I am aware that this piece will probably offend some people. But I am not willing to dally around. I am thinking about offense, and candidness, and truthfulness, as I type it all out myself; I refuse to couch these opinions in someone else’s words. Everything you are reading here was written by me. Everything you will ever read on this website was written by me, unless it is specifically quoted and attributed to another human author.

I feel very strongly about (AGAINST) the use of generative AI, and I realized recently that I hadn't ever laid out in plain English why I am opposed to it. There are a lot of very important smaller reasons, and one big one.

(Before I begin it's important to me that you understand that when I say “genAI,” I am talking about programs and apps such as ChatGPT, Claude, OpenAI, Midjourney, Grok, and whatever nonsense the Best Buy customer service website is using now instead of a human representative. I am not talking about the use of artificial intelligence in the computer and medical sciences, about which I do not know enough to speak definitively. I am talking about the use of AI in the humanities and for personal daily enterainment: to create images and videos, to write social media posts, to “create” in a manner that is meant to mimic a human. Do not come for me in the replies with some “oH sO yOu dOn’T tHiNk onCOloGIstS sHoUlD uSE rAdiOLoGy pRoGrAmS thAt cAn sPoT cAnCeR” comment.)

The Environment

Put simply, genAI is burning up our usable drinking water. And it’s doing so in a way that does not render the water recyclable or reusable in any other capacity— it is literally eradicating fresh water. Your electric bill will be higher soon, if it’s not already, and the emissions caused by massive AI data centers are producing thousands of tons of carbon dioxide, which as I’m sure you know is not great for our climate.

“Of all of the concerns with AI, one of the most commonly cited is its impact on the environment. In fact, Americans are more likely to name AI as an environmental concern than other prominent environmentally harmful activities, including meat production, air travel, and cryptocurrency mining. One aspect that’s gotten a lot of attention in particular is the rapid growth of data centers, which are warehouses of computers used to train AI models. These centers are cropping up all over the country and the world, consuming massive amounts of energy, increasing local electricity rates, and even creeping into land set aside for our national parks.”

—Andrea Jones-Rody in What AI Costs the Environment

“But lots of other things use water! Look at farming! Farming uses TONS of water, way more than AI!” people will say. Yes, and you know what farming gives us? Food. Textiles. Things we NEED, not a picture of Marco Rubio dressed as a combo Ayatollah/President of Venezuela. The ROI on AI images is not remotely comparable to the growth of soybeans. Get a grip.

Theft from Artists

Every image that’s created by genAI comes from a massive amount of digital artwork that was fed into a water-guzzling data center by a “data trainer” who definitely did not have permission from the artists in question to use their creative work as a model. A computer cannot have an original thought. A computer cannot truly generate an image; it can only predict a sequence based on thousands of millions of previous sequences that have been (illegally) shown to it. Artists have the legal right to the reproduction of their work, and no matter how many of Sam Altman’s minions try to put the “tech bro” into “technically,” (is this anything? hmmm no) it is unethical to take someone’s creative work without their consent and feed it into a Plagiarism Machine so that the Plagiarism Machine can copy it so you can have a “Studio Ghibli style” profile picture on Facebook. No one should need to have that spelled out for them, and yet.

This goes for both visual art and written work, by the way. The Atlantic published an exposé in 2023 about the thousands of ebooks which had been pirated and used to train Meta’s AI software. Anything you write on the internet, technically, can be scraped by a bot and fed into a Language Learning Model (LLM) so that your style can be mimicked. It’s not cute, it’s terrifying. (And yes, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” format in clickbait social media posts is beginning to drive me mad. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.)

There’s a false and pervasive idea that if you put something on the internet, it becomes free for anyone to use for whatever purpose. There’s also a false and pervasive idea that the moon landing was faked and that the 2020 election was stolen. The fact that people believe these things doesn’t make them true.

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Deepfake Porn

Listen, I don’t want to talk about this any more than you want to read about it, but let’s just say, if someone with nefarious intent uploads a photo of you to Grok, Elon Musk’s gross AI feature on X, they can create an image of you in a nude and highly compromising position in seconds. It does not matter if you didn’t give consent. It does not matter if you’re not an adult.

This is one of many reasons why I don’t share identifiable photos of my children on the internet. I’d urge you to consider locking down your digital circles, too.

Deception

When you “write” something with the help of AI, even if it didn’t draw anything from a proprietary source, it’s still not your writing. And if you pass it off as your own, that may be legally legitimate but the ethics are dubious at best.

“Oh, I never claimed I wrote this,” people will say, smugly, as their LinkedIn and Threads accounts churn out an endless scroll of bland, mindless drabble. Yeah, okay. Maybe not in so many words. But you hit “post” with your name attached and no citations. High school students know what that means. Pull yourself together.

Mistakes Galore

As long as you have a webpage with enough traffic to appear high in Google search ranking, you can say anything you want and it might get included in the “AI search results” Google roundup. People have tested this theory with silly stuff like a recipe for adding glue to pizza cheese, but it’s far from funny.

Suicide encouragement, bald-faced lies about easily-verifiable facts, and the germinating of psychosis from chatbot significant others (I wish I were making this up) round out the list. I could go on and on and on. I won’t.

It Looks Stupid

Your soulless, shiny, cookie-cutter graphics are ugly. Use the free version of Canva and a single ounce of chutzpah. I believe in you.

All of these facts, taken separately, are bad. Quite frankly, each one of them alone ought to be enough to discourage you from using genAI. And yet even if all of these things were not true— if someone invented a version of genAI that was completely ethically trained, never violated anyone’s privacy, was completely carbon neutral and looked flawless— I would still be against it. I would still urge you not to use it.

Because it is atrophying your brain into a colander of limp spaghetti.

Your imagination is a muscle that must be exercised. If you, like me, have trouble returning to your childhood fancies with the same abandon, it’s likely because you, like me, haven’t done it very much in the last decade or two. If you stop thinking about magical lands, it becomes much harder to return to them. And if you stop drawing pictures and writing words and coming up with your own thoughts, is it any wonder if your whole theory of being becomes more difficult to articulate?

You cannot just scroll, you cannot just watch, you cannot just ask Chat to summarize the text for you. “We’ve built machines that promise to relieve the burden of painting, writing fan-fiction and even playing video games so that we have more time to look at our phones,” says Boze Herrington. Ewww??? EWWW. What are we doing????

Creating art is not a burden. You do not have to make art! You truly do not. I mean, yes, on a certain level we must all tell ourselves stories in order to live (thanks Joan Didion) and even if you live without an inner monologue I do not think you can thrive without at least an inner narrative, but you do not have to make pictures or stories for other people to consume, and if you choose to do so, you have the responsibility to make something good and true and beautiful. I can’t find the exact quote now, but recently Karen Swallow Prior wrote something about the abundance of AI-generated slop infesting the book industry— and how it doesn’t have to be this way! You are not required to be a writer. If you can’t write, and you can’t even conceive of putting words together without the help of a program, then don’t.

And what of the non-creative writing, the stuff no one could call artistic yet we all need to do every day? The emails, the product listings, the notes to our families and friends? Shunting that off to genAI is not only lazy and disrespectful to the people with whom we are communicating, but it’s strangling your ability to do this work yourself.

“ChatGPT is making you boring,” argues (who also wrote the brilliant Things You Can Ask ChatGPT to Write For You). I would add that it is also making you dumb. You do not need GoogleAI to summarize an email for you. You do not need ChatGPT to tell you to call the doctor for a weird rash that won’t go away. You do not need a chatbot to write a book report or fill out a personality test or answer the damn essay questions for an ENGLISH LITERATURE CLASS where you are supposed to be STRETCHING your damn BRAIN! (yes! This is a real-world example! I sit behind you, [Redacted]! I can see your screen!)

Sorry for swearing, I have a lot of feelings, unlike a COMPUTER.

AI is not capable of saying “I don’t know.” Did you know that? If you ask a chatbot something and it can’t answer the question, it will make something up, and if you call it out it will make up something else, and maybe it will reformat its search function but it will not say “I don’t know.” Because if you can’t ever truly know anything, you can’t know what you don’t know, you know?

There’s a lot of discourse out there right now about the future of writing and books, and I want to reassure you that when it comes to poetry, we’re all good. AI literally can’t write a poem. Anyone is welcome to try. It’s not real. It's just dead words. A computer system can’t feel lust, endure jealousy, taste her grandmother’s chocolate cake, watch a child be born, trip walking across a stage in front of 500 people, have a first kiss, or hold their loved ones hands while they cross to the other side. Poetry is made strictly of human experience. There’s no wiggle room. What a gift.”

—Kate Baer in Dear Reader

“Very few writers know what they’re doing until they’ve done it,” Anne Lamott writes in her famous essay on shitty first drafts. (That one was Anne, not me. I, like Emily Starr, am “only kwoting.”) You cannot write anything good without human experience—both the experience of living, and the experience of actually writing.

I did a rough estimate of how many words I’ve written in the course of a lifetime. When you take together days of relaxation and not writing anything, mixed with spiral notebooks in childhood and NaNoWriMo as a teen and the hundreds of thousands of emails I’ve sent to friends and for work, the dozens upon dozens of blog posts and Twitter threads and and and and and—

—if you assume something like 200 words a day for 26 years (since I learned to write) it’s nearly two million. Probably more. I don’t know. I’m not a computing machine.

Every time I write anything, I think about how much farther I have to go, but I’m also, sometimes, delighted and awed by how far I’ve come. That isn’t vanity, it’s just frankness. The way I used to write as a dramatic seven-year-old would-be novelist is very very different from the way I write now, as it should be, and it happened because I have a functioning brain that matured and was worked, hard, and now it can do things it couldn’t do even two or three years ago.

“My fingers,” says Elizabeth Bennet to Mr. Darcy, “do not move over this [piano] in the masterly manner which I see so many women’s do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault— because I would not take the trouble of practising.”

Darcy smiles then (take that, Colin Firth!) and says, “You are perfectly right. You have employed your time much better. No one admitted to the privilege of hearing you, can think any thing wanting.”

And you know what? He’s wrong! He’s blinded by love! That’s the whole point. Elizabeth is not a good pianist, because she doesn’t practice. But Darcy doesn’t care, because he’s smitten. And if this little analogy were translated to modern day, of course, it would not hold up, because there is no way in the world that Elizabeth would ask ChatGPT to play the piano for her. None of Austen’s heroines would, except maybe Catherine Morland, and she would learn from her mistakes, as she is meant to do.

Are we, the stubborn Luddites who refuse to ask ChatGPT, being “left behind” by tech?

If we are, I’m fine right here. I’m happy with my books and the brain I have to read them. I’m happy with my refusal to get with the times. “I think we will look back with regret if we don’t act now to temper AI, if we don’t change our posture toward AI to one of prudent skepticism,” writes O. Alan Noble.

“I don’t think the problem is that writers don’t accept that AI is here to stay.

That argument is a straw man.

I think the problem is that people using AI don’t understand that to some people, the craft of writing is what matters. The slow and painstaking development of skill.

I am one of those people.

And I don’t want to see the art and craft of writing become the sacrificial lamb on the altar of productivity or profit. So I do the only thing I can. I write about it.”

— in A Blunt Conversation about AI Writing

(Linda has written a lot about AI. It’s worth reading.)

I am going to keep writing and I am going to keep refusing to plug prompts into a BOT, for any purpose, and I hope you will too.

And I will drink some water while I do it, while it lasts.

“I am intimately acquainted with the horror and suffering guns inflict, and even more intimately acquainted with the goodness of God. Nothing in me knows how to make these two things fit together.”1

On this day thirteen years ago, a man holding a rifle walked into a school and shot my dear friend . She was at her desk job at New River Community College, completing a normal day of work and planning for her upcoming wedding. Then a man with a sick vendetta attacked her and several other people with a gun.

It seems very trite to say that Taylor is one of the strongest people I know. We have been friendly acquaintances for several years, and became close (thanks to the internet) over the last twelve months. I have seen up close how brave, tenacious, vulnerable and good Taylor is— throughout long-lasting aftershocks of her shooting experience, through sleepless parenting nights, difficult personal relationships, more medical crises and a book about peace that earned her death threats. With every hit, she has remained kind.

