, on March 8th 1859. He had three siblings: Helen, Willie, and Roland. After the family moved from their Castle Street home to Inverary,, where his father was appointed Sherriff substitute, his mother Bessie contracted scarlet fever and died soon after. he took to drink and soon proved inadequate to raise his growing children.

His father fought to overcome his drinking problem and regain custody of his children. After he had a significant relapse, however, the children returned to their grandmother’s care in Oxford, while their father moved to France. The Grahame children were not in contact with their father after that time.

These years left a positive impact on young Kenneth--the stately country home and its gardens and orchards proved to be fertile ground for his young mind. They attended church in nearby Cranbourne where Kenneth's favourite uncle, David Ingles, acted as curate. Kenneth tended to be shy and he had a great imagination and love of nature. Boating on the nearby River Thames and jaunts in the surrounding fields and woods became some of his favourite past times and proved to be excellent fodder for his future creativity as a writer.

Excelling in both academic and sports pursuits like Rugby whilst attending St. Edward's School in Oxford (from 1868 to 1875), Grahame did not continue on with his dream of a university education due to the financial constraints of his Uncle John Grahame, who had been supporting him. In 1879 Grahame obtained a position with the Bank of England in London on Threadneedle Street as a clerk. He found the routine dull and boring and so, from his rooms on Bloomsbury Street, turned his pen to fiction and non-, submitting articles and stories to such publications as St. Edward's Chronicle, the National Observer [previously The Scots Observer], St. James Gazette and The Yellow Book. His first published story was titled By A Northern Furrow in 1888 and his most famous short story is, probably The Reluctant Dragon.

Grahame's works were printed in collections titled Pagan Papers (essays, 1893), his stories of orphaned children in The Golden Age and it's sequel Dream Days To critical acclaim. There is a ten-year gap between Dream Days and the publication of Grahame's triumph, The Wind in the Willows.

During that decade, Grahame became a father. The wayward, headstrong nature he saw in his little son Alastair he transformed into the swaggering Mr. Toad, one of its four principal characters. The character in the book known as Ratty was inspired by his good friend, and writer, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. Grahame mentions this in a signed copy he gave to Quiller-Couch's daughter, Foy Felicia.

Despite its success, he never attempted a sequel. The book is still widely enjoyed by adults and children. It has given rise to many film and television adaptations, while Toad remains one of the most celebrated and beloved characters in children's literature. In 1929, A. A. Milne wrote the play Toad of Toad Hall, which is based on part of The Wind in the Willows, which won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. In the 1990s, William Horwood produced a series of sequels.

Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire, in 1932. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope, also a successful author, wrote him an epitaph: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the river on the 6th of July, 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time."

He was buried side by side with his son in the same grave.

The blue plaque and house in the pics are his birthplace at Castle Street Edinburgh.

[therumpus]

The Myriad Worlds We Each Contain: Mini-Interview with Maya Jewell Zeller

By Janet Rodriguez

Maya Jewell Zeller writes poems that glitter, like crystal snowflakes, and land with such beautiful grace you might not expect them to be the swift agents of change they are. Zeller’s most recent collection of poetry, Out Takes / Glove Box (New American Press, 2023), selected by Eduardo Corral for the New American Poetry Prize, is a gift to her readers. Structured in five distinct sections, each containing thematically focused poems, Zeller paints image after image of beauty and starkness, life and death, science and history, motherhood and loneliness. Diane Seuss describes the book as enchanting, where “the vehicles that carry us into and out of imaginative spaces abound.” Zeller’s newest project, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), is the equally impressive flip side of a proverbial coin. Complementing the creative surface, Advanced Poetry is a college textbook with a diverse canon. Upon closer examination, the anthology is an ice-cutter of college texts, where readers and educators alike are challenged “to push their writing and reading into new understandings and innovations, across varied and inclusive global aesthetics.”

In May of 2024, Zeller was featured at the Lion Rock Visiting Writers Series at Central Washington University, which was broadcast for those of us who couldn’t be there in person. She had recently returned from a month-long residency at the University of Oxford, where she worked on current and future creative projects, a place where she “was also able to rest and gather up energy for the next stretch of work.” 

