& The Midnight Heart Blog
I am judging the Battered Moons poetry competition this summer. There is just a week to go until the deadline (June 30th, UK residents only) so here I answer the question, what do I look for in a poem? 1. I have eclectic taste. I do not exclude any school or movement from my reading: [...]
Recently, some scary things have been happening in Ohio in relation to anti-abortion legislation. At the same time as these debates began to take on a new urgency, Welsh writer Robert Minhinnick asked me to contribute to a project called "Letters from the Future," which sees a collective of writers creating imagined letters from a [...]
What kind of sex education did you have, if you had any at all? I’m always interested in hearing about people’s experiences of sex education in school, but whatever your experiences have been, I can bet that it was not as helpful as it could have been. Yeah, remember these from sex ed class? [...]
A feminist call might be a call to anger, to develop a sense of rage about collective wrongs.– Sara Ahmed Most women have had it happen to them. Walking back to the car one day after work, I am thinking about all the things I have to do, when a man stops me. “You should [...]
[Featured image by Christian Schloe, Lost in a Dream.] I am very excited this month to see the first episodes of my podcast going live, a project which I developed with Brendan Walsh. The title is Sinister Myth: How Stories We Tell Perpetuate Violence, and the logo was designed by the brilliant Breanne LeJeune. But [...]
Early on in the Sexuality Studies course I'm teaching, we read some extracts from Harvey Milk’s writings, especially where he was defending gay teachers from campaigns that sought to eliminate them from the classroom. Harvey Milk’s work is memorialized - his speeches have been recorded and published for example - but the work of other [...]
I felt very lucky to recently have an opportunity to be interviewed for a program on BBC Radio 4. It was a program created by writer Mab Jones, who had an idea inspired by a series of postcards she collected featuring women in traditional Welsh dress. She started to wonder about what the women would [...]
I have a new article out today in Wales Arts Review, which tries to capture the strange time before elections in America, when the midterm hype coincides with Halloween. Halloween was not really celebrated in the US until the 1920s, brought over by white immigrants, but it has become a national craze, and far more [...]
I had an essay out last month on The Manifest Station titled 'Fuck Self-help.' It's about all the women I know who have come to me for advice on whether their relationship is abusive, and it also tells something about my own experience of intimate partner violence. What the past has taught me is that [...]
“If we could perceive death as a part of pregnancy, we might just take women more seriously.” These words are taken from a recent article on ‘Mothers as Makers of Death,’ published by Claudia Dey in the Paris Review, in which she affirms a darker alternative to the Hallmark version of motherhood. Mary Shelley also [...]
