If you're in Canada, this informational google doc is updated almost daily with information, scripts, and direct actions you can take to pressure our government into withdrawing its support for Palestinian genocide. If you're in the US, Jewish Voice for Peace has many tools for coordinating action. I hope that wherever you are in the world you're finding ways to work for the liberation of all people.

Dear Friends,

On the first morning in January I dressed in the dark, then moved through the house avoiding windows. There's one in particular, in our living room, that looks out on to a big beautiful pine, where at most times of day I can reliably spot cardinals and chickadees. I shunned it. January first is a questing day, a day to wander outside no matter the weather and meet the New Year's Bird, a tradition I've engaged in since 2020: an exhortation to greet the first bird of the year with attention. Over time I've interpreted "first" in various ways—first I hear? See? First to hear and see? First to be different from last year's?—but integral to my process is the sense of seeking, of quest.

This year began with a different first: I carried binoculars, having treated myself to a good pair before attending Wayward last year. Bedecked with them I wandered towards a park I've enjoyed spending time in, taking stock of weather and surroundings, trying to be alert to encounters.

Almost immediately I began hearing crows behind me. I love crows, and have a history of draping them in augury, but was determined not to look behind me; I wanted to keep walking forward, make it to the park, and find what I would find there. Still, I thought, a Year of the Crow sounds potent, moving.

When I arrived at the park, I stood in quiet for a while, and contemplated the weather: mild, no snow on the ground, the day a little overcast. I watched a tree line, heard crows again, and then, there, far over the trees, glimpsed a silhouette of Most Probably Crow flying away from me, and I felt disappointed. I found myself thinking, well, but it could have been a raven at that distance, so since I can't know for sure I should keep looking and see if a crow presents itself to me more significantly.

A flock of dark shapes appeared above me, flashing and flexible, and I thought, starlings? And instantly (and slightly guiltily) felt that I'd rather have the crows, but lifted the binoculars to follow them until they settled on a tree. I was surprised to find that they weren't starlings, but robins—a childhood bird I'm used to seeing in lone, repeated instances, a harbinger of spring. In our family we'd make a wish on the first robin we saw in spring; I was deeply surprised to see it in a large winter group, but it turns out that American Robins don't so much migrate as change their behaviour in winter.

Closer, then, this feeling of something stirring in my chest, but still not quite right. I pondered robin versus crow, didn't like feeling that I was choosing on a technicality, or making a choice at all. I didn't want it to feel like a choice, but like the receipt of a letter—something I could feel was addressed to me wherever I happened to be standing. In my first year out I wanted to be surprised and affirmed; in subsequent years I'd felt the rightness instantly. This dithering wasn't what I wanted.

I turned towards home, and as the sun started coming out, I saw hairy woodpeckers climbing a nearby tree, and marvelled at them, but felt them out of bounds; on what basis could the third bird I see speak the year? I loved seeing them all the same. Soon after that I saw a white-breasted nuthatch, one of my deep favourites to find by ear. But no, I maintained in vague confusion, crow or robin, probably, I'd have to figure it out when I got home.

I got home. I shucked off binoculars, boots, and winter coat. I found Stu in the living room next to the big beautiful window, hot coffee at the ready, and sat down to sip it with him and tell him my birding dilemma from start to finish.

When I was done, he looked out the window—the same window I'd so deliberately avoided. "What's that bird?" he asked.

I turned around. I do not exaggerate when I say I fully screamed, leapt from the couch, grabbed the binoculars and ran to the door.

There was a flock of Bohemian Waxwings across the street.

Chris Rimmer calls waxwings "Itinerant, Unpredictable Winter Jewels," giving some eloquent articulation to my feelings on the subject. I saw a Cedar Waxwing for the first time last summer, but not this, this sheer wild bounty of birds unmistakably descending on the neighbourhood's wealth of wrinkled crab apples and rowan berries raisined by the cold. Only once before have I seen what was (probably) Bohemian Waxwings, one winter day sometime between 2016 and 2019, before Merlin and life lists and more confident IDs, certainly before any deliberate seeking out of birds on my part, but it had seemed like an accident or a miracle then too. Bohemian Waxwings seem to have been steadily spreading eastward over the last seventeen years; comparing their current spread in Merlin to the maps in my 2006 National Geographic's Field Guide to the Birds of North America is astonishing.

I watched them, utterly exhilarated, thrumming with joy.* A friend I burbled to observed "it feels very special to have a bird that visits for winter, when you're so far north," and I agree. I keep thinking about this in relation to portents and augury: I'm expecting winter visitors, looking forward to their arrival, preparing space and fruit bowls for the jewel of their itinerant company. But I'm also waiting, this month, to learn whether or not we get to stay in this house past August; whether Stu and I will have to turn bohemian ourselves and take to our wings in search of a place to sustain us.

Inventing a guy in my head to get mad at me, I could say the Bohemian waxwing isn't my New Year's Bird, but Stu's; I should go back to teasing apart my feelings about crows and robins and what they mean within my personal mythography. I might quip to the guy in my head: well, we're married! We can share our birds!

But I like, instead, to reflect on the experience, the circle of it: I went in search of something, hoping to earn it, but ultimately found it at home after someone I love pointed it out. I might try to read in it an encouragement to look at what I have and see the wonder in it, winter jewels already in my hands. I might try to make a tarot spread of them, see in crows and robins and waxwings the importance of flocks and families, of lineage and solidarity, of recognizing fruit in all seasons.

Mostly, though, as is becoming usual: none of that matters as much as the pleasure of getting to see some cool birds. To begin as I mean to go on: seeking, looking, noticing, sharing stories of what I find.

Wishing you all the best with the coming year,

Amal

*While I dithered over titling this Stu had the temerity to muse "would you say you've been... Rhapsodizing about it," and I will not speak further of my actions in response.

Postscripts

• On Saturday, January 6 at 12PM EST, this incredible reading event will be streamed in support of the Edward Said Libraries. An event featuring Mosab Abu Toha, Kaveh Akbar, Rabih Alameddine, Ammiel Alcalay, Hala Alyan, Peter Balakian, Fatima Bhutto, Leila Farsakh, Nick Flynn, Ru Freeman, Carolyn Forché, Damian Gorman, Jorie Graham, Fanny Howe, Ha Jin, Ilya Kaminsky, Canisia Lubrin, Askold Melnyczuk, Eileen Myles, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Shuchi Saraswat, and Lloyd Schwartz, it is not to be missed. Here's the description:

Gaza’s libraries have been destroyed over the course of the last several months of bombing. The Edward Said Public Libraries, the first English-language libraries in the region, have been at risk for months and require support for their continued existence.

Libraries, as Mosab indicates, are critical places of learning, solace, and cultural preservation.

During this virtual event, free to attend and streaming on YouTube, preeminent writers will offer short readings in a show of solidarity with the literary and reading communities of Palestine, and a confirmation of the vital nature of literature and access to written culture.

