Tag: Friday Finds

Friday Finds: B Movies (Board game review!)

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Hello friends! It has been a minute. My last blog post was back in May and then life swept me up like a giant pterodactyl and deposited me – somehow – at the end of August. Where did the time go? Well, I was teaching a creative writing (fiction and poetry) class this summer at the University of Edinburgh AND finishing the edits on a new book AND hosting friends AND traveling in Sweden AND interviewing and landing a new job (!) which I’ll tell you more about soon. Phew. All of this to say: thank you for your patience during this crazy time. More Madeira Mondays will be back (the first Monday of each month), with a few ‘Friday Finds’ sprinkled in there too.

And this ‘Friday Finds’ is an exciting one for me because it’s a first: my first board game review!

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Friday Finds: The Poetry of Sappho

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Here in garlands, goddess of love, as a sign

to our own festivities, with a graceful hand

in golden cups pour nectar out like wine.

from Sappho: Songs and Poems, translated from the Greek by Chris Preddle

I must admit: I don’t know much about antiquity. Frequent readers of this blog will know that I’m interested in 18th and 19th century history which – believe it or not – is fairly recent (when we take into account all of human history). But what I do know is that there were many complex and vibrant civilizations long before our own and we can still feel their influence today in our beliefs, our values and our art. And how cool is it that one of the most famous and lasting poets in all of Western literature was a woman?

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Friday Finds: I May Destroy You (2020)

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I’ve been meaning to write about ‘I May Destroy You’ for a long time. Actually, it was one of the reasons that I wanted to start this ‘Friday Finds’ series at all. When I watched it last year, based on the recommendation of a good friend, I really wanted to write about it on my blog. But at the time I was writing almost exclusively ‘Madeira Mondays’/historical focused content, so it didn’t feel like I could. But even after I introduced ‘Friday Finds’, it slipped my mind for a while, only to renter it when I was reading about all of the drama surrounding the Golden Globes, and how shows like Emily in Paris received recognition when I May Destroy You (a critical darling, at least in the UK) did not, back in 2020. Anyways: let me tell you about I May Destroy You, which, if you’ve not seen it already, is a really excellent and thought provoking show!

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Friday Finds: Revisiting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

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I am part of the generation that ‘grew up’ with the Harry Potter books. I was roughly the same age as the characters as all of the books came out and remember vividly waiting for the final installments to figure out what happened next. And while the series never meant as much to me as it did to some of my friends (it was a formative series for many people my age), I did really enjoy the books. For years I’ve been curious to revisit them as an adult. I finally took the opportunity and, before embarking on a transatlantic flight, I downloaded a Harry Potter audiobook from the library. I chose the one that I remembered as being my favorite in the series: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. After twelve hours of listening to it on planes, trains and automobiles, in airports and coffeeshops, I can say that it was, frankly, pretty incredible and much better than I even expected.

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Madeira Mondays: changes ahead!

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Almost two years ago, I sat down to write the first ‘Madeira Mondays’ post. I had just finished my Doctorate of Fine Arts (which was looking at 18th century historical fiction and forgotten women in the early American South), was working on a historical fiction novel, was volunteering as a costumed historical guide…basically my life was: all 18th century, all the time. This blog series was meant to be a fun way to share my research and passion by writing about all the cool (and bizarre) stuff I’d learned about during my PhD. I would share 18th century recipes and strange facts about 18th century underwear! My first post was on one of my favorite novels about this period of early American history: Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes.

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