"The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields

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What song would you use to describe your current relationship?

The first song that came to mind was Riki Lindhome's "Middle Age Love," because we've been together for almost 27 years and still find each other super attractive. But I wanted a less explicit choice so I picked "The Book of Love." It's long and boring, like our relationship might look to people outside of it, but I love so much of what my husband does.

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"I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by The Proclaimers

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Describe the perfect song for a road trip and why it works.

This song starts every road trip our family takes, as an homage to its use in How I Met Your Mother. The driving beat is perfect for that early road trip energy.

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I had two newsletters in my inbox today that talked about the value of diving into an author’s complete works or backlist, A Love Letter to the Single Author Course by Ravynn K. Stringfield and Your next best friend by Austin Kleon.

Stringfield says,

To follow an author across the trajectory of their life, see how their styles and ideals changed over time, watch them venture into different forms and genres, was captivating. It was like the most immersive psychology class you could imagine. Under the guidance of the right professor and with appropriate supplementary materials—not just secondary sources, but writing by others that perhaps the author in question may have been inspired by or inspired with their own work—important cultural moments could be rendered in sharp relief. Literary disputes made as lively as any reality TV beef. Portraits of artistic communities shone. So much could be gleaned from taking an intentional walk through just one person’s corpus.

Kleon says,

We spend a lot of our lives as readers on the search for new books. But how many great books are already waiting for us on our shelves? How many favorite authors would we form deep relationships with if we simply read or re-read a few more of their books?

In the Discord community for the Fated Mates podcast, I’ve seen several of us do this with a particular author. Especially rewarding for me has been reading Sarah MacLean’s adult (as opposed to young adult) novels, watching her grow from writing the Regency ballrooms that populate so much of historical romance into creating a Victorian-era girl gang dealing out justice to people who are extra misogynistic as a backlist to Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne. I love tracking features MacLean returns to and evolves. For example, her books usually include a high-emotion scene tied to some incredible location—an underwater ballroom, a bench where if you whisper on one end another person sitting on the other hand can hear you perfectly as if you were right next to them. But then she evolves this, so in a book where characters are on the road for much of the book, she deploys a gorgeous puzzle box in exactly the same way she deploys these magical locations and it’s a joy to behold.

I think it would be fascinating to take a romance author’s work—Stringfield suggests that Beverly Jenkins is ripe for this treatment—and dig into not just the texts themselves, but the texts the author might have been reading, the world events happening while they were writing.

I listened to the Fifty Shades of Grey episode of Fated Mates yesterday and in that, Sarah MacLean talks about how romance writers are all reading each other’s works and having a conversation in their books. Her casino series, The Rules of Scoundrels, was a response to J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood. I suspect MacLean’s series influenced Joanna Shupe’s casino book, The Prince of Broadway.

This makes me think of the concept of scenius, which Brian Eno coined but I learned of through Kleon’s work. What can we learn about the creative network present in an author’s life by doing a single author study either individually or as part of a group or class?

What authors’ backlists have you explored? Whose would you like to?

This week is National Library Week in the US and today is Right to Read Day. @cygnoir@social.lol wrote a great post about how you can show up for libraries. United Against Book Bans has a page on actions to take for Right to Read Day.

Here in North Carolina, I’m tracking House Bill 595, the latest parental rights bill filed. As soon as it’s moved far enough to go to a vote, I’ll be contacting my state legislators and urging then to vote NO on it.