In 2021, Taylor published her first book, When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough: A Shooting Survivor’s Journey into the Realities of Gun Violence. I “met” her online shortly after the book was released. For far too long, I resisted reading it, though I liked Taylor as a person and wanted to be her friend. I’m not sure why I didn’t just order her book. Maybe I was hesitant about reading something that would heighten my own propensity for anxiety. Maybe I didn’t want my worldview challenged further. Maybe I was afraid of what I’d find.

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I grew up in a home without guns. I married into a home with guns. When pressed, I would say I’m pro-reasonability—that I think the second amendment is important, but that gun violence takes far too many lives and needs more parameters. But I could be easily swayed by either side— the strict constitutionalists who argue against any infringement of the Bill of Rights, or the plowshare-crafting pacifists who want to melt everything down and start anew.

I wish I could say my mind was changed about guns without needing a personal anecdote. In a way, I suppose it was. The ground was tilled years beforehand with a slow and steady breaking down of preconceptions and assumptions. I had been deconstructing some of my most rigid religious and political beliefs since my early twenties—marrying a Responsible Gun Owner didn’t change any of that, it just added nuance and, sometimes, disagreement.

Reading Taylor’s book was, to be trite again, eye-opening. Eye-watering, too. I cried for my friend so many times in the first few hard chapters. Thirteen years ago, Taylor’s left hand was permanently disabled by a bullet, shrapnel shards embedded in her body when she hid from her attacker in a utility closet. Yesterday, we texted about potty training woes. Taylor survived, and I have the privilege of knowing her and hearing her story. But so many people didn’t. So many people have no story to tell, because their platform was shot from under their feet. Last Christmas I stood waiting with a woman in a local supermarket and, with one tendril of conversation that led to another, she told me her only son had been killed in an act of gun violence that summer. There are no words to say to something like that. If there were, I wish I could have thought of them.

One of the aspects of memoir that resonates most deeply for me is when the personal becomes universal. When Thoughts and Prayers Aren’t Enough starts out with Taylor’s own testimony of survival, recuperation, setbacks, disappointments, and coming to grips with her altered life and the fact that her tragedy was—is—one of many before and many to come. The personal narrative shifts into research-driven fact reporting in the second half of the book, tracing the history of gun culture in America and the (failed) attempts to legislate it into something akin to harm reduction. Taylor’s writing is straightforward, sincere, and life-affirming. She is not trying to take your freedom. She is writing about what you can do to help ensure it for others.

I learned a lot (another trite-ism) from Taylor’s book. Some of it I already knew. Some of it was deeper and harder to read than I had anticipated. But all of it left me grieving the way we have failed so, so many people. The tools for peace—for limiting accidents, investing in community, pausing tragedies before they can start—are in our hands.

My hands both function, physically, at 100%. I am luckier than my friend. But with hers, including the one that was harmed forever— what a wildly tragic and yet hope-brimming thought that practical fact is— she wrote a beautiful, heartfelt letter to the world and to the church. Don’t let it be in vain.

Is it any wonder, really, that the home of 
the brave bombed a school full of children? 
Are you actually surprised? You say you are 
shocked and horrified, your thoughts and 
prayers ribbon out in a hasty spill, how on
earth could we have done such a thing. Be
serious. When you stop and think of those
little girls, tiny and gangly and just beginning
to learn, are they really any different from
the children on your street? They were 
just born into a different family, a foreign
country, not like good American children,
lucky to be in the land of the free,
who can go to school and be anything 
they want to be until a twisted terrible person
comes into their classroom
and shoots them.

Rest your eyebrows. Relax your mouth. You
are not blindsided by this news. You have heard
it, over and again, in headlines that break
families and bullets that spell might and right.
The missiles of freedom will sprinkle childish
fury over a nation that, they say, confines girls 
in a box of sexist oppression, nothing like
the boxes we have here, for the remains
which we, at least, are able to find. 

You can call your representatives and urge them to act against genocide at 5calls.org.

Last month I dreamt I went to Idaho again.

It was a reasonable sort of dream. Once upon a time, my best friend lived there, and once a year or so we would save up all our money and visit each other, from one landlocked side of the US to the other. I’d fly in from Pennsylvania when it was my turn and we’d stay up until an unholy hour, giggling and whispering and writing Northanger-Abbey inspired fanfiction, of sorts.

Last month, I dreamt one of those visits was happening again. The dream was snarled and patchy—one of those where everything is sort of going wrong, but not in a way that awakens you, heart pounding a cold sweat. I won’t bore you with all the details, but in the dream I was nineteen again, just learning to drive, and my best friend was writing in her journal in the back seat of the car. We were arguing over something stupid. It makes sense that I would dream this, not because we argue over stupid things very often these days, but because in real life I was actually visiting her. Except now she lives in New England, and we are older and better at driving, and we are both mothers now, or about to be.

I had flown north to Boston on a Friday, and my best friend picked me up at the airport there, and we went to the Houghton Library and saw and handled (!) four letters of Jane Austen’s (!!!!) and visited Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House. We went to her baby shower (my friend’s, not Alcott’s) and to church together, and I was supposed to fly home the coming Monday, but a nor’easter moved in and I was stranded at my friend’s apartment for two more days.

There are worse things I could do.

I had my books, my notebooks, tea to drink and internet to access. It was a marvelous little respite from everyday life, not unlike the break I took in 2024 when we went to the beach. I had plenty of time to read and research for a big end-of-term project, and one of the books on which I took notes was Austen Years by Rachel Cohen.

One of my sisters gave me this book for Christmas a few years back, and I am now on my second slow luxurious re-read. The notes I wrote after that beach trip (about the same book!) are now forming themselves into the thesis of a paper1, and the concept of Jane-Austen-At-Rest is constantly on my mind. Circling back to the last time I wrote about Austen Years, in the summer of 2024, I am reminded of the constant pull on my time and the distractions that keep me from reading. Here is what I wrote then:

Rachel Cohen, who wrote her memoir while in the midst of parenting two small children (and grieving the loss of her father!), seems to understand this very well. “We are subject to constant interruption,” she writes of parents and other careworn adults, “and we must nevertheless exert ourselves to make sense and to become coherent. One lives with one eye on the laundry and one eye on the reckoning.”

I love this way of describing the tugging, shifting balance between the mundane and the intellectual, the determined reading of books in the tired few moments before sleep and the way we are all minutely and constantly building our lives and our sense of self out of days made up of little pockets of thought. A liturgy of the ordinary, if you will.

In my uninterrupted time to read and to sip tea and to pet an astonishingly fluffy cat, I had a lot of time to think. One eye on the book and one on the calendar, I suppose. Luxurious leisure time for reading isn’t typical for me. In normal life, I am slipping it in where I can, choosing to put down a device and pick up a novel, listening to a book instead of music while I drive, tapping my e-reader as I lie beside my two-year-old who can only fall asleep when I am there. I am reading in the margins of my life, making notes and circling and underlining passages to return to, building my reality out of the words I make time to absorb. Reading is more than just a part of me—it is shaping who I want to become.

All that to say I’m re-naming my Substack, lol.

It’s been Something Funny, Something True for four years now. (I wrote about the choosing of the original title here.2) This this title, though quippy, is a little too vague for my current purposes. I was hesitant to make my name too book-centric, for fear people would expect to read only book reviews (a genre in which I’m not too skilled). But that snow day of uninterrupted reading (and thinking!) time gave me a fresh perspective: everything I write comes back to books in the end anyway. Whether that’s Austen, or the Bible, or a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook as we drive down South, books are in and around and of the margins of my life and work.

Also, I like to write notes for myself about what the book I’m reading is making me think and feel. Here on Substack and in the book itself. In the margins, get it?

So Something Funny, Something True is going to become Reading in the Margins, and by next week my links and headers and such should all be updated to reflect this fact. I hope you like the new name. Whether you do or not is actually of very little consequence, of course, since I maintain absolute tyranny over the publication dashboard, but I do want the title to reflect what you’re getting, and I hope you like that too (for real).

Actually, I could have called it Parenthetical Statements, because I cannot, for the life of me, stop inserting those. It’s a malady at this point.

Happy reading, whether as your full-time job (lucky duck!) or in the parenthetical margins you make for it,

Amy

Almost six years ago, I wrote a dream-castle sort of letter to my yet-unborn oldest child. I’m republishing it here today because I have a follow-up piece brewing, and I’d like to be able to link back to this one, so I’m giving it a home here on Substack. (Originally, it lived in a now-defunct publication about love and relationships on Medium.)

There’s a lot of hokum floating in and out of solid parenting advice. Some of it is harmless (let your unborn baby listen to classical music to make him smarter!) and some of it is a little horrifying (put an amber bead necklace on your child to magically stop teething pain, never mind the fact that it’s a strangulation and choking hazard!). Some of it is based in science, but then taken to the nth degree: the concept of reading to your baby in the womb, for instance.

Sure, babies in utero can hear sounds starting around the 16th week of development. And yes, obstetricians and pediatricians agree that hearing their parents’ voices can be soothing. A newborn can recognize the voice of its mother within moments of entering the outside world.

But at what stage in fetal development does auditory reading comprehension enter the picture? If I’m reading Fox in Socks aloud to my unborn baby when I’m 30 weeks pregnant, is he actually giggling at Dr. Seuss’ wordplay through the amniotic fluid?

Probably not.

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Yet, despite the fact that my son is not due to be born until September1, I find myself wanting to jump start the reading process anyway. Children whose parents read to them on a regular basis tend to be better adjusted and have a higher mental retention capacity once they start school, after all. (That one is from the American Academy of Pediatrics, so I’ll take it.) The “million word gap” between kindergarten-aged children who are exposed to several books every day versus children who are not is another powerful argument for reading. Surely I want him to be as prepared as possible as he embarks on that scary educational journey. I don’t want learning to be frustrating and fraught for him — I want him to feel confident, comfortable, secure in a strong background filled with words and pictures and ideas.

Could there possibly be any downside to fostering a love of reading in my son?

In the early days of my pregnancy I hauled three empty cardboard Boise Paper boxes home from work and have slowly filled them with thrift store finds, books once loved by another child which are now mine for twenty-five or fifty cents apiece. Curious George, Frog and Toad, Amelia Bedelia and other well-known characters are sharing space with less famous (but just as special) personages such as King Bidgood, Toot and Puddle, and Owen and Fuzzy, memories of my own younger days. My husband has begun practicing reading them out loud. Sometimes, in between folding tiny sleepers and onesies, I pause to flip through the covers, wondering which one might become the favorite.

Trips to the library were the highlight of my week as a small child. My family moved four times before I turned seven years old, and our home-base library kept changing. I’ve lost track of the number of buildings out of which I’ve staggered with a canvas tote bag full of more books than I could reasonably carry. I still have the first library card I got when I was twelve, and can still see the excitement in my preteen scrawled signature on the back, so thrilled at the independence of checking out my own books instead of using my mom’s card. (With this newfound freedom came the responsibility of my own late fees… less fun.)

But reading isn’t everything, reluctant as I may be to admit it.

I just finished reading — yes, I see the irony — There’s No Such Thing as Bad Weather by Linda Akeson McGurk. McGurk, who was born in Sweden and has raised her two daughters both in the U.S. (with her American husband) and in Sweden, stresses the importance of unstructured, messy, in-all-weathers outdoor play that is touted in Scandinavia under the term frilufstliv. Mental and emotional health, she claims, are bolstered and uplifted by the simple effect of time spent outdoors. According to McGurk, Americans put too much emphasis on their children’s academic prowess and are frequently guilty of helicopter-parenting. “Let kids be kids,” is the underlying mantra of her memoir, brushing aside overachievers and Little Einsteins with a simple recommendation to buy your child a good pair of rain boots.

I’ll admit, I felt convicted. I identify far more with the hobbit than with the explorer. I understand the benefits of fresh air and exercise, but I’m more likely to be holed up indoors with a book in my hands or a keyboard on my lap than hiking the forests. But maybe I could stand to rethink that posture, at least where my son is concerned.

Sure, my neck of the United States is pretty different from Sweden, and the hands-off type of parenting McGurk promotes could warrant a call to Child Protective Services in American culture (a fact she points out, and laments). But a greater focus on letting my son nurture his own interests — and encouraging him to just get outside without a specific agenda — might do us both a world of good.

Even if it doesn’t immediately appeal to me as a reflection of my favorite things.