You can register for free at the link or tune into Brookline Booksmith's YouTube channel, and you can donate in support of the libraries here.

• The creators of Israelism have decided to make the documentary available to stream indefinitely while Israel continues its US-supported genocide against Palestinians. Having now watched the film, I truly recommend it, and if any friends want to discuss it with me I'll make myself available. I want it to be widely watched and digested, and I think I'll need to write something more comprehensive about it as time and tide allow. There's also this Q&A with the film's directors, and you can organize screenings of the film in your city.
• If you're Canadian, I urge you from the bottom of my heart to read and send this letter to your MPs, demanding that Minister of Immigration Mark Miller remove the outrageous, arbitrary and racist cap on emergency family reunifications for Palestinian-Canadians.

The racist nature of the cap is exemplified in the immigration measure’s asymmetry with Canada’s emergency travel measures for Ukrainians following Russia’s invasion in 2022. That program, which similarly provided 3-year temporary status, imposed no cap on applications, and at least 616,000 individuals were approved. (Proportionately, based on relative population sizes, this would work out to about 30,000 from Gaza.) The government also provided financial support and up to two weeks of temporary accommodations to Ukrainian applicants – something not accorded to applicants from Gaza. Further, the program was not restricted to the family members of Canadians – as per the program for Gaza – but any Ukrainian national and their family members could apply.

Standing in sharp contrast are the measures implemented for only 1,000 family members of Canadian citizens and permanent residents in Gaza.

This effectively forces Palestinian-Canadians to compete with each other for the prize of extracting their family members from a war zone, and it's absolutely unconscionable. Please write, call, do whatever is available to you to lend your voice in support of Palestinians at this truly horrifying time.

If you're in Canada, this informational google doc is updated almost daily with information, scripts, and direct actions you can take to pressure our government into withdrawing its support for Palestinian genocide. If you're in the US, Jewish Voice for Peace has many tools for coordinating action. I hope that wherever you are in the world you're finding ways to work for the liberation of all people.

Dear Friends,

I'm sick and bearing up under it as best I can. So in brief, here are some things that I wrote or saw published in December.

First, I was very honoured to be invited by Sarah Gailey to contribute to their Personal Canons Cookbook. I dithered for months over what Meaningful Dish I wanted to share—ful mdammas, mjaddara, aadas bi hamoud—before deciding, in something of a fugue state, on labaneh and zaatar.

The result is an essay titled Sour Milk and Bitter Herbs, which I hope you'll read. Here's an excerpt:

There are foods I don’t associate with a specific memory so much as with the act of remembering. If all my favourite breakfast foods were laid out before me—smoked salmon and capers, ful mdammas, soft goat cheese and honey—I would reach for labaneh and zaatar first. As ubiquitous to the Lebanese breakfast table as buttered bread is to others, labaneh and zaatar are extraordinary in their simplicity, a constant, evergreen staple. When I feed friends a morsel of labaneh and zaatar on whole wheat pita, I’m not offering them a relic of my childhood so much as an invitation into the fullness of my family—a piece of who I am, and who I’ve been, when I’m at home: a daughter, a sister, an aunt.

Second: I wrote a poem for Bisan Owda, a 25 year old journalist in Gaza whose updates I've been following. In this video from November 29 she tries to translate the word "Qahr" into English and gets frustrated with the attempt. It hit me deeper than most of her updates because the very specific grief she describes—seeing records and archives obliterated by an enemy who wants to erase you from the world—speaks to the work of my life, as does the reaching and searching for how to translate and be understood.

Anyway here it is.

As it happens, one of my father's love languages is translation, so here is his translation of it into Arabic.

Third: my Top Ten Books of the Year went up at the New York Times Book Review. That there's a gift link. I hope you find something there to enjoy.

There are six days left before I venture out in search of my New Year's Bird, and I might wait until then to look back on the wildness of this year and give it a proper accounting. Presently all I want to do is rest in ways that relax even the creases of my eyelids. But either way, before 2024 dawns on us I wanted to wish you a gentle, easing, restorative liminality, and hope that whatever rest you grant yourself in this handful of days and nights supports you tenfold as we move out of them together.

Love,

Amal

Postscripts:

• The hardcover edition of The Book of Witches, edited by Jonathan Strahan and containing my novelette "John Hollowback and the Witch," is 40% off on Books-a-Million until January 31! That's pretty wild for a beautiful hardcover anthology, and I hope you get to take advantage of the sale.
• Applications for the Wayward Retreat close on December 31! If you think you would benefit from it you should apply! I wholeheartedly recommend it as something that moved, nourished and transformed me. Make sure you read the FAQ and Code of Conduct first!
• I'd like to make people aware of Israelism, a documentary that's available to stream for $5 until January 1. I haven't watched it myself yet, but it's been highly recommended to me, and I would really love to watch it in the virtual vicinity of Jewish friends from different backgrounds and nationalities to discuss it. "When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity."

Dear Friends,

It's been almost two months since I've written to you. Partly this was due to receiving guests and writing secret things in the woods, and partly due to being in the streets demanding ceasefire now and a cessation of the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people. I will not mince words about this. If you're in Canada, this informational google doc is updated almost daily with information and direct actions you can take to pressure our government into withdrawing its support for genocide by demanding a permanent ceasefire. If you're in the US, Jewish Voice for Peace has many tools for coordinating direct action. I hope that wherever you are in the world you're finding ways to work for the liberation of all people.

Feeling utterly incapable of talking on the internet in a way that is separate from the urgency of relentless atrocity means that I've accumulated a good deal of news to share in the interim. I hope to get one more newsletter out after this before the end of this wild year, but in the meantime, here's what's what.

Star Crossed: Love Letters

Star Crossed: Love Letters

Star Crossed is back! This lovingly illustrated book is full of characters, settings, and new ways to play that will help you enrich and enhance your sessions of the two-player tower-based game of forbidden love!

BackerKit

Ever since This Is How You Lose the Time War came out in 2019, people have been asking me if I've played Star Crossed, Alex Roberts' beautiful two-player game of forbidden love. I've long been deeply honoured by the comparison (not least because Roberts' For the Queen is one of the games of my heart, that I literally carry with me everywhere like a Tarot deck on the off-chance I can convince a group of people to play it with me, which, before you say anything, is a totally normal thing to do).

Anyway Max and I were absolutely bowled over to be invited to contribute to the forthcoming Star Crossed expansion! And we had tremendous fun coming up with a pairing to spark player imagination: as Alex writes, "In Tender is the Knight, a solitary dragon and the knight sent to confront them find a surprising connection." Back the project to see a truly fantastic illustration by Sovanny Vorn, and, you know, to get the expansion, which is going to be amazing. There are only five days left to back it!

Get Signed Copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War

As in years past, Perfect Books – my favourite local independent and a bookstore at which I worked as a teenager – is the shop that will most reliably have signed-by-me stock. I check in with them regularly and keep them in signed books as needed; I can also pop in to inscribe things given reasonable notice. They'll also ship anywhere in the world provided you pay for shipping.