Here are some of its chilling library-related provisions:

• placing responsibility for the selection of materials in the hands of superintendents and boards, instead of in the hands of library professionals with training and professional expertise in selecting materials
• requiring that all library books selected are “integral to the instructional program,” which will likely limit the purchasing of materials for students’ free choice of reading
• the creation of a “content access designation” (read: rating) system, flattening complex evaluation of books for a given community’s needs
• requiring that all materials selected be available for a 30 day review period by parents, which will place an immense administrative burden on library staff (I have a relatively small library budget and I order about 100 books at a time)
• the use of a broadly defined designation of “harmful to minors” as a test of whether materials should be included in a collection, which is likely to target books about growth, development, and anatomy as well as disproportionately target books with LGBTQ+ topics
• the establishment of standing “community library advisory committees” with as-yet-undefined requirements for membership, as opposed to ad hoc committees carefully curated to evaluate each materials challenge
• the requirement that every book made available in a book fair be reviewed by “appropriate school personnel,” which will generate a large administrative burden for library staff and, I anticipate, result in the reduction of book fairs and the resulting budget they provide for libraries without any alternate method of funding provided
• the criminalization of library staff who provide items deemed harmful to minors
• the ability for parents to demand access to a record of their child’s library borrowing
• the creation of restricted sections in public libraries, effectively requiring library staff to spend time reclassifying every work in a collection
• the creation of a special category of library cards for minors (another immense administrative burden)
• the revocation of library cards obtained by minors without their parents’ permission

Taken together, these provisions are likely to lead to librarian’s self-censorship in purchasing, administrative burdens grinding library services to a halt, library staff leaving the profession, school libraries losing funds, and most importantly, kids not having the materials they need to learn and grow as readers and people.

If you live in NC, please keep an eye on this bill and get ready to contact your state legislators about it. If you live elsewhere in the US, check EveryLibrary’s Legislation of Concern tracker to see what’s going on in your area.

Please join me in fighting for libraries. These are existential threats for libraries and library staff.

In November or December, I choose a word for the next year. Then for the first quarter of the new year, I try it out and see if it actually fits. If it doesn’t, I pick a new word to coincide with the spring equinox, the start of the western astrological year.

At the end of 2024, frustrated by the fact that all I did was work, sleep, read, and play video games, I chose the word “More” for 2025. I wanted to do more, connect more, pursue more.

But that’s not the word I’m finding myself living.

My new word for 2025 is “Enough.” Enough is the spirit of harm reduction. It’s enough to feed myself, even if what I feed myself is not what I have in the moments of my richest nutritional profile. It’s enough to do my job and keep myself and my child going.

Two books are really helping me feel into enough, even though I haven’t finished either of them yet:

• How to Keep House While Drowning by K. C. Davis
• Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

And in the spirit of enough, I’ve decided this blog post is long enough.

I haven’t been writing much lately, something that has special irony since on Sunday I took Sarah MacLean’s Start Your Romance Novel Today class. (Reader, I did not start my romance novel that day. Or rather, I started playing with several ideas for romance novels. But did not get any words down.)

I haven’t been writing for REASONS and reasons, but I think it would be good for me to blog a bit.

It’s just a hard time right now, you know? I subscribed to too many newsletters with action alerts. I think I need to scale back to just Bull City Indivisible. It’s just that they recommended all these other ones. But now I get overwhelmed and don’t read any of them, and that’s no way to be active in my community.

I hadn’t really thought of migraines as a condition where I have flares, but I’m beginning to, because I get these status migraines that go on and on. I’m seeking better treatment for them than I ever have before, and that’s promising, but still not enough.

I’m going to go put away laundry soon. That’s a thing I can do that will make my and my family’s world a little better.

I’m a big pile of meh today.

In her week notes, cygnoir links to my post, Political action guidance for the overwhelmed, and credits me as Dr. Kimberly Hirsh.

I appreciate the recognition of my title. I want to say though that I wouldn’t be grouchy to have been credited as Kimberly Hirsh.

I work at a Quaker school. All of us go by our first names, in keeping with the Quaker practice of plain speech and the testimony of equality. This does not make me grouchy.

When I get grouchy is when people insist on using a title and then call me Miss, Mrs., or Ms. Because I have a title and those aren’t it. If I haven’t told you my title is Dr., then I don’t mind you not using it. But if I have and you ignore it, that makes me grouchy.