Maybe my job as a parent isn’t about making sure he hits all the milestones before he starts preschool, or ensuring that he loves all the same things I love. Maybe it’s not about giving him a “jump start” over other kids, but letting him develop at his own pace and discover how big and beautiful this world is on his own. Maybe it’s not about being pushy and overbearing and controlling even the imaginative aspect of his existence, but stepping back a little and accepting the fact that he might not be a bookworm.

Am I still going to read to him? Of course! I think everybody benefits from good books, whether or not they identify as an insatiable reader. But everybody can benefit from an increased sense of wonder at the world they live in, too. It’s not an either-or scenario: I don’t have to choose between encouraging trips to the library or trips to the woods, with no overlap and no natural flow.

But neither do I need to shove my son into a box shaped exactly like a miniature version of me.

Yes, I want him to love what his father and I love. A mutual passion for reading was one of the first things that attracted us to each other. We already have a well-established routine of reading together. We look forward to bringing our baby into that family circle and helping his imagination to flourish. But as I organize the picture books in the nursery alphabetically by title — old habits die hard — I’m reminding myself that these books don’t represent the sum of my baby’s personality.

Maybe he’ll be a puddle-jumper, a climber, a runner.

Maybe he’ll be a cloud-counter and weather-watcher.

Maybe he’ll be a budding engineer, with an eye for balance and a penchant for building.

Maybe he’ll find his passion in the kitchen and love nothing more than making good food.

Maybe he’ll be a bookworm.

Whatever he is, he’ll be loved, encouraged, and helped on the way — and I’ll try to remember to take a step back sometimes and just watch.

Even if it means he doesn’t want to hear Horton Hears a Who! for the hundredth time.

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

When I read Fredrik Backman’s Anxious People, from which the above quote is taken, I gave it five stars on Goodreads. But as I clicked “submit review,” I hesitated.

Was five stars, Goodreads’ highest possible rating, a fair assessment of this book? Was I right to effectively tell all my friends, foes, and followers that this book was practically perfect in every way?

Letting my personal beef with the star rating system slide for the time being (I’d prefer a scale of 1–10, rather than 1–5, to allow for more nuance), I went ahead and posted my review with all five stars. But, as I am wont to do, I worried and fretted in great disproportion to the actual problem, that someone would read the book and think me a nincompoop for giving it FIVE WHOLE STARS.

Err on the side of generosity, I say.

But of course I don’t give five stars to every book. I don’t even give a like to every article. What’s the rationale, then?

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As a kid, I cast a scornful side-eye toward recipe descriptions in my mom’s Taste of Home magazines (which I read for fun on quiet Sunday afternoons because I was a weird child).

“Tasty” broccoli cheese casserole, Janet from South Dakota? I scoffed inwardly.

How can you say such a silly thing? Just because YOU think it’s tasty doesn’t mean everyone ELSE will think it’s tasty. You don’t know what they like and dislike.

Food, I felt, was the most subjective subject on earth. My sister abhorred bananas, while I thought them delicious. I loathed rice, and she requested it for her birthday dinner. (I still feel a latent brooding resentment for that betrayal.) It was almost like lying to simply state that a food WAS good. Grownups, man.

Now, of course, I too am a grownup and my tastes have expanded. I like rice these days and I don’t sneer at people who deal in absolutes when it comes to describing food.

But I do wonder if I am unable to be objective when I recommend a book.

A Man Called Ove is still my favorite Backman novel, but I’ve enjoyed almost all of his books so far. (Beartown had a bit too much of what I typically refer to as sportsball, but I guess in this instance it was sportspuck — and I couldn’t finish Us Against You since it was more of the same.)

Anxious People was no exception; it made me laugh and cry in short order, and both emotions continued throughout the book. The dialogue was witty without being so witty as to be aware of itself; that is, it read with the natural fluidity of a normal conversation. I found the narrative clever and suspenseful, which is especially impressive when you consider that this book has been translated from Swedish to English, and at least one plot twist hinges on how the narrative is worded.

And yet all the mechanics of the book were not really what won my five-star rating. It was the anxious people themselves, the sympathetic characters who irritated me and yet kept me turning pages; the poor choices and reckless decisions and kindness winning out in the end. (Is that a spoiler? It shouldn’t be.)

I’m a sucker for that kind of thing.

I don’t want to give away too much in case you haven’t read the book, but one subplot revolves around a man who is wrestling with the fact that he was unable to prevent someone else’s suicide. The frank depiction of clinical depression in particular and mental instability in general was an unusual choice for a story that purports to be a locked-room mystery, and yet it all fitted and framed together and by the time the last pages arrived, I didn’t want it to end.

As an anxious person myself, even the most unlikable dancers in Backman’s beautifully calculated choreography managed to tug at my heartstrings. All these people, bound together with their very different problems and their one mutual problem (being locked in an apartment with a bank robber)… they leapt off the page.

And I gave the book five stars.

Then I read the other Goodreads reviews, as I am wont to do.

Some of them made me smile. Some of them made me cringe. And a couple of them made me want to change my rating, just for a moment, because those reviews pointed out elements I hadn’t seen and analyzed from a perspective I hadn’t taken.

In the end, though, I kept my five stars. Because Anxious People made me feel five stars (although I respect the opinion of those who felt only two stars). And even if that statement wouldn’t fly in any kind of serious literary-criticism situation, I take comfort in the fact that am not a serious literary critic. I am just an anxious person who read a book about anxious people and felt seen.

The question of how much weight an author’s intentions should hold in a discussion of what readers perceive, and how a text is read and taught, is hotly debated. I tend to lean toward giving more credence to the author’s personal beliefs (insofar as they may be known), the historical context, the social and political context in which a book is written, in order to call an Important Work of Literature “good” or “bad.”

But when it comes down to everyday, ordinary, read-in-bed-with-the-covers-pulled-up-to-my-chin, satisfying novels, I go with my gut every time.

Maybe it’s not terrifically helpful for the stranger perusing reviews on Goodreads. I’m sorry for that. I really do want to be helpful to other readers.

Yet in the end, our perception of books really is just as subjective as our perception of broccoli cheese casserole. It’s personal. Easily influenced. Can change as we grow up (positively, in my case — at least for broccoli and cheese). What I think good you may think rubbish — one’s trash is another’s treasure, after all. My life experience that informs the reading choices I make and the opinions I form of that reading will never be the same as yours.

But if we do share some common anxieties — some common joys or sorrows or a shared love of chocolate, too — then I hope you’ll see my five stars and think “that sounds like something, I, too, would enjoy” and take up a book I loved and read.

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”
— Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

It's nearly 8:30 P.M. and we've just passed the exit to Richmond. My husband is driving, our two-year-old is snoozing in his car seat, and our five-year-old is drowsily listening to a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle audiobook on the car stereo while I type this on my phone. (Jody Jones is pretending to be sick so he won't have to go to school and Mrs. P-W is about to prescribe a Tonic to straighten him out. I guess truancy laws weren't a thing in the 1950s?)

We are driving through the night to visit my husband's grandmother in rural North Carolina, and I am going to wait to publish this little new-year reflection until tomorrow morning, when we are safe at the hotel, so that no one need worry that Rob fell asleep at the wheel and we all died. (EDIT: it is now three days later and everything was fine.)

I think I sort of have death, and sudden death, on my mind a lot lately. 2025 was a real jerk about that. My grandfather's death wasn't really unexpected, of course, but still-- the part of me that is still forever a little girl has always thought my grandparents would live forever. They don't. In the summer a dear friend with whom I worked at my church died very unexpectedly, and then on October 18th my father died, twenty-three hours after a devastating stroke. For twenty-two of those hours his five children were with him, in cycles and shifts and all at once, until the very end when it was just him and my mom and he chose that moment to let go. They had been together for forty-two years.

I am not ready to write about my dad yet. Maybe I never will be. But it seemed odd to kind of slide back into writing here without acknowledging the gaping, raw crevasse that is the death of a parent. I think about my dad in some way every single day, even sometimes when the thought is just "oh my gosh, my dad is gone and for a little while I had forgotten. Why did I forget?"

I don't know what the answer to that is, but I know I'll be talking about it in therapy. I don't mean that in a flippant way. I mean that I really am going back to counseling later this month because I have a lot to process and my brain and nervous system are struggling to keep up. Writing is a soothing and necessary release but I do need to, you know, actually confront some of my emotions in a healthy way.

I don't mean to imply 2025 was all bad. Looking back, there were a great many bright spots. Friendships deepened and my once-baby brother got married and a beautiful, fat, imperious little niece was born (to my sister, not my brother). We got a cat (pictured at top) and she now rules the household, or at least thinks she does. I started a new part-time job, returned to school full-time, won a couple of scholarships, and finished the fall semester with three hard-won As and an A-, of which I am extremely proud. Going back to school at age thirty is challenging in a lot of unexpected ways but one really lovely aspect of it is the way you appreciate the opportunity so much more than you ever could have at eighteen. It also makes you much, much less tolerant of the shenanigans of incoming freshpeople who do not fully appreciate their opportunities and are not recognizing their dewy-eyed, childless potential. No you may NOT copy my notes after failing to show up for half the classes this semester and scrolling Instagram for the other half, Mykynleigh!

I am now just three semesters away from finishing my English degree, and am now in the delightful position of taking courses that are almost completely focused on my major. Which means a lot of my reading is focused on those courses. Which means you can expect to see posts here that are directly linked to those assigned readings, and not simply whatever fiction I take it into my head to read this year. (Okay, you'll probably see a bit of that too. My list of library holds is currently maxed out.)

I mentioned before that writing is a soothing and necessary release (even when done with two thumbs in a notes app, ahem) and I'm planning to squeeze in whatever I can this year. I don't know what that's going to look like. If I can publish here once a month I'll consider that a win. Topics I want to cover this year include Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Beverly Cleary's middle grade books, Schindler's List, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the new BBC adaptation of The Other Bennet Sister, and what sort of qualities the excessively picky reader, like me, might be looking for in historical fiction.

Maybe this will finally be the year I write a draft of a novel. Maybe I'll just keep my head above water with work and school and the everlasting exhausting antics of my wondrous children. Maybe I'll read a book I haven't even heard yet and it will change my life. Maybe the dumpster fire of U.S. politics will... you know... expire. Maybe I'll grow my bangs out! The year lies open.

If 2025 was brutal for you, too, I'm here for you. Maybe 2026 will be better. And if it's not, I'm grateful we have good books to escape into. Thanks for escaping with me.

Hey mama, hope you’re ready for the most wonderful time of the year! Have you made the list of gifts you’re buying? Make sure your kids are getting an impressive stack of presents, but not too many because you don’t want spoiled brats. Don’t deprive them of the magic of childhood, though! Are you baking some scrumptious treats? Wonderful! Too much sugar will definitely send your kids hurtling toward Type 2 diabetes and a full catalog of eating disorders, just so you know. Oh, you don’t let them leave out cookies for Santa because it promotes unhealthy habits? Monster.

Speaking of Santa, where are we on that? Hope you’re not lying to those precious little angels and telling them Santa is REAL. But don’t tell them Santa isn’t real or they’ll be talking about you in therapy. Get that picture on Santa’s lap and make sure they smile real big, except don’t ever force your kids to hug a stranger, haven’t you ever heard of bodily autonomy? Groomer. That Elf on your Shelf is a symbol of a surveillance state and it’s honestly disgusting that you would let your kids engage in that kind of copaganda. What, your family doesn’t do Elf on the Shelf? Have fun explaining that to everyone else at kindergarten. Now all the other moms hate you. Spoilsport.

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It’s Cyber Monday and the deals are rolling in! Save some money this year to augment your stretched-thin budget, you spendthrift shopper, and don’t forget to select fast free shipping. What are you doing supporting an evil corporation like Amazon? Go buy a ceramic bird from a local vendor and think about your choices. Think about them while you travel to see family; how many more Christmases is Great-Grandma going to have? What, you’re taking those germ-ridden little goblins to visit your immunocompromised elderly relatives? Selfish! Ask the grandparents to come to you. They want to be included on the holidays. Don’t make them travel though, you’re young and can handle it. Ugh, don’t take those kids on a plane, they might cry and scream and ruin the holiday for everyone else! Oh, you’re strapping your six-month-old into a car seat for a seven-hour road trip? Get ready for container baby syndrome and a raging Cocomelon addiction. Neglectful!