If you want books signed by Max, your best bet is to reach out to Porter Square Books.

If you want books signed by both me and Max – well, the world is inimical. It is currently very hard for Max and me to be in the same place, especially in any book-event-having capacity. But while Max was visiting – did I mention Max was visiting? – early last month we attempted a scheme to supply people with double-signed postcards of Time War that could function as fun ephemera and/or book plates of a sort. If you'd like one, Porter Square Books' Cambridge location has, at time of writing, about 12 remaining.

That said, there's a possibility that Max and I will be in a public-facing same-place situation in July of next year, because –

Readercon Invited me to be a Guest of Honour!

Along with the magnificent Rebecca Roanhorse, I'm scheduled to be a Guest of Honour at Readercon 33, from July 11-14 at the Quincy Marriott in Quincy, MA. This means more to me than I can easily say; Readercon was one of my first conventions, one that I loved enough to volunteer with for a few years; it's a site of many career firsts, including where I first met Max, and where we launched Time War together in 2019. I hope I get to see many of you there, and bridge the gulf of the last five years with talk of books and belting of folk songs and showtunes as is tradition.

Speaking of which –

MusicalSplaining: Notre-Dame de Paris

I was a guest on one of my favourite podcasts! Musicalsplaining is a show where musical-hating filmmaker Kaveh Taherian and musical-loving writer Angelina Meehan watch musicals and talk about them. The project is drawing to a close, but I'm thrilled to have gotten to slide in under the wire to talk about the very first musical with which I ever became obnoxiously obsessed: Luc Plamondon's Notre-Dame de Paris. You can listen to the episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

NYTBR Columns

Due to the state of the world I think I missed sharing my October column, which has perhaps my favourite title of any I've yet been assigned. In it I covered books by Malon Edwards, Melinda Taub and Karen Lord.

This month's column is a double-sized one in anticipation of the holidays, and my last one of the year (though on Monday they'll run my Top 10). In it I cover Vajra Chandrasekera's The Saint of Bright Doors, Avi Silver's Pluralities, Cadwell Turnbull's We Are the Crisis, Michael Mammay's Generation Ship and T. Kingfisher's Thornhedge. I hope you find something to enjoy among them.

Project Pizza - Ends at Midnight Pacific Tonight!

I got to contribute the tiniest piece of silly doggerel to a really fantastic cause!

For the past few years Shing Yin Khor and Eron Rauch have been co-organizing a pop-up store to raise money for food insecurity causes in Los Angeles. Here's what Shing has to say about it:

I get to corral wonderful artist friends and throw a pizza party where we get together and produce a pile of amazing original art. We raised $8000+ last year, which is a new record, and we were hoping we could break it this year!

This project has become something so important to me and my friends - it is hard to feel like we can do something quantifiable about the ills of the world, but we KNOW that for this project, just drawing a slice of pizza can rescue hundreds of pounds of food that gets redirected to our hungry neighbors.

You can support us RIGHT NOW by buying a slice of pizza or a party pack! They are only available for a very limited time(the store closes at MIDNIGHT Pacific on Saturday, December 2nd).

My contribution is a concrete poem titled "This Is How You Lose the Project Pizza War" that Shing turned into art with their hand-writing and colour sense, and it'll go out as a thank you card to anyone who buys a slice of pizza-art.

Get 'em while they're hot!

Now that the year's review-reading is done I get to spend a little more time on reading strictly for pleasure, so I've picked up Alix Harrow's Starling House, which I've been saving for precisely this time; I bring this up partly to recommend that you all read Alix' newsletter, which most recently also provided a delicious reading guide. I also hope to finally, finally get to read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series for the first time in the month most appropriate to it, and to finish Thus Was Adonis Murdered, which Stu and I have been reading to each other in sleepy snatches before bed after Max recommended it highly.

I'd love to know what you're looking forward to reading in the darkening time of the year. It snowed today in that way that sleeves tree branches in white and makes the morning feel like the miracle it is. Meanwhile afternoon light slants in thin and golden as a delicate tea; night falls like a heavy blanket at half past four. I hope you're finding, and being given, time to rest; I hope you're finding, and giving, love and kindness and support as the world hurts everywhere.

Love,

Amal

Postscripts:

• If you're into Rude Tales of Magic, as I am, you should know that they have limited edition merch that's only available til December 4! Also they've just started a new campaign!
• If you're into birding, as I am, and support urgent medical aid for Palestinians under bombardment, as I do, you might consider buying this shirt, proceeds from which go to support the Palestinian American Medical Association. Here I am wearing it and hand-painted earrings by the amazing Luna Sangre.

Dear Friends,

It's October! There's a great deal to share! Let's dive into it.

I'm thrilled to be taking part in an event with these luminaries! To celebrate The Book of Witches in this most traditionally witchy of months, Fonda Lee, Millie Ho, Premee Mohamed and I are congregating at Perfect Books in Ottawa to read from our works, talk about witches, and sign books. This event is totally free and open to the public, and I hope you'll join us!

That said, the reason we were able to put this together live and in person despite living very far apart is that we're all attending Can*Con, Ottawa's very own SFF convention! (Fonda Lee is this year's Author Guest of Honour, in fact, and if you haven't yet become a devotee of her Jade books and want a bite-sized and perfect novella I urge you to read Untethered Sky, which I adored and reviewed here).

All to say – I'm taking part in Can*Con programming, and we were just given our finalized schedules! You can find mine here.

Finally, today's a day I've been waiting for since 2013: Nicola Griffith's Menewood – her sequel to Hild – is out in the world, and I was lucky enough to give it a full review for the New York Times. Here's a gift link.

September was a winding path of a month, one that saw Stu and me travelling separately for a while. For the first time in so long that it never even occurred to me to reckon it, I found myself home alone, trying on rhythms of work and rest in this new stage of life. I cleaned the house, I read books for my next column, I poked at a new short story idea, and did a really fun collaborative thing that I'm excited to share once we get the go-ahead to do so.

But I also spent five days visiting my darling Caitlyn Paxson on Prince Edward Island / Epekwitk. I've exulted about Caitlyn and her newsletter here before; in addition to being a brilliant writer, folklorist and historic house enthusiast, she's been making a Wreath of the Month out of her incredible garden and surroundings for a couple of years now, and since I was visiting I got to take part in the ritual.

First, some crowns.

Then, some amaranth stalks.

Finally – the sea.

It was a beautiful visit, especially once the storm we'd been bracing for passed us over. On top of the usual pleasures of traipsing around a beautiful place in a friend's much-missed company, being fed extraordinary confections by her baking-wizard of a husband, we had a fantastic book event together at the Beaconsfield Carriage House, reminiscing about our friendship's origins (it's been fifteen years!), talking about writing, having a generally lovely time. Huge thanks to everyone who joined us, asked questions, and listened to me read from unpublished work!

