Untitled painting by Daniel F. Gerhartz/ excerpts from 'Text me when you get home' by Kayleen Schaefer/ 'Hinds feet' by Daniel F. Gerhartz

Leila Chatti, I Dreamed I Forgot 

“The most haunting time at which to see them is at the turn of the moon, when they utter strange wailing cries; but the lagoon is dangerous for mortals then…”

“the mermaids” - marianne boruch // “hylas and the nymphs” - john william waterhouse // “the love song of j. alfred prufrock” - t.s. eliot // “a mermaid” - john william waterhouse // “the siren” john william waterhouse // moby-dick - herman melville // “the knight and the mermaid” - isobel lilian gloag // “the land baby” - john collier // “lamia” - john keats // of “hylas and the water nymphs” - henrietta rae // peter pan // j.m. barrie

Elaine Castillo, America Is Not The Heart Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Ijeoma Umebinyuo, ‘Confessions’, Questions for Ada Mohamad Hafez, Baggage series Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited Anne Carson, ‘The Glass Essay’, Glass, Irony, and God Margaret Atwood, ‘November’, You Are Happy Richard Siken, ‘Boot Theory’, Crush

Love™️ cont.

— Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas

“I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness” —“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” by Tennessee Williams

—“Poor Little Rich Boy” by Regina Spektor

“Kaling being a total boss lady seems to only make him love her more. An audience member asks if he is going to marry her, to which after only a slight pause he says, “I don’t know.”” —B.J. Novak about Mindy Kaling

“Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.” —The First Bad Man by Miranda July

“But I love you. I want you to have your own thoughts and ideas and feelings, even when I hold you in my arms.” — A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

“She still loves him. This is the fact she wakes up to each morning. She checks it, sometimes, a tongue probing an aching tooth, making sure it still hurts.” —Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

—“State of Grace” by Taylor Swift

“I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you.” — De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

“My love for you is more/athletic than a verb,/agile as a star” — Sylvia Plath

“I think I see the difference now, between loving someone from afar and loving someone up close. When you see them up close, you see the real them, but they also get to see the real you. And Peter does. He sees me, and I see him.” ― To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before by Jenny Han 

― Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke’s Heart by Sarah MacLean

— Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, c. 1978.

From todays newsletter

“Medusa lost her beauty—or rather, it was taken from her. Beauty is always something you can lose. Women’s beauty is seen as something separate from us, something we owe but never own: We are its stewards, not its beneficiaries. We tend it like a garden where we do not live. Oh, but ugliness—ugliness is always yours. Almost everyone has some innate kernel of grotesquerie; even fashion models (I’ve heard) tend to look a bit strange and froggish in person, having been gifted with naturally level faces that pool light luminously instead of breaking it into shards. And everyone has the ability to mine their ugliness, to emphasize and magnify it, to distort even those parts of themselves that fall within acceptable bounds. Where beauty is narrow and constrained, ugliness is an entire galaxy, a myriad of sparkling paths that lurch crazily away from the ideal. There are so few ways to look perfect, but there are thousands of ways to look monstrous, surprising, upsetting, outlandish, or odd. Thousands of stories to tell in dozens of languages: the languages of strong features or weak chins, the languages of garish makeup and weird haircuts and startling clothes, fat and bony and hairy languages, the languages of any kind of beauty that’s not white. Nose languages, eyebrow languages, piercing and tattoo languages, languages of blemish and birthmark and scar. When you give up trying to declare yourself acceptable, there are so many new things to say.”

— What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? Jess Zimmerman (via kuanios)

“call me medusa for my monstrosity is not mine to bear, but yours to fear.”

— a.c  (via onceuponapenis)

i’m going thru big trauma hours and reading your compiled research has been very cathartic and oddly healing in a way. i was just wondering if you had recommendations for writing with more trauma-focused/interpretation of Medusa or other horror ish, female-focused works?

i hope whatever you’re going through eases soon. here are some things i hope might help. 

What If We Cultivated Our Ugliness? or: The Monstrous Beauty of Medusa, Jess Zimmerman

Transforming Medusa, Charlotte Currie

Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, Leslie Jamison

Nightingale: A Gloss, Paisley Rekdal

The Thread: Forged in Fire, Marissa Korbel

The Thread: Volcanoes, Marissa Korbel

The Girls Who Turned into Trees, Miranda Schmidt

There Is No Way Out of Here: Trauma and Transformation, Andrea Applebee

Make Me a Cold and Pitiless Goddess, Sharma Shields

Xenomorph, Sara Eliza Johnson

The Resurgence of the Monstrous Feminine, Hannah Williams

Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies, Brooke Bolander

Embrace Your Monstrous Flesh: On Women’s Bodies in Horror, Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Horror Lives in the Body, Megan Pillow Davis

Hero Status: Medusa, Hazel Cills

Medusa Writes for Teen Vogue, Dorothy McGinnis

Snake Eyes: The Power to Turn the Patriarchy into Stone, McKenzie Schwark

The Timeless Myth of Medusa, a Rape Victim Turned Into a Monster, Christobel Hastings

OUROBORICISMS, Alice Lesperance 

On the Haunted Lives of Girls and Women, Rachel Eve Moulton

Prey, Kathleen Hale

Medusa Reflects, Jacqueline Doyle

you’ve given me a very broad topic and thus i have tried to give you a wide range of things to read. some of these don’t exactly fit what you requested, but since they helped me, i hope they might help you too. i’m always available if you want more. i hope you find your healing soon, angel 💖