Steve Himmer

"In a small town, each of us is a biography, a row of photos, a continuous thread, our identity affixed to a story, to a history. Three, four, five moments in a person's life that, in some way, make up enough of a sketch to identify us."
~ Federico Falco, THE PLAINS, tr Jennifer Croft

Uh oh, that car is going to slip and crash

I was just talking about and recommending Refuse To Be Done with one of my thesis students this afternoon. Looking forward to seeing you in Baltimore!

one of the neat things about submitting to the fancier lit mags is that by the time they send you a rejection all the cells in your body have been replaced with newer cells, they're not rejecting you but as past version of yourself, how quaint

This snow knows what it did

Time is a flat circle.

deep in the bunker yelling at minions to bang out the konami code faster while dozens of screens show it all going horribly wrong

The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

As the ice age recedes, the strata of ancient civilizations are revealed

Now playing

Maybe we flew too close to the sun

Dooneen Check out Dooneen - <p>Bartholomew Port, known to all as Mew, steps into the bushes in a London park and steps out of the bushes in a Dublin one. Not only that – there are no cars; there are moving fo...

You can pre-order my debut novel Dooneen on @bookshop.org here. It's my sixth debut novel. Pre-orders, as I'm sure you know, are essential to the healthy continuance of society. If you don't pre-order right now, you're basically destroying everything beautiful.

Congratulations!

I hear it's a real headbanger

"Because we cannot properly remember, because our culture has cut us off from the past but put nothing in its place, we cannot properly forget." ~ Gabriel Josipovic, FORGETTING

Great to see this for the press

Pic David Tapley

I should perhaps mention that 'frost heaves' are caused by cold weather causing upward swelling of soil as frozen water expands from below. Why walls in this part of the world need regular mending . . .

All morning the loud blizzard winds had me anxious about a tree I was worried would fall, one already scheduled for removal, and now it has fallen, fortunately without hitting any houses.

Why does it take a crisis for Boston to feel neighborly? - The Boston Globe Our sense of community seems to fade when extreme events are over.

For @bostonglobe.com, I wrote about how a snowstorm can bring out the best in Boston, while the aftermath often inspires the worst. This paradox applies to many places. Why does the solidarity seen during acute disasters often fade as soon as it's over?
www.bostonglobe.com/2026/02/18/o...

Skull season And some book news (No. 191)

Winter's end in the weird woods aided by a canine homunculus, urban heron rookeries behind the old warehouses, dystopian auspices in the airport flyover, and news about a new book, in this week's Field Notes: fieldnotes.christopherbrown.com/p/skull-season

Mind How You Go On paintings of edgelands, landscapes of power and powerlessness and what spaces have been left for us to imagine within. (Exhibition in London through Saturday 28 Feb.)

On/inspired by the exhibition 'Mind How You Go', edgelands and landscapes of power/powerlessness. (image: joanna whittle)
uncannylandscapes.substack.com/p/mind-how-y...

The blizzard has been knocking our electricity out briefly every few minutes for hours, and the constant cheerful chorus of devices reactivating is beginning to drive me mad.

yeah, pretty much the same here today

A photo of a copy of the 2012 Puffin edition of Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. The cover art is by the author.

"Time and all the world was lost. Everything he could feel and look at had blown away, only a bewitched whirl of damp and dancing darkness was left.
Any sensible person could have told him that this was the very moment when the long spring was born."

You don't want to plan lunch on an empty stomach and make a bad choice. That's why prunch is so important. Ergo,

Our polling place was the community room in a senior apartment complex for years but it moved to the elementary school gym. Whiplash!

When a Norwegian writer puts a small event or detail early in their novel that portends something big happening later, that's known as fjordshadowing

Slow morning at the squirrel drive-in

Congratulations!

What I love most about this is how clearly it demonstrates a core principle of dog life: They view themselves as fully belonging wherever they happen to be. Never any question.