Aunt Bertrude made a delicious bitter lemon peppermint pine needle tiramisu, surely your kids can be polite and taste ONE bite. Trying new foods is essential to good development. Wow, mama, looks like someone’s having a meltdown! Were you aware that routine is the most important thing for these kiddos? Why didn’t you pack a curated pre-made dinner of safe foods? Make sure your kids are hyped up for our 10pm tree lighting followed by a live spoken word performance of The Nutcracker! Cultural appreciation is the linchpin of our society. Um, have you been informed that keeping these littles out past their bedtime is neurologically damaging? Children need their rest! Idiot.

Oh, while we’re on the tree topic: did you get a real one? Your kids simply can’t miss out on that core-memory experience of chopping down a LIVE evergreen on a real farm. Too bad you’re single-handedly burning the environment and flushing money down a public toilet though. An artificial tree can be used year after year and teach your family the importance of thrift. What, you put a plastic monstrosity in your living room and LIGHTED IT UP? Climate-destroyer.

It is better to give than to receive, so I hope you’re instilling those principles in your children early! Don’t let them think it’s all about gifts unless you want to raise the next Elon Musk or Donald Trump. Oh, your husband didn’t get a stocking for you and put gifts in it? Divorce. DIVOOOOOORCE. Dump him, girl.

There simply isn’t enough going on this time of year– you need to plan, prepare, execute, and clean up from an intricately themed family holiday activity each and every day. How else will your children remember Christmas 2025 if not via a keepsake Advent calendar hand-crafted by their mother’s own glue-burnt fingers? Don’t forget to stop and smell the snowflakes, mama. They’re only little once. Let it all go. Just sit back and relax. Enjoy every moment. Wait, are you reading this on your PHONE?

I’m back, biscuits. Thanks for still being here while I took a break from writing for a couple of months, and thanks even more for reading all the way to the end of this silly satire piece! Happy holidays!

I’ve got an incredibly busy fall semester ahead of me (and six weeks behind me already!), not to mention a new job (virtual assisting) and teaching English as a Second Language, and for this reason I’m pausing Substack writing until December. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all of you who read, support, and contribute to (!) this little newsletter. Because I’m not able to offer any writing during this time I have also put a pause on paid subscriptions to Something Funny, Something True— if you have a monthly subscription, you won’t be billed during this period, and if you were thinking about signing up for a paid sub (either monthly or annually) that option will not be available until December.

In the meantime, you can read my work intermittently at and perhaps in a new magazine or two depending on acceptances and rejections for things I sent out a while ago. :)

Thanks again. You have no idea what your presence here means to me.

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If your underlings ask for hazard pay during a hurricane or a pandemic or whatever the trendy complaint is these days, what they really want is a pizza party (after closing time on a Friday, once everyone is off the clock).

If they mention a holiday bonus, what they would truly prefer is a company-monogrammed blanket stuffed in a too-small gift bag.

If they talk of accountability and listening to ideas from the common horde, they are actually requesting a town hall meeting in which three audience questions will be accepted from a pool of fifty inquirers, so that only the very best and brightest will be showcased.

If they grumble about stress at work, this is a plea for a lunch-hour chair yoga class that will be benevolently offered free of charge, but must be taken during an unpaid break and cannot conflict with normal working hours.

If they submit papers to the complaint box, this is a subtle way of indicating that removing the complaint box altogether would boost general morale and positivity.

If they request a specific block of PTO at the beginning of the year, this is a cry for help regarding work-life balance and priorities, and really requires a helpful refusal with eight days’ notice.

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On the topic of work-life balance, if this comes up during a town hall meeting, it is a perfect opportunity for a reminder that overtime is forbidden and all work must be completed within 8 hours or go unpaid.

If mention is made of hiring a new employee to replace Marge from HR who quit after her third week, this is best interpreted as a need for consolidation of responsibilities among the remaining team.

If complaints are heard about a lack of DEI, this is simply a request that Doug from Accounting, who is 1/32nd Cherokee according to his late grandmother, should be prominently featured on the “About Us” page of the website for the next month, or until the topic comes up again.

Any talk of raises or merit increases is a broad hint that this particular employee is stealing company time on Indeed.com and feels the need to come clean about it.

Scuttlebutt around the water cooler about a possible snack bar in the break room is a plug for a rotating chore wheel to make coffee for the entire office every morning (a task that should be evenly divided between all women below a certain pay grade.)

If they talk about the lengthy trek time involved in getting to the main building from the faraway parking lot, take them up on this idea for team-building physical fitness, and set a step-counting incentive (winner at the end of the year gets a $5 Starbucks card!)

If they suggest that the wait times in the hold queue for IT may be too long, they are simply looking for reasons to multitask and should be assigned more busywork.

It should be noted that mass resignations are not technically “employee jargon,” but we will include them on this list anyway, and note that they should be interpreted as an unspoken statement that the perpetrators simply felt unworthy of working for such a brilliant corporation and wanted to open up the playing field to other hopefuls.

This piece originally appeared in The Belladonna Comedy in January 2023.

Here is where an introduction ought to go, but since I am going to make this snappy, this sentence will have to do.

(If this post is too long for your email, click the title to open the full version in your browser.)

What I Read This Summer (Books)

-Austen at Sea by Natalie Jenner, which I reviewed here.

-You Have a Calling by Karen Swallow Prior, which I reviewed here.

-Jane and Dan at the End of the World by Colleen Oakley

A fun and light novel which was a bit surreal at times (the main plot events are ridiculous! A terrorist/activist group inspired by a novel written by the main character takes an upscale restaurant hostage!) but also talked about marriage and long-term, committed relationships in a down-to-earth and forgiving way that I found refreshing. There are so many books about rediscovering yourself apart from your first relationship— as someone who is married to my first serious boyfriend and hopes to continue so for many more years, I enjoy reading about love that stands the test of time. Sorry if that’s a bit of a spoiler. I still think you’ll enjoy the book anyway if you can suspend disbelief (and logic) a bit. I listened to the audio read by Hillary Huber.

-Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

At first blush, this is the sort of fiction that seems… I don’t know, unremarkable? But the longer I sat with it, the better I liked it. I think the unremarkability is the point. It’s about Bill Furlong, a working-class man in mid-20th-century Ireland, who has a humble and somewhat disreputable past (illegitimate child of a maid at the “big house”) and who has never known his father. The kindness of his late mother’s employer gave him a childhood and education, and now he has a wife and five daughters and a business selling coal. Then one day he encounters a young girl at the local convent who is begging for help. I won’t spoil it, but I hope that if you read it it will stay with you as poignantly as it did for me.

-The Women by Kristin Hannah

My first Kristin Hannah novel and though it likely won’t be my last (The Nightingale is sitting on my shelf, waiting) I was underwhelmed. I like historical fiction, I like reading about women in the medical field, I didn’t know much about the Vietnam war and was eager to know more, but this book just really fell flat for me. It felt like less of a novel tracking character development and more like a dumping ground for the (extensive! admirable!) research Hannah had done on women in Vietnam. At the close of every chapter, a bit more trauma got sprinkled in to the mix. I was sympathetic, but also annoyed at the choices the main character kept making and the improbability of several… shall we say, lucky escapes. I know Kristin Hannah is a popular book club choice but I hope her other titles are more engaging/sympathetic.

-Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (a re-read)`

I can’t say enough good things about this novel in such a short roundup. But I’ll just say I really love it, despite some quibbles about the ending, and I think anyone who wants an irreverent, laugh-out-loud, ridiculous book with a semi-unreliable narrator should pick this one up. I think I’m going to write a whole piece later this fall on my favorite books with unreliable narrators.

-All of the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary, as read by Stockard Channing in the big audiobook collection (thanks Libby!). My four-year-old and I listened to these together in the car, and what a treat it was to revisit such a happy place from my own childhood. I’m not entirely sure how much he absorbed, being younger than Ramona in her youngest Pest era, but he really enjoyed some of the funnier anecdotes and was sympathetic to such events as (spoilers!) the death of Picky-picky. I have a feeling these stories will be on a frequent rotation in our home.

-Every Elmo book our library has in stock, a billion times, at the non-negotiable request of my two-year-old.

What I Read This Summer (Articles)

This piece by Beth Allison Barr is both chilling and vital. Please read it if you’re vaccine hesitant. Please read it if you’re pro-vaccine. Please read it if you’re RFK Jr. and you somehow drunkenly stumbled on my Substack, idk. Everyone should read this. We cannot go back.

Marginalia with Beth Allison Barr

A Ghost Town Story

“Mom, what are the symptoms of diphtheria…

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9 months ago · 130 likes · 14 comments · Beth Allison Barr

I’m an unashamed fangirl of just about anything writes, but this piece on Jane Austen’s Rogues was top-tier. It’s inspiring me to finish my own long-languishing draft on why Mr. Darcy is not the dreamboat that pop culture wants him to be.

Mirrored Longings

Jane Austen's Rogues

The year of our Lord 2025 marks the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth on December 16, 1775. I began 2025 by providing a list of ways to prepare young readers to meet dear Jane. It’s easy to think of Austen’s drawing-room world as safe compared to ours. Her characters never had to worry about being catfished on a dating app! Yet, the more I read A…

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10 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Melody Schwarting

If you’ve seen my posts on social media for any length of time, you’ll know I’m vehemently against the use of, indeed the idea of, generative AI. I really enjoyed this thoughtful piece by Linda Caroll.

Hello, Writer!

Are Popular Substackers Using AI?

Mary Oliver said she doesn’t know exactly what it means to pray, but she knows how to pay attention, how to fall down in the grass, how to kneel in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields. How to watch a grasshopper eat sugar from her hands, jaws moving back and forth instead of up and down…

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10 months ago · 450 likes · 134 comments · Linda Caroll

’s piece on why the beach is magical all by itself really struck a chord with me. It's so easy to feel as if you aren't doing enough for your kids, especially with the highlight reels on social media that sometimes seem bent on outdoing each other with extravagant gestures. I'd rather slow down and look for shark teeth.

The Pomegranate

The Beach Is Magical All By Itself

The other day I was scrolling Instagram when I came across a video that made me recoil in horror. The video was of a little girl at the beach, probably about 5 or 6. As she is walking down the shore, she notices something sticking up out of the sand. It’s a “mermaid comb,” the video informs us. It is, as we see from the next shot, a comb her mom has spe…

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10 months ago · 52 likes · 5 comments · Lucy Huber and The Pomegranate

I laughed out loud several times at this brutally honest account by , and I really do mean that, not just the snorted-air-through-my-nose-a-little-louder-than-usual that usually passes for an LOL.

Mistakes Were Made

This Is What Happens When You Go Viral

My middle grade novel Fall Of The Robots comes out in paperback on June 10. It’s the follow-up to The Last Human—which is being developed as a movie from the brilliant filmmakers who made Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Lego Movie. I’m thrilled that both of these books will finally be available in paperback…

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a year ago · 331 likes · 134 comments · Lee Bacon

is generally a satire writer and I opened this piece on John MacArthur’s legacy thinking it would be in that vein, but I was pleasantly surprised—and moved— to find it quite thoughtful and sincere. It is not an easy read, but I think it is an important one.

Evangelical Think Pieces

John MacArthur is Dead, Sort of

John MacArthur has died. He isn’t coming back, but he isn’t going anywhere, either…

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10 months ago · 349 likes · 78 comments · matthew pierce

I loved reading the Ramona books with my son this summer, but I don’t think I’m going to write about them in much detail here, because Kathryn Barbash did it so well in this piece!

A Wonderful Mess

Beverly Cleary as a Parenting Influencer

Summertime brings out a seasonal variety of shame-inducing messages for parents. Maybe there are other places to find wisdom besides social media? The children’s section of the library is a treasure trove in this way. Let me introduce a different kind of influence(r): Beverly Cleary…

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9 months ago · 15 likes · 3 comments · Kathryn Barbash, PsyD

What I Wrote This Summer

My Kids Don’t Sleep, But Neither Did I for The Pomegranate

twelve hours of search history (in between vomits) for HAD

Do the Hard Things In Public for The Pomegranate

My McSweeney’s (!) debut with Reviews of New Food: Panera Strawberry Basil Fresca Lemonade

Every Parenting Website’s Baby Registry Recommendations for The Pomegranate

Who I Interviewed This Summer

I did a 12-part series featuring an eclectic group of writers I’ve gotten to know through the Internet. You can find them all here, because I am too tired to hyperlink each name individually, but I shall list them because I appreciate each one!

