
![]() Click here to read Miranda Kennedy's article "In Dialogue with Dogma: Women Doing Battle with Religion."
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Hey, I just put up some pictures of the Release Party at Benchmark Books and our presentation at the 2015 Sunstone Symposium here. While not all contributors could come, we had a full 10 of the 12 contributors able to participate in some way between these two events. Given that we have contributors living in Jerusalem, Alberta, Oman, California, the DC area, Indiana, and Colorado, as well as Utah, I'd say it was a major success, and Signature Books helped fly in the out-of-state contributors for these two events.
On a personal level, I haven't seen most of these women in over a decade, so it was powerful to meet in person and reconnect after communicating digitally for so long. Together we span a spectrum of belief, circumstance, and desire, and yet to feel a deep kinship with these women despite our differences was a testament to the message of Fresh Courage Take. ![]() I feel like I've been in a dream these last seven months, and upon waking, I find that several major projects are suddenly finished. It's a nice feeling. In January, I started my final term at Bennington with Deirdre McNamer, who really helped me solidify my ideas for my novel. Every time I talked with her, I got excited and wanted to start writing immediately. I consider that response a hallmark of a great teacher. I also began working on my graduate lecture, which dealt with the cross-section between science and literature. Andrea Barrett, whose work I admire, gave her feedback on it, which was awesome. ![]() A little more than halfway through the year, the Scrabble Powers That Be pulled a fast one on me and came out with the Fifth Edition of The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary, with about 5,000 new words. Great, I thought. I'm going to have to start over. But thanks to the Seattle Scrabble Club, I was able to read a list of the new words that were added. My observations: This is the final weekly post. It ends with zzz, the sound for snoring. But I am far from asleep, here at the end. It was interesting to the last. I will be doing one more post: an addendum discussing the 5,000 words that were added to the Fifth Edition of the OSPD, which came out in August 2014. It's been a beautiful experiment. We are currently being blasted with williwaws here in Montreal—the perfect word for a violent gust of cold wind. In contrast, there were also a lots of songbirds and shorebirds today, my favorite being the wheatear. Also, I think w is one of my favorite sounds. Best word of the week was verbify: to use as a verb. Since verbify itself is used as a verb, it is one of a special subclass of words known as autological words. Autological means that it possesses a property that it describes (noun is a noun, short is short). Heterological means it possesses a property that it does not describe (long is not long). A major paradox arises when we ask if autological and heterological are themselves autological or heterological. Fortunately, someone has already written about it. Also, I've always wanted to know what the front, hinged part of the medieval helmet was called, and now I know: ventail. Life: complete. I also finally found (I think) a list of how OSPD4 (the dictionary edition I have been using this year) and OSPD5 differ—the 5,000 new words. Thank goodness for all those Scrabble aficionados who saved me the trouble of going back and comparing the two side by side. Thank you, thank you. This week's post is super short (I was in the un- section). Despite being short, however, these have got to be some of my favorite words of the year. |
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