Reading Season

First, some updates!

Just thrilled to absolute bits to be teaching in the Kenyon Review’s Winter Online Workshop! Applications for participants close on December 10, so get your application in and make some new writing with me and this amazing slate of faculty!

Recently I had the pleasure of being a guest on The Tease podcast for a conversation about Heading North and sports fandom, and I was interviewed for the massive and massively helpful late November edition of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing newsletter, where I get into writing habits, how being a gym rat helped me finish Heading North, and how everyone needs a little help from their friends.

Reading Season!

Here in the northern hemisphere, as the days are shortening and temperatures dropping, it is reading season.

Most bookish folks have heard of the tantalizing world of Iceland’s Jólabókaflóð—the Yule Book Flood—and the premise of spending Christmas Eve curled up with hot chocolate and your newly gifted book. I appreciate this Smithsonian dive into Jólabókaflóð that offers a more thorough accounting, its historical context, and the material reality of this demi-holiday I pine for: Iceland’s Christmas Book Flood is a Force of Nature.

There are very few things I love more—and find more and more endangered—than settling onto the couch with a book that makes me forget time exists entirely. Better yet is to be in one of those rare particular moments when I’m allowed to forget about time and the day can just go sweetly and liquidly by while other worlds unspool in the imagination—it’s so magical. Bonus for some twinkle lights and a full teapot.

That’s the dream, but we’re not there yet. Because right now, it is also, for those of us who teach on a semester schedule, the reading season of hundreds of pages of student essays and portfolios and exams. Sometimes, when all of the final assignments are submitted, I will do a rough count of the number of pages I have to read and respond to and evaluate, and sometimes I try very hard not to calculate it. It’s hard to say what I’ll decide for this year; at the moment, I’m pretending I won’t count and I won’t spend quite as much time as I usually do making agreements with myself about how many things I’ll grade each day and then breaking them. What I need is a single-minded, efficient pursuit of the tasks at hand so I can have at least a day or two before the actual holiday crush to simply read for myself.

At the very top of that list is Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, and before I dive into it, I want to re-read Hild in preparation. Thereafter, I want to embark on a deep survey of novels written in the last 30 years with omniscient narration.

What are you excited to read on these winter nights? And do you have any favorite omniscient narration novels to recommend?

Gaza still needs help. Don’t stop pressing for a ceasefire and a lasting peace. Support Doctors Without Borders to provide necessary aid.

Events for Heading North go on pause a bit, but if you’re in Pittsburgh in the New Year, I’d love to see you at Riverstone Books on January 25, where I’ll be in conversation with the brilliant Clare Beams!

Also, I’m offering a giveaway of five print copies of Heading North to interested readers on LibraryThing! You can request a copy until December 26.

A little making & doing:

While I was on my whirlwind of a booktour, I had the delight of staying with two friends who make their own bread, which is something to which I have long aspired. In the summer, I get bread I really love at the farmers’ market, but the farmers’ market is not in session just now. So over the last two weeks, I’ve taken some stabs at a no-knead loaf baked in a Dutch oven.

Last week’s loaf hadn’t risen enough before I baked it; the kitchen was far too cool and I was impatient, and though it still made edible bread, the texture was dense, tight, and not particularly pleasant. This loaf—this is very much what I wanted: open and light and chewy. It’s a 100% hydration dough, 330 grams white bread flour and 70 grams whole wheat flour, done with four bowl folds across the first hour of bulk fermentation, a second hour on the counter, then three hours of resting in the fridge before the final rise and bake.

(The 15 minutes between each fold is ideal for this moment in time: it’s long enough to respond to a few small assignments or to do a couple of cleaning tasks or get the Duolingoing done and then it’s time to fold, which feels novel and exciting, and then there’s another little block in which to knock out the to-do list clutter, etc.)

Baking it in the Dutch oven really is an excellent process, though I will say that the round loaf is not my favorite shape, so next time, I’ll try a free-form loaf on the pizza stone with a bit of steam and see how it goes.

Readers who are good with bread-baking, I will totally take tips! But for now: I’ll toast to this loaf…with toast.

If you’d like to do something nice for the writers in your life this holiday season, some of the very kindest and most helpful things you can do are free: review their books on GoodReads, Amazon, or LibraryThing; add their books to your to-read list on GoodReads; request that your local library get a copy of the writer’s book for their general collection; and finally, simply tell your friends, enemies, and perfect strangers about the books you love because nothing is more powerful than hearing from another actual human being.