Beccy Sharley
Jeannie Prinsen
Amy Mantravadi
Julie Vick
Kristen Mulrooney
Gina Dalfonzo
Rachel Darnall
Melody Schwarting
Ruth Buchanan
Karen Swallow Prior
Shannon Sanders
Devoney Looser

And, as a lovely little bonus, I was interviewed by Ryan Teague Beckwith at Your First Byline! You can read that here.

Thanks for coming to this roundup! What did you read, write, and enjoy this summer?

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I first became aware of Professor Devoney Looser when she appeared on Karen Swallow Prior’s podcast Jane and Jesus in 2022. Since then I’ve enjoyed reading her online work, and when she announced a new book slated for release in September 2025, I jumped on the chance to read an advance copy and write a review.

Wild For Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane came out on September 2nd. I had hoped to have my review up before then but school and work got in the way, so here we are today!

(I received a free ebook from the publisher, St. Martin’s Press, in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review.)

Persuasion’s outside-of-the-box wildness stems from a hero and heroine who become capable, rational creatures separately before they return to each other’s arms. —Looser, ch.10

Wild For Austen is a scholarly yet approachable work exploring the concept of wildness in Jane Austen’s life, influences, work, and legacy. What does this mean? Well, for decades Austen was regarded as a prim Victorian-esque spinster (despite dying before the Victorian era began) whose admitted expertise in writing began and ended in the drawing room. Though there were cynics who espoused this view (think of that viral, meme-ified Amazon review of Pride and Prejudice, which asserted it was “just a bunch of people going to each other’s houses”) the concept of Austen as confined to romantic relationships and narrow social commentary (limited only to the lower echelons of the upper class) has persisted even among fans and some scholars. Looser’s work attempts to “put that myth to rest” and show exactly how subversive Austen was in her time—and ours.

I was slightly apprehensive at first that this book would try to superimpose modern attitudes on Austen posthumously, and dally too much with half-baked apocryphal fancies about Tom Lefroy and the mysterious seaside gentleman. Though I’m not one who considers Austen a “chick lit” writer (insert eye roll) or a Charlotte Bronte fan who agrees with Bronte’s rude assessment that “the passions were entirely unknown to her,” neither am I a conspiracy theorist. My appreciation of Looser’s past works, however, gave me confidence that her study of this topic wouldn’t be silly. And I was happily proven right.

The book opens with Austen’s Juvenilia, sometimes called her Teenage Writings, and the witty wild wanderings on which they take the gumptious reader. (Seriously, the Juvenilia is unhinged. In a good ways From there Looser examines the heroines of all Jane’s major novels and the ways they upheld and subverted the societal expectations of the day. Don’t look for a staid interpretation of Elizabeth-Bennet-as-ahead-of-her-time and Fanny-Price-as-a-boring-prude, though. Looser’s examination of the women Austen wrote, and how and why she wrote them, is thoughtful and well-documented. She also covers the Austen family’s background and the scandals in which the extended family were embroiled (such as Aunt Leigh-Perrot’s shoplifting charge) and the abolition of slavery and how this connected to the Austens, as well as to Jane’s own work.

I confess I found some of this center section on family ties to be a bit slow-moving. I appreciated the wealth of research demonstrated here, but as a casual reader and not a scholar I found myself a bit bogged down with the level of detail. I wanted to get back to Austen herself, not her brothers or nephews.

The final section on Austen’s legacy was both illuminating and thought-provoking. I am skeptical of many Austen continuations and spin-offs, as I often feel the writers are simply capitalizing on her popularity in order to sell books, without actually loving and respecting the source material. But the cultural impact of “pop Austen” is fascinating and widespread, and I enjoyed reading about the Austenesque phenomena of the 20th (and 21st) century.

I also really appreciated Looser’s take on people who don’t care for Austen, or people who study and teach her works but take issue with the culture and class from which and about which she wrote (a valid critique and one worth considering, especially as we seek to unearth voices whom Looser notes may have been “drowned out” by Austen’s popularity.)

Emma’s heroine opines, “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.” It ought to be more than okay with us when others don’t love the same authors we do. …To my mind, criticizing Austen and her writings must be fair game, ought to be encouraged, and is important to her continued relevance. —Looser, ch. 24

In short, I would highly recommend this book for the devoted Janeite, though I would hesitate to push it on the less-avid fan; it’s heavily detailed and might not hold the attention of the more casual reader. But that might just convert a new Austen aficionado, might it not?

I also had the privilege of interviewing Devoney Looser for my Writer Showcase series! writes here on Substack. She has written several other books including Sister Novelists and The Making of Jane Austen, she teachers at Arizona State University and she competes in roller derby under the name Stone Cold Jane Austen!

What do you write about?

I write about history’s smart, strong women, especially British women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and especially *especially* Jane Austen.

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

I started graduate school thinking that I might specialize in Jane Austen and the writers who came after her. But then I learned about the hundreds of fascinating women who were writing before and alongside her. I got pulled back to write about her predecessors as well as those she inspired.

How long have you been writing on Substack?

I moved over to Substack in 2022, having migrated there from another email newsletter program.

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I’m the author or editor of 12 books. I also have a series of 24 30-minute lectures on Jane Austen for The Great Courses and Audible, and I’ve published short pieces in such places as The Atlantic, the New York Times, Slate, Salon, the TLS, and the Washington Post.

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

“Three of Jane Austen’s Six Brothers Engaged in Anti-Slavery Activism: New Research Offers More Clues about Her Own Views,” The Conversation (US), 14 August 2024, https://theconversation.com/3-of-jane-austens-6-brothers-engaged-in-antislavery-activism-new-research-offers-more-clues-about-her-own-views-230176

This is the third of three pieces I’ve published in recent years, reporting new discoveries about Jane Austen’s brothers and their public activism in the anti-slavery movement in the years after her death. Their activism offers us a potential new window into understanding the handful of references to slavery and abolition in Austen’s fiction.

“To Find Great Female Novelists, Stop Looking in Jane Austen’s Shadow,” The Washington Post, Book World Section, 27 November 2022, print and online. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/11/25/austen-bronte-great-female-novelists/

The title of this one says it all! This essay makes the case to readers and critics to look for greatness and genius in past women’s writings without measuring them against Jane Austen.

“The Forgotten Sisters who Pioneered the Historical Novel,” Smithsonian Magazine, 20 October 2022, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-forgotten-sisters-who-pioneered-the-historical-novel-180980730/

Smithsonian Magazine published an edited excerpt of my dual biography of Jane and Anna Maria Porter. I hope it gives readers an idea of the flavor of the book as a whole and persuades them to care about the wrongly forgotten Porter sisters.

“Jane Austen Wasn’t Shy,” The New York Times (15 July 2017). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/opinion/sunday/jane-austen-wasnt-shy.html

In this piece, I describe why I believe that we’ve overstated the case for Jane Austen’s modesty as an author and supposed hiding of her writing. I believe it’s based on slim and suspect evidence from her biographer nephew’s imagination.

Who is one other Substack writer you admire?

’s The Austen Connection!

The Austen Connection

Happy everything!

So glad you’re here at the Austen Connection. You can see all of the Austen Connection conversations including the podcast here. If you are not signed up yet you can take a few seconds to sign up, below, to get all of the conversations dropped into your inbox. Join us…

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a year ago · 57 likes · 36 comments · Plain Jane

You can order Wild For Austen online or find it in your local bookstore.

Today’s writer showcase series features Shannon Sanders, an extraordinarily gifted writer and very busy mom whom I’ve had the privilege of befriending via… you guessed it, social media. Twitter may have descended into Hades but the connections it fostered are still so strong for many of us who are weirdly addicted to microblogging! Shannon writes at The Red Eye about the process of writing while in a deeply demanding stage of parenting. I look forward avidly to each newsletter she sends out, and I think you will too. She is also the author of Company, a linked short story collection which I will be reviewing here shortly, and the forthcoming The Great Wherever, her debut novel (releasing in 2026).

What do you write about?

I'm a fiction writer, first and foremost—I process my experiences and feelings by inventing totally new ones! It's my favorite thing to do, and I hope I get to do it forever. Most of my fiction centers on one of a few things: being Black in the United States, being a Millennial in the post-capitalist era, and/or being a woman in patriarchy. Within those really broad realms, I tend to write a lot about family dynamics—I'm one of only two siblings, but we’re part of a large extended family, and I’m fascinated by ordinal positioning and how it impacts personality, worldview, and experience. I’m also a shameless lover of gossip! I love to write stories about loaded microdramas—incidents that seem small but reveal so much subtext and character detail. And my fiction is usually multigenerational; I like to show how events can reverberate for decades.

Something that’s become super clear to me over a decade of interacting with other writers is that we all have our inescapable obsessions! No matter how hard we try to steer our writing in various directions, we always come back to certain topics that live at the core of our imaginations. I’ll share one of mine: My fiction tends to heavily feature the aunt-niece relationship. Something about it is so inspiring to me! I think it has to do with the idea of being linked to this other person by way of a third person you both know so intimately, but in such different ways. Your parent's sister understands things about them that you never will, but (if she's worth her salt) she'll never tell. I have maternal and paternal aunts, plus lots of aunties (close, lifelong friends of my parents'), so I have a lot of material to draw from here!

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

See above—I didn't necessarily choose any of it! I think a lot of writers are writers specifically because they are deeply bothered by preoccupations they can't deal with otherwise. I write about things I'm interested in, that make me laugh, and that I think I can render with truth.

That said, I feel very lucky to be living in a moment (though, as of summer 2025, it's an evolving moment) in which writers who aren't straight white men are being celebrated for the perspectives we offer. I'm excited to be able to reach readers who want something new to relate to!

How long have you been writing for the internet?

I have a newsletter on beehiiv, and I haven't been writing on it for very long. I started it this past March because I wanted to chronicle the tail end of the book tour for the paperback edition of my fiction debut, Company. It's taken me a while to fall into a groove, but lately I'm aiming to post every Tuesday or as often as possible!

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I've been so lucky! I have work in a bunch of literary magazines and journals. In addition to the work listed below, my short stories appear in One Story, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Electric Literature, Southeast Review, and a few other places that are no less important, just less recent. (You can find more of them listed here!)

I suppose I should mention here that I have a novel, THE GREAT WHEREVER, coming out next summer, and that you can get my debut short-story collection, Company, wherever books are sold (preferably an independent bookstore)!

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

(I'm going to limit myself to pieces you can read entirely online! The first three are short stories, and the last one is an essay.)

"Dragonflies" (read by LeVar Burton!!!!): This was truly the first serious "pinch me" moment of my writing career. I grew up on Reading Rainbow and have loved a lot of Mr. Burton's other work, and I was over the moon when I learned that he would be reading one of my short stories on his podcast. It's a story I'm proud of, and if you stick around through the end you'll hear him offering some really complimentary commentary (he says the story makes him feel seen!!). Truly a dream. This story first appeared in a beautiful magazine called SLICE (sadly not around anymore), and is also in my collection.

"Mote": This is a slightly creepy short story I wrote to explore a few things I was thinking about in the fall of 2019, when my first child was a toddler and I had recently moved back to the suburb where I grew up after spending a few years living in the city. It's a triptych, each segment shorter but more punchy than the last, and I think it's a lot of fun!

"Company": This is the title story of my collection. People call it a ghost story, but that's open to interpretation. I was so proud to publish this in Strange Horizons! I feel strongly that writers shouldn't feel any pressure to limit ourselves to any particular genre labels, literary included.

"Writing on Prepaid Time": I published this essay in Lithub while promoting my first book, and it resonated with a lot of writer-parents. It gets into the nuts and bolts of how I stumbled through the early days of trying to write with three small kids.

Who is one other newsletter writer you admire?

Claire Taylor has a beehiiv newsletter, Other Thoughts, that's exactly aligned with everything I enjoy reading about. (Parenting, publishing, and mental health.) Here's a great representative post, Part of the Problem.

Amy again. I’m in awe of ’ work ethic and the quality of her work, and I’m honored that she took the time to do this interview! I love how Shannon’s writing is so simple yet so thought-provoking; she manages to do a lot with just a few well-placed descriptors that leave a lingering effect. I first read “Mote” over two years ago and I have not stopped thinking about it since. I’m going to recommend I Don’t Think You Should Take a Vow of Poverty to Write, because I really enjoyed how Shannon wrote so accessibly about practicality and art and how they intersect (and have no choice but to get along, for most of us). Subscribe to The Red Eye wherever you get your emails, and be on the lookout for The Great Wherever in 2026!

