My essay on Susanna Clarke’s Mr Simonelli is out now in the journal Revenant.
Category: scholarly
Out Now: Rook Chant
Few things make a writer happier than a gorgeous book cover and this one’s a beaut, thanks to the ever talented Queen of Everything, S. L. Johnson. You may recognise the image from a photo I took: how rare for a writer to have a hand in the book cover! Rook Chant brings together a…
Converting Monks into Friars in Iowa
So, the trip to Iowa included an unscheduled night in Chicago. A bit irritating to spend all those hours in O’Hare, but the truth is the seasoned traveler needs to be prepared for this kind of inconvenience. I had books to read, things to write and social media at my fingertips where I could complain…
Publication: Wild Desire
My essay on Johanna Sinisalo’s Troll: A Love Story is up on the new magazine for the Mythic Imagination Institute. “Wild Desire” was originally a conference paper given at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts a few years back. http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=magicwombat-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=0802141293 Here’s a snippet: Wild Desire: Gendering the Other in Sinisalo’s Troll: A…
Reviewed (Two Years Later)
Okay, so the Google search doesn’t necessarily catch everything. In looking for something else, I ran across a reference to a review in The Lion and the Unicorn 32.3 by David Russell of Tove Jansson Rediscovered, for which I wrote the essay, “Roses, Beads and Bones: Gender, Borders and Slippage in Tove Jansson’s Moomin Comic-Strips”:…
Review: Bright Star
I headed off to see Jane Campion’s latest film, Bright Star, with my intrepid fellow film reviewer, Peg, on Friday. Yes, it was another afternoon matinée, or what we have come to call the blue hair screening. It was also a particularly packed one, so there was nowhere to go to get away from the…
Curse of the Demon
Day two of the horror class consisted of a full-on run through the 40s and 50s. While I talked about a lot of things, I concentrated on showing two films — not something I plan to do everyday, but as I was giving short shrift to the time period anyway, it only seemed fair. For…
Women’s Month Interviews: Carolyn Coulson-Grigsby
How do we know each other? We met in graduate school at the University of Connecticut Medieval Studies program. How would you describe yourself?Strong, determined, funny (I hope), creative educator.In what part of the world are you located? Northern Virginia – recently moved and very happy to be here.Where can we find you on the…
Albacon & Reading
There have been changes in the Albacon schedule, most notably the loss of a GOH, but the show must go on. Here’s my revised schedule: In A Flash: The challenges and rewards of telling a story in under 1,000 words. Mead, Schwabach, Laity, Strock(M) Fri 6:00 PM Beverwyck Why write? It pays badly, you have…
Leeching
There’s a somewhat ridiculous scholar in Tom Stoppard’s India Ink who says, “This is why God made writers, so the rest of us can publish.” I love that quote because it speaks to an uncomfortable tendency in my academic field (and in many others, too) to feel like a kind of leech. We loot the…
K. A. Laity 