I may have fallen in covetous love with some Morris wallpaper while visiting Beaconsfield, too.

On top of all that, I finished reading three absolutely superb and very witchy books for fun in September: A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck, Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner, and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. I'm writing an essay entirely for myself about the latter two, because they feel like they're holding hands (whose hand was I holding?) – but all three made a beautiful seasonal triptych for me, and I want to talk more about them soon.

But for now, this is long enough. Welcome to October; I hope you read and eat things that thrill you, listen to music and watch television that delights you, and enjoy every beautiful fragrant crumb of Spooky Season as it lengthens towards your doors like a shadow.

Here's my finalized schedule for Can*Con, Ottawa's local SFF convention! I'm so happy to be attending in person for the first time in years.

If you're looking to attend, please be aware of the convention's 2023 COVID-19 policy, and its other attendance policies more generally!

Friday, October 13

5PM - Story Generators (Salon D)
Amal El-Mohtar, Luke R.J. Maynard, Mark Robinson, Lydia M. Hawke (m)

Writers tend to find stories anywhere, but games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, and Blaseball are built to let players pull grand tales, compelling characters, and quiet moments out of emergent properties and random numbers, and tools like the card-based Story Engine and Deck of Worlds harness randomness to inspire. How can story generators reinforce creativity for writers or help them through creative slumps while still foregrounding the human creative touch? How have panelists used tools like this in their writing, if at all?

Saturday, October 14

10AM (technically 10:25) - Reading (Salon C)
Can*Con pairs authors in reading slots, and I'm delighted to be in with Fonda Lee! She'll read from 10:00-10:25 and I'll read from 10:25-10:50. What will I be reading? Something you'll never have heard before unless you were in PEI at the same time as me last month!

4PM: From Prose to Games and Back Again (Salon D)
Brandon Crilly, Amal El-Mohtar, Tao Wong, Jesse Scoble (m)

Many prose writers find themselves contracted to write games, or vice versa, and many writers draw influence from one form to the other. For writers who have worked in both mediums, how do they navigate bouncing back and forth? Which sorts of narrative tricks or techniques translate between mediums, and why? How does something like rigorous game mechanics prove useful for a novel – or will trying to use something like that only lead to disaster?

7PM: Book of Witches Reading at Perfect Books
It takes about 12 minutes to walk from the Sheraton to Perfect Books, so plan accordingly! Doors open at 6:30; if you'd like to come mill about in the bookstore ahead of the event (and heck, make any purchases in advance), please feel free!

Sunday, October 15

10AM: Bonds of Sisterhood (Penthouse)
Carolyn Charron, C.S.E. Cooney, Nivia Evans, Amal El-Mohtar (m)

Sometimes sisters just get each other - or drive each other up a wall. Or both! Like with other types of familial relationships in fiction, sisterhood carries a particular sort of nuance, whether it’s enemies-to-family like Gamora and Nebula, having only each other to rely on like Revenger’s Adrana and Fura, or growing together over decades and longer. Our panelists discuss their favorite fictional sisters (either blood or found) and why their relationships are particularly compelling, and the various ways notions of sisterhood can be explored in stories.

Sunday, October 15, at 12PM: Signing (Vendors Room)
My pens and I are available to your textual objects from 12-12:30! Feel free to bring your own books and magazines from home, or books you've bought in the Vendors Room (several bookstores will be present).

I hope to see you there!

is, calendrically speaking, still a week away, but today I felt it: the weather cold enough to demand a hoodie, to rebuke me for wearing sandals, to encourage me to think about keeping scarves at the door again. Crows are cawing against a grey sky of swift-moving clouds, casting their shapes against it in a kind of scripture of what's to come.

Lately Stu laughs at me whenever I mention autumn, claims I've been saying it's autumn since May. I haven't, I protest: there's a difference, a very necessary sequence of differences, between scenting an imminence on the air, observing the slanting loss of daylight, gasping at clumps of colour hidden in green leaves, and saying, finally, "today it feels like autumn". All the difference between the herald of the arrival, and the arrival itself; the Silver Surfer isn't Galactus.

Autumn isn't Galactus either, I hasten to say, for all that we're leaving the seasons that feed us and tilting into the seasons that devour us. But I find myself yearning and bracing in equal measure: yearning for the colour of leaves, the welcome hug of heavy clothes, the migrations of birds, and bracing against whatever the dark will do to me.

I'm hopeful, though. About a lot of things. About this autumn being different. About writing. About spinning the darkness into thread and weaving something with it, something warm and good.

Postscripts:

• Speaking of threads! I'm headed to Charlottetown, PEI tomorrow, to participate in part of The Wild Threads Literary Festival; storms willing, My very dear friend Caitlyn Paxson and I will be in conversation at the Beaconsfield Carriage House on Sunday, September 17. The festival's been tracking Hurricane Lee's progress and so far the event hasn't been cancelled, but we're playing it by ear. Tickets are free for this event so you lose nothing by reserving a spot! I hope all goes well and that I get to meet folks!
• Sloane Leong and Cassie Hart are kickstarting the second volume in their illustrated horror anthology series, Death in the Mouth, and it's got about 12 hours left to go with a fair amount of ground still to cover. I've been in awe of Sloane Leong's art since I read A Map to the Sun, and deeply moved by her editorial vision and insight as expressed in posts like this, so I'd really love to see this project succeed; the authors who've committed to participate include Jeeyon Shim and Sascha Stronach, whose work I've also deeply enjoyed in the past. I hope you'll take a look!
• I really loved reading my darling CSE Cooney talk about using gaming to figure out how to write combat scenes.
• This New Yorker piece by Jill Lepore is, as I think Helen Rosner put it, a bloodbath, and I very much enjoyed reading it. Ostensibly a review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, it's much, much more than that, and I appreciate the precision of its knife-work tremendously.
• Speaking of Helen Rosner, I loved her recent article about Cecchi's, where she talks about ghosts, Hollywood, and parties with a kind of gauzy ambivalence I adore. The piece also gave me the gift of "pigeon martini" as a conversational Mondegreen that I want to use somewhere.
• I happened to be in Montreal for the day yesterday and wandered over to Argo Bookshop to sign stock! I'm always really moved to find a copy of The Honey Month on a shelf – written when I was 23 and published by Erzebet YellowBoy's Papaveria Press in 2009, it's a deeply cherished juvenilia that I'm so glad is still finding its way into people's hands.

I also signed more stock at Perfect Books, the beloved local indie where I used to work. This included shiny new copies of From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi – just lately listed as a USA Today best-seller!

That's it for now! Wishing you all safety from storms,

Amal

When I was a child, I watched with great and regular passion a show called Are You Afraid of the Dark? In it, a group of teens calling themselves The Midnight Society would gather around a fire in the woods at night, and one of them would share a scary story. They'd say submitted for the approval of the Midnight Society, then toss a handful of "midnight dust" (wikipedia informs me it was Coffeemate) on to the fire, making it flicker and smoke before they named the evening's tale. Then the episode itself would be the tale.