I’m going to be very honest with you all today— I was nervous about approaching today’s featured guest with my request for an interview. Dr. , better known on Twitter as The Notorious KSP, has been one of my literary role models for quite some time now. Imagine my delight when she agreed and told me to call her by her first name! Karen is the author of Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me, Fierce Convictions, On Reading Well, The Evangelical Imagination, and her most recent title, You Have a Calling (which I reviewed here). In addition, she has written for The Atlantic, Christianity Today, The Dispatch, and hosted the podcast Jane and Jesus. She currently writes at here on Substack. Karen’s writing on faith, literature, and the beauty to be found in good books has been foundational for me in figuring out how I want to read and write. Her literary citizenship, and the way she kindly interacts with newer and less experienced writers, has also been foundational for me. (We first met on Twitter! I’m not there anymore, but I cherish many fond memories of bookish fun on that platform.)

What do you write about?

I have two or three sort of parallel tracks at : I have an ongoing series taking readers through a survey of British Literature, and I intersperse those installments with more personal reflections and updates from the writing life (including interviews with other writers).

So I end up writing about a wide range of things, but they all flow out of my lifelong study of literature. Literary criticism isn’t far from cultural criticism, so I end up writing about all kinds of texts, even the textures of life, politics, and other human arts. Perhaps what threads all of my subjects together—whether literary, historical, cultural, or personal—is the mode of interpretation and analysis.

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

I had no real plans when I started writing on Substack. I began the newsletter because I was facing a major and traumatic shift in my life when my decades-long academic career suddenly ended. I needed to process that (which is a lot of what I write about) but not far into beginning at Substack, I realized that in my previous life, I’d have been starting a new semester of British literature. I realized I could create a new “classroom” and “teach” the same works on Substack, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. We are going much more slowly though! Two years in and we are still in the seventeenth century.

How long have you been writing on Substack?

My first post was published on August 1, 2023. I post weekly, more or less. It sure adds up quickly!

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Christianity Today, The Atlantic, Religion and Liberty and lots of other places. I am currently a contributing writer at The Dispatch and a columnist at Religion News Service.

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

“Lessons from Loving and Losing a Pet,” published some years ago at Christianity Today, is my most requested article and one of my own favorites. As any animal lover knows, losing a beloved pet is its own particular kind of grief. Loving a pet is its own particular joy. The end of the article is probably one of the best things (I think) I’ve ever written:

Animals show us what our own fragility looks like before God. When we mourn these lesser creatures, we taste, I think, a bit of God’s sorrow over us in our human frailty. When we love fellow humans, we love as equals. When we love an animal, we bring with that love all the might and grace of one both in and above the world of that creature. It is like the love God has for us, with all the joy and grief we bring him. As human is to divine, so animal is to human. I think perhaps we are no more like God than when we love an animal.

“The Case for Getting Married Young” at The Atlantic was an early piece that put me in the national spotlight. I think its points need even more consideration now than when I first wrote it. In this article, I share my own experience of getting married at age 19, and now 40 years later, I see my marriage as the cornerstone of all my husband and I have built together. Marrying young isn’t an option for everyone, of course, nor is it wisest for everyone, but it seems less and less to be even considered, and I think that is a loss.

More recently, over at The Dispatch, I wrote about the problems with medically assisted suicide. This was one of the hardest essays I’ve written because I wrote it fresh from the holy and sacred experience of caring for my mother during her terminal illness and witnessing firsthand the vulnerability of all who are dying:

What lies ahead for the dying—as well as the living—is certain pain and suffering, helplessness and dependency, fear and uncertainty. It is not possible to live without suffering. But thanks to palliative and hospice care, choosing death isn’t the only means of ending the pain of living. In a world of limited time and resources, all the energies that go into legalizing medical aid in dying are ultimately diverting resources that could improve and expand end-of-life care.

This RNS column, “Don’t Go into a Relationship—or an Institution—Thinking You Can Change Them” is a highlight in my ongoing journey of processing my own church hurt (which many of us have gone through):

I thought for a long time I could help the church (or at least my slice of it) change. I could take a community and denomination rife with racism, cronyism, misogyny and abuse and change it.

How foolish I was.

Who is one other Substack writer you admire?

Well, this is perhaps a very niche choice, but I’m going to mention Evangelical Think Pieces by . Matthew writes some of the best satire and hilarious humor pieces (some of them are NSFW), but if there is anything evangelicals like me need, it’s a sense of humor and willingness to see the errors of our ways. And to laugh ourselves into correction.

Amy again. Typically when I interview a writer for this series, I link to one of their online pieces at the end. Today, though, I’m going to wholeheartedly recommend an entire book. If you love to read— if you don’t love to read!— then On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books, an accessible treatise on building character through literature, will be both an improvement for your mind and a journey of delight. The chapters on A Tale of Two Cities, “Tenth of December,” and Persuasion are three of my favorites. I’m due for a re-read myself… and I might need to finally read Pamela.

It seems odd to center a review of a book about calling on the idea of not being called. But in this deeply personal work about the deeply personal idea of vocation, the chapter that stood out the most to me was in the very center.

In the chapter on “Calling,” the fifth out of nine, Karen Swallow Prior writes,1

This is by no means the most eloquent or beautifully written passage of the book. It is neither poetic nor particularly profound, at least not when compared to other sections that leaped off the page. But it struck me personally because it met me where I am right now.

I read You Have a Calling: Finding Your Vocation in the True, Good & Beautiful in two parts. The first was in e-book form as an ARC through NetGalley, and the second was in the lovely little hardback edition that came in the mail just before I left for vacation at the Outer Banks. I began reading the digital version because it was available sooner than the hardcover, and I knew I would want to write about it on Substack; it was practical, accessible, and quick. But I savored the paper copy in the car as we drove to the ocean, on a third-floor porch at the beach house we rented for four precious fleeting days, and in bed tucked beneath clean white sheets that I didn’t have to wash. It was a vocation read, not a vacation read, but what I read of work and calling blended very well with the beauty and goodness I was enjoying on our trip.

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This little beach getaway came just as this summer is ending, and as I am looking forward to a new school year that will be different from any I have had before. I have been in some form of college classes at some time during every year since 2017, but this semester is my first time experiencing full-time academic work. Before this I was always either working full-time or parenting at home full-time. This year, I am shifting gears, and this shift has brought with it a good deal of anxiety and angst. Is this English degree a good use of my time and our family finances? Is the pursuit of a writing or academic career the best thing I could be doing? Should I be at home with my children, or working a more prosaic job to provide for them? How do I balance school and work and paying for childcare and doing childcare and being present for my family and volunteering with my church and doing all the things that are important to me in just twenty-four hours a day? And what exactly does God want me to be doing right now?

I have to admit I picked up You Have a Calling hoping it would give me a straightforward answer. It did not. But, as Prior makes clear in the opening pages, that is not this book’s job. There is no One Best Way for the Christian life, for the abundant life. Each of us has a journey to discover our own calling, and that calling may look a lot more like ordinary work and a lot less like beatific vision than we may prefer. And in reading about the truth, goodness, and beauty that can be found in doing ordinary work with all my might, I felt a greater sense of peace about letting some of my work take a season of rest right now. When I am sorting through my schedule and figuring out where I can fit in writing between work and teaching and studying and making meals and doing laundry, I am often overcome with a feeling that I need to be doing more, as if there is some sort of tangible inspiration I need to take hold of lest it pass me by. If I don’t write now, if I don’t outline and edit and publish and “““network,””” I will miss out on… what? If I don’t respond right away to a request for assistance—someone to help out at youth group, someone to serve in the nursery—I will let down… who?

Hard work is its own reward, certainly, but frenetic, finger-in-every-pie energy that allows for no honing and specialization is not so much hard work as it is manic busyness, and I see in myself a tendency to the latter. I am not indispensable, and though there are needs pressing in on every side, there is community rising up all around me as well. Every opportunity is not a call to me. Part of the ability to say no, I think, is grounded in humility: the painful but necessary realization that I cannot do it all. Nor am I called to.

In chapter seven, “The True,” Prior writes,2

This fall I will be focusing my strength on nurturing my children in the shorter hours I have with them, studying and reading as diligently as I can, spending time with the people I love, and keeping my house from dissolving into an actual pigsty. I will probably write here on Substack less. I will likely read fewer books “for fun.” I will set strict boundaries around my work in ESL ministry, and channel my time and talents into making my classroom the best it can be—and, no matter how fun it sounds, let someone else chaperone the teens to the trampoline park. (Youth group will still be there in a few years, after all.)

In the chapter on “The Transcendentals,” Prior writes,3

As I write about this book I am conscious that I am not writing a traditional review. I am writing about how this book spoke to me, personally, subjectively, and not attempting to make a generalized recommendation to everyone reading this post. Certainly I think you should read it. I think you may take something different from it than I did, and that is the point. In reading about and pondering my own calling, I felt a clear and gentle motivation to step back. Perhaps you will read this book and feel called forward. I hope, whatever the outcome, that you will find it true, good & beautiful. And that you will be as amused as I was to spot the reference to the menswear guy on Twitter.

Today I have the honor of featuring a writer I know from The Internet World but whom I have actually gotten to meet in person! You’ll have to read to the end to see the ridiculous photo we took together in 2024. is the author of Socially Awkward, and The Proper Care and Feeding of Singles, and the director of literary services at Build a Better Us. She writes here on Substack. You might remember a recent piece we collaborated on, In Defense of Middle-Grade Bangers. Ruth is a dedicated, energy-brimful writer who inspires me to work hard and not take myself too seriously. Interviewing her was a delight!

What do you write about?

Offline, I'm the author of five plays, nine books, and countless articles and essays. No matter the topic, framework, or genre, everything I write seems to carry a thread of humor running all the way through. I've written about a woman who breaks her ankle and thinks she's being stalked by a serial killer (the Collapsible series), a heartwarming tale of holiday mayhem (Murder on Birchardville Hill), a book about being a single woman of a certain age in the American Evangelical church (The Proper Care and Feeding of Singles), a book about how all stories point back to the Creator (The Cross in the Culture) and perhaps the book baby I'm proudest of at the moment, a book about having hard conversations about topics that matter (Socially Awkward: Pressing Through Discomfort to Engage Tough Topics).

I also have some unpublished manuscripts floating around on submission through my literary agent, Rachel McMillian. But we shall not speak of this because it makes me want to throw up in a trash can.

Online, I mostly write about reading, writing, and absolute nonsense.

Here on Substack, I just tend to play around, have fun, and write about life's little adventures and foibles, like how I recently fell down the stairs and broke my foot. (Sorrows!)

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

Honestly, I sometimes I wish I'd chosen just one topic.

But I have ADHD. Literally. Diagnosed. And it affects my writing life. My brain chooses topics and obsessions, and I follow my interests.

It's extremely creatively enriching, though I will admit, confusing for branding purposes.

How long have you been writing on Substack?

According to my Dashboard, I joined in June of 2020.

What other bylines have you had in the past?

Before Substack, I was writing on Wordpress, and before that I was on Blogspot, and before that it was LiveJournal, and before that it was embarrassing diaries and unhinged personal letters to friends.

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work, and tell us a little about each one.

The Men on the Internet Have Something to Say: Some thoughts on going viral as a single woman on the internet.

Because We Carry It Well: Co-writer Lacey Keigley and I discuss what "handling it well" and making it look so easy" really feels like.

Hi, It's Me. The Potato Girl.: In which I attend a speed dating event and talk way too much about potatoes.

The Time I Called 911 on My Run: No, really. I did. It was terrifying.

5 Signs You're Not Living in a Rom-Com: Alas.

Who is one other Substack writer you admire? (Link to one of their pieces.)

I love reading my friend Lacey's essays over on So Every Day! Lacey writes oodles of beautiful personal essays rooted in her everyday life, like this recent one about The Coldplay Kiss Cam Debacle from her perspective as someone who, in her words, "has also been surprised by adultery."

