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Tips For Men Writing Women
Can men write woman and femme-presenting characters? Men can, do and may. William Trevor did it well. Apart from an excess of crying, Larry McMurtry also did it well. Ian McEwan is also right up there. Content note: This is a gender binarist topic. Non-binary genders exist and continue to be invisibilised the vast majority…
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The Bus by Shirley Jackson
I once read an article about why so few commuters were inclined to take the bus. This would have eased congestion in my home city. New Zealanders are notoriously wedded to their cars (which have only gotten bigger and bigger since the aggressive marketing of double-cab utes). Sure, we like our cars. But there’s this…
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Pink in Illustration
In the last half century or so pink has increasingly become femme coded. This wasn’t the case before the second world war.
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Hunting And Trapping In Art And Illustration
Stalking Horse: a person or thing that is used to conceal someone’s real intentions. I heard this phrase used to describe a tactic used by Woolworths Australia, who installed a digital mirror at some self-serve check outs. They said that they were not retaining any images, and if customers don’t like it, customers were free to use the staffed…
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Young Adult And Middle Grade Books With Trans Feminine Characters
Young adult readers can now find better queer diversity scattered across young adult literature. Many of these new stories feature trans masculine characters. Here are some young adult stories featuring trans feminine characters.
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Yours by Mary Robison Short Story Analysis
“Yours” is a 1982 short story by American writer Mary Robison.
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Magical Times of Day
Before we had clocks, humans paid more attention to the sky and environment. Read older classics such as the novels of Thomas Hardy and notice how characters make use of all their senses once the sun goes down. They couldn’t simply flick on a light. Even though candles have long been available, they were expensive.…
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Extra by Yiyun Li Short Story Analysis
“Extra” is a short story by Chinese-American author Yiyun Li. Deborah Treisman and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum discuss this story in 2021 at the New Yorker Fiction podcast. This was the second story Yiyun Li published anywhere. “Extra” was included in Li’s 2005 debut collection A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers. Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years…
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When The Sky Is Like Lace by Horwitz and Cooney Analysis
When The Sky Is Like Lace (1975) is a picture book written by Elinor Lander Horwitz and illustrated by Barbara Cooney (1917-2000). If you read Wind in the Willows and wanted more otters, this one’s for you. (I’m not familiar with otters but I think these may be river otters rather than sea otters?)
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Resources About Non-binary Genders
Gender is in Western culture a relational concept. And “masculinity” relies on a binary relationship with femininity. Non-binary people have existed since the dawn of humankind, and are now cracking open proscribed Western gender expectations for everyone.
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Of Mice and Men: Classroom Alternatives
Of Mice and Men is a 1937 novella by John Steinbeck. Two migrant ranch workers move from place to place in California looking for work during America’s Great Depression. This social protest novel is widely studied with high school English literature students. But, where funding allows, English teachers are starting to replace class sets Of…
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Writing Thumbnail Character Sketches
We see people and things not as they are, but as we are. Anthony de Mello Park: “What did he look like?” Girl: “Well, kind of plain.” Park: “In what way?” Girl: “Just……..ordinary.” Memories of Murder, Bong Joon-Ho (2003) Readers differ in the amount of description they need when reading a fictional character. I remember…
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The Cosy Little World In Illustration
Artists have various ways of deliberately distorting naturalistic perspective to achieve a certain mood, for example, a cosy little world.
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Donnie Darko Film Study
Donnie Darko is a 2001 film set in 1988, in a fictional Virginia town called Middlesex. This genre blend of drama, mystery and science fiction is precisely ambiguous enough to generate much discussion about what is meant to have happened. This is ideal ‘cult-following’ material. Note that Donnie Darko didn’t make much of a splash when…
