Sara Ryan

Anaheim, here I come! As usual, my conference will be a mix of librarial and authorial. Two highlights: Saturday June 28th, from 1:30-3:30 pm: I’m on a panel — “Teens at Your Branch Library: From Trauma to Triumph?” at the Anaheim Marriott, Platinum 3/4 (Spoiler: Yes to triumph.) Sunday June 29th, from 9-10 am: I’m [...]

“I biked to work today!” I enthuse. My colleague smiles politely. She’s been biking to work in all weathers for years. At home, I crack open the copy of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I bought last year, but hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. I’m thinking vaguely about where to go for dinner. As I [...]

I didn’t know any of the dead at this small cemetery, close to Sandy, Oregon. But you can’t visit a cemetery without thinking of your own. I only took photos of the oldest graves. That way, it felt more like documenting history and less like an invasion of privacy. But I noticed decorative trends among [...]

…you see that the carpet is not merely a different color, but also a different texture than it was previously. (Stop shedding, Snag.)

Tippi Hedren from The Birds. via Boing Boing Gadgets, elsewhere.

First, admire the website. Then, read Personal Days. I went to Ed Park’s reading at Powell’s last night, and read the book in one sitting after I got home. When you start it, it feels like office humor — especially clever and funny office humor, but office humor — but there’s already more going on. [...]

This is so cool. Wordle is “a toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.” This one is generated from the prologue & part of the [...]

Or rather, a meme I hope to inaugurate. I just got a copy of What It Is, and I find it as wonderful as I thought I would. Barry’s looking at the process of creating any kind of art — how we shut ourselves off from it out of fear, how we can open up [...]

Background for this post: In the late fifties and early sixties, my father Richard Ryan published fanzines as a member of FAPA, the Fantasy Amateur Press Association. Members wrote about sf/f, each other’s zines, current events, and (as with all zines) anything else that crossed their minds. I have copies of the zines he produced, [...]

This is just to say that I have now experienced my first wrock concert, and the Remus Lupins did, indeed, wrock the house. Or rather, library. The funnest part was seeing just how incredibly into it the audience was, complete with Rowling-influenced fashion choices and signs. If you missed them, Portlanders, don’t worry, they’ll be [...]