Amy here. I love Ruth’s ability to distill a profound sentiment into a few well-chosen words. I think that’s why her piece Things Are Things resonated with me so deeply. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it too, and that you’ll subscribe to for writing encouragement, funny memoir, and reflections on reading well.

In August 2024, I had the privilege of hanging out with Ruth in person at a writers’ meetup, and she signed my copy of Socially Awkward. I was appropriately, and awkwardly, awe-struck. :)

Long before I had this Substack, I had an old-fashioned Blogger blog. On Blogspot. And in those merry days of writing about anything and everything related to Jane Austen and period dramas and a great deal of absolute nonsensicality, I made some dear friends. Some of those have passed in and out of my life as is the way of things. And some have stuck around, and the Internet has kept us bound together over a matter of… well, decades now. One of those latter ones is . I am honored to call her a friend (though we’ve never met in person!) and delighted to share some highlights of her writing with you today. We have both come a long way since the early blogging days (listen, there’s a good reason why I’m not linking my old blog here— the fact that she still willingly reads my work to this day is a testament to loyalty!) and her intelligent literary analysis is an absolute day-making treat when it lands in my inbox. I’m delighted to share this interview with all of you!

What do you write about?

Books worth reading, ideas worth considering, beauty worth seeing. Mostly I write about books, but I share anything beautiful and thought-provoking. I focus on topics that give me a sense of longing for eternity, and subjects that I think will touch that longing in others. I try to offer something a little different, most often by talking about books that are worth being more widely known, and sometimes by taking a slightly different angle on a common topic. Mirrored Longings comes from Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt: “I found lines that mirrored an ache and longing I had so often felt when the beauty around my woods cathedral was too intense, when the need to grasp and keep loveliness left me with a sense of desolate frustration.” The ache is still there, but it’s shared, and that helps.

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

It felt like the best way to sum up my life: orienting myself to what is most beautiful, while looking for meaning in the darkness. I’ve gone through phases where I felt different and lonely for experiencing those longings. The evangelical church of my childhood reverted to easy answers and Christianese, yet my parents were handing me Les Misérables and “Babette’s Feast.” Clearly there was a way to be a person of faith without shushing my mind or disguising my heart! Over the years, I’ve come to find every longing I have mirrored in literature, friendship, art, faith, and the great tradition of being human. There truly is nothing new under the sun, and I love that. I hope my writing mirrors others’ longings, too, and makes the world feel a little less lonely.

How long have you been writing on Substack?

I started Mirrored Longings in February 2024. By that time, I had enjoyed following other writers on Substack for long enough to know I would be a good neighbor on the platform. It took a while for the concept of my little corner to emerge. I wanted to keep a publishing schedule and have enough writing topics jotted down so I wouldn’t feel desperate for ideas. I hadn’t poured into my creative writing since college (I focused on academic writing through grad school, and then needed a break) so it’s been wonderful to find that side of myself again.

What other bylines have you had in the past?

My writing self needed a long winter’s nap after my MA, so I haven’t submitted my writing to many places. I’ve published at Jokien with Tolkien most recently. My MA thesis on a feminist/abolitionist, Witness to Liberty: Angelina Grimké’s Abolitionary Exegesis, is on ProQuest under my maiden name Cantwell. No one, least of all me, expects anyone to read their MA thesis, but it’s brought me some interesting connections and speaking opportunities.

Please share a few links to your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

“The Swastika and the Crucifix: Day of No Return by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor” profiles a gobsmacking 1942 book by a forgotten writer. It’s a marvelous look at the German Lutheran church in the 1930s and has one of the best sermons in all of literature.

“Great Christian Literary Fiction” was a labor of love. I enjoy books old and new and don’t think “Christian fiction” is entirely made up of Amish romance novels. We are “the test of time” and I am doing what I can to make sure modern books I love will last: “Living authors are our neighbors. Reading their books is neighborly, especially for those who hope to be published one day…Stewarding the fledgling reputations of new books is neighborliness to future readers.”

“Jo March & Guy Morville: Following a Thread in Little Women” was the most fun research I’ve done for Mirrored Longings (which is saying a lot because research is my favorite part). I found the book Jo March wants in chapter 1 of Little Women and the book she cries over in chapter 3 (they’re connected), discovered the most convincing inspiration for Laurie along the way, and met a new Victorian author to enjoy, Charlotte Mary Yonge.

“Love Makes One a Better Person: Irene Hunt’s Up a Road Slowly” covers one of my favorite vintage young adult novels, and gives the full story behind the name Mirrored Longings. If you love Anne Shirley, Betsy Ray, and Marianne Dashwood, Julie Trelling is waiting to meet you!

“Art and the Difficult Artist: A Still More Excellent Way” gave me a chance to wrestle with artists and historical figures whose moral choices fall short of the moral and aesthetic beauty of their creations. It was hard and rewarding to write, contains a cool story about Charles Dickens, and is the fruit of many years of working on this topic for myself. I often need my own advice: “Setting things in context involves nuance, and nuance is a hard task. It requires careful thinking, further research, and more words. Walking the middle way of nuance keeps us from the extremes of fanaticism for idols who can do no wrong, or narrow-mindedness that fearfully rejects art.”

Who is one other Substack writer you admire? (Link to one of their pieces.)

Dominika, at Gathering Light, convinced me to read Guard Your Daughters by Diana Tutton in one sentence: “Pandora, Thisbe, our narrator Morgan, Cressida, and Teresa have had an unconventional, often scattered, and mainly artistic education at home.” I needed to meet the literary family who gave five daughters those names! Dominika is Substack’s queen of 20th century women writers, and I adore her focus on retrieving women writers who have been obscured by literary history. She is effortlessly funny and deep in the same article and I always save her posts to read when I can immerse myself in her writing.

Amy here. Whenever I settle in for a Melody post, I know I am in for a treat. I don’t open her emails right away; I savor them. Because of this it was very hard to pick a favorite piece of my own to link! I'm choosing From Page to Screen because it offers insights I had not considered about a film I didn't enjoy as much as Melody did. But that's exactly what good literary analysis should do! I highly recommend subscribing to for the improvement of your mind— and the delight.

Mirrored Longings

From Page to Screen

Like many other readers who enjoy movies, I often watch literary adaptations. Often, the conversation pivots to book vs. film: of course the book must be better! So much is lost from page to screen! That’s not a choice The Author (read: I) would have made! And so on, and so forth, and what have you. The conversation often spirals down to the same dredge…

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2 years ago · 7 likes · 13 comments · Melody Schwarting

When my grandfather was in the hospital nearing the end of his life, there was a whiteboard in his ICU room listing the care goals for the day. He didn’t have many, and the section for “Respiratory” had been left blank by the nurses. But when I went to see him for the very last time—the day that he died, in fact—one of my cousins had written on the whiteboard. In sloppy green marker it said “Respiration: Hut Hut!”

For years and years, I didn’t know this was military slang that had entered the American lexicon by way of football. I just thought it was something Pop-pop said. It was his trademark sound for entering a room, for clearing his throat, for setting up a grandchild with a baseball bat and the proper stance for hitting a tennis ball clear across the back yard. When my oldest cousin was a toddler, family lore says he marched around the house after Pop-pop as soon as he learned to walk, wearing a too-big baseball cap and shouting, “Hut hut!”

I thought of that scribbled note as I composed a eulogy for my grandfather. His forty years of grandparenting and the ten grandchildren that tagged after him, eating his breakfast off his plate and asking him to play chess, spanned vastly different lifetimes and experiences. There were six boys and four girls and it was rare that we were all in the same room at the same time. One of us left this world before Pop-pop did. There wasn’t much that we all had in common, except Grandmom and Pop-pop and the warm detergent scent of their vast old house. And every one of us remembered the “hut-hut.” When I brought up this and other anecdotes at the funeral, it steadied my voice to see my cousins laughing through their tears.

My grandfather lived a long, full life. When he passed at 88, we’d known the end was coming. That didn’t make it easier, but it helped us prepare.

Last week, I lost my friend Holly. It seems almost wrong, selfish maybe, to say that I lost my friend. She was not just my friend. She was a wife and mother and grandmother and a friend to far more people than just me. To phrase it this way seems like I am claiming some right to mourn harder than others, and that’s not what I’m trying to do. But the hole she has left in my life is no less significant because she was loved by so many.

Holly was here one day, and then she wasn’t. She was a force to be reckoned with, a constant drive for kindness and service and helping people who needed tangible love and support, and then a devastating brain bleed took her out. The last email exchange I had with her is from just a few days before she went into the ICU. We were talking about plans for the next school year, for the English as a Second Language (ESL) class we teach together—taught together— the class I will go back to in September without her.

Maybe I should have waited until I had more closure to write this, until it was less fresh and raw, but I’m doing it anyway.

When Holly was in the ICU, a group of us from our church who knew and loved her gathered to pray and process together. As we talked, we realized each woman in the circle had come that night thinking she had something special to offer the group, a close connection with Holly that the others had not had the gift of experiencing. But in reality we’d all been made to feel like her dearest and closest friend. She had been there for some of us for decades, and for others (me) just a few years, but we each knew her intimately in a different way. And each of us had a story about how she had, somehow or other, roped us into helping somehow.

Holly was not the kind of person to guilt-trip. You know the kind of “church lady” who makes you feel like you’re somehow letting Jesus down if you don’t show up to stack chairs after a potluck? She wasn’t like that. She didn’t deal in making people feel bad. Instead, she showed up first and then came to you privately, laid her hand on your arm, looked up into your eyes (she was quite short!) and said, “I have been thinking and praying about this, and I think you are perfect for this role.” And then she would tell you where help was needed, whether it was collecting donations for a refugee family or providing transportation for an elderly lady or teaching an English class even when you think you can’t do it.

I cried so much that night. My friends cried so much that night. (I thought I had cried all my tears, but! guess what! I have more, spilling out even as I write this!) But even as we cried together and passed around a box of tissues, we were laughing about the memories we all had in common. The little things, like that arm grip and the earnest stare into your soul. “I have been thinking and praying about this…”

How could you say no to someone whose whole life was one generous, hands-outstretched yes?

Neither my grandfather nor my friend lived in the public eye. Their obituaries, though filled with love, listed no great deeds. They hit the high points: born, educated, married, worked, gave, loved, died. There was no mention of their idiosyncrasies, the way they said things and the kind of cake they liked to eat. Anyone can read a funeral home webpage and find out where the departed went to school; only those who knew them will remember the face they made when someone said something stupid.

It is the biggest things that will be remembered publicly. But it is the little ones that bind those of us who remain together. For many years to come— I hope— people who remember little bits of Holly and little bits of Pop-pop will gather and share those memories. I felt this last week as I stood beside my aunt at my brother’s wedding reception, watching a horde of young people stomp and turn and clap. “Remember Pop-pop dancing at Carolyn’s wedding?” I asked her. “He was so into it. He’d be right out there with them right now.”1 And suddenly we both welled up. It hurt a little to cry at such a happy moment, and at the same time it was like that shimmer of ozone after a rain, a gentle warmth.

As I thought about grief and loss and the ties that bind this week, I read a post from a dear writing friend who is going through something very similar. Isn’t it funny how that happens? She wrote poignantly about missing those who have loved us into being, and it struck a chord for me.

Jeannie Prinsen

Missing one of my saints

I was initially going to say something about this in my previous post, but it just wasn’t fitting or adequate to classify it as “What I’ve been up to…

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9 months ago · 2 likes · 7 comments · Jeannie Prinsen

Christmas will come again this year and Pop-pop won’t be there, won’t make that weird yodeling noise when he opens a jar of the chocolate buttercreams I made for him. I will make the buttercreams anyway, and the rest of my family will eat them. They never fail me in this endeavor. This fall I will teach ESL again, and I will step into that classroom without Holly. When I write new vocabulary words too high on the whiteboard, she will not be there to gently rib me about making sure I wipe them off, since she can’t reach. I will tell my incoming students about her. I will probably cry. I will definitely cry. The new intro-level class will not know her. But I will remember. I will pass out books she chose and purchased, and consult notes that she wrote.

She was left-handed. Did you know that? I knew.

I’ve been having such fun sharing the work of online writer friends in this summer showcase! Today’s guest is , whom I first met on Twitter during (I think? it’s hard to remember now!!) the lockdowns of 2020. She’s a deeply intelligent and thoughtful person and I’ve learned a lot from her measured, well-researched prose (be it in article form or tweet thread form).

What do you write about?

