via Instagram https://www.instagram.com/p/B6joxdyJHek/
Happy Kwanzaa to my listeners who celebrate, and much love! #happykwanzza #celebratioms #holidays #history ♥️♥️♥️🧁🧁🧁 #bookstagram #bookpodcast #bookpodcaster #bookpodcasts #trypod #podcast #beyourownheroine #podcasts #theremightbecupcakes #podernfamily #ladypodsquad #zebrapodcaster #spooniepodcaster #disabledpodcaster #horrorpodcast Repost from @smithsonian using @RepostRegramApp – Happy #Kwanzaa! Not long after it was founded in 1967, the @smithsonianacm—a space for and by the communities of Anacostia in D.C.—started hosting Kwanzaa programs. This 1987 museum flyer in @smithsonianarchives shares the history, principles and symbols of the week-long celebration to honor African heritage in African American culture.
You must read this spooky novel that my friend #LizHand has written. I was honored to help out out as an early reader, and it’s a fabulous and highly original amalgam of historical fiction and horror. (that background is a Sunbonnet Sue quilt made by my wonderful maternal great-grandmother, who was as fiesty as the main character of Curious Toys, and who was a child at around the same time.) Repost from @carlahaunted using @RepostRegramApp – I haven’t had a chance to share this yet: my early reader’s copy of @scary_neary’s brand-new novel Curious Toys. I mean that literally: I was blessed to be an early reader of the manuscript and help Liz out with the final polishes and tweaks, what an honor to do my little part. #books #amreading #bookstagram #beyourownheroine #readersofinstagram #bookstagrammer #bibliophile #bookgram #booklife #bookblogger #bookpodcaster #booksofinstagram #bookphotography #bookdragon #bookaesthetic #bookpodcast #prettybookcovers #theremightbecupcakes #curioustoys #horror #horrornovels #historicalnovels #history #henrydarger #newyorkhistory #lizhand #celebrations
via Instagramhttps://www.instagram.com/p/B4QBM7RJxdn/Episode: Family Trees This came up in my Facebook memories, dated about six months before I started the podcast. It ended up as a story in the episode Family Trees, which I link below, but it is worth copying here for posterity—and because it’s a fine tale out of American history, and a good one about a politician for once. We can all stand that, right?
Original post:
This still makes me laugh. My family made minor Congressional history for being firm in our beliefs (read: stubborn) and strong in our convictions (read: opinionated). I give you The Pettigrew Indictment. “In 1917, while being interviewed by a journalist from the Argus Leader, Pettigrew offered his opinion that the First World War was a capitalist scheme intended to further enrich the wealthy, and he urged young men to evade the draft.” They tried to charge him with espionage, he countered with his friend Clarence Darrow (yes, that Clarence Darrow, he of the Scopes Trial) and was acquitted. Best part: he then framed the original indictment for display in his home office…right next to the Declaration of Independence. It’s still there in the Pettigrew Home Museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_F._Pettigrew Congressional record: http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=P000271
Link, with photo of my great-great-great-grandfather Senator Richard Franklin Pettigrew from South Dakota, an embedded player to listen to the episode, and all the referenced books and sources from the episode: https://www.theremightbecupcakes.com/episode-9-family-trees/
Working on episode 51 (Suspiria and the mythos of the Three Mothers) while multitasking (I’m always multitasking) and listening to another podcast for my therapy homework: Believed, by NPR. Two of the most disparate topics, for certain, but my John Nash-y brain works like this, always has. I am working on myself while working on the podcast. And so it goes, snatching good moments of health while I can.
“What if I’m not believed?”
They both are similar in one way: woman’s body as power. In one, dance as spellwork…and as danger; the other, gymnastic as medal winner…and as vulnerability.
Note: my episodes on my own sexual assault and my own CPTSD, episode 45 Reverberations, episode 44 A Different World (by way of Bill Cosby), and episode 34 This Girl Just Had a Bad Date.
Some books entertain you, some books distract you, and some books, if you are very, very lucky and find them, captivate you, and take your breath away from the very first page. You recognize them–and it almost feels as if they recognize you.
–Carla Hufstedler, episode 26, Pilgrim at Little Piney Creek
The Little Piney River is a 7.6-mile-long tributary of the Piney River in Amherst County in the U.S. state of Virginia. Via the Piney and Tye rivers, it is part of the James River watershed. (Wikipedia)
The Piney River is known around here as the “Big Piney”. Naturally. And notice we are so out in the country that the map just says “2” for “District 2”.
Walden (free in ebook format), by Henry David Thoreau — I once spent the afternoon at Walden Pond, and that place truly has an aura about it. I highly recommend putting it on your bucket list. In the spirit of nature writing, here’s the facts:
Kettle hole formation lake, formed by glaciers retreating 10,000 to 12,000 years ago
Depth: 108 feet (33 m)
Surface area: 2,657,157 sq feet (246,858 m²)
Shore length: 1.70 miles (2.74 km)
Also recommended in the spirit of this book
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Philip Lopate — the personal essay is a window into the private human condition. My best English teachers gave me scores of essays to read, from antiquity to modern American history, and they taught me much about what it is to be human, and to communicate that humanity with emotional power.
my essays shelf:
It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting…The mountains’ bones poke through, all shoulder and knob and shin. All that summer conceals, winter reveals. —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Little Piney River, January 8, 2018, taken by Carla’s husband
It has always been a happy thought that the creek runs on all night now every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale. —-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Little Piney River, January 8, 2018, taken by Carla’s husband
Putting you in the mood to put pen to paper? Good!
The Writing Life by Annie Dillard herself: Kindle, Audible (also narrated by Tavia Gilbert), paperback
And you’re going to need a paper companion for your initial forage into your environment. I suggest these guided ones, which I plan upon playing with myself, and may discuss my adventures with in a future episode: The Pocket Scavenger and How to Be an Explorer of the World, both by Keri Smith.
And we the people are so vulnerable. Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swelss and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important–it fills, as it were, the holes–and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.
Perhaps it is all balanced as it should be, perhaps everything is happening exactly as it should. And, to reference the minor prophet Ferris Bueller, if you don’t open our eyes, life goes pretty fast, you’ll miss so very much. You can choose to see pain and horror or beauty and mystery in every process, every moment while still being bluntly honest about what’s happening.
–Carla Hufstedler, episode 26, Pilgrim at Little Piney Creek
Poe was handsome. Some of the drawings of him are mockery, exaggerated by rivals. Some of the photographs, from which the drawings are taken, were made near the end of his life when he was ill. Exhibit A right here, Poe the looker.
