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Helen Lowe’s Month of Joy: From the Color Blue to “The End”

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“These I have loved:         White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood…”     ~ from The Great Lover, Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915   This excerpt from Rupert Brooke’s poem, The Great Lover, captures how seemingly small things can encompass joy. I recognize many if not all of the items contained in The Great Lover—from “the cool kindliness of sheets” to “blue-massing clouds”—but of course I have a list of my own…

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Month of Joy: A Few Candidates by Mike Reeves-McMillan

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Thanks, Skiffy and Fanty, for asking what brings me joy — because now I’m thinking about that, and that’s a good thing. Especially in these times. There are a few candidates. Erin, my spouse of nearly 19 years. Marrying her still ranks as the best decision I ever made, and I’m still astonished sometimes that someone so amazing would choose me. Being married to someone with a chronic illness isn’t all joy, certainly; it can be tough. But I knew that was the deal going in, and going through the tough times together makes the joy stand out more against the background.

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Month of Joy: Signal Boost by Jen Zink

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I know I’m beating a dead horse when I say this, but 2017 was a really tough year. There definitely were some amazing moments which brought me joy, including when the court granted my son his official name change and when he started his transition, when I got to share my daughter’s incredible artwork on the cover of the Robogoblin Gazette, and when my husband brought me home a beautiful flower he made for me out of molten metal. But I talk about those moments on twitter whenever they happen, so today I want to focus on Skiffy and Fanty.

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Month of Joy: La Alegría del Lenguaje by Cassandra Rose Clarke

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A year ago, I decided to embark on a not-exactly-new endeavor: teaching myself Spanish. I say not-exactly-new because I had attempted it before with a dubiously-acquired copy of Rosetta Stone, which I used for about a month in 2013 before giving up. My failures with Rosetta Stone hadn’t killed my desire to learn Spanish, though. Spanish is a language I grew up around without ever actually learning—I’m from South Texas and now live in Houston, so it’s been a part of the sonic and cultural landscape my entire life. However, I went a Classics route with my formal language learning in high school and college (Latin and Ancient Greek, respectively) and so Spanish was firmly lodged in a strange space of being both familiar and unknown. This frustrated me. How could I see and hear a language almost every day and not understand it?

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Month of Joy: Cooking and a Recipe by Cora Buhlert

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A few weeks ago, I chanced to read this article at the Guardian about the history of the premade sandwich. It’s a fascinating article and you should definitely read it. But what struck me was this quote by one Roger Whiteside, head of Marks & Spencer’s sandwich department in the 1980s: “Once you are time-strapped and you have got cash, the first thing you do is get food made for you […] Who is going to cook unless you are a hobbyist?” This quote not just made me bristle, it also baffled me. It baffled me as much as the lawyer from New York City whom I met online in the early days of the Internet and who told me that his family never cooks, whereupon I blurted out, “But what do you eat then?”

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Month of Joy: Of Flying and Baking: How Researching Novels Changed My Life by Claudie Arseneault

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One of the greatest joys of writing is how it can make you look at something new, push you to research it, and discover new passions. When one of my characters really loves something, I tend to not only read on it, but to experience it myself. So in 2011, while I was still in the process of drafting Viral Airwaves (and learning how to write at all, too), I went on a hot air balloon flight, and it was amazing. It was early in the morning, and as I held the balloon’s envelope while huge fans pushed air into it, I could hardly believe my luck. The sun shone, the pilot was funny and easy to approach (my boyfriend asked him tons of questions about everything because I was too shy), and the flight remains one of the most peaceful moment of my existence. I was up there, a tiny notebook in hand, scribbling observations while a choir of angels sang in my head. And a lot of it made it into Viral Airwaves, too, notably the description of forests as broccoli, and the use of the thick red emergency rope.

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