Some of the stories had recurring characters, and my favourite of these was Dr. Vink, "with a vuh, vuh vuh." I remember all the ones with him in them best, but his first appearance has stayed with me longest. It's an episode full of riddles, which I was obsessed with in the wake of The Hobbit, and the first of them exploded my tiny mind:

Q: How far can you go into the woods?

A: Halfway.

Because after the halfway point, you're going out of the woods.

It's on my mind, now, as August 15 recedes into the distance, and as I've found myself feeling the usual inward wrestling that comes with the tail end of summer: how can there be so little of it left, I wail, while my spouse gently tells me that there are still weeks of it, reminds me that September is no longer the looming behemoth it used to be when I was struggling to make a life in academia.

So: it isn't that summer – that August – is over. It's just that we've stopped going into it, and have started going out.

This is also on my mind because Terri Windling posted a beautiful, warm video on her Patreon (which I urge everyone to support), talking about going through difficult times and how those difficulties intersect with our ability to make art; how, in the past, art pulled her through those hard times, but presently, she finds herself unable to create. She says,

I've always been able to keep creating. I've edited manuscripts and written from hospital beds... I've turned it, through the alchemy of imagination, into something of beauty through the power of art. And, to go through a stretch of time where that alchemy didn't work for me... Was shocking, distressing. It's made me really think about what we need to get through those dark times. Those mythic times, when you go into the underworld, and need to slowly come out again. Go into the dark of the forest, meet the monsters there, and emerge... At least intact, if not triumphant.

I'm dwelling in the question, wishing I had more immediate, actionable wisdom of my own to offer, but Terri's not soliciting a solution so much as a conversation. So in that spirit, I offer this memory of a child answering a riddle in the woods, remembering – even while lost in them – that you can only go in halfway. After that, you're on your way out, back into the morning and the light. As true for pain as it is for pleasure – we are always sometime arriving, and always sometime taking our leave.

Wishing you all the best,

Amal

Postscripts:

• Come see me in Charlottetown, PEI on September 17! My very dear friend Caitlyn Paxson and I will be in conversation at the Beaconsfield Carriage House, under the auspices of Bookmark and The Wild Threads Literary Festival. (Bookmark and the Wild Threads sounds like a fantastic title for something, gotta keep that one in the back pocket.) I've only been to PEI once, on a roadtrip with my sister, and I'm really excited to get to visit again!
• I had a new column go up at the NYTBR; after 8 books' worth of unmitigated raves, I was due some disappointment, and I'm still wrestling a little with the expression of it. There's so much more I wanted to get into, especially with The Archive Undying, to unpack and explain what frustrated me while speaking more fulsomely to what kept me reading, but I did what I could in 300 words.
• I was interviewed by Read the North in their most recent episode, which includes interviews with Chris Szego of Bakka Phoenix Books (first 14 minutes) and Kerry C. Byrne of Augur Magazine (14-27 minutes), on the topic of defining genres. My section starts at 27:30, but I encourage you to listen to it from the beginning, as the hosts have done a great job of building up a topic that's more than the sum of its parts. I'm usually reluctant to have "what's the difference between SF & F" conversations because they're so often plagued by tedious grognards (not you, you're great), but this is a really fun stitchery of perspectives that harmonize in their difference, from a (former) bookstore manager, a magazine editor, and an author/critic. That said, it was recorded back in February at a time when I was very, very tired, and I can sort of ... Hear that, not least in how many times I say the word "expansive" in ten minutes. Enjoy!
• Can*Con has posted their updated COVID policy for 2023, and I'm very glad to see it. It's my local Ottawa convention and I love it very much, and am looking forward to attending it again for the first time in years.

Dear Friends,

Happy Lammas, Merry Lughnasadh, and a fine August 1 to you all!

The first day in August is one of harvests to me – aesthetically and metaphorically, anyway, as I live in a Zone 5 climate. There's a promise of tomatoes ripening, the last of the raspberries and the first of the blackberries; there's still a whole month of summer left, whether or not that time's restful. In this burning, drowning world we have to make and keep our own holy days.

So I woke early this morning, and baked a sourdough loaf, and laid out a board of fruit and cheese for a visiting friend, and we all sat down at the dining room table together and worked on our writing for a spell.

Speaking of which: The Book of Witches is now out in North America!

I planted this story in Jonathan Strahan's inbox just over a year ago, and now it's ready for your own reading harvests. John Hollowback meets the Witch "at the far end of a fallow field, browning with the fall," but to me it's a late summer story that feels gardens and seasons deeply. I truly hope you enjoy it.

In other short fiction news: I'm beyond thrilled to be able to reveal STAR WARS SECRETS, which is to say, the subject of my contribution to From A Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi. Here he is, in all his distinct lack of glory: Moff Tiaan Jerjerrod.

If you don't remember who Jerjerrod is, here's a quick refresher:

I find this scene mesmerizing, for several reasons that I'll get into closer to the story's publication  – but for now, if you'd like to read more excerpts from the anthology, you can find one from each and every story gathered here, and you can pre-order the anthology here, or else into your local independent!

Finally, just a quick reminder that I'll be in Perfect Books today to chat about Dehiscent, Ashley Deng's shiny new novella. It's about a house haunting its inhabitants with abundance while they live in a difficult, ravaged-climate world, and it found its way into my dreams last night: radishes turned to mushrooms when I touched them, black walnuts ripened on the walls, and I kept trying and failing to feed people.

I'm excited to talk about it with Ashley and Suyi Davies Okungbowa, and I hope you'll join us!

Wishing you all the best this coming month,

Amal

Postscripts:

• If you haven't yet watched this perfect, perfect clip, I urge you to; and if you enjoy it, know that the full version is coming out August 22, and that DJ Crazy Times is a recurring character played by Kyle Gordon.

• In a similar vein – this small miracle.

• Did you know C. S. E. Cooney's wonderful Saint Death's Daughter is on sale for $0.99 until August 7? This is a WILD deal and I urge you to take advantage of it! This was my blurb, in case you missed it:

Saint Death's Daughter is a tumultuous, swaggering, cackling story, a gorgeous citrus orchard with bones for roots. Miscellaneous Stones’ journey into adulthood and power, sorting knowledge from wisdom and vengeance from justice, has an ocean’s breadth and depth, its storms and sparkles and salt. Soaring with love and absolutely fizzing with tenderness and joy--I have never read anything so utterly alive.

Dear Friends,

I sit down to write this letter, and look back through the last month for some kind of accounting of it, and latch on to that word, accounting. An account is at once a story and a ledger, a representation that mixes words and numbers: I can account for something, I can give a good accounting of myself, I can open a savings account, I can tell you the story of July and balance its intangible books. I can say, July was hard and strange, but not give you the full explanation of why, because it is a mixture of things that refuse a public gaze and others that are so fully public and wide-reaching that it feels wrong to count them among my own private pains.

