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So…in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, which I have commented on a few times in these pages, there’s a cryptic note discovered early on which Wimsey says reminds him of some of “Uncle Lorne’s” visions in Sheridan Lefanu’s novel Wylder’s Hand. Never having read a Lefanu novel other than Carmilla, and looking to divert myself, I decided to read it. It does not shed that much light on The Nine Tailors. But since I’ve read it, I’m gonna write it up. I will try to avoid major spoilers.
First thing to know about Lefanu’s fiction is that it takes a kind of…elastic…approach to construction. There is a first person narrator, but he sort of fades in and out of the story, and 85% of what happens is stuff that he could never have witnessed, narrated in the third person. As far as I can tell the narrator’s main function is to introduce us to the main ‘supernatural’ elements of the plot, so that we can experience them from his freaked-out point of view.
Most of this story is about two landed families, the Brandons and the Wylders, who have both intermarried enough to be inextricable and feuded enough to be constantly at odds. An arranged marriage between the Brandon heiress Dorcas and the eponymous Mark Wylder is meant to end the mutual animosity and strengthen both families by reuniting them. But both of these families are kind of cursed, and so is Brandon Hall where most of this takes place; and things start going wrong pretty early on. Mark Wylder, for instance, doesn’t like Dorcas, beauty though she is; he’s a lot more interested in his cousin Rachel Lake, the loyal and long-suffering sister of Captain Stanley Lake, an outrageously self-involved ne'er-do-well who’s constantly scheming to better his condition and really not being that good at it. Knowing what a heel he is, Dorcas Brandon falls in love with him anyway. So now we have an arranged marriage that neither party wants but in which all the biggest landowners around have invested quite a bit. Add to this one Jos. Larkin, a lawyer who is a giant religious hypocrite as well as the biggest, most devious, meanest schemer of them all, and is determined to exploit every confidential Situation revealed to him for maximum personal gain, and you’ve got quite a lot of scope for intrigue.
The narrator, who is asked down to Brandon Hall by Mark Wylder partly because he’s a lawyer and Wylder has some suspicions about Larkin, is woken in the middle of the night by someone trying to get into bed with him. This apparition freaks the narrator right out, but leaves without doing him any kind of injury. The apparition identifies himself as the ghost of Uncle Lorne, one of the Brandon ancestors, and says that he can foretell misfortunes destined to befall the Brandons/Wylders. The narrator encounters him several times, indoors and outdoors, and is freaked out every time.
So what you have, for a long time, is a typical nineteenth century novel focused on marriage, property, and related shenanigans…and then every once in a while there’s a ghost encounter. It’s kind of jarring, especially because the materialist side of the plot is VERY materialist. Like, you REALLY have to care about property and inheritances and debt and electioneering to get through a lot of this. book. In addition to the ghost, there is a Mystery–because shortly before his marriage to Dorcas is scheduled to take place, Mark Wylder disappears. He keeps sending letters with directions about what to do with his money, etc., from different European locations. But he refuses to marry Dorcas, to return to England, or to provide anyone with a return address.
So, not to get into spoilers, here are my favorite things about Wylder’s Hand:
After a certain point, I did find it very compelling; but I also got frustrated with some of the side quests (especially the election stuff), and the legal shenanigans exhausted even me (and if you know me you know I have a high tolerance for legal shenanigans). So, not a five star recommendation here, but all in all I felt like it beguiled the time acceptably.
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If everyone had less than an hour to live, would your actions in those moments matter more or not at all? Author Holly Seddon explores this question in the Big Idea for her newest novel 59 Minutes, taking a closer look at whether people are capable of being kind and good up until their last breath. When the rules no longer apply, who would you choose to be?
HOLLY SEDDON:
The terrifying premise of 59 Minutes is that everyone in the UK receives an alert to say nuclear missiles are on their way, and the characters have a race against time to get to their loved ones to say goodbye. I’m very proud of this hook, I know it grabs people’s attention.
But the theme, the big idea, behind the hook is, How do people behave when all the usual rules no longer apply?
This has always interested me. It’s what draws us to shows like The Sopranos, where characters operate in a world that eschews the rules most of us live by, often running within the guard rails of a whole different set of rules. It’s why films like The Purge are so compelling.
But even if the rules go up in smoke, I have to believe, as a human trying to negotiate my way through this life, that most people are good and well-meaning.
So, in writing 59 Minutes, I was in a constant dialogue between that good and bad human impulse. The selfless and the selfish.
Because some people really would use their last minutes to do terrible things. A last hurrah. You only have to look at the boom in crimes that happened under the cover of darkness in the blacked out London of World War Two to know that. Muggings. Sexual assault. Even murder. The serial killer Gordon Cummins who murdered four women and attempted to murder two more over a six-day period in 1942.