So. If you want to avoid making me grouchy, here are ways I would like you to refer to me:

• Kimberly
• Kimberly Hirsh
• Dr. Kimberly Hirsh
• Dr. Hirsh

Any of those are fine. Feel like calling a person Dr. is elitist? Okay! Use my first name or full name.

(There is a whole deal I’m not even getting into here about untitling, mistitling, gender, race, and ethnicity. Explore it if you’re interested.)

Information is my love language and how I like to learn about the world, but I also can start to drown in too much of it and need to scale back. So if you are like me, especially right now when there is A Lot Going On, you might like to do what I’m doing.

For calls to action, I have picked one main issue to focus on (library advocacy) and follow a few organizations dedicated to that work (Every Library, For the People, ALA). For broader concerns, I am reading my local Indivisible group’s newsletter.

I am focused on taking one action daily, ideally one that doesn’t activate my nervous system extra. So today I emailed my senators and told them to vote NO on Vought’s confirmation. (Please don’t at me about the effectiveness of email vs. phone. Or how I should really show up in person. Please trust me to know my own availability and capability.) I also emailed my representative and asked her to demand accountability re: an unelected private person’s access to the treasury.

I am also trying to remember to do other things that keep me grounded, like crocheting and reading romance. I’m trying to find joy where I can.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: This was fun to do and after doing some reading, I’ve realized that for my purposes, I don’t actually need to know how to draw with CSS unless I decide to try and make some wacky layouts with shapes or something. In which case, I’ll review. But in the meantime, CSS is for styling HTML that structures content, just as I feel it should be. This project is not hard but I definitely had to use references sometimes. Which is fine! But slows things down a bit. For this project, the use of a checkbox gave me the idea to make this a Mystery Shack feedback form so I could use Mabel’s rigged “Do you like me?” form.

Link(s) to work: Mystery Shack Feedback survey

In Austin Kleon’s newsletter today, he writes about 7 questions he asks himself when he doesn’t know what to do next. (The newsletter has free editions on Fridays and paid ones on Tuesdays.)

At the end of the newsletter he asked his subscribers, “Do you have a question that helps you?”

My response got so big and I liked it so much, I decided to turn it into a blog post, so here you go!

I feel like I have stolen this like an artist in the best way, in that I’ve taken from multiple sources that get at this idea and combined them into something new:

“What does my body need right now?”

I manage multiple chronic illnesses, and the answer to that question can change from moment to moment. I often feel like a brain floating around in a meat cage. So I drop in to my body and see what it needs: water? A nap? A shower? A hug? Stillness? Motion?

Because I can’t do everything I need or want to do, I have to prioritize, and asking this question helps me choose what to do first, what to expend my energy on in a way that gives me hope of sustaining or even increasing my energy for the rest of the day.

In the coming days, I’ll be sharing resources for defending libraries in the United States. Today, I wanted to share the American Library Association’s form to tell Congress to show up for libraries.

According to ALA, personalizing messages increases the likelihood that congress members will respond to and act on them. Sometimes, I don’t have the brain power to do a good job of this, so I thought I’d share what I did today.

First, in the first paragraph I made sure to refer to myself as a supporter of the Durham County Library, rather than just saying “my local library.”

Then, I added a paragraph about specific library programs DCL offers that I think will resonate with my congresspeople. I focused on business and Maker/STEAM services.

In the last paragraph, I change “libraries” to “libraries in general and the Durham County Library specifically.”

I hope this is helpful. Maybe the institution you’re going to defend is something other than libraries. If so, see if organizations related to it have similar ways to help you take action.

Take care and stay safe, y’all.

I didn’t want to write this blog post in 2024. For reasons I cannot remotely explain, my gut/intuition/heart wanted to write this in the new year.

So here we are. I’m very sleepy.

I don’t make resolutions. Instead, I choose a word of the year (MORE) and I make a list of things I want to try. Here’s this year’s list:

1. To make something daily.
2. To write something daily.
3. To cook more.
4. To dig deep into my personal spiritual practices.

