Sara Ryan

So yesterday I took the day off from the day job to do those presentations with Steve at Madison High School. I think they went well. The most unintentionally hilarious moment: when someone was deeply concerned about “what’s up in that panel”: Well, it gave Steve a chance to talk about the always-treacherous potential for [...]

Got email about a training being offered on how to balance your personal and professional lives. I thought, “Well, I’m too busy to take that,” and deleted it.

No, no, I’m not moving. (Ever. Again.) I’ve been corresponding some with Steve Burt, and Moving Day is a very cool poem that he wrote. I think it would also make an interesting comics jam if you gave each line (aside from the refrain) to a different artist to illustrate.

The revelations I think I have about writing often prove to be, on further reflection, things Sharyn has been telling me for years. This one is probably another one of those: I really thought, after I finished Empress of the World, that I’d learned how to write a novel. I hadn’t. I’d learned how to [...]

I just read She’s Not There: a life in two genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan. Y’all should, too. It’s not just about gender, it’s about the stories we tell ourselves and each other about who we are. And what it means to continue caring about someone who changes in a way you’d never anticipated or [...]

Back when I worked at the Music Library, my friend Michelle and I had to shelf-read the record collection. The unutterable tedium of this task was relieved, periodically, by the chance to see truly odd album covers. And now you, too, can experience similar delight, through the magic of the Internet.

While en route to a school today, saw a sign advertising “Frontier Taxidermy.” Anyone want to hazard a guess what gives taxidermy that special frontier quality?

Philip Reeve had me from the first sentence:”It was a dark blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.” This is what you read after you finish Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.