Author: Laurel L. Russwurm

is a self publishing novelist and photographer.

Tagged by @erinbeatty – thank you! (Answering this on my main just to keep everything in the right…

Tagged by @erinbeatty – thank you! (Answering this on my main just to keep everything in the right place.)

Name: Laura.

Nickname: Not a lot you can do with Laura really.

Zodiac: Taurus.

Favourite
music/bands: Mostly folk or folk rock these days. Traditional or contemporary, it’s all good. Some particular favourites at the moment are Karine Polwart, Jim Moray, Greg Russell & Ciaran Algar, Julie Fowlis, Emily Portman, False Lights, Sam Kelly, and Ruth Notman.

Favourite sports team: Don’t really have one. I vaguely follow the England cricket team but that’s about it.

Other blogs: Just this and the writing blog. I’m thinking of setting up an Animal Crossing blog or a Welsh history blog though (hey, I contain multitudes!).

Do you get asks: Haha, no, not very often.

How many blogs do you follow: 407 apparently, which is a lot more than I expected!

Tumblr crushes: I always enjoy reading posts from @teashoesandhair, @morgauseoforkney, @lloerwyn, @lettersfromthelighthouse and @bookhobbit.

Lucky number: 3.

What are you wearing right now: A short-sleeved jersey dress – purple, navy and white with a kind of stripey pattern, navy leggings and my favourite socks (they’re purple with bees on!). With minor modifications for the seasons that’s basically my ‘uniform.’

Dream vacation: Iceland or Norway. I’d love to see the Northern Lights or go on a fjord cruise. I’d also quite like to experience Christmas markets in Germany (guess my favourite season).

Dream car: I really couldn’t care less about about cars, haha. As long as it gets me from A to B reliably I’m good. I guess maybe a Volkswagen Beetle or one of those vintage/hippie Volkswagen camper vans? They both look pretty cool!

Favourite food: I’m a crappy cook but I love food and could talk about this all day! To name only a few – lots of different kinds of curry, pad thai, sushi, burgers, cherry bakwell tarts, apple pie. Jalebis too, which I can’t eat any more. 🙁 Oh, and ‘Swansea Fisherman’s Breakfast,’ which I had at this one B&B in Cardigan. It’s cockles, bacon, and laverbread cooked in cream and served on toast with some chopped chives. Delicious!

Drink of choice: Tea! Always tea. I even have a tea tag on this blog. Specifically Earl Grey, spicy Chai or Lapsang Souchong. When I want something cold I tend to go for ginger beer, coke or lemonade.

Instruments: I played violin throughout school and had some acoustic guitar lessons but I’m terrible at both because I never practised enough. I was also part of a djembe drumming group for a while and that was great fun.

Languages: English is my first language. I started learning Welsh as a kid and I’m sort of edging my way towards intermediate level there now. I also picked up a tiny bit of Latin at university. Other than that though it’s just what scraps of French I can remember from school. I’d love to get a grip on the basics of Icelandic or Old English but I always find it really difficult to try and teach myself things.

Celebrity crush: Dev Patel.

Random fact: I collect stuff with bees on.

Favourite ecosystem: It’s a toss up between tundra, taiga, and temperate rainforests.

Favourite cat: Maine Coons and Norwegian Forest cats. Or Scottish wildcats for a non-domestic kind.

Tagging: @troiings, @ellatholmes, @ambarwen and @allspiritandfireanddew, but only if you want to. Feel free to ignore!

“It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into…”

“It is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled up bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again – if to do that is human if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.”

– Ursula K Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

finnlongman: I’ve been very quiet these last few days – as a white British person, it seemed more…

finnlongman:

I’ve been very quiet these last few days – as a white British person, it seemed more important to keep quiet, listen and put the work in offline to make sure I’m part of the solution and not part of the problem, than to performatively demonstrate that I care. (If I had an audience, it would be different, but let’s be honest – I don’t.) There are a great many petitions and donation links circulating at the moment – if your Tumblr dash and Twitter feed look anything like mine, you’ve seen them twenty times already today, and these are proof that there’s a lot we can all do from behind our computer screens.

However, most of these links are, understandably, US-focused, so for those of us in the UK it can be difficult to know the best way to help. One thing many of us might not have been aware of is the fact that the UK sells tear gas and rubber bullets to the US. There has rightfully been a lot of discussion about how the UK is far from innocent when it comes to racism and police brutality, but our goverment’s direct role in supporting and exacerbating the violence currently occurring in the US is often overlooked.

Like many people, I was ignorant of the danger posed by rubber bullets – the name is disingenuous for something that can be profoundly disabling if not fatal. A photojournalist lost her left eye a few days ago and is now partially blind (she’s already working again and being extremely badass about the whole thing). Tear gas is evil at the best of times, but during a pandemic that affects the respiratory system, it is unfathomable. To continue to sell these weapons to the US makes our country complicit in the lives lost and injury caused.

There’s been a call for these sales to be suspended (see article linked above), which would send a clear message that the UK does not condone this brutality. It’s only a drop in the ocean when it comes to putting a stop to the harm caused by the UK arms trade more generally, but it’s a drop that would help.

So please, if you’re in the UK, write to your MP in support of suspending these sales. While you’re there, ask them to condemn Trump’s response, and demand that the government release the delayed report about BAME Covid-19 deaths. It’s easy to feel helpless adding your name to dozens of change.org petitions, but there are concrete issues you can approach your elected representatives about, and these are some of them. None of us can fix the world, but we can help.

You can write to your MP very easily using WriteToThem.com. You don’t need to be registered to vote, you just need to live in their constituency. If you have a home and term-time address (e.g. you’re a university student), you have two MPs. You don’t need to know their name, because WriteToThem will find them for you. You don’t need to send a long, thought-out email (although that’s great!), you just need to make it clear to them that this is an issue their constituents care about.

The world is awful right now.  Let’s do what we can to make it a tiny bit less awful. <3

“I find I am at ease with other imagined minds — bringing to life, restoring in some sense to…”

“I find I am at ease with other imagined minds — bringing to life, restoring in some sense to vitality, the whole varnished men of other times, […] the incessant weaving labour of the marvellous brain inside the skull — making its patterns, its most particular sense of what it sees and learns and believes. It seems important that these other lives of mine should span many centuries and as many places as my limited imagination can touch.”

– A. S. Byatt, Possession.

woolandcoffee: aspiringwarriorlibrarian: I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism…

woolandcoffee:

aspiringwarriorlibrarian:

I’ve seen the Ursula K LeGuin quote about capitalism going around, but to really appreciate it you have to know the context.

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Ursula K LeGuin got up in front of an audience of some of the most powerful people in publishing, was expected to give a trite and politically safe argument about literature, and instead told them directly “Your empire will fall. And I will help it along.”

We stan an icon.

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that…”

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”

– Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read

maisiewilliams:

I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!

1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout. 

2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.

3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms. 

4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway. 

5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs. 

6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race. 

7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past. 

8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose. 

9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas. 

10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.