Those are the main ones. I’m sure others will pop up. I’ll document them when they do.

I mentioned in my month notes for September that I’ve been playing epistolary RPGs with my friend K.

K lives three states away from me and is a trailing spouse; his husband got a tenure-track professor job and as one does, K moved with him to the area where the university is. Unfortunately, the gaming scene there was… not what K was looking for. So in the hopes of combatting some of K’s trailing spouse isolation, we started a D&D game that we play over Zoom with a couple of our other friends who are local to me and thus also far from K.

But getting 4 busy people together at the same time is hard and that group will often go 9 months or more without playing.

I buy charity bundles on itch.io sometimes and I noticed that some of the games there are for only two people and are easy to play asynchronously, so I asked K if he wanted to try some of those and he did, so here we are.

The obvious benefits of this kind of game are that you can play it whenever one of you has time and the other can then catch up at their convenience. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but we play in a shared Google Doc we create for each game.

So far the games we’ve played have used a deck of cards, either standard playing cards or Tarot, to randomly select prompts for you to address in writing as you play.

I anticipated the gaming benefits of this style of play, but what’s been a delightful surprise is the effect it’s had on my writing and my writerly identity.

I thrive as a writer of fiction when I know there is an audience of at least one. In fifth grade, we had to write stories using vocabulary words and I wrote a series featuring characters based on my classmates. They eagerly awaited each new installment. In ninth grade, I wrote a story called The Hog Prince and shared it with friends.

I prefer writing fanfiction to writing original fiction partly because I know where to publish it and know that someone will read it.

An epistolary RPG means that the other player(s) are going to read what you wrote, so that audience I crave is built in, with no delays for publication.

Like fanfiction, when you’re writing in these games you kind of get to play with someone else’s toys. And when the players know each other well, you can give each other gifts in the text. You can make something appear that you don’t have a plan for but that you know another player will do something great with. Which is even nicer, I think, than just picking up and playing with toys that weren’t built for you.

A third piece of these games that makes them really work well for me is that they inherently require you to be creative within constraints. Kate Bingaman Burt gave a great TEDx talk about the value of these kind of constraints. I’m the kind of person who gets paralyzed by the number of choices available when doing something creative. I could write anything, so I don’t know how to begin, so I write nothing. The prompts in these games and the contributions of other players mean that I don’t have to choose a starting point, and that’s huge. And if I get stuck, well, soon I’ll have a new prompt to work with.

If you’ve been struggling to do creative writing, maybe find a way to make it a game. There are solo RPGs you can play this way, too, and maybe I’ll try one of those soon.

It’s been a full month since the official first day at my new job, and we’ve had the kids at school for three weeks. And, as you might expect, in that time I’ve learned some things.

There’s a 40-minute recess period before lunch and I have the library open during that time. Kids are welcome to come in, check out books, sit and read, or draw. In the first two weeks, I felt slammed during that time. There will often be a LOT of kids in the library. Maybe eventually I’ll actually count but all I know is it feels like maybe as many as 30 at a time. And inevitably 8 - 10 of these kids will require my help at once: to find a book, to check out a book, to suggest a book that we purchase. I am so glad they’re there, so happy that so many kids (there are about 130 at the school and I would guess at least a third of them come through at some point in lunch recess) are excited about reading. Of course I want to help them all! But it was overwhelming and exhausting.

So I started thinking about how we can make it so that the help I’m giving has the most impact.

The most obvious place to start was to teach even the youngest kids (1st graders) how to check out books themselves. Many of them have learned, and there are usually at least a few other kids who already know how that are happy to help. This frees me up a lot more to help with finding and choosing books.

We were having super long lines at checkout, and kids were getting back to lunch late, so I ended up dedicating two computers to checkout. In the early days, hardly anyone was using the catalog. Now we’re getting long lines at the catalog computer, so I may need to reconsider this set up. It is possible for me to have them set up for kids to do both, but that will require slightly more training.

