Psst...! My next novel comes out May 9th! Check out my schedule of events here!

JBB: An Artblog!
Sade Olutola

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Discoholic đȘ©
cherry valley forever

Andulka
todays bird
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Three Goblin Art
trying on a metaphor

ç„æ„ / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
tumblr dot com
đȘŒ
Monterey Bay Aquarium
YOU ARE THE REASON

@theartofmadeline
ojovivo
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Aqua Utopiaïœæ”·ăźćșă§èšæ¶ă玥ă
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@italicsmine
Psst...! My next novel comes out May 9th! Check out my schedule of events here!
Michelle Obama moodboard
However chaotic and cruel the world seemed, setting aside time to read classic books with our children, letting our imaginations take flight, made the universe seem legible again.
I wrote, with my friend Tess Taylor, about starting a book club with our sons.
2016: The year my daughter learned to stand on her own and walk away. Itâs also the year my son learned about the Holocaust, that it happened, and not that long ago. He is five, she is one. If this opening relies too heavily on the metaphorical, please forgive me: I refuse to besmirch my entry with a certain someoneâs name, he has crowded my Internet and my brain too much already.
So begins my Year in Reading entry at The Millions.
Love this, and also happy that my forthcoming book can check almost all of these categories. (I love the âGirls making bad decisionsâ genre.)
âI am still a little surprised by how deeply interested I am in moral choices⊠I remain deeply puzzled â Iâd have to say indignant â that as adults we can find ourselves in situations where there is no obvious right thing to do.â The great @italicsmine interviews Margot Livesey.
I interviewed my former teacher Margot Livesey! Check it out!
Iâm trying my heart is chaos.
A year ago today Ginger was born! It was raining outside and our house felt like this little warm cave, quiet and full of love. It hurt to sit down on my metal dining room chairs and I was so tired, but also stunned by how good I felt, considering Iâd just been in labor and delivered a baby. I remember her pale white body swimming up from the birthing tub in the dark room. Everyoneâs faces and laughter, and the relief I felt--that the pain had stopped, that I had done it, Iâd had my baby. Here she was! I remember her squished-up little pug face. The way she held her arms and hands close to her chest, and her legs bent into herself. I remember her eyes which seemed to stare into my very heart. I remember thinking sheâd been on earth before, that she was an old soul. I remember my shallow sleep afterward, and Ginger in the bassinet at the foot of the bed. I remember going to wake up Bean and him asking me if I was still in labor. How he held her on the couch and said,âI love you already, Baba.â I remember craving ramen that first week, which is a food I never crave. I remember the milk coming in, how Iâd forgotten how cartoonish the milk-boobs look. I remember how sheâd cry for at least an hour every night, and how we didnât know how to make her stop, we didnât know what was wrong. When her belly button thing fell off I meant to save it, but it just stayed on top of the dresser like a huge booger until it dropped to the floor and was swept away, or maybe it disintegrated, I donât know.
Ginger was always so still and happy in the beginning. We joked sheâd never move. She liked to sit and twirl her wrists, and then eat, eat, eat. When she started crawling, she did it with one leg out, a little chimpanzee hustle. She still crawls like that. Once she turned mobile she got curious--opening everything, crying if you took away something dangerous. Finally some opinions! I remember taking the suede-boot cleaning spray from her and receiving a scream full of rage.
Her cheeks are almost always pink. Her hair is blonde and often sticks out in every direction. She used to moan with happiness when she ate, but now she just yells âmo mo moâ until you give her more of whatever it is sheâs consuming: milk, yogurt, lambchops. She is standing a lot, but careful about walking, and very deliberate.
And now she is one. She loves to get into everything, and dance, and blow kisses, and put things inside of other things. She says a few words even--mama, dada, raspberry (raspa!), agua. I canât help but be proud. She is a goofball, an expert hugger, a sly little observer. I canât believe I get to be her mother. Happy birthday, Ginger Dean Brown!
Enough with judging a woman for what she puts on her body, and for what she consumes in service of that body.
I wrote about my favorite J. Crew jacket for The Cut.
Thursday, October 27th, 2016
