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Miscellany

Miscellany

Top 5 children’s books for Earth Day

This Earth Day, consider the power that the spare prose and arresting illustrations of children’s literature have in delivering a message.  Children’s books have the ability to teach us a thing or two about the delicate dance that happens between us and our planet. Here are five of the most…
Amanda Harkness
April 21, 2014
Miscellany

What kind of flower are you? Six literary heroines and their floral alter egos

A red rose means love. A daisy, innocence. A violet signifies faithfulness. Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s bestselling novel The Language of Flowers (Ballantine, 2011) sparked renewed interest in Victorian “floriography,” or flower symbolism. Recipients used floral dictionaries to decode the meanings of complicated “talking bouquets” and made floral arrangements to communicate feelings…
Kim Kankiewicz
May 10, 2014
Miscellany

Ten lyrical and lovely literary tattoos

You have to really love something to get it tattooed on your body. And I mean really love something — once it’s in your skin, that ink isn’t going anywhere. Even if you get it removed, there will always be a scar. Because of their permanence, tattoos can be a…
Rachel Carter
May 21, 2014
Miscellany

How to dress like Zooey Deschanel

We’ve all seen 500 Days of Summer, that 2009 hipster-love anthem where Joseph Gordon-Levitt is whiny and romantic, and Zooey Deschanel is the manic pixie dream girl who gets away. It’s a solid story, sure, but what I remember most about the film isn’t the lovesick moping or The Smiths-heavy soundtrack—it’s…
Rachel Carter
March 20, 2014
Miscellany

Oodles of Doodles: Which type are you?

I knew from a very young age that I was a doodler—in fact, I was a repeat offender. Any time that I had to focus in class, my pen would instantly begin to move across the margins of my three-ring notebook: a flourish of spirals here, a cascade of words…
Amanda Harkness
March 25, 2014
Miscellany

Pecan brownies for the soul

The love affair of Myra Sims and Gabriel Catts will break your heart. And Claybird Catts will steal it. Janis Owens's three novels centering on the life of Myra—who has a past more tragic than most, and a present she just can't seem to hold on to—are beautifully haunting. My…
Ingrid
April 7, 2014
Miscellany

What’s so great about writing by hand?

For most of my young life, I hated my own handwriting. The other girls in my class wrote with such beautiful, rounded loopy script and I envied them, even the ones who dotted their i's with little hearts. My scratchy letters always came out flattened, each one drooping ever closer…
Carrie Padian
January 12, 2014
Miscellany

It’s (no, not its) National Grammar Day!

Americans have a strange relationship with grammar. Anyone who spends a significant amount of time on Facebook, or perusing the comments section on YouTube (or any website, really, where people are allowed to comment) might conclude that as a culture, we are losing our grasp on the English language. Does…
Melissa Duclos
March 4, 2014