Next, I realized that kids didn’t know how to use the catalog to find the physical location of the library, because the initial screen that pops up gives a call number but because our library is genrefied, the kids need to know both the call number and the location. So once I learned how to find that information in the catalog, I developed a brief lesson to share what I learned. That seems to be working well; kids are now able to find locate most things in the catalog on their own.

My goal is to make these sort of administrative tasks as independent of me as possible. Because the real joy in my job happens when a kid says, as one did this week, “I really like books like Guts, Drama, Ghosts, and El Deafo. Do you know any others like that?” Things are so busy at lunch recess I had to say, “Give me a day to work on it.” But the next day I had a big stack of other books for her to try. This is called readers’ advisory, and it’s one of my favorite parts of library work.

Another of my favorite parts is supporting instruction, which I did for the first time this week. Our younger students will be learning about North America this week including animals, people, and maps/land features. The teachers working on the animals lessons asked me to pull some resources together for them. So I spent a couple hours on that, getting a big stack of books together and building them a collection of ebooks on the ebook service we use, as well as recommending iNaturalist for photos of the animals out in the world.

I could only do that, though, because the teachers happened to catch me on a day when I didn’t have any students in for circulation.

The key thing to note is that I work 50% time. And the way that 50% is scheduled, about 2 of the 5 hours I work on a given day are dedicated to front-facing, direct student support. Another hour or two are dedicated to administrative tasks like getting books checked back in.

This only leaves an hour or two a day for the deep work of readers’ advisory, instructional support and collaboration, and collection management. (I haven’t even really gotten started with collection management yet; I’ve been thinking about it, but not doing it.)

I do have high school TAs who can help with shelving and checking in, but when they’re available and when I need to have books ready to go back out to kids or free up space (they’re allowed a maximum of 10 books checked out at a time) aren’t always the same.

So. I’m trying to create systems to help me make more time for the deep work.

I think I had a different high school experience than a lot of my peers. When the reunion committee asks, “What was your favorite after school hangout?” mostly people mention fast food restaurants or the mall. I’m all, “My house? No, wait, play rehearsal.”

First, I didn’t have a car.

Second, I genuinely can’t imagine being able to just go and hang out somewhere after school. As I remember it, I would (in 9th & 10th grade) ride the bus or (in 11th & 12th grade) be dropped off by a friend, always at home. I might watch Animaniacs and Batman: the Animated Series, but then I’d get right to homework. And then I’d have dinner and head to rehearsal.

I have no regrets about living in theaters in high school.

The other thing though as I think about it is that if I wasn’t home, who was going to hang out with my siblings? My mom was so sick with pernicious anemia and hypothyroidism, she barely had the energy to get out of bed. (I have worked very hard to make sure this isn’t my adult life. She didn’t have the access to information that I do.)

My brother was ages 1 - 4 when I was in high school and childcare was prohibitively expensive. Was I going to make my 9 - 13-year-old sister care for him? No. Was I going to consign her to a fate of waiting in after school care until my dad could pick her up? Definitely not; we’d lived that life when I was in elementary school and our school’s after care felt very sad.

So I didn’t go hang out anywhere until my dad got home from work, and then I went to rehearsal. Usually he drove me, but sometimes a friend did.

I had such a bad experience in driver’s ed and driving with my permit that I didn’t get my license until I was 20. So there’s a real sense of freedom that my peers had at 16 that I just didn’t.

But even if I’d had my license: we had one car. If I’d gotten a job to buy a car, the childcare question would come up again. (I just realized that of course my mom had to care for my baby brother during the day, so now I’m thinking that’s where all her spoons went. She had to save her energy for that.)

Anyway, yeah. My favorite after school hangout was our futon I guess until my dad got home and could take me to the theater, my actual favorite after school hangout.

But my favorite weekend hangout?

That was the library.