I'll share some good things, then.

Ashley Deng was a student in the very first Creative Writing cohort I taught at uOttawa, and I'm excited to take part in launching her first published novella! Come join us at Perfect Books (my favourite local indie, where in the dim mists of time I also worked for five years) on August 1 for what promises to be a wide-ranging conversation about homes, hauntings, and the end of the world.

As it happens, August 1 is also a great time to be in a bookstore with me if you're into witches:

August 1 is also the publication date for The Book of Witches, edited by Jonathan Strahan! Perfect Books has stocked up on it, and I'll be very happy to sign or inscribe copies for interested parties (whether you're there in person or you buy it from afar! Perfect Books also ships internationally, but charges for the shipping). It contains "John Hollowback and the Witch," the short story I wrote to break a years-long short fiction dry ...spell?! Ho ho. Anyway I'm proud of it and I hope you enjoy it. I wrote a little bit more about it in a previous newsletter, where I also shared the first page and invited people to comment for a random first-line from the other stories in the book. I'm so looking forward to it being out in the world.

This event will be my first in-person bookstore thing since 2019, and I really hope to see folks there!

Wishing you all a soft easing into the week's – and month's! – end,

Amal

Postscripts:

• My very dear friend Karen Meisner lost her home in the devastating Vermont floods, and it is a frankly daily pain in my heart that I can't just get into a car and drive across the imaginary line between our countries to put my body to work on her family's behalf. You can hear (or read) her describing the situation on local news here, and donate money to ongoing relief efforts in Vermont here.
• My very dear friend Jessica Wick loses her workplace as of today, as the Savoy Bookshop in Westerly, RI – where she's worked full-time for 8 years – very suddenly closes its doors: the owner announced the closure one week ago, and informed the staff some two hours before the announcement. Since Jess lost a lot of work time to an injury recently, this is a particularly hard blow for her, so I just want to make you aware that Jess is, among many other talents, a very skilled editor, and you can hire her for your projects through her website.
• Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams have collaborated on editing an anthology of Black horror called Out There Screaming and it looks absolutely amazing, with work by Erin E. Adams, Violet Allen, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Maurice Broaddus, Chesya Burke, P. Djèlí Clark, Ezra Claytan Daniels, Tananarive Due, Nalo Hopkinson, N. K. Jemisin, Justin C. Key, L. D. Lewis, Nnedi Okorafor, Tochi Onyebuchi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Nicole D. Sconiers, Rion Amilcar Scott, Terence Taylor, and Cadwell Turnbull. You can pre-order it here.
• Speaking of horror anthologies! There are only 3 days left to back Why Didn't You Just Leave, a horror anthology edited by Julia Rios and Nadia Bulkin. It's very nearly at its goal and any project Julia's involved with is a project I want to see succeed.
• Parul Sehgal wrote this very beautiful essay called "The Tyranny of the Tale," about storytelling and its limits, that I feel certain is going to be something I return to, to read and reply to, because its themes have been on my mind for years now. In particular, this part struck me: "When children ask for stories, what they’re asking for is the presence of the adult."
• Over in Esquire, Kate Dwyer wrote "The Year of the Slim Volume," which I'm so grateful to Lincoln Michel (who has a great craft-focused newsletter) for sharing with me because in addition to being a fine conversation piece, it launches its argument with a very familiar tweet.
• My agent DongWon Song wrote a truly stunning essay for Sarah Gailey's Stone Soup, that I don't want to tell you anything about because sometimes, very rarely, I feel more strongly about essays being spoiled than I do about fiction, and I treasure the surprise I experienced reading this and wish it for you too.
• I read Jamie Loftus' Raw Dog while my back was in a state of acute explosion and the sky was orange with wildfire smoke, and by the time I finished it my back was functional and the sky was clear. Coincidence? Who can say! I utterly loved this deep dive into hot dogs and US labour history by way of road trip memoir, and as a direct consequence of reading it I ate what is probably my first hot dog in a decade and it was delicious.
• Max and I recently appeared as guests on Subtle Asian Book Club to talk about This Is How You Lose the Time War, and had a lovely time! The conversation's just about an hour long. Enjoy!

Dear Friends,

I'm writing to you from Glasgow, Scotland, where I've been for the better part of two weeks, wrestling with a personally unprecedented amount of jet lag. It turns out that spending two weeks on Pacific time followed by five days of Eastern time before embarking on British Summer Time is confusing for the body, especially when sunrise is at 4:31 AM and sunset is ... well, this was 10PM a few nights ago.

I used to live in Glasgow, and it remains one of my favourite cities full of some of my favourite people. But Stu and I came here to attend a family funeral, so I haven't been able to make the kinds of plans to see friends or organize events or meet-ups that I would have under different circumstances.

Still, it's been very good to wander around the city between errands; I was able to drop in to both the Waterstones on Argyle St and Sauchiehall street to sign copies of This Is How You Lose the Time War, and was surprised and delighted by how many they'd laid in.

We've also been able to wander through some local woods and see some local colour, like this beautifully Glasgow take on the Siege Perilous.

(Every single person I have individually shown this to has asked "but did you touch the seat" and I don't know whether to chastise or salute them.)

I've also gotten to see many new-to-me birds, all in a kind of chiaroscuro along the coast: black guillemots, common eiders and house-martins, black-headed gulls and a white wagtail. I couldn't photograph any of them, but here's a photo of a herring gull taken by holding my phone up to my binoculars in order to spend a truly unnecessary amount of time determining whether or not it was actually a Caspian gull.

In other(worldly) news – here's a gift link to my latest Otherworldly column up at the New York Times! It went up while I was Waywarding (about which more soon) and I haven't had a minute to share it. In it I cover Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee, The Witch King by Martha Wells, Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway, White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link, and Ink, Blood, Sister, Scribe by Emma Törzs. I genuinely loved all of them, as I tried to express more succinctly in this tweet.

I hope you find something there to enjoy!

Anyway that's enough out of me for now – there are many logistics left to wrangle before facing the flight home in a few days. You'll find some postscripts and links below the sealfie (that's a selfie by the sea), but in the meantime I'm wishing you all the best and hoping you're enjoying good books, good food, good birds, wherever you happen to be.

Cheers,

Amal

Postscripts of News:

• For one day only – June 18! – the ebook of This Is How You Lose the Time War will be discounted to $2.99 in North America wherever ebooks are sold! It's usually $12.99! Get 'em while they're hot!
• I saw Across the Spider-Verse and it was AMAZING and I highly recommend it!
• Margo MacDonald is a Dora Award finalist in the Outstanding Solo Performance category for Dressed As People, the triptych of uncanny monologues I wrote 1/3 of! I'm so thrilled and so proud of her. The awards will be presented on June 27 and I invite you to root for her alongside me!
• In sadder news: Blaseball will not be returning. I had so many feelings about this that I needed to construct an elaborate concluding ritual with far-flung friends and enact it in my dreams before attempting it in the waking world. The short of it is that I defaced a coin and threw it into the sea; the long of it will have to wait until I'm home. But until then, if you loved blaseball and want to commemorate or mourn it by sending money to charity in exchange for apparel, you can do so through the medium of Blaseball Cares until June 30.

