Kimberly Hirsh

The giant cat popped less than 24 hours after going up with probably less than 10 hours up time. Hubris? I’ve got special tape ordered to try and repair it but this is super disheartening. (Tears aren’t covered by the warranty.)

📚💬📝 “… the being we become in the very act of writing is only ever intimately present to the one who writes.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “Writing that keeps us away from death, from despair, does not necessarily help us to be well.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “There is always someone who waits for words, eager to embrace them and hold them close.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “Since my interests are broad and wide-ranging, I am not surprised that there is an endless flow of ideas in my mind.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “No writer writes often or well if they despair of ever having an audience for their work.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “Since I have never tried to make a living as a writer, I have had the extreme good fortune to be able to write only what I want to write when I want to write it.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “…we all should feel utterly free to write as much as time, grace, and the imagination allow.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

Giant cat!

It’s spooky season, so I’m living my best life with a skeleton glow necklace.

📚💬📝 “Even in academic circles it has become much more fashionable to do work on gender than work that is distinctly feminist in outlook.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “…we must not let the commercial success of writing by women lead us to believe that the struggle to create and maintain a culture where women’s words will be heard and valued is over. That struggle continues.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

📚💬📝 “No woman is writing too much. Women need to write more. We need to know what it feels like to be submerged in language, carried away by the passion of writing words.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work

There have been 22 weekdays this September. My kid has been in school for only 14 of them. The 8 remaining days: 1 holiday, 1 school break, 3 home sick, 2 dentist appointments mid-day, 1 hurricane flooding cancellation. This has made it hard to establish a fall workflow.

I’m reading Howl’s Moving Castle. Bit of a spoiler & Miyazaki left it out of the movie (rightly, I think) but Howl is actually a post-ac wizard whose family is v. disappointed he isn’t doing more with his PhD. This delights me. 📚🍿

Finished reading: Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones 📚

Super fun! Highly recommend.

🔖 Read Howl’s Moving Castle should be the model for every book-to-film adaptation (Polygon) by Petrana Radulovic

Finished reading: Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure by Patricia Ellis Herr 📚

An uplifting and compelling read. Herr documents her daughter’s successful climbing of the 48 NH mountains taller than 4000 ft. Highly recommend.

I’m exhausted. My mom has gone to the ER once a week for the past 5 weeks. My kid has not been in school for a full week since the beginning of the month. I’m still tweaking my thyroid meds. I will gladly accept your sympathy & empathy. I do not require your advice or questions.

Yesterday, W, M, my sister ME, and I went for a little hike at the Eno River State Park. I’d planned a little flat loop, but we didn’t know which access to use to get to it. We ended up at the Few’s Ford access and just walked the closest trail to where we parked, which turned out to be the Buckquarter Creek Trail.

We happened upon some folks from the Eno River Association, who had set up a tent, nets and water shoes, and little bins with water in them so people could catch little water animals and learn about them. It was a beautiful serendipitous occurrence and we had nowhere to be, so we stopped to join in. M found some water striders and a snail.

After they packed up, we continued down the trail, then stopped for a break so M could play on the rocks and fallen logs. While he was doing that, a great blue heron landed a ways from us. We watched it stretch its neck down to the water, then pull its neck upright. It was huge. Eventually it flew from one side of us to the other. Its wingspan was incredible. It’s a majestic bird.

Eventually, a tree wobbled under M and he fell in the water. We didn’t have a change of clothes, so we ended our break and started walking again. We made our way to the pedestrian bridge. It was a suspension bridge, and walking across it gave me a bit of vertigo. We continued on the other side of the river, then crossed the river on rocks when I heard a family ahead of us talking about an animal on the ground. I thought it might be a snake and W hates snakes, so we went ahead and crossed.

We finished up the trail and came home for a late lunch from Domino’s.

This was a super successful adventure, so I think we’ll try a hike every weekend while the weather is favorable.

Want to read: Ghosts of the Forbidden (Glazier’s Gap Book 1) by Leanna Renee Hieber 📚

My currently-planned NaNoWriMo novel is a YA supernatural rom-com set at musical theatre camp in the late 90s. It miiiiiiight have some autobiographical elements.

I just ordered a 20 ft inflatable black cat. It will dominate the culdesac. I’m kind of hoping it becomes haunted. (RIP The Best Cat, 11/1999 - 6/2017)

You can have all of the research that funding agencies can possibly provide us but if we can’t talk about what it means for our actual lived experiences and put it into perspective with our real lives, it’s not worth much.

• Chelsea Conaboy

I love today’s issue of Publish Not Perish in which Jenn McClearen draws a connection between Joli Jensen’s idea of communal writing and rejecting the narcissistic individualism of the academy.