Shaay Gallagher-Starr

If you know this, then you know me. 😂❤️

@levarburton.bsky.social Mr. Burton, I just saw a conversation between you and Laurence Fishburne, about why you keep Kunta Kinte’s chains on your wall. Your story made a deep impact and shifted my perspective. Thank you for your fierce honesty, your anger, and your willingness to connect & teach

You certainly do! Please pass along our love 💕

💙📚 #ReadThisNotThat
Look to #NaomiNovik #Scholomance series to replace that trans antagonist #JKR

Start with *The Graduate* to follow El Higgins through her perilous magical boarding school. Perfect YA fantasy!

📚💙 #ReadThisNotThat
Try Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, beginning with *Midnight Riot.* (to replace #NeilGaiman #Neverwhere)

Fun, thoughtful, engaging, set in a London where magic still exists. Sort of a police non-procedural. Enjoying whole series!
#Aaronovitch #RiversofLondon

💙📚 Booksky, let’s start a #ReadThisNotThat thread for authors who have turned out to be disappointing human beings - however y’all define that. For me, JKR & Gaiman are on that list. Recommendations follow:

THAT is the damned truth!

Go read The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones. Then pass it on. The only comparison I can make is with Blood Meridian - and TBHH is better. Don’t let this one languish is the “genre fiction” backwater. It’s too good, and too important. 💙📚 #SGJ #booksky

The only comparison worth making is McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.

The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is better, in my opinion. This book should be required reading.

@sgj.bsky.social reading The Buffalo Hunter Hunters has hollowed me out. I wonder if writing it has done the same to you.

The news provides the epilogue: the cruelty & brutality that birthed the US is ending it, too. There is no real answer to Good Stab’s question.

@stephenking.bsky.social thank you! Just finished listening to you read Bag of Bones. 21 hours of storytelling was an invaluable mental health boost. Loved the ways in which things were never quite what they seemed at 1st glimpse, or at the 2nd. Racism as a type of original sin was compelling, too.

Quote from T. Kingfisher, Jackalope Wives and Other Stories. White text on a blue background with irregular white spots reads, “The moon was the eye of an ink-dark whale overhead, barnacled with stars.”

@tkingfisher.com I both love and envy you for this image, in this story. It’s perfect, and I’m glad I got to read it. I 👀 what you did there.

Idc who you are. If you have a pulse and a sense of humor, go read this

www.tumblr.com/gallusrostro...

💙📚Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 17/20 #booksky #books #bookchallenge

💙📚Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 16/20 #booksky #books #bookchallenge

💙📚Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 15/20
#booksky #books #bookchallenge

Cover: Clockwork Boys; Clocktaur War Book 1; T. Kingfisher

Cover: The Wonder Engine; Clocktaur War Book 2; T. Kingfisher

💙📚Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers. 14/20
#booksky #books #bookchallenge
@tkingfisher.com

“Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.” — The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

📚💙

Wyndreth Berginsdottir’s Savage Daughter — Women of the Water Some of us here at Women of the Water have been singing this song around our kitchen tables and in circles of women online for the past year. It’s become a bit of an anthem at times swelling our heart...

#WitchSky
Christianity - the unkind, commercialized, death cult type - can feel relentless this time of year.

When it gets too much, I hum this to stay calm and grounded: www.womenofthewater.org/wow-blog/sav...

Gratitude to Wyndreth Berginsdottir 💙

#weekendplans
Get out in the National Forest, ostensibly to find a tree and greens for Solstice. Mostly to get our family out into the forest 🌲

Gather fallen Usnea for medicine

Store food for the apocalypse

Love on my people

Read banned books 📚 💙

Wrap gifts 🎁

What are you up to?

The Past and Present of Immigration Detention: Your Questions Answered A historian of migrant detention responds to questions from <em>Bolts</em> readers on the vast network of local lockups that jail immigrants, and how it

Our readers had a ton of questions on immigration detention: where it takes place, who benefits, who makes profits, how can one push back?

So we turned to a great historian to answer your questions, and I learned *a ton* from her—from Reagan's role, to all the $$ sheriffs make, and so on:

Shirley Jackson blows my mind. As good as ‘The Lottery’ is, I’m not sure it’s even the best story in that collection.

She wrote about racism more than most people realize now, too. Her short story, ‘After You, My Dear Alfonse,’ is a masterclass in white liberal racial bias & micro aggressions.

Which is perfectly set up by the pause in: “are supposed, by some, to dream.”

The way the rhythm stutters in those sentences is masterful.

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met nearly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

Today, on Shirley Jackson’s birthday, let’s all marvel at one of the greatest opening paragraphs ever written (from THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE)

Which is precisely why pasteurization was invented and why it became a part of the regulations for the sale of milk - along with things like not mixing in plaster to make it whiter.

Next up, a massive return of TB, typhoid, and diphtheria.

Are we Great Again yet?

Well, I definitely want to know what his “next steps” were gonna be!

Surviving President Tr*mp: Lessons from the 1960s and Octavia E. Butler I originally wrote this essay to coincide with the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017. It deeply grieves me to publish it…

Octavia E. Butler signed this copy of Parable of the Sower for my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due.

The power of these Black women inspired me to write an essay after Tr*mp's inauguration in 2017. I've reposted a slightly revised version I hope will bring you hope today.

tinyurl.com/mwazxrb4

@tananarivedue.bsky.social I read “The Rider” last week in Jordan Peele’s “Out There Screaming” and I’m still thinking about it. Maybe because the whole US is pondering vengeance right now, it stays close with me. Sometimes it’s the short stories that hit hard. That one did. Thank you for it.

I think we need to re-define “violence” when a venal judge who sentenced *children* to long prison sentences in exchange for cash is considered a “non-violent” offender. These men are responsible for every act of violence those kids suffered.

This is disgraceful