Edinburgh
with many pictures!
The Vulgar American
a writer's life in Britain
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Latest posts
The Upgrade
Before we get started, I have new work out! An excerpt from Aurora appears in Lilith magazine! https://lilith.org/articles/fiction-aurora/ I would be so grateful if you gave it a read. Onto the newsletter… The PhD programs in the UK function differently than those in the US. You have to have a Masters degree to apply to one. You have to pitch professors a project that is very well thought through,…
Anxieties
My anxiety took over for a few weeks this spring. I had too much to do. Some things couldn’t be done in advance, and many things depended on other people. None of that feels great for me. I like to get things done ahead of time, and I like to work alone. It might be silly to spend one of my newsletters detailing my anxieties, but I’m hoping it’s helpful to see how little things add up, and if…
The Vague, the Cliché, and the Precious
I was recently talking to a scholar about teaching creative writing, and I realized there are a few things that I think of as common knowledge, but they are decidedly not! So I figured I would talk about some of those things here. I want to start with the three most common things that I was confronted with in introductory creative writing classrooms: the Vague, the Cliché, and the Precious. (I’m…
Another Valentine’s Day Aquarium Trip
A lot of you know that my son and I have a Valentine’s Day tradition of going to an aquarium. We’ve been to one in Brighton, Portsmouth, Chessington, and two in London. This year we missed Valentine’s Day by a week, but we still had our trip. Since we’ve gone to every aquarium nearby, we had to take three hours of trains to get to one in Hastings. Hastings was already on our list of places that we…
My First Conference in the UK
The organization funding my PhD puts together two mandatory conferences every year. The first one that I got to attend was in January. My first thought about writing about this conference is: why did I say I would write about it??? Maybe I thought the conference would be much more exciting than it was. It was, instead, lackluster. The practical bits weren’t as practical as I thought they would be.…
The Monstrous Feminine in The Haunting of Hill House, Part Three
The finale!
The Monstrous Feminine in The Haunting of Hill House, Part Two
Happy New Year! Let’s get into it! Barbara Creed is a scholar who wrote a book called The Monstrous Feminine in 1993, and the second edition came out in 2023. In these books, she outlines archetypes of The Monstrous Feminine as they appear in horror films. For my PhD, I’m connecting her archetypes to the princess in Sleeping Beauty , as she appears in similar tales across many centuries. For this…
The Monstrous Feminine in The Haunting of Hill House, Part One
I’m excited about this post because it’s mini-practice for my PhD essays. If you like it, let me know, and I’ll do more on here. The first thing I have to say—there will be spoilers for the TV series of The Haunting of Hill House . If you haven’t watched it yet, I wouldn’t recommend reading further! The Haunting of Hill House is based on a book by Shirley Jackson (most famous for her short story,…
Starting My PhD, Again
The orientations