Here’s the talk description:

Setting is defined as the location and time period of a story, but a character’s sense of place and interactions with places can add depth and nuance to a story that elevates setting beyond simple backdrop. How does place reveal character and provide sources of conflict? How can experience of place add resonance to stories, in particular to endings?

Join us online on September 12th to discuss the place of place in fiction. This talk will draw examples from middle grade and young adult novels but is open to all.

You can register here.

My teaching semester wrapped up at the end of May, and since then I’ve been juggling parenting with writing, research, and various other things. We had a friend visit and have about 5 more short visits coming up in July and August — along with two trips of our own. One of my son’s programs wraps up at the end of this month and the other at the end of July. He has August off, and then we make the switch to preschool.

Given all of the planning and logistics, I’ve been fairly pleased with my steady writing pace, but I wish I could double it. The hardest thing has been trying to compartmentalize the daily barrage of headlines and hot takes and all of the emotion that goes along with them while simultaneously managing the quotidien ups and downs of parenting. Somehow we continue.

I’ve been trying to take better care of myself by journaling, adjusting priorities as needed, exercising, drinking more water, and getting outside whenever possible. My most effective way of coping with chaos has been to get offline, get outside, walk around, and take photos. Here are a few photos from the past few weeks in the hopes that they’re calming and centering for you, too.

I’m in the middle of all of this right now — the part that feels like a slog. I love doing both critical and creative work, but everything is slow and difficult right now. It was nice to read someone so tremendously accomplished say Yes. Yes it’s hard. And yes, the work is worth it.

Mukherjee is a doctor and a writer, as Chekhov was, and he describes the numbness one experiences when faced with the daily tragedies of medicine. But instead of addressing his career as an oncologist, he asks, “How shall we continue to write in these numbing times?” and turns to Chekhov for answers.

The essay, like all of Mukherjee’s work, is beautifully written. I also appreciated his inclusion of Chekhov’s six rules of writing:

“Six principles that make for a good story,” Chekhov would later write, “are: 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality . . . and; 6. compassion.” The first five principles cleanse and desensitize our wounds. But it is the last—compassion—that moves us beyond numbness toward healing.

Yup, it’s the Flash/Supergirl crossover musical episode! And, like Vanity Fair, I think it was even better than the Buffy musical episode.

As someone who did musical theatre through K-12, college, and grad school (the first time around), I absolutely love this stuff, cheesy as it can be. This episode had plenty of theatre references and classic songs along with a couple of new ones. They also pulled out all of the heavy hitters from across the D.C. TV universe — John Barrowman and Victor Garber guest starred and sang with Jesse L. Martin. They had plenty of spectacle (song below, which begins at 1:40) and superhero in-jokes. I loved it.

And did I mention the tap dancing? Or the opening scene with young Flash and his mom watching Gene Kelly perform Singin’ in the Rain (song begins at 30 sec.), which is something I do with my son?

If you need a dose of escapist delight, take a 40-minute break and watch this. And with that, have a good weekend!

In the meantime, I’ve been collecting “This is cool!” links. So. Here are several pieces that made me go “Wow!” recently:

“Humans in Amazon rainforest ‘earlier than thought’” — 2000 year old geoglyphs! Using landscape elements to (re)define places.

“Inside the incredible underground city that once housed 20,000 people” — In the 1960s in Turkey, a man found a secret room in his house that was actually part of a Byzantine-era underground city. It runs about 18 m / 59 ft. underground and housed up to 20,000 people. There’s a novel waiting to be written. The article has some evocative photos, so click through.

“Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms” — Okay, so this isn’t ancient or medieval. We’re traveling to 420-350 million years ago to when the world may have had giant mushrooms! And by giant, we’re talking trunks that were 8 m / 24 ft. tall. Imagine walking through a forest of those…

And I am going to stop there instead of closing all tabs because this seems like a good bit of wonder for one day.

A thousand years ago, huge pyramids and earthen mounds stood where East St. Louis sprawls today in Southern Illinois. This majestic urban architecture towered over the swampy Mississippi River floodplains, blotting out the region’s tiny villages. Beginning in the late 900s, word about the city spread throughout the southeast. Thousands of people visited for feasts and rituals, lured by the promise of a new kind of civilization. Many decided to stay.

At the city’s apex in 1050, the population exploded to as many as 30 thousand people. It was the largest pre-Columbian city in what became the United States, bigger than London or Paris at the time. Its colorful wooden homes and monuments rose along the eastern side of the Mississippi, eventually spreading across the river to St. Louis. One particularly magnificent structure, known today as Monk’s Mound, marked the center of downtown. It towered 30 meters over an enormous central plaza and had three dramatic ascending levels, each covered in ceremonial buildings.

from Finding North America’s lost medieval city by Annalee Newitz

Turpin contacted The Library of Congress, which had what’s believed to be the only remaining copy of this newspaper on file and still on microfiche. They emailed him a scan of the first page. He went on to find that the novel had been published in six installments in this paper.

The novel was just published online. The full story of the discovery, a perfect example of scholarship, intuition, and the affordances of technology, is here.