Dear Friends,

I promise this isn't a daily newsletter! These are merely extraordinary circumstances!

I'm writing to you from Vancouver Island – more precisely, from my aunt's sunny kitchen table – on the cusp of vanishing into the literal wilderness for ten days. From here I'm going to Quadra Island for the Wayward Retreat – which I briefly wrote about here, and lengthily wrote about here – where the only way to get a single bar of cell service is to climb an actual mountain, so I'll be effectively unavailable to the world at large until May 30. I wanted to channel all the wild lightning of the past couple of weeks into a few small, anchored announcements before going.

First: welcome, new subscribers! So many of you found me thanks to Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood, and I'm so glad you're here! (If you're reading this and have no idea what I'm talking about, I sent out a textual highlights reel of the whole thing yesterday.) You're probably here because you like queer anime vibes, but I hope you also like, uh ... Birds? I write about birds a lot!

Second: I reviewed R. F. Kuang's Yellowface for the New York Times Book Review! I haven't written a full-length review in a while, since my focus is usually on the Otherworldly column, and this was such an interesting book to wrestle with. I was really touched by LitHub's including the review in a list of 5 reviews you should read this week – it's a cool thing to do, holding reviews themselves up to the light.

Third: I have a book deal!

I'm so happy to share that I'm going to be working with Ali Fisher at Tor on four separate projects. From the announcement:

Tor Books is thrilled to announce the acquisition of four books from Hugo Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar—two novels, one novella, and one short story collection—sold on exclusive submission to Ali Fisher, Executive Editor, at Tor Books by DongWon Song, Literary Agent at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency, for world English rights.

El-Mohtar’s new novella, a fierce reworking of a 17th century murder ballad about sisters, willows, and swans, is slated for release in Fall 2024 with the rest to follow.

More on all this soon! But for now, the lilacs are out, I am so grateful not to have missed them in this wild and wacky bout of travel, and I deeply need to turn them into syrup before they're gone for another year.

Wishing you all a wondrous, nourishing, beautiful time in this tender, emergent spring.

Dear Friends,

Previously, on Amal Content:

A lot has happened since then.

I truly struggle with how to talk about the past 12 days, during which a viral tweet from an anime fan account with an excellent name turned This Is How You Lose the Time War into a New York Times Bestseller. Do I make a comprehensive timeline like I've attempted to do on Twitter, but less ephemeral and chaotic? Do I do a highlights reel of notable events? A deep-dive into my absolutely enormous and inchoate feelings of feral gratitude, the overwhelm and tumult of everything that was happening out of public view? Do I write a pastiche of the Twelve Days of Christmas? On the first day of Bigmas, our true friend tweeted free: read this. DO NOT look up anything, read!

Nah. I think, for now, with one foot out the door, gazing towards the tranquil island I'm heading towards... Let's go for some mish-mash of the first two.

Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood (whose username is maskofbun) made their S-tier tweet at 1:39AM EST on Sunday, May 7.

People started showing it to me on Sunday night, and accelerated doing so into Monday morning.

I quote-tweeted it on early Monday afternoon; by Monday evening, I started noticing the Amazon rankings, and the fact that Amazon had slashed the price of the book to encourage the sales acceleration. (To those who expressed shock and concern: this doesn't affect our royalties.)

On Tuesday morning I sent out a newsletter about what was happening; by Tuesday evening Dan Kois of Slate asked if I wanted to chat about it.

We had a lovely conversation on Wednesday morning; the Slate interview appeared on Thursday at 1PM.

Meanwhile other journalists got in touch, and by this point I was able to reach Max (who was in Hawai'i!) and loop him in to conversations with Amanda Silberling at Tech Crunch and Madison Kircher at the New York Times. Those appeared on Thursday and Friday respectively. Gizmodo also interviewed Bigolas Dickolas, who is utterly sweet and kind.

Throughout this, our book kept climbing the Amazon sales ranks in All Books. I saw it go from 21, to 15, to 7, to 6, to 5, to 4, to 3. There it peaked. At one point our agent and friend DongWon Song said our only enemies were now Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Mother's Day.

There were media pieces on Gizmodo, Book Riot, Polygon, and many, many more, if my Google Alerts that I haven't had time to click through are to be believed. The nature of the virality began to transform: Yoshihiro Watanabe, the producer of Trigun Stampede, said he'd bought the book.

Then the art started happening.

And the cosplay.

And the STICKERS.

And just as we thought it couldn't go much further... People who'd bought the book in the first half of the week were finishing it, and they started talking about it, propelling the hype cycle further. This Is How You Lose the Time War stayed in the top 5 of All of Amazon for days. "Time War" started trending on Twitter ("Bigolas Dickolas" had done so days earlier).  

Mother's Day weekend came and went. I struggled to finish an overdue book review column for the NYTBR in a pre-travel fugue state while I locked myself out of the internet. I finished it. On Tuesday, Dark Horse Comics announced they were reprinting the original Trigun Manga. Whether or not this was already in the works is an open question.

I boarded a plane to Vancouver, briefly visited with dear cousins, boarded a ferry, arrived at my aunt's on Wednesday–and then this happened:

Four years after it came out, This Is How You Lose the Time War is a New York Times Best Seller. Max and I are New York Times Best Selling Authors. Neither we nor the book have ever had this distinction before; now we will have it forever.

Because of Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood, and you.

Skipping over the rainbow rivers of feeling this has produced in order to continue the highlights reel – oh, you thought it was done? Ha! No! Because now the art/cosplay/stickers have formed a triumphant sort of internet Voltron:

So here we are. Friday, May 19. It's been 12 days of this magnificent chaos beauty, this tremendous cycle of self-amplifying joy. And this is where I have to leave it, for now, because I am vanishing into the literal wilderness tomorrow and putting up my autoresponder and I cannot imagine a higher point at which to leave the internet, to leave Twitter after it gave us one truly good and glorious thing.

But if you can believe it – there is more news to share under separate cover: some that happened in this window of time independently of this magic moment, and some that will be announced later as a direct consequence of it. All of it has thoroughly changed my life. But for now, this is where I'll close the Ballad of Bigolas Dickolas, and send you over to read Max' newsletter, which has more of the deep, beautiful feelings portion of this experience from his perspective.

Love and Peace!

Amal

Dear Friends,

What's this! Another newsletter, so fast on the heels of the last? Forgive me – it's time-sensitive and extraordinary.