I can usually be found on or near the intersection of theology and history, especially women's history. I'm particularly interested in understanding why women are drawn to patriarchy, and in some cases become more passionate defenders of it than men. The "big idea" I'm working with right now is that patriarchy was initiated by the woman's desire for the man's "patronage" in Genesis 3:16; in other words patriarchy doesn't happen because the man clubs the woman over the head and drags her to his cave, it happens because the woman turns from trusting in God, to trusting in the man. This was the theme of my master's thesis, and the theme of the project I'm currently working on for the Anastasis Center for Christian Education and Ministry - a video series called "It's a Man's World: The Genesis 3:16 Effect." It's an endlessly fascinating idea to me, because I think it challenges a lot of popular assumptions about the power dynamics of gender on both sides of the issue. Basically what I am arguing is that men and women build patriarchy together because they both believe that it's an arrangement that will benefit them, but in the end it harms both sexes, just in different ways.

Why did you choose this theme/topic?

I have a passion for helping women find or rediscover their Christian faith outside the world of high-control religion, especially Christian patriarchy. Having grown up in a home shaped by the teachings of Bill Gothard, I've seen the harm of patriarchal authoritarianism up close from a pretty young age. My own deconstruction of Christian patriarchy led me to an interest in theology and the historical roots of modern Christian fundamentalism, which I've been writing about in some shape or form since 2017. My favorite thing is when a reader will say, "You put words into what I was feeling but didn't know how to say." I think there's so much power in finding the right words.

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How long have you been writing on Substack?

About two years. Like a lot of people here, I started exploring Substack after Twitter turned into "X." I'm still on X, because I hate myself I guess, but I am trying to slowly diversify my social media reach.

What other bylines have you had in the past?

I've had articles published in Fathom Magazine, Current Pub, and of course my current project with the Anastasis Center. Back in the day (before I switched to Christian writing), I also wrote for Arc Digital, Parenting Co., and even the Federalist, although there's been a LOT of water under the bridge since then!

Please share a few of your favorite pieces of work and tell us a little about each one.

"It's a Man's World: Episode 1: Why We Trust the Man of Dust"
This is a preview episode of "It's a Man's World" that we've released early. It discusses a lot of the things I've talked about here, and considers what Adam's identification as the "man of dust" (1 Corinthians 15:48, Genesis 3:17-19) means for patriarchy, as an institution. We discuss the benefits that men can experience from rejecting the myth of male invincibility and embracing their "dustiness."

Profiling Key Figures in the Biblical Womanhood Movement
This was my first foray into video content, and I'm pretty proud of myself for barreling through the whole series even though I didn't really know what I was doing. I learned a lot, not just about the women I was profiling, but about creating video content in general! The series profiles eight women who, in one way or another, made the biblical womanhood movement what it is today. I profile some pretty big names, like Elisabeth Elliot and Edith Schaeffer, but I also profile some lesser-known women who are important to the story, like Helen Andelin and Susan Foh.

It's Not Marriage; It's the People: Singlehood, Marriage and the Spectre of Mr. Collins
I absolutely adored writing this piece. It's so self-indulgent: it's got fundie stuff, history, and Jane Austen. It started off as a response to an article that was saying singlehood isn't good, and by the end of it I basically walk the reader through I think three scenarios in Jane Austen where you see why "Young people should try harder to get married!" is a really silly position to take.

Field Notes From the Basic Seminar: The pathos - and consequences - of our wanting to be shiny happy people
This one is a combination of personal memoir, and commentary on Bill Gothard's "Basic Seminar," which my family went to countless times. After "Shiny, Happy People" came out, I wanted to write something that would go more in-depth into the Seminar, which was a huge part of the Gothard empire. Since I was too young to attend the adult seminar back when we were going, I actually made myself watch the whole thing (25 hours!) online in preparation for doing this article. It was an absolutely hare-brained idea and nobody gets paid enough freelancing to be worth that pain, but it built character ... I think?

We Need to Stop Using 'Did God Really Say ...?' as a Shorthand for Moral Permissiveness
This one tackles one of my pet peeves: turning Genesis 3:1 into a clobber text to unquestioningly accept rigid moral standards that are (allegedly) derived from the Bible. The temptation of Eve is actually teaching the opposite lesson: Satan makes sin seem attractive by making God seem restrictive.

Who is one other Substack writer you admire?

There are so many, but if I have to pick one, I really appreciate ’s work. We have some areas of overlapping experience but he brings a really unique perspective because military service is part of his story too. In the piece I'm in the Lord's Army, he draws out the similarities between the military-esque A.L.E.R.T. program for teenage boys (part of the Bill Gothard/Institute in Basic Life Principles extended universe), "Biblical" parenting methods a la James Dobson, and actual military conditioning, all of which are aimed at producing instant obedience by stunting critical thinking. I loved this piece because it was something I had vaguely intuited, but I hadn't heard someone who had actually gone on to serve in the military talk about this before.

Amy again. I love that piece Rachel linked about Mr. Collins and singleness—if you haven’t clicked it yet, I urge you to go back and read it! It’s my top recommendation of hers but she’s written many other articles I’ve thoroughly enjoyed, including We Need to Talk about TLC and the Public’s Complicity in the Duggar Kids’ Commodification. Rachel does such a great job of quantifying exactly why family-oriented “reality” TV gives me the ick! Don’t miss Rachel’s new video series on the celebrity-driven biblical womanhood movement of the 20th century, and subscribe to her Substack at .

I’m a regular Aldi shopper, cruising the aisles with my son almost every week now that I’m an independent adult who has her act together, or at least some semblance of such a thing. But my history with Aldi goes back a lot further — all the way to my preschool years when my mom first began shopping there. It’s safe to say I have insider knowledge at this point.

Aldi isn’t like your typical grocery store, where shopping carts are wild and free and cashiers slowly bag your items — which you chose, willy-nilly, from a staggering array of options — as you wait in an interminable line. Aldi is hip and European and fast-paced and clean and tiny, as dizzyingly foreign from the American supermarket experience as a corporate chain can be.

When I arrive at Aldi, I have a system. Load my two-year-old into the baby seat of a massive cart, place my stash of reusable bags on the seat beside the toddler, argue with my four-year-old about sitting in the cart (and eventually agree to let him walk alongside IF he doesn’t take things off the shelves), and stick my quarter into the cart’s greedy cash receptacle — oh, yes, you have to pay for the carts here, but you get your money back when you plug the cart back into the corral system before you leave. It keeps costs down (fewer stolen or lazily lost carts) because everyone wants their quarter back at the end of the trip. You actually can’t buy anything for 25 cents these days, but psychology is a funny thing.

Today, I am prepared with my own quarter. Other times, I’ve forgotten it and have had to scour the corral for a Good Samaritan cart. This is an unofficial bit of Aldi folklore — though most carts are returned according to the system and money accordingly pocketed, every so often someone decides to do a random act of kindness and leave a cart in the corral with the quarter still inserted.

Or maybe they just didn’t realize that you’re supposed to take the quarter out by connecting the cart’s chain to the one behind it in line.

Either way, it makes a nice fallback for those of us who occasionally forget to bring cold, hard cash.

(Of course, if no quarters and no freebie carts are available, a desperate shopper could always approach a departing fellow customer and offer a dollar in exchange for their cart, prompting the other — in many if not most cases — to graciously surrender the cart for free. This exchange, though good at restoring that ever-crumbling faith in humanity, is nonetheless embarrassing for the freeloader.)

At Aldi, shoppers bring their own reusable bags, to save the planet or save money — it’s not clear which. Suckers who didn’t know this are forced to shell out for admittedly sturdy paper sacks at the checkout, or roam the aisles looking for abandoned cardboard boxes in which to tote their comestibles. I watch as a man in flip-flops and sweats shifts lunchmeat and cheese from one arm to the other, freeing up a hand to grab coffee creamer, and gazing around uncertainly for a lone box. From my smug vantage point (pushing a cart loaded with cloth bags), I wish I could offer one, but I haven’t spotted any. It’s a busier morning than usual, and there are no boxes unclaimed.

As aforementioned, Aldi keeps their costs tamped down pretty low in comparison with other markets. (For reference, I usually spend around $100-$120 for a week’s worth of food, toiletries, and household goods like soap and paper towels, for a family of four.) In olden times, they offered only one kind of each item they carried. You want to buy sandwich cookies? OK. Here’s a generic 24-pack in plain chocolate with vanilla filling. That is the only flavor. That is the only size. Eat it and be thankful. Oreo who?

If you’re loyal to particular brand names, Aldi is probably not the one-stop shop for you. But if you’re okay with bedecking your pantry with Baker’s Corner flour or sugar and Happy Harvest canned vegetables, and filling your fridge with Countryside Creamery butter and Tuscan Garden salad dressing, you’ll quickly find that the taste quality is just the same as the fancier, more expensive varieties with recognizable and sometimes dastardly trademarks.

I should probably note that Aldi isn’t paying me to say any of this. If they’d like to fund my writing whimsy, I’m certainly open to corporate sponsorship (whether in cold hard cash or in a free supply of Benton’s cookies) but for now, I write only out of the goodness of my heart, and my desire that all humanity shall see and hear of the glory that is the Aldi supermarket chain.

That reminds me, I need to grab a 99-cent bag of baby carrots and a $2.45 jar of the best mild salsa my delicate wimpy taste buds have ever experienced.

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As I shop for groceries, I prefer to stick to a prewritten list (see above notes regarding Thrift and Budgeting and Spending Less Than $150 Every Week). This resolve is usually thwarted at least once by what I like to call the Valley of Temptation aisle. Located near the back of the store, featuring BUY NOW! closeouts and extra-discounted extraordinary extra overstock, the Valley of Temptation aisle is very good at convincing me that I absolutely NEED to buy a lawn sprinkler for a lawn I do not possess. Today, I manage to avoid the siren call of the autumn-scented candles and frosted Halloween giant cookie kits, and succumb only to an adorable egg slicer shaped like a cartoon hen.

…Which is slightly disturbing imagery, if you think about it too hard.

One more note, before we proceed to checkout: though the imported German foods usually featured on aisle endcaps are certainly not as cheap as many other Aldi branded goods, I have yet to be disappointed when I pick up a new-to-me treat. The Deutsche Küche cornichons with herbs (a savory pickle) are a favorite of my husband’s, and I am probably going to yield some day soon to the irresistible magnetism of the frozen Bavarian soft pretzels. Today, I content myself with a box of raspberry jaffa cakes (a seasonal item usually only available around the time of Oktoberfest).

The speed with which the Aldi checkout line functions is bewildering to a first-timer, a marvel to the newly initiated, and blasé to an old salt like me. As the next customer in line unloads their groceries onto the belt, the cashier — lightning-fast, robotic-precise — sweeps the items over the scanner and into a second, waiting cart on the other side of the register. Once the transaction is complete, that customer’s old cart is brought forward to house the groceries of the next player in the game.

Got it? Hold onto it. There’ll be a quiz at the end.

Babies strapped into cart seats complicate the issue. It slows the whole clockwork process down if a parent has to haul a struggling chubby bundle from one cart to the next, transferring sippy cup, toy, and handle cover as well. I brace myself to ask if the usual rigmarole can be upended to inconvenience the entire line because of my inconsiderate reproductive choices, but the cashier — a man who is new to the store, but apparently old hat to this kind of problem — is one step ahead of me. “Leave the baby where he is,” he calls down the conveyor belt, and pushes the extra cart aside.

I tumble my groceries onto the belt as fast as I can, trying not to keep the people behind me waiting. I shouldn’t have worried. The cashier moves my groceries back into my original cart as quickly as if there’d been no break in the action, and (as I’ve been implicitly trained to do) I insert my credit card into the reader before he’s scanned the last item. In what feels like a few seconds, I’ve paid, gotten my receipt, and moved on to bag my own groceries at the counter along the far wall.

I could go on and on with this exercise in writing about a mundane weekly mission, but I’ll save the enthralling process of unloading groceries with a hungry toddler in tow for another day.

I promised a quiz at the end, so here goes (it’s a short one, don’t worry): are you an Aldi shopper? If not, has this piece convinced you to become one? And if you don’t have an Aldi in your neighborly vicinity, how do you cope with the tears of grief that bedew your pillow at night? I could use some tips, in case my store ever closes.

A version of this post was originally published on Medium.com.