Agreed to be backup Recording Clerk for my Meeting earlier this year, and had to actually perform my duties today. Actually went rather well, I think. We were generally in unity with the basics of what we were doing, but there were some needles to thread about the how and why and wording.

Took a while to persuade the flock to come over the hill for hay this morning

I think I just updated a very vanilla Drupal site to a new version, so I’m pretty sure I’m super powered now.

In case anyone wants a good podcast on the history of trans kids by Jules Gill-Peterson, focused around her amicus brief for Skrmetti - overcast.fm/+AAP0KkHG…

Sat down to write yesterday and was reminded that writing is hard, and also that clearing the brush of “here is a text under considerationion and the things that made it stick out” and “here is my theology that made those things stick out” in order to to productively rub them together is also hard

One thing that The Writer and the Critic captures about Saint of Bright Doors that I’m grateful for is mentioning that there are a few sections (like Fetter just getting stuck in a wierd prison camp) that shouldn’t work, but totally do. overcast.fm/+AAA8yJAp…

For most of my life, I could go days or weeks without thinking about how society perceives me. For at least the past year, I’ve been acutely aware of being the parent of a trans kid every day. It’s exhausting. So I guess now that I’m in my 40s, I get to learn more of what my country is.

Second round, 5-year old figured out “double yellow” to turn around and taking a more circuitous route in order to get to zap a couple extra ice towers.

Thinking about a biblical and Quaker exhortation to “be not conformed to the patterns of the world” and how that might productively wrap up with some SFF and perhaps some nonfictionion I’ve been reading recently. Noodling an essay, now just need to find the energy to put it together.

We keep the sheep away from the goat feeding bowls because otherwise they push the goats away, but Phobos had company today

Starting Nicola Griffith’s “Menewood”. Really enjoyed both “Hild” and “Spear” and so far “Menewood” is also pulling me in. I like the size of it - small personal interactions, hinting at larger patterns, and the importance ofe off of filling in unknowns with careful guesses.

When the Corrie’s introduce Barrett’s Privateers as an actual 18th Century song, I wonder if they’re sincere? Probably, and that’s a pretty profound comment on knowledge in the last 50 years

I just finished re-reading “Sorceror of the Wildeeps” which remains excellent. I’m not sure I’m up to an organized review, but I definitely have thoughts.

One of the first intrusions early in the book is the language and dialect of the “brothers” who guard the caravan. Some use AAVE, some french-inflected, and the eponymous sorceror uses highly organized/scientific language to discuss apparent magic (Clarke’s sufficiently advanced technology, etc.). One thing about this is simply the way that it transgresses expectations of the fantasy genre.

Another is that it acknowledges the size of the world. I recently listened to the album of “Come from Away” and in that musical, which at least tries to position itself as a based in a small & isolated community in Newfoundland “Welcome to the Rock if you Come from Away / You probably Understand about a half of what we say”, but turns out to have a older jewish man who’s hidden his identity for his whole life. It seems to me that there’s something really useful to mix together things like dominant culture, reparative readings to understand what’s actually going on with dominant culture, understanding history and the ways that it’s hidden but also lives in real bodies (and coming back to “Wildeeps” also in family structures). “Wildeeps” seems to me to be one of the best representations of how melting pots of history both mix cultural influences and form their own culture and society, in ways that I’d like to unpack more.

I recently read Sofia Samatar’s “The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain”, much of which I loved, but which along with “Wildeeps” ends with a character transcending the limitations of their existence in a way that I found pretty dissatisfying in “Practice” specifically because in that book it seemed to suggest it would change or threaten systems, while in “Wildeeps” that individual transcendance specifically isn’t positioned as a threat to systems. That seems more honest.

I’d like to engage with “Wildeeps” more as a Quaker (not that I think Wilson is, but I am). Damane has moments of aversion to violence and respect and love for individuals which really resonated with me.

Similarly, thinking about how the story starts pretty linear, but ends up as we travel through the magical land of the Wildeeps moving backwards and forwards throught the history of the world and also the history of Damane’s life seems really interesting. I’m not sure if there’s much more I could say beyond “look at how the narrative structure of the book parallels the structure of the story being told and encourages the reader to fill in gaps and reconsider assumptions and traditions in ways that “Wildeeps” sits uneasily within and comments on traditions … very meta, and quite excellent”

There’s a moment in the relationship between Demane and the Captain where it’s clear that the Captain is both in love with Demane and grateful that he turned out to be kind because the captain’s love isn’t directly about that, and it made me realize how entirely unprepared I am to actually comment on and think about relationships in fiction (and also real life, because this is one of those moments that feels like it’s absolutely one which happens today), and makes me wonder if I can’t even really think about that besides acknowledging and realizing I don’t know what to do with it or how to situate it in the rest of the book, maybe I’m not really able to say anything substantive or coherent about “Wildeeps”.

Anyway, some scattered thoughts before my kids wake up and the day escapes me.

Nice morning with the sheep including one old lady who gets her own flake

Two recent joys - teenager giving younger sibling a piggyback ride, and cats relaxing on our quilt

Oddly, I can read again, and here’s your reminder that Kai Ashante Wilson’s “Sorceror of the Wildeeps” remains brilliant.

The age-old (or I suppose somewhere between 300 and 400 year old) #Quaker Query is “How does the Truth prosper among you?” (New England Yearly Meeting Queries #1)

Completed (and memorialized) my civic duty/taking out the trash.

An advice from New England Yearly Meeting #quaker “Have joyful worship. Do not always be somber.”

Some lovely late autumn berries in our swamp on a crisp fall day

“Stand still, wait for divine guidance, then act” - New England Yearly Meeting Advices number 8 #quaker

Ironically, one of the bills I testified against last year, which passed, required parental notification of any planned lessons that touched on sex or gender identity, so the “voting lesson” that decided biological sex was a required element of an election process is also probably violating NH law

Gotta love getting the text from kiddo that the “mock election” getting staged at school also misgendered them.

This is, indeed, uncanny. Who goes Nazi, Yale Law School edition - Lawyers, Guns & Money

“since we have torn down every institution that brought liberals together, from the union hall to the social club to the liberal Protestant church, we have nothing but our anxiety.”