Recommended reading: Sara Paretsky writes for The Independent on George Eliot‘s The Mill on the Floss and the sibling bond so seldom portrayed in English fiction.
George Eliot & Siblings
The Illest Brother
“Wherever you are…realize that your essence is divine, son / and let it shine, son.” Peace to Guru Keith Elam, 1966 – 2010.
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The New Fiction of Solitude
“If we are now relentlessly connected, every marginal identity gaining collective recognition, becoming assimilated, ever more rapidly? If that is where we stand, then something like a stubbornly solitary voice may be welcome, even necessary, telling us that what it means to be human—and what may keep us human—is to feel alone in a strange room, with our seclusion the thing that defines and can save us.” On bearing witness to the spectacle of aloneness and the fiction of empathy.
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Your Thoughts on Painters?
“Writers are not often great lovers but pathological inventors of explanations. Sex induces a kind of cowardice in them, a fear of experimentation, of being vulnerable, of stepping naked onto the stage to examine all the presumptions that pass without question when everyone still has their pants on.” Michael Thomsen makes the case that dating writers is a bad idea.
Correcting Gender Inequity
The Interference Archive went on a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to help balance gender inequality on the site, which is overwhelmingly edited by men. Our own Sonya Chung writes on how to write across gender.
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Quilting Anew
Recommended Reading: Bernadette Murphy on how knitting can be instructive for writers.