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“how could you have forgotten that” i forget Everything. unless i remember

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin (via nightkitchentarot)

making bad art and dressing weirdly and collecting random things and listening to silly music is actually so important

Paper Lamps by Sachie Muramatsu

Thank you to whoever made this :) I felt like posting some writing tips.

loneliness becomes an acid that eats away at you

Haruki Murakami, Sergey Tutunov, Pablo Picasso, Maurice Pirenne, Yvan Favre, George Pratt, Marie Muravski, Aaron Wiesenfeld

buy me a coffee

Some More Aesthetic Playlists for Writing

For when you’re running through the streets of a steampunk city

For when you’re gettin’ lit and plunderin’ ships with your rowdy pirate crew

For when you’re exploring the surface of a new planet

For when you’re in a southern, mystical Wuthering Heights™️ situation

For when you’re roaming the fog ridden streets of Victorian London

For when you’re traveling Europe by train with your college friends in the 1900s alternatively light academia

For when you’re on a space adventure with a fearless band of friends

For when you’re wandering through the palace gardens awaiting an arraigned marriage

For when you’re sailing on the high seas and your crew is singing some shanties to keep the spirits up

For when you’re walking through the streets of a big city and you can’t help feeling like there’s something magical running through your veins

For when you’re experiencing the Highs and lows of aristocratic life

For when you’re chilling with your cyborg friends at an android jazz club

For when you’re monster hunting in a small woodland town

For when you’re making your way through a bustling town and trying to take in the beauty and splendor

Carbickova Crowns on Etsy

hi my reader friends lithub has a new syllabi section that has some great (u guessed it!) syllabi from much beloved writers like ocean vuong and ross gay here’s the full list that i have already added half of to my tbr:

ekphrastic poetry with victoria chang (featuring works of john ashbery, joy harjo, paul tran)

the literature of obsession with julia may jonas (obsession as transformation, destruction, catharsis and form)

place, space and landscape with alexandra kleeman (featuring didion, okorafor and hernan diaz)

lyric research with ross gay (books that combine research with an “I” like nelson’s bluets or christle’s the crying book)

hybrid poetry with ocean vuong (traditions, innovations and possibilities featuring bhanu kapil, rimbaud, clifton)

multigenre experiments in form with paul lisicky (for writing that explores connections between genres)

reading about writers with peter ho davies (books that teach the craft and give writing advice, think ‘the outline’ trilogy)

speculative women with lina maria ferreira cabeza-vanegas (a look at speculative works by women writers like jemisin, butler, k le guin)

writers and the world with viet thanh nguyen (rankine, baldwin, and coates)

sports and contemporary writing with sam lipsyte (exactly what it says on the tin)