The short version: This Is How You Lose the Time War is presently, at this moment of writing, half-price on Amazon.com, available for the princely sum of $8.79 in paperback.

It is also currently ranked #21 in Books. On Amazon. Like, in all books. All the books on Amazon.

Why is it #21 in Books on Amazon?

Because of this tweet, screenshotted below in two parts because Twitter is, forever, right up until the end, super weird.

As far as I can tell, someone going by the name Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood runs a fan account for a 90s anime called Trigun which was recently rebooted, and tweeted about loving Time War with imperative enthusiasm, and somehow over the course of 24 hours that tweet went viral with people chiming in to say how much, how passionately, how violently they love the book, and it blew up, and despite the fact that Twitter Does Not Sell Books enough people bought our book in a short enough period that whatever algorithmic alchemy determines Amazon's best-sellers took notice, and the upshot of it all is that corporate marketing people at Simon & Schuster now know the name Bigolas Dickolas.

Stu had first shown me the tweet – which turned up for him in his For You tab on Twitter with no connection to anyone he follows or knows – and I blinked and wondered who Bigolas Dickolas was. A celebrity? A popular TikTok account? What was going on? What could account for the pace, the reach of this virality? The account had, at the time, around twelve thousand followers, which in terms of Twitter isn't huge – celebrity there is usually reckoned in the hundreds of thousands at least.

To say this doesn't usually happen is to invent a new category for understatement. Time War came out in 2019. It is approaching four years of being out in the world. This is wildly unusual at this point in any book's life cycle, especially one as strange and baroque as ours. I cannot explain it, and am releasing the desire to try. This is lightning striking repeatedly into the same bottle, and all I can do is marvel at it and give thanks for it. Not just to Bigolas Dickolas – blessed be their name – but to every person who read this book and loved it enough to share their passion for it at any point in the last four years. Max and I are so grateful, so overwhelmed, and so delighted.

And if you're new here and want to know what all the fuss is about – well, now's a great time to buy it! And while the audiobook isn't discounted, it is a fantastic performance from Emily Woo Zeller (Blue) and Cynthia Farrell (Red) and, as our benevolent spirit so eloquently put it, "it's only like four hours."

Dear Friends,

I've found it so difficult to write a newsletter lately. So much has happened since last I wrote – big life-changing things, small quiet things, changes of scene and season. I've felt suspended, often, between the desire to write a heartfelt outpouring about the river and the forest and the meadow and the sky with which I kept close company all April, and the equal and opposite desire to write a sensible, robust accounting of how I spent my time last month and the first week of this, to offer updates on work and general circumstances.

In the past I've made vague, hand-wavy attempts at bifurcating these postings between Letters of News and a more haphazard wilderness of writing whatever I'm feeling, usually but not always on a Friday, sometimes an actual essay, sometimes slipping back into the musing, earnest, letter-to-the-world wonder that was blogging in its early days. I don't want to write less than once a month; I don't want to write more than once a week; I still crave an elusive schedule that I will find generative rather than restrictive, more like a sonnet than a sestina.

While I figure that out – some news!

First: I'm thrilled to share that I've contributed to Star Wars canon!

“What I have told you was true…from a certain point of view.”

Since 2017, Obi-Wan Kenobi’s quotable line from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi — a defense of his own retelling of Anakin Skywalker’s death at the hands of Darth Vader — has heralded an anthology series celebrating each 40th anniversary of the original trilogy films.

Today, StarWars.com and This Week! In Star Wars are excited to reveal the third installment in the collection, From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi, including the cover art by artist Will Staehle.

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the film’s debut on May 25, 1983, 40 storytellers explore the story of Return of the Jedi through the eyes of supporting characters, including heroes, villains, droids, aliens, and creatures.

I'm in tremendous company, and very proud of what I wrote, which was a departure for me on several levels – but I hope to share more about that soon. The anthology comes out September 5; in the meantime, you can pre-order it here, or from your favourite indie.

Next: a new Otherworldly column went up last month, covering Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett, The Lies of the Ajungo by Moses Ose Utomi, and Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey. (It's a gift link, so feel free to share it with anyone stymied by paywalls!). It's another one of those delicious columns where I fully adored everything I covered, and I'm always so grateful when that happens.

Finally, the biggest news: we've moved house.

The last time we did this was the autumn of 2020, moving from a 2 bedroom apartment in a walk-up to a 3 bedroom apartment in a high-rise. It was a vast improvement on our previous circumstance; Stu and I had separate offices, we had balconies on which I could grow things in pots, the kitchen had a stove I could open all the way. There were things to adjust to, living in a condo, but overall I found it to be a haven for us, one in which we endured pandemic immurement and I figured out remote teaching and the cats murder-chirped at pigeons to their hearts' (dis)content.

This time we've moved into a house, and we (and the cats) hardly know what to do with ourselves.

There's a yard! There's a kitchen so good that one of our movers nodded "dope kitchen" while walking through it. We've doubled our daily step counts merely by existing in a place with stairs.

There've been challenges too: the house is old and venerable, which means subsidence, which means I'm engaging my core as I write this to keep my office chair from rolling away towards the door. There are lots of little ramshackle problems to solve; we've been here two days and are already wrestling ants in the kitchen. And as ever with renting, we don't know how long we'll be here, but we're going to do our best to make the most of it. Like Millie's doing:

Wishing you all a sweet, gentle easing into whatever you have coming next,

Amal

Postscripts:

• The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. I urge you to read the announcement here, stand in solidarity with the union and support striking members however you can. I joined the WGA last year, and this was my first strike vote, but given the truly amazing contempt the studios have shown the union thus far, I very much doubt it will be my last. Here's a recent New Yorker piece offering a glimpse into TV writers' lives.
• This profile of Kelly Link by Lila Shapiro is so beautiful and so worth reading. Also Kelly has a new collection out called White Cat, Black Dog which I can't wait to tuck into.
• Speaking of new collections – the marvellous Kathleen Jennings' first collection of short stories, Kindling, is forthcoming from Small Beer Press in October! I've long adored everything of Kathleen's I've read, and she's tremendously generous with her own reading and insights into creative work; she's an artist as well as an author, and my brain absolutely tingles in the wake of her posts. You can read a ton of her stuff for free at her website, or sign up to her Patreon.
• Back in March, Max Gladstone and I were In Conversation about Dead Country, the latest instalment in his Craft Sequence, under the auspices of Mysterious Galaxy Books. There's video of that event available now, and you can watch it here!
• A while back I saw this video of the B-52s performing on SNL and it has not left my mind. I'm simply in awe of how anyone could curate this much chaos into so immaculate a structure.
• My very dear friend Jessica Wick had a bad accident recently and has had to take two months off work to recover. This is a fundraiser to help support her and help her (literally) get back on her feet. Any amount helps, but so does boosting stuff on social media if you're so inclined.

Also, welcome to new subscribers! For reading this far, you deserve a photo of Devon as he helped me write this letter.