The Battered Moons Prize-giving at the Big Poetry Weekend Imagine if we were suddenly given the supernatural ability to hear people’s thoughts. It’s a source of longing and desire - that feeling of almost wanting to climb into each other’s skins, to be so close to another human being that we could hear what they [...]
Author: zbthompson
Playlist for Notes from a Swing State
I might be trying to distract myself from hard Brexit developments (!!!), but I just wrote up this playlist to go along with my new nonfiction book: Notes From A Swing State. I am a popular culture junkie, and songs come up quite a bit in the book, all having some personal or political meaning [...]
Unicorns in America
My 5-year-old son has decided he doesn't like unicorns anymore. “Unicorns are for girls,” he tells me. “The boys in school said so.” I bought him a unicorn T-shirt but lately he only wears it at home. I try to encourage him, but I also think back to my own childhood: how my wise, feminist [...]
Trauma, Poetry, and Punctuation
Edward Burne Jones: Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott "Chaucer": p.441, 'The Legend of Goode Wimmen'; Philomene, with a woman (Philomela) standing by her loom holding a shuttle in an interior, with a half-woven tapestry with the story of Pholomene and Tereus, looking out of the window. 1896 I have been [...]
Battered Moons Poetry Competition: What do I look for in a poem?
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: [...]
Letter from Ohio 2025: A Speculative Fiction
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 [...]
Real Sex Ed?
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? [...]
On Smiling, Or Not
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 [...]
Sinister Myth: The Harpy and the Medusa
[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 [...]
A Note on Remembering Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson
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 [...]