But I have to believe that plenty of people, plenty more people, would have sacrificed their own safety to help other people. They always do.
When I first had the idea for 59 Minutes, and started to cautiously tell people the premise to gauge their reaction, I noticed the same thing happened repeatedly. Their eyes would glaze over, they’d clearly stop listening to me waffling on and then they’d snap back to attention and apologize. What they said next was always a variation on the same thing. “I’m sorry, I was just thinking what the hell I would do.”
I understood. That is the universality of the hook – every one of us if forced to confront extinction would have somewhere we wanted to be, some people with whom we wanted to spend those last minutes. But what if, like in the novel, it’s not that simple. What if missing children need help, do you stop and lose those minutes? What if you are forced to choose between your own safety, and the safety of someone you loved?
In writing this book and asking my readers to consider such existential questions, I couldn’t shy away from them myself. I’d like to think that, if not brave, I would at least be kind right up to the end. But we all like to think we’d be heroic, don’t we?
So what about you? What would you do if the usual rules of the world just no longer applied. How would you spend your final minutes?
59 Minutes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s|Simon & Schuster
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Japan has an aging population. The median age is 49.5 years and the average life expectancy is 85, both about ten years older than the US average. These stats and numbers give rise to a very human dilemma: How do we, as a society, care for the elderly? Dementia 21 tackles that question in the form of an absurdist comedy manga that uses a blend of SF and horror to get its point across.
The main character (and one of the few consistent things in this off-the-wall series) is a young woman named Yukie Sakai who works as a care aide at an elder care company. Yukie is diligent, thoughtful, kind but always professional; she’s the type of care worker you’d want looking after your loved ones, or even yourself. Thanks to glowing customer feedback, Yukie is the top-rated employee at her company. This leads to her co-worker Ayase becoming jealous, and she in turn convinces their boss (whom Ayase is sleeping with) to give Yukie only the most dangerous/demanding clients. This is the framework to explain why Yukie ends up in one bizarre situation after another, but honestly you can forget about the setup pretty early on. There doesn’t need to be a reason for Yukie to end up in these wild scenarios; that’s just the job of an at-home care worker.
An early story, and one that maybe best exemplifies the themes of the series, has Yukie go to a home where three elderly ladies need care. As the client explains, his mother’s two sisters never married, and so his family took them all in. Yukie approaches the job with gusto, despite the challenge of having to do triple the work. On her second visit to the home, there are six elderly family members to care for (“My mother has three other sisters, you see …”[vol.1, p.22]). Yukie stays on top of things, only for the number of patients to double the next day, and the next. When Yukie calls the client to say it’s too much for her to care for thirty-plus old patients, he’s taken aback, saying there are only twelve old folks in his extended family. Yukie discovers that people have started abandoning their elderly family members at the house, expecting Yukie to care for them. The old folks are sanguine about their fate: “I only get in the way at home,” one of them says. “It’s better to be abandoned” (vol. 1, p. 23). Yukie rallies the people in the house, who now number in the hundreds, asking how they can stand to be thrown out like trash by their own families. Yukie’s words spark a flame of righteous anger in the assembled old folks, and they combine into one giant humanoid figure big enough to burst out of the house. The chapter ends with this newly forged giant shambling off with the collective intent of taking revenge on the families who had abandoned them (“We’ll show them the might of senior power!!” [vol. 1, p. 32]).
As outlandish as the dénouement is, this is one of the more down-to-earth stories in the series. I could spend hundreds of words recapping many of the high-concept ideas in Dementia 21. One story has Yukie dealing with a forgetful aging Ultraman proxy and keeping this massive superhero from destroying the city. One has her dealing with an elderly telepath with dementia: Every time the woman forgets a concept/person, her powerful abilities wipe it from existence. Another has Yukie trying to find a client in a foggy city, only to discover that aliens have turned Earth into a pachinko machine and the fog is from their cigarette smoke (that last one is from volume 2, in which some of the author’s ideas are a little less on-theme). There’s even a very Junji Ito-esque story with some mild body horror involving a high-tech pair of dentures.
Shintaro Kago’s main influence, though, is Katsuhiro Otomo. Otomo is best known for being the creator the sprawling manga epic Akira (1982-1990) and the landmark anime film based on it (1988). The similarities art-wise between the two creators is clear but doesn’t amount to a precise copy: There’s simply an eighties sensibility to Kago’s art, and like Otomo he balances the right mix of detail and minimalism to make the absurd seem almost mundane. Thematically, it’s clear that Kago takes a lot of cues from Otomo as well. While Otomo might be most widely known for Akira, in 1980 he created Domu: A Child’s Dream (1980-1981), a manga in which an elderly man and a young child living in the same apartment building use their psychic powers to wage war on one another. He also wrote the script to the 1991 anime film Roujin Z, in which an eighty-seven-year-old man’s robotic hospital bed turns into a giant mecha and kidnaps him in order to fulfill its prime directive of keeping him safe. The main character in Roujin Z is a young nurse in the same mold as Yukie, and the plot of Roujin Z could easily work as a chapter of Dementia 21.
