This Remembrance Sunday marks two years since I attended my first Quaker meeting at Friends’ House, in London. It wasn’t an entirely typical meeting. There were a number of people there specifically to mark Remembrance, among them several members of Veterans for Peace. While my own attendance was triggered by an interest in Quakerism that …
Writing For Myself
Blogging about NaNoWriMo as though the US election isn’t looming over all of us — yes, even those of us who aren’t American — feels strange. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from 2020, it’s that there’s absolutely no point waiting for things to be normal again. Because something is always happening, and that …
Grief Nonlinear
Content warning: this post is about grief and contains references to suicide. I am always haunted at Hallowe’en. Not by ghosts in white sheets or creepy faces at the window. Just the kind of ghosts that live inside your head, half-forgotten until something draws them back to the surface and then all of a sudden …
The Case for Queer Theory in Celtic Studies
Most of you have heard enough about my research interests to last a lifetime, but for those who may have stumbled on my blog for the first time, one of my primary areas of academic interest is queer readings of medieval Irish literature. In particular, I look at the Ulster Cycle, and I’m fascinated by …
Making Peace With The Unfinished
So I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I kind of suck at blogging these days. I’m not going to apologise for that, because frankly I’ve made excuses for it enough times that you all knew what you were getting into when you subscribed anyway, but I am going to say that radio silence for …
The Story So Far
In my last post, I shared the news that I signed with an agent, Jessica Hare, for my novel Butterfly of Night (and hopefully many more). I had enough interest in that news to make it feel worthwhile to write a follow-up post giving a bit more information about the whole process and how it …
Agents, Avoiding Reality, and The Future™
This isn’t really a blog post, as such — I seem to have lost the knack of that. I thought when the lockdown started I might start blogging regularly (to track the passing of days, if nothing else; to leave some record of all this that’s more comprehensible than my scribbled journal), but the fact …
Truth, Names, and Choice
I don’t really make New Year’s Resolutions anymore. They’re too much pressure, and the emphasis on success or failure to achieve some arbitrary change no longer seems like a particularly helpful way of approaching things. But it’s still nice to see a new year as an opportunity to begin some new project, or set oneself …
Dancer In Recovery
I am trying to remember how my body works. No, that’s not quite right. I know how it works. I know the stiffness of my knees in the morning, the strain of that early cycle into work. I know the clicks and clunks of my spine as I shift in an uncomfortable chair, the way …
Dear Younger Me, from the Future
I thought about writing a regular post summing up the past year and the decade before it, but that seemed like a cliché, so I decided instead to write a letter to my younger self — the person I was as the year turned from 2009 to 2010. Dear younger me, It’s hard to know …