Dear friends and family,
My August newsletter has been stuck in draft form since the 15th and as we head into Labor Day weekend I am finally ready to admit that autobiographical writing is not where my head has been this past month. Our lives have burbled on since mid-July with a couple of heat waves, ongoing work projects, sewing, reading, and fiction writing.
The cats survived their adventure of visiting the vet for their annual check-ups with more grace than we expected, and both have been pronounced healthy though Teazle has lost some weight and Christopher needed ear drops (which he does not like) to clear up a lingering problem with mites. They continue to grow more comfortable with one another and Teazle is even teaching Christopher how to play chase-and-grab-tail!
My quilt project continues, with the promised delivery date of October looming closer each day! My goal over the Labor Day weekend is to complete the quilt top so that I can begin the quilting portion of the project. I enjoy the quilting step as I get to use Valdani perle cotton which gives a lovely texture to the finished piece.
On the first two Thursdays in August, I was lucky enough to attend the NT Live encore broadcast of Angels in America at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. It was the first time I had seen the stage play (as opposed to the HBO miniseries) and I loved to see how the more fantastical elements of the script were translated for the stage. It was also sobering to watch the play and think about its contemporary relevance given that it is set in Trump's New York City of the 1980s, and Trump's mentor Roy Cohn is a major character.
In defiance of the daily shitshow that is our current political situation, I've been reading a lot of queer romance this summer. In the past month I've been working my way through Harper Fox's m/m romance (all with a hint of the paranormal) and Jordan Hawk's Whyborne & Griffin series. I particularly recommend Fox's Seven Summer Nights and Hawk's novella Undertow is that rare, magical creature a cross-species f/f romance!
In nonfiction, I read David Hollinger's Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World and Changed America (Princeton University Press, October 2017); Sara Dubow's Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2010); and R. Marie Griffith's Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, December 2017). I was particularly fascinated by Hollinger's examination of Christian ecumenism between the 1890s and the 1960s, and the ways in which mainline Protestant missionaries set out to Westernize the world's citizens and ended up, as the subtitle implies, more often than not returning to America with a much deeper respect for the people of foreign nations in which they spent significant portions of their careers. I am now reading Hollinger's collection of essays After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
This two week period over the Labor Day weekend is the move-in period for Boston's many colleges and universities; seventy-five percent of the leases in Boston begin on September 1st. As I was walking to work this morning after dropping Hanna off at Countway Library, the street was dotted with moving vans and the sidewalks with piles of belongings coming or going. Ten years ago I was one of those movers.
Since moving to Boston in 2007, August has always been a bittersweet time for me. The beginning of the fall semester is inescapable in Boston this time of year, and while I always excelled at formal schooling, and took great pleasure in opportunities for discovery, the rhythms of the academic year did not sit well with me. This fall marks the seventh September since I finished my Master's thesis and I am still grateful not to be returning to student life. The first week of September also marks the tenth anniversary of the first date Hanna and I ever went on (even if neither of us realized it was a date at the time). We took a long, meandering walk through Boston, went out for coffee, and talked about queer romance fiction. #Winning.
Oh, and beforeI go, enjoy this moment of unalloyed joy courtesy of Alan Cumming (and h/t to my friend Sarah for the link).
Think of the children. Think of the children. Think of the children. The children who need to see this is a possibility for them too.
Onward, always onward,
~Anna
My August newsletter has been stuck in draft form since the 15th and as we head into Labor Day weekend I am finally ready to admit that autobiographical writing is not where my head has been this past month. Our lives have burbled on since mid-July with a couple of heat waves, ongoing work projects, sewing, reading, and fiction writing.
The cats survived their adventure of visiting the vet for their annual check-ups with more grace than we expected, and both have been pronounced healthy though Teazle has lost some weight and Christopher needed ear drops (which he does not like) to clear up a lingering problem with mites. They continue to grow more comfortable with one another and Teazle is even teaching Christopher how to play chase-and-grab-tail!
