as dreamers lie in bed asleep

August (08) assortment

Sanna Wani, “Good morning, the sun in October”

Her husband’s job

Her child-care arrangements

How she nurtures her underlings

How she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field

How she’s such a role model for other women

Still, the virtue of some rules in Aschwanden’s test is difficult to see at first. Take the rule of “no firsts.” In the comments section below her post for Last Word on Nothing, Finkbeiner explained that no sooner had she taken the vow to ignore gender, than she caught herself writing that the astronomer she was profiling was the first to win a certain award. After a reader urged her to stick to her pledge, she removed it.

“The fact that she’s the first woman to do that says a lot more about the prize-giving committee than it does about her,” Finkbeiner explained in our interview. “So if I were going to put that into a story, it would be a story about prejudice in that prize committee.”

A lot of commenters have said, ‘But isn’t it sometimes ok to mention these things about a woman?’ And my answer is, yes. In some circumstances it’s perfectly fine. For instance, if you’re writing a story about sexism in science or about the gender gap in leadership roles in science or you’re writing about sex-related issues specifically. What’s not ok is to turn a story about a scientist’s professional life into one about her personal life or her gender roles. What’s especially problematic is to frame the story, ‘and the most remarkable thing is that she accomplished all of this while being a woman!’

on april

barbara kingsolver demon copperhead \\ sara teasdale a november night \\ fatima aamer bilal i mother it, the absence of her ii. i was hard to bear from the very start (via @ivynightshade) \\ anne carson the glass essay (via @petaltexturedskies) \\ raymond p. fischer an aged man remembers april \\ cyrus cassells \\ anton chekhov love \\ t.s eliot the waste land \\ michelle o'sullivan the flower and the frozen sea: "bespoke"

Web-Weave

Yanyi, from Dream of the Divided Field: Poems; “Paradise, Lost”