Through a series of emails, Zeller and I discussed what structure means for a writer, how creativity is sparked through inspiration, and why landscapes inspire her poetry and conversation.

***

The Rumpus: I love how Out Takes / Glove Box takes the reader on a  multifaceted journey through the imagination. When someone asks you what your book is, what do you say? 

Maya Jewell Zeller: I think of it as maybe an avant-garde, indie, documentary film, or a museum with several curated and related exhibits. I really want readers to feel invited and welcome in it, even as the protagonist is very specifically a version or many versions of myself—my girl-self, my woman-self, my mother-self, middle-aged, in the academy, in late capitalism, feeling the extreme othering and splitting effects of the economic over selfhood, as she wills magic back into her life, and defends her rights to her reproductive system and her mind’s way of mapping image and narrative. I’m so grateful to Diane Seuss for her insightful and generous blurb, as well as to Eduardo Corral, Laura Read, and Carol Guess for how they all saw parts of the book that others didn’t—that kind of close reading and validation of what the book is doing as an art space.  It felt like they understood its very viscera.

Rumpus: The five sections of the book contain complementary poems that are also very different from one another. Why did you structure the book this way?

Zeller: I think of the book’s shape as a Wunderkammer or Commonplace book on a self, fractured by contemporary pressures and mended by everyday joys. I often quote Kazim Ali on his own writing of Bright Felon, a hybrid text which he says, “wrote itself out of requirement.” I feel this way about my own organic forms, both in terms of poetic structure and in terms of a collection’s arc. In a lineage with Denise Levertov and Hopkins, I do believe art rises up and out of us and we need to listen to its need for unconventional orders, disjunctive music, and surreal images. EJ Ianelli asked me about this—which he called “difficult poetry”— in a Spokane Public Radio interview back in fall, and I told him that rendering a difficult world into art often requires us to take shapes that fragment narrative. 

In the case of Out Takes, the book’s five sections feel to me like a cabinet of curiosities or a curated set of museum rooms. It begins with a frontis poem, “Field Girl Come Home,” which is both an invocation/invitation from the mud fields, and a documentation of setting in which we might imagine the book takes place. Section 1 follows that [with] a set of poems that are “documentary” and then a series of “out takes” from that documentary—developing the conceit of film, through deep image poetics. Section 2 are all autobiographical poems of the speaker’s self, past and present. Section 3 practices embodied poetics by taking the voice of a persona: a woman who has been institutionalized because she believes she used to be a mermaid. This mythic, lyric imagining, I hope, creates a space in which we ultimately believe women—who are rarely believed, in our imaginary and real worlds—and also follow these women’s emotional truths to deeper understandings. Section 4 is a set of spells, which reiterate the need for magic as a healing space. It also suggests that revision and re-seeing allow us to fully inhabit. This section repeats two versions of one poem—the way the book keeps insisting that more than one way of existing deserves equal space. Finally, Section 5 returns us to a series of outtakes: surreal dreamscapes that pull from the book’s imagery and narrative suggestions and deepen those threads. We are invited to imagine, again, the whole book as a film with a cutting room floor ready for more collage-making.

I hope the book also serves as an invitation to create form, imagine one’s own art and art life as complicated and worth sharing in whatever shape it needs to take, to invent models, to move outside normative expectations for both poetic and book structures and allow the material itself–and our deep imaginative spaces and diverse reading canons—to guide us. 

Rumpus: The language in your poetry is thoughtful, but dangerous. Precise, but deadly. I feel like my skin is being detached from me as I'm reading. What is it about language that can do this? 

Zeller: Detached skin! I love this, and I’m overjoyed that you had that visceral experience. It recalls the well-known moment in Emily Dickinson’s letter to T. W. Higginson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way.”  I love that—a feeling so many poets have written about since, and I do not pretend to really understand it—poets, who make art with words, sometimes translate an experience or feeling so successfully that someone else is able to also feel it, across time and space and in another body. That is what I always aspire to, and I’m honored you felt it. 

