🔖 Read Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?.
Another great piece with an argument centered on the importance of information literacy.
Planet Word Museum in Washington, DC
Hi there! I'm Kimberly Hirsh. My pronouns are she/ her/hers. I'm somebody's mom. I work as a school librarian. I have a PhD in information and library science. I love to read, play tabletop and video games, and make things. I used to perform in theater and improv comedy and I may one day again. I have been extremely online since 1993 and still enjoy tinkering on the web. I manage multiple chronic illnesses. I'm married to my kid's dad. We have a cat.
Want to get in touch? You can reach me by email.
Recent posts
🔖 Read How Gullibility Became Our New Normal.
I love when information literacy pops up in popular publications like this. These pieces can be models for my own public writing.
🔖📚 Read Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke.
O’Rourke’s making the rounds to promote her new book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness which I want to read so much. (I’ve got it on hold from the library.)
There are a couple of key quotes from the interview I want to share:
when I was at my sickest, I couldn’t write anything much longer than a sentence. Not a paragraph, and definitely not a chapter.
On my worst days, I feel this way. The difference between days when my brain is zipping along in clarity and wheh it’s slogging through fog is hard to communicate. It is vast.
I was talking about this with a student the other day, and she made a great point. Writers are always being told that you need to be at your desk every day, that you have to push through. And for writers like herself — she has several chronic illnesses — that’s just not feasible. It’s an unreasonable expectation, and an unhealthy one.
Yes! I sometimes scold myself for not writing every day but this is important to remember. It’s also important to capitalize on the good days when we have them.
I wanted the book to be readable for people like me. When you suffer from brain fog, it’s tough to sustain your attention for so long. That’s also why I wanted the chapters to be relatively short and digestible.
This is awesome. I turn to essays when my brain is foggy but I want to read. I’m going to think more about what accessible literature means with respect to cognitive capacity.
It’s good to have a statement that sums up what you do, writ large, that isn’t just a job title. And thanks to influences including Star Trek: Picard, Judaism, and multipassionate entrepreneurs, I’ve got one:
I leverage passion and learning to repair the world.
🔖 Read 5 Ways to Thrive as a Multipassionate Entrepreneur
“Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.”
Whoa, I needed to read that.
🔖 I’m always looking for Leonie Dawson’s post about heroic self-gentleness and struggling to track it down in searches so now that I’ve succeeded once, I’m dropping the link here so I can just search my own website for it next time.
Reading the schedule for GIFCon and my breath caught and I teared up a little at Kat Humphries’s paper title, “What’s this cheery singing all about?”: Fantasy television and the musical episode.
🔖 Read Academic Waste. 🎓
Why I like St. Patrick's Day ☘️
I originally posted this on Facebook on March 17, 2016.
I’m only 9% Irish, but I sure love Saint Patrick’s Day. I think most of my affection for it comes from St. Patrick’s Day 1991, when my sister, our mom, and I arrived at our Tallahassee church for the last round of the church’s progressive dinner, and my dad, who had been living in Durham for more than a year, surprised us by showing up. Will and I have a picture from that Saint Patrick’s Day hanging on the wall of our parlor.