Narcissistic Forests
and other things we admire in Nature but can't stand in a person
Hey there, admirers of fall foliage!
I happen to be a massive admirer of autumn colors. As you (mostly) know, I grew up in Texas where the season of fall is literally about a week long: when all the green oak leaves turn brown at once and migrate from the branches of the trees to the surface of the grass. There might be raking and leaping into very large piles of dead leaves and the sound and smell (and unfortunate taste) of crushed leaves is very much married in my mind with the word Fall.
But the colors? I had never seen a maple tree before moving to Baltimore for college. The day I first set eyes on my college campus was one of those hot, dry September days with the white tower beaming in the foreground of the insane cloudless blue sky.
The burning, orange maple trees enflamed the campus. Dazzled by outrageous greens and the eggy yellow of birch leaves, I think that weekend might have marked the first time I ever used the word autumn.
Fun fact: My college undergrad was an all-women’s establishment run by nuns. That’s the tower. It’s name changed to the Notre Dame of Maryland University some time after I graduated. However: when I attended college, its official name was (drumroll please) the College Of Notre Dame Of Maryland.
How good are you at acronyms?
To celebrate autumn, since my husband and his driving skills left for a weekend in California, I decided randomly to go to a town that neither LadyTeen nor I had ever visited. So we went to New London, CT. Why? Because it is between Boston & NYC and because Amtrak trains are fun and because…well…why not?
We saw some good sparkly water, my friends! We read books in cafes! We were lured by cultists on a tallship! It was a great day-trip, mostly because of the crazy anticipation of not knowing at all what we were getting into until we were already there.
Publishing news:
The villanelle issue of Limp Wrist will be available this coming week—I’ll post a link next Sunday. I love working a good villanelle. It’s like a word puzzle and a game and a thought exercise all rolled into one. Fun and very hard: my favorite combo.
The Halloween anthology has a title! Silver Webb’s All Hallows Eve: The Thinning Veil should be available October 15. No preorder yet….my story “Checking Out” is set in a NYC library!
Curious about what I do with my free time? Here’s a day in my life post on Medium. I wrote it in response to those Sunday features in the New York Times. Are celebrity lives actually more interesting than ours??
I was floored to receive a print copy of the last four issues of Baltimore Review in the mail today - I had forgotten this was in the works! Lovely surprise!
My included story is available online - “The Scissors of Hope and Despair” there is also a blue link under the bio where you can hear me read the story aloud! What are you doing October 12th? I’m co-hosting a Pen Parentis Literary Salon online that night with Christina Chiu. You can RSVP early if you like! These are the featured authors:
RSVP at penparentis.org/calendar
PS: for regular readers, in case you’re still thinking about the astronomy vs astrology question from last week, my wonderful, talented and very very smart friend Emily knew the answer!!
“regarding astrology v. astronomy (because I have wondered as well): We’re so used to thinking of “logy” as the study of something and forget that its root is logos. So astrology is “star word,” or what the stars are telling us. “Nomy” refers to organizing or arranging (e.g., gastronomy, economy, etc.), which is what the origins of that field were all about. “
Which makes me think that we should be studying “bionomy” and “geonomy” and especially “psychonomy.” And PhDs in library science should actually be awarded for “libronomy” resulting in “Libronomists.”
