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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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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To many of us, the year 2020 felt like the first draft of apocalypse. The COVID-19 pandemic claimed nearly two million dead worldwide. Lockdown life drove minds and economies around the bend. George Floyd was murdered by a policeman on a Minneapolis sidewalk. Brexit disaster flapped down on rusty wings to roost on the once-United […]
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On the top floor of the Accademia in Florence, in an overlooked panel of a medieval altarpiece, is an image that’s easy to ignore: a shepherd’s dog, barking at the angel who’s suddenly appeared to rouse the obviously startled shepherds from their sleep. There were shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks […]
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Left: The great writer. Right: Her tinfoil avatar. “I was hoping for a great memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft…this isn’t it.” – Historian Simon Schama I’m sure everyone involved meant well. I can’t wait to see how my next crop of “In Frankenstein’s Footsteps” study-abroad students will react to it [in a post-COVID J-term 2022 — […]
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Possible introduction, continued, to An Awful Rainbow: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. Read Part One here. *** We Frankenstein pilgrims came home to a year that only got scarier. First, there was barely-averted war with Iran. The presidential caucus – Iowa’s pride and joy – came apart in our hands. Then the […]
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First of all, happy birthday to my fellow Virgo. Today! You look wonderful for age 223. Here’s my brand-new, just-finished, 800-page first draft of Creature, a novel I wrote about you. I hope you don’t mind. Thank you for inspiring me more than you ever could have known. We’ll talk. XOXO, Amy
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From the introduction-in-progress to my book-in-progress An Awful Rainbow: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. All photos by me. – A glittering blue day at the top of the world: Montenvers in the Alps above Chamonix, France. January 15, 2020. Elevation 6276 feet. Everything here is ice and rock and sky. Look up […]
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Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
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At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
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