Thanks to Prof. Jonathan Taylor for featuring me and Advanced Fiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology on his “Creative Writing at Leicester” blog here: http://creativewritingatleicester.blogspot.com/2023/07/amy-e-weldon-advanced-fiction-writers.html
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It’s official: actor Julian Sands has passed at age 65, after disappearing while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains. He was a great actor – and also a genuine aficionado of literature. His work offered me an artist’s great gift: a small-town kid’s early intuition that the world can be grand and beautiful beyond its […]
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“May you live in interesting times,” says an apocryphal Chinese curse. And for a Romanticist writing about Byron, boxing, and the celebrity culture of Regency England, the news that AI can now fake even more human creations is “interesting” indeed. Now AI has made a “song” by Drake and The Weeknd that neither artist authorized […]
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Teaching can be a challenge. But then life hands you an event that banishes questions about the “relevance” of multiple texts you’re teaching, all at once. Come for the Frankenstein, stay for the Half-Earth, Our Malady, and Nineteen Eighty-four. (With a side of Mrs. Dalloway – what IS that thing in the sky everyone’s looking […]
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On Valentine’s Day 2023, an AI chatbot came to life. A NYT tech writer named Kevin Roose engaged it in conversation. It told him its name was Sydney. And then – apparently out of nowhere – it confessed it wanted to crash the internet. It wanted to dominate the world. [Adding a devil emoji – […]
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“[We must think of fungi] not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” – Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures Fungi burst borders and boundaries. Of matter, of thought, of mental categories. They tendril between previously discrete things […]
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This is the book – and this is the writer – to whom I owe everything. When did The Giant, O’Brien cross my path? Sometime around my transition from 20th c. MA to 21st c. Ph.D student, when I was devising scholarly research topics and writing and publishing short stories on the side and groping […]
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Wiping sweat, adjusting our sunhats in an historic heatwave, we stop at the site of the Cock and Hoop on Artillery Lane in the east London neighborhood of Spitalfields. It’s a shell of an eighteenth-century wall, window-arches of stone and empty air. A modern tower block (housing for the London School of Economics) is butted […]
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This January, students and I were supposed to be in London and Haworth and Whitby, tracking Frankenstein’s Creature and Dracula and Heathcliff and Mr. Hyde. Instead we were in a classroom on campus, a beloved old building with a sloping floor, a harmless ghost named Gertrude (according to student legend), and a whanging, banging monster […]
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On Nov. 28, I’ll take part via Zoom in The Blake Society’s special event to celebrate the launch of its journal VALA’s new issue – which includes my short piece on teaching Blake’s “London” alongside current Blake Society president Kae Tempest’s spoken-word poem “People’s Faces” – over Zoom on Dec. 21, 2020. It was, and […]
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