A few years ago (partly inspired by you), I started composing odes to my favorite drinks and dishes in Colorado. After more than a dozen years working on another project, in which I wrote long-form, navel-gazing essays about being a single father, this seemed like a fun and sustainable way to keep my writing chops in fighting trim while sharing my love for Denver's gems. My goal was to publish one short, impactful, overwrought piece a week.
Is there any punctuation mark more divisive than the humble semicolon? It has, I'll admit, some strong competition. The use of exclamation marks (particularly by women) makes some people very excitable. The Oxford comma has sparked vigorous debate among friends, family and internet strangers. More recently, ChatGPT's apparent proclivity for the em dash has caused consternation among em-thusiasts, who are terrified they'll be accused of using AI.
In his studio, Sam Winston appears less artist, more linguistic alchemist. He is experimenting with manufacturing inks out of tobacco from Marlboro cigarettes, the juice of Belarusian chokeberries imported in a 100g packet small enough to make it past customs and a strange brew of kohl eyeliner from the Middle East and galena the mineral form of lead sulfide from Wales.
Not long after the novelist Kiran Desai published her second book, The Inheritance of Loss, which won the Booker prize in 2006, she began working on her third. The title, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, came to her quickly, and she knew she wanted to write a modern-day romance that wasn't necessarily romantic, one as much concerned with the forces that keep us apart class, race, nationality, family history as those that bind us.
She is a sought-after TV writer (on Succession and Normal People) but Birch's blazing plays are known for their form and fury. Her brutal breakout in 2014, Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, was written in a 72-hour whirl. She wrote her latest, Romans now on at the Almeida in around 10 days. Of course I didn't write' it in 10 days, she clarifies. I wrote it in eight years.
This is one of my rare memory pieces, in which I mine the past for drama and resonance by way of opening a window onto my own hapless participation in the human condition. That wife is mine, those children are mine, that house was mine. This is fiction, however, and the events have been remodelled to fit the architecture of the story (and, yes, I did make the mad leap from the roof on the impulse of the moment).
The intrigue: The debate on how to say "pecan" is still nutty. According to Merriam Webster "puh-KAWN," "puh-CAN," and "PEE-can" are widely used. And depending on which survey you point to, either "PEE-can" (preferred by Northeasterners) or "puh-KAWN" is the most popular way for Americans to say it. Some people have very strong feelings about their preferred pronunciation.
The sea brought small treasures back to the shore that The Girl scours every day. She finds little things buried in the wet sand, she fills her pockets with them and walks back home. She lays the little treasures around the house. She wanders around, from one room to the other ; one is dark and cold. The AC works but the light doesn't when she flicks the switch.
See them at low tide, scallop shells glittering on a scallop-edged shore, whittled by water into curvy rows the shape of waves that kiss the sand only to erode it. Today I walked that shoreline, humming, Camino Santiago, the road to St. James's tomb, where pilgrims traveled, scallop badges on their capes, and chanted prayers for a miracle to cure disease.
For the past four decades, a massive event older than Dreamforce and TechCrunch Disrupt combined has been drawing crowds of thousands from all over the world to airport-adjacent hotel ballrooms south of the city. Held during the last weekend of August, the gathering is the second largest of its kind in the country and a decidedly big deal for anyone in the know. It's the San Francisco International Pen Show.
A few weeks ago, Jason came back from a reporting trip to Barbados and made a comment about how some Bajans thought he was from the Caribbean, because his accent changed when he was there. This was fascinating to me. The ensuing discussion made me realise that all of us had shifted our accents at various times, which got me thinking about all the unconscious ways in which we code switch, alternating between different identities.
In September there was a plenary meeting of the board of the Ukrainian Writers' Union, from which it clearly transpired that some of the Ukrainian novelists, poets, and critics were not doing their duty in promoting communist ideals or the Soviet way of life. In Russia two writers were selected by Zhdanov, in his famous address, as examples of the wrong point of view Anna Akhmatova, who was said to be an escapist, largely living sentimentally in the past and absorbed with her personal emotions; and Zoschenko, who was described as trivial, frivolous, and cynical in his distorted portrayal of Soviet life.
Cambridge Dictionary says the term is mainly used when admitting something that might be embarrassing, or when someone is trying to tone down a criticism or complaint so it is less likely to offend the subject. It conveys a similar meaning as saying, "to be honest," "if I'm being honest" or "honestly" when delivering an opinion. The website uses examples including, "Ngl, I was staring at his photo for about half an hour," and "That was tough, ngl."
The Elder Futhark is a historic alphabet carefully developed and used by an unknown but highly influential group of speakers of an early Germanic language, apparently somewhere from 0 CE to a few hundred years before. The oldest inscriptions on record (at the moment) appear to date from 0-250 CE and a period of development beforehand is expected. The earliest form of the Elder Futhark consisted of 24 different runes, each representing a sound value and its name, a meaningful noun.
When James Joyce first travelled from Dublin to Trieste in 1904, he went via Paris, Zurich and Ljubljana. Zurich, because he mistakenly believed a job to be awaiting him there, and Ljubljana because groggy after the night train he thought they'd pulled into Trieste. By the time he twigged, the train had departed and, without ready cash, Joyce and his partner Nora Barnacle had to spend a night on the tiles.
Cut from the Madison Junior High basketball team, I discovered writing for the school newspaper offered more power and influence than sitting on a bench. Everyone likes to see their name mentioned, so now I knew I had a big responsibility going forward. It was the time of Watergate and new heroes such as journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovering corruption at the highest level, inspiring future journalists. While attending Poly High in Sun Valley, Pete Kokon, the sports editor of the San Fernando Sun, offered to pay me $15 a week to write a story about high school sports.
The next time you're in a sticky situation where you know a word exists but can't quite remember what it is, check out a site called Reverse Dictionary. ➜ Reverse Dictionary lets you provide a phrase describing a word and then get back a list of possible matches. ⌚ It'll take you less than 10 seconds to start using. I've been playing with it for a couple of days, and I'm really impressed with how well it works.
I also did journaling for each of the characters in this book. This was a process because I was creating three first-person perspectives of girls in similar demographics from the same place, going through very similar experiences. But each of them has a different perspective and a different kind of foundational sense of the world that changes the way that she interacts with pregnancy, with parenthood, with life. And I wanted us to understand that there are a lot of ways to be a good mother and that teen parenthood isn't monolithic and it doesn't look just one way, and that it exists across race, and across class, and across geography, and that we see a lot of different examples and representations of the way that these girls handle themselves and their lives and their friendships.
