Category: Uncategorized
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Laughing at History
Yesterday the website The Mary Sue published a post of mine, a short, lighthearted little thing about the malady known as green sickness. After it was published, I committed the cardinal internet sin of reading the comments. Normally I don’t do that, but The Mary Sue’s readers are savvy and smart, and I was curious […]
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The Spitting Image
I came across this image while browsing in the online collection of the Wellcome Library (heaven only knows what my search terms were). Even in the often-bizarre world of the Wellcome’s collection, with wood engravings of eyes swollen shut by a witch’s curse and pictures of possessed men spitting up nails, this image stood out. Regurgitating, […]
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Scratching “The Itch Infalable” at The Recipes Project
I wrote this blog post for The Recipes Project: Food, Magic, Art, Science, and Medicine about a 17th-century anti-itching recipe: Scratching “The Itch Infalable”: Johanna St. John’s Anti-Itch Cure On the downside, you may get psychosomatic itching after reading it, much like in 5th grade when you watched all those educational movies about lice. On […]
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I Am Not My Writing
I’m currently revising a novel in which some folks have said I do a whole lot of telling and not enough showing. I trained as an academic, so it’s practically a given that my early fiction attempts would skew towards the didactic, the wordy, the analytic. I knew that going in. So if that feedback […]
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Libraries Matter, No Matter What
I’m really sad. For the last seven years, I’ve been volunteering with Josephine Community Libraries, an amazing group of folks who’ve worked with persistence and dedication to reopen our libraries after they were closed due to lack of funding (leaving 82,000 people without access to any library services whatsoever). This year, some of us formed […]
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Pimple post
I have a new post up at The Recipes Project titled “Mrs. Corlyon’s Pimple Cream: A Toxic Topical.” I’m linking to it below, but first a preface: Turning 40 sucks. Within six months of my big 4-0, I developed a case of acid-reflux bad enough to land me in the emergency room (I called it my […]
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Today’s Libraries: Something for Everyone (But Maybe Not A Swimming Pool)
In 2007, all of the libraries in my county were closed due to lack of funding, leaving 82,000 people without access to any library services whatsoever. It sucked. A lot. For so, so many reasons. Since then, I’ve been a volunteer for Josephine Community Libraries, a nonprofit that reopened the libraries when the county government […]
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Hog-Faced Woman ISO Single Male for Love, Marriage, Transformation
Human culture is a strange and wonderful thing. I’ve been reading about a genre of folk stories that have as a central character a “hog-faced woman,” and I’m left shaking my head at the uncanniness of human imagination. These tales seem to have arisen in the early 17th century concurrently in England, The Netherlands, and […]
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Ten Things To Do Instead of Writing
Top Ten Things To Do Instead of Writing: 1. watch old episodes of The Animaniacs 2. help daughter melt hot glue so that she can make incredibly complex jewel bauble for cosplaying obscure anime/manga character 3. research bicycle trips through Italy/Denmark/Ireland (after driving to supermarket less than a mile away) 4. unpack fall/winter clothes in […]
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Great Globs of Glowing Urine
Many fields define themselves by specialties. Doctors are not just doctors—they are podiatrists or pediatricians or surgeons. Restaurant workers are baristas or pastry chefs or sommeliers. Writers are novelists or poets or “content providers.” So it is for academics, as well. When I’m wearing that hat, I define myself as an early modernist. But even […]
Jennifer Sherman Roberts 