My quilt project continues, with the promised delivery date of October looming closer each day! My goal over the Labor Day weekend is to complete the quilt top so that I can begin the quilting portion of the project. I enjoy the quilting step as I get to use Valdani perle cotton which gives a lovely texture to the finished piece. On the first two Thursdays in August, I was lucky enough to attend the NT Live encore broadcast of Angels in America at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline. It was the first time I had seen the stage play (as opposed to the HBO miniseries) and I loved to see how the more fantastical elements of the script were translated for the stage. It was also sobering to watch the play and think about its contemporary relevance given that it is set in Trump's New York City of the 1980s, and Trump's mentor Roy Cohn is a major character.
In defiance of the daily shitshow that is our current political situation, I've been reading a lot of queer romance this summer. In the past month I've been working my way through Harper Fox's m/m romance (all with a hint of the paranormal) and Jordan Hawk's Whyborne & Griffin series. I particularly recommend Fox's Seven Summer Nights and Hawk's novella Undertow is that rare, magical creature a cross-species f/f romance!
In nonfiction, I read David Hollinger's Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World and Changed America (Princeton University Press, October 2017); Sara Dubow's Ourselves Unborn: A History of the Fetus in Modern America (Oxford University Press, 2010); and R. Marie Griffith's Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics (Basic Books, December 2017). I was particularly fascinated by Hollinger's examination of Christian ecumenism between the 1890s and the 1960s, and the ways in which mainline Protestant missionaries set out to Westernize the world's citizens and ended up, as the subtitle implies, more often than not returning to America with a much deeper respect for the people of foreign nations in which they spent significant portions of their careers. I am now reading Hollinger's collection of essays After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History (Princeton University Press, 2013).
This two week period over the Labor Day weekend is the move-in period for Boston's many colleges and universities; seventy-five percent of the leases in Boston begin on September 1st. As I was walking to work this morning after dropping Hanna off at Countway Library, the street was dotted with moving vans and the sidewalks with piles of belongings coming or going. Ten years ago I was one of those movers.
Since moving to Boston in 2007, August has always been a bittersweet time for me. The beginning of the fall semester is inescapable in Boston this time of year, and while I always excelled at formal schooling, and took great pleasure in opportunities for discovery, the rhythms of the academic year did not sit well with me. This fall marks the seventh September since I finished my Master's thesis and I am still grateful not to be returning to student life. The first week of September also marks the tenth anniversary of the first date Hanna and I ever went on (even if neither of us realized it was a date at the time). We took a long, meandering walk through Boston, went out for coffee, and talked about queer romance fiction. #Winning.
Oh, and beforeI go, enjoy this moment of unalloyed joy courtesy of Alan Cumming (and h/t to my friend Sarah for the link).
As a white woman in Boston, I've rarely experienced public homophobia or felt unsafe on the street as someone visibly queer. But every time Hanna and I hold hands in public, or I kiss her goodbye when I drop her off at work, the narratives in my head run on much the same repetitive themes.I know we don’t get happily ever afters in real life. I’m a hopeless romantic, not a total fucking idiot. As my friend, Russell, said to me once, “Even with the happiest couples, one of you dies first.” But first there is such unalloyed joy.
We went to the supermarket yesterday and we were wandering around and, at one point, he took my hand, because that’s the kind of thing he does. And instantly, I got flustered. Residual anxiety. Remembrance of past battery. Enduring scars. Even though I know I’m hardly likely to get my head kicked in by the salad bar, PDAs can still make me nervous. And then he said, gentle as anything, and I’m not going to do the accent… “If there’s a gay kid in here with his folks, frightened that he’s a freak, don’t you think that it might give him hope, seeing two guys wandering around, being themselves, getting their groceries, like everyone else?” If happiness is a place… it’s the biscuit aisle in Sainsbury’s. And anywhere else I am with him.
Think of the children. Think of the children. Think of the children. The children who need to see this is a possibility for them too.
Onward, always onward,
~Anna