Itâs a weird time to be doing what Iâm doing. Itâs a weird time to be huddled in a dark room beside a sleeping baby sighing in her crib, to be formulating my first real sentences in eight weeks in the short window before she will rouse, and smile, and coo, and eat. Sometimes I fear that as an adult sheâll come across a record of the year in which she was born and say, You thought it was a good idea to bring me into this? How can I ever explain myself? The hospital gave us a newspaper from the day she was born with a Trump headline, does it even matter at this point which, and I had the fleeting, solemn thought, We have to burn this before she sees. Iâve done nearly nothing but tend to my newborn daughter for almost two months, and so dispatches from the outside world come to me in tweets that I scroll through hazily while nursing, and they seem like bad jokes or very short pieces of very bleak dystopian fiction. Meanwhile my world is cozy and strange and small: blankets and milk, repeated performances of âHow Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?,â and staring into my childâs bright, adorable eyes.
We lost our first baby and spent the next fifteen months completely terrified. Before we tried for another we had to make sure that neither of us carried the mutated gene that damaged Hawkâs heart. If one of us had it any baby we conceived would have a fifty-percent chance of having it; if one of us had it our own life expectancy would lower by a lot. We went to India not knowing. We waited two months after that. Hawk died in May, and it wasnât until around 6 p.m. on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving that a geneticist called me and told me that neither of us were carriers. The mutation was random bad luck. After that a fog lifted for about as long as it took for me to find out I was pregnant, and then there was every ultrasound to fret over, every hour in which I didnât feel her kick. I didnât tell a lot of people I was pregnant because everyone naturally wants to believe that every pregnancy ends the way itâs supposed to, and I needed to remember that it wasnât true. I have a baby nowâa sweet, hungry, beautiful beanâbut since I donât carry that mutated gene I understand that the difference between her being here and her being somewhere else is only a bit of muscle in the heart that hardened the way it was supposed to. Thatâs all. The understanding makes life feel eternally precarious, but thatâs okay, because it is.Â
You thought it was a good idea to bring me into this? I did. I donât think you can go through what we did and go on to try again unless you really, really believe that the world is a place worth living in. It has racists and war and demagogues, but it also has dogs and autumn afternoons and Mad Men, and dancing to music from Fiddler on the Roof at your brotherâs wedding, and eating dumplings with your best friend on a rainy day. It has the tiniest socks youâve ever seen. It has the capacity for the best luck in the world, wherein you meet a man and watch That Thing You Do! with him, marry him, have a baby, and watch the man hold the baby, and watch the baby smile at the man. The world has baseball and Hamilton and Barack Obama and Christmas.Â
And now it has Tessa, too.
Oh, Katie, this is beautiful.
Looking for an idea for your next novel? Weâve got five great ones for you right here.
I wrote about five novels Iâll never commit to!
THIS PAGE CONTAINS MEMORIES, STORIES, HIGHLIGHTS, PICTURES, EPHEMERA, ETC FROM SKYLIGHT BOOKS TWENTY YEAR HISTORY!
top to bottom:
Liz & Jenn / Charles / Arlo / Kerry / Mary / Steven / Kerrie
Aww, I love this!
âThe book is about core family values and a family that went through several hardshipsâsome of which I didnât know about, my relatives didnât know about either, or werenât fully aware. It was very emotional for me to find out the actual truth.â creative writing program coordinator Suzanne Overstreet, on her first novel Wait For Me (via Oberlin College & Conservatory)
OMG, Suzanne! xoxo
Galleys of Woman No. 17 have arrived and they are stunning.
Big faced Ginger, from some time last month...
Francesca Woodman
Who wouldnât love this origin story? All the stories about California are tantalizing, especially when the venerable Northeasterners visit and theyâre ogling at our bougainvillea, exclaiming at our light. Later, they might take pictures of tacos. To outsiders, California is for surfers and cults and blondes; lately, itâs for tech nerds. The people are beautiful, and so is the produce. These images of our state arenât unfounded, and we have only ourselves to blame for fulfilling and promoting them. I can go to Beverly Hills to see women turned simian with plastic surgery, like extras from Planet of the Apes, and I can drive by dozens of aged hippies in Berkeley, not far from the man-boys with their iPhones in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the ocean preens.Â
--from my essay âMy Californiaâ at Zocalo Public Squareâs new issue about the west.