Rumpus: You began your reading with, “I am most comfortable when I am dissecting a dead cow..." I know I might be misquoting you, but you ended this part by saying, "I want to see the worlds inside of this..." How many worlds does a person possess deep inside?

Zeller: I was reading from my essay, “Scavenger Panorama,” originally published in Willow Springs Magazine and then listed as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. I like to think that Vivian Gornick and anyone else who read it understood the Joan Didion feeling of being on nodding terms with our past (and present?) selves, the myriad worlds we each contain. I hope that it gives other writers—particularly those who don’t always feel themselves represented in literature—permission to share those worlds, to create space to expand them. 

Janet: How do your inherited landscapes influence your art?

Maya: My landscapes are both coastal and inland, in the Pacific Northwest, as well as probably some percent Iowan (my mother is from Des Moines). I hope that my connection to and love for these various watersheds and home-spaces comes through in the poetry—that it may be riparian and delta and converge and sheetwash and rivulet and soaking wet and barn-roof-beat, as well as ferned and mossed and also logged and fished and mud-rutted and salvaged and repurposed and gritty and glittery and full of tall grasses and flung seeds, hay and scrape and grass-cut legs and rusted gears. I hope it is as beautiful and complicated as the people and plants and animals in these places and the people who pass through, too. I think of other contemporary poets who write of rural spaces with both gentleness and unflinching questioning—poets like M.L. Smoker and Joe Wilkins and Vievee Francis and Kathryn Smith and Canese Jarboe, and feel an unwavering depth of gratitude that I get to be alive and working with language during this time, when the pastoral and antipastoral and necropastoral coexist in our conversations about life and love, on and off the page.

Rumpus: You collaborated with Kathryn Nuernberger to compile Advanced Poetry: A Writer's Guide and Anthology. It’s an ideal textbook: the most inclusive, representative sampling of modern and classical poetry. Is this the reason you traveled to England? What is your dream for this book?

Zeller: It’s always an honor to collaborate with Kate, and we were really thrilled to be able to bring more light to the poets in its pages and moreover, to encourage every person writing to curate their own canons. That, really, is our dream for this book—that it gives permission to poets at all stages of their careers to dream their own ways forward in a web of rhizomatic literary and other ancestries. 

Traveling to England was interesting at this stage in my own academic, creative, and personal lives because while I have genealogical roots in Scotland, and I feel at home in the green and gardens (and mud), my own upbringing was in rust and ravine and logging communities—people of physical labor, and not much “of the academy.” I always feel like an imposter in higher-ed, so I felt this even more at a prestigious school like Oxford, where you wear a formal academic gown to a swearing-in—and then to a dinner. These are beautiful events held in ancient halls and heralded sometimes by a horn and chalices of wine and gavels and by people who represent their fields with joy and depth and sometimes a public bravado and others a real nerdy shyness I find very charming. I want the poetry textbook to feel like all of that for its readers—but the swearing-in to poetry can be a ceremony the poet invents themselves, and the attire anything that feels holy to their own culture and creature, and honoring of their deep personal poetics, from any background or way of being. 

[tastesoftamriel]

February update!

Hi all, hoping you're doing well! Just a little monthly update from my end.

I'm into the second week of my PhD and I'm feeling slightly nervous, overwhelmed, and imposter syndrome-y. It's really intimidating being around all these smart people and having to make something up when they start talking about ontology and ethnographic methodological concerns. It's all very exciting but yeah, adjusting to all this is gonna take a while.

In terms of Tastes of Tamriel, I'm going to do my best to put out a worldbuilding or menu post at least once a month. I can't make promises, but I also can't leave you all without fresh content (that would be so rude of me). All of this obviously has to work around my currently packed schedule, but we'll get there!

In the meantime, enjoy the queue. Seeing my writing bound in tomes that I can hold in my hot little hands really made what I've achieved so far real. Speaking of, the book on Security and Paganisms that I contributed to last year (you may remember the transhumanism study I did) will be published this month by Bloomsbury Academic!

That's about it for now. Stay safe, eat well, be kind. ~Tal