As we embark on a new decade, I wanted to provide a guidebook for a year of reading – a list which might offer, loosely, a template for reading to encourage you to hear new voices, support new authors, and step outside your comfort zone.
Continue readingThis summer, I took a bit of a break from Drizzle for many reasons. I had a sudden illness and death in my family that shook everyone I loved. I moved my partner across the country to join me in Massachusetts. It was a good break, and a hard one. It was needed. Perhaps it’s the break or it’s just the drizzly fall weather that has me reflecting on this site and its origins, but now that Drizzle has returned from hiatus in full autumnal swing I wanted to take a moment to think and write about why reviewing books is important, and the role it’s played in my life and that it continues to play in the literary world. Continue reading
Writing from rural America
Lately, I have been thinking about the idea of many Americas. I mean, I have been thinking about the America I know and the one I live in now, and all the Americas I’ve never experienced, and how they fit together under this umbrella, under one leader, under one name. Continue reading
At the beginning of August, Drizzle celebrated its first birthday — one year of reading, of writing, of cultivating this beautiful community of people with a passion for witnessing and promoting books that reflect the widest possible scope of human experience. Continue reading
Though I live now in a place of mild, drizzly winters where the trees stay green and the sidewalks clear even in the middle of January, as a child I spent nearly six months of every year trapped inside, gazing out the window at a landscape of ice and snow. I was raised in northern Vermont, about an hour south of Montreal and a few hours north of anywhere notable, and I still remember vividly the slate grey winter sky, the long sheets of black ice over asphalt, the high, squeaking sound of boots against snow when the temperature dipped below zero and even the packed ice screamed from the cold. Continue reading
This morning, I sent my best friend Annie Finch’s poem Moon for Our Daughters. The middle stanza of the poem reads: “These are our bodies’ own voices, / Powers of each of our bodies, / Threading, unbroken, begetting.” She sent back, “Overnight all my plants wilted at my desk, and I walked to my office in the pouring rain.” Outside my window, the rain came down too.
I wanted to write a short editor’s note before the launch of our first Droplet review, a series which seeks to highlight quality young adult and children’s literature from under-represented authors. Specifically, I wanted to talk about why I am choosing to write critically about YA, and the role YA plays in the literary world. Continue reading
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