Kago himself talks about his influences in an interview at the end of volume 1, but only just: It’s the type of interview where the questions are often longer than the answers, and most of Kago’s answers boil down to him declaring his desire to let the work speak for itself. While Kago clearly takes a lot of inspiration from the works of Otomo, the similarities between the two men’s works mostly show how the theme of elder care is something anime and manga have been dealing with for decades.
It is a toss-up in any given story whether the elderly characters will come off as plot devices or actual characters. The manga is hilarious and cuttingly insightful, but it is simultaneously juvenile, with jokes and humor that wouldn’t be out of place in Mad Magazine. Not every old man Yukie meets is a perv, but a lot of them are, and if off-color sex jokes put you off, then this might not be the series for you. The manga is at its best, though, when it shows that the elderly are no different from anyone else. My favorite story in the series involves a high-tech care home in which the elderly live in rooms the size and shape of small cargo containers. These box rooms have everything a person could need to live: toilet, shower, food, medical equipment. The boxes are then stacked on top of each other, creating towers that go higher than the clouds.
At first, it seems like this will be a story about automation and the dangers of outsourcing the job of looking after human beings to machines, but that’s not the case. Instead, it becomes a story about the society that the denizens of the boxes have formed amongst themselves. They use wires slung across the towers to trade goods and use the internet to communicate. They elect their own government, create a thriving black market, fall in love with each other, and form rivalries that escalate into people sending bombs to each other’s rooms. For all its outlandishness, the conflicts and machinations remind me a lot of the care home my Nan lives in, where securing a spot at the Friday three p.m. bridge game takes as much cunning and guile as a courtier trying to get ahead at seventeenth-century Versailles. It’s also a story that shows how, just because people might grow frail with age, they still remain people—with all the wants and needs that come with that.
Part of the manga’s humor hinges on a disdainful view of human nature. The characters are all mainly selfish and only concerned with themselves. Even Yukie, who often goes above and beyond for her clients, is shown to be doing so just to keep her top-rated spot at her company. There are other comics out there that have elderly main characters with a slightly kinder view of humanity—one of my favorites is BL Metamorphosis (2017-2020), a manga series in which a teen girl and an elderly woman form a friendship over their shared fandom of boys’ love (small point of disclosure: I work at the company that published BL Metamorphis but I did not work on the series). But Dementia 21 isn’t here to warm your heart: it’s to make you laugh and marvel at the absurdity of life.
Near the end of the series, Yukie changes sides: After being fired from her job, she is recruited by the government to help “reduce the surplus at the top of the population pyramid” (vol. 2, p. 244), which is exactly what it sounds like. The government has stealthily been making the country more hostile to old people in order to kill them off indirectly, by means as diverse as getting rid of elevators and escalators to including more mochi in meals to cause choking. Yukie is at first adamant that she would never take part in such a cruel system, but one panel later a pile of money changes her tune. This sets off all-out war between the generations, with various characters from previous stories coming back for the finale. But even after all that, there is no solution: Aging and the struggles that come with it are part of us indefinitely. Dementia 21 points out the absurdity of capitalism and social norms and bureaucracy, but also the hypocrisy of ageism: The lucky among us will get to grow old; to resent those who already are highlights humanity’s shortsightedness.
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oursinWhat I read
Finished The Golden Notebook - had a few comments about Lessing and blokes and plus ca change and allotropes of excuses in yesterday's post.
Decompressed with a Dick Francis, Slay-Ride (1973), which is the one set in Norway - period at which The War, resistance, Quislings etc still hangs heavy over them - not a top specimen of his, I spotted Dodgy Person very early on (but maybe protag does not read thrillers....).
Then got a jump on the next volume in the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, Temporary Kings (#11), which is the one set at some kind of cultural conference in Venice.
Also the latest Literary Review.
On the go
Continuing to dip in to Some Men in London 1960-1967.
Was agreeably surprised by the arrival of my preordered Cat Sebastian (had forgotten it was due), After Hours at Dooryard Books, which is being v good so far.
Up next
Latest Slightly Foxed.
james_davis_nicoll
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For various reasons I was reminded that two years ago this week, I quit the former Twitter for good; I had been doing a slow draw down of my presence for most of 2023 but on November 16 I abandoned the place entirely, mostly decamping to Bluesky, with additional outposts at Threads and Mastodon. At my peak on Twitter I had 210,000 followers (down to about 180,000 when I pulled the plug), accrued through a dozen years of being on the service, so it was no small thing to go. But the other option was to stay and be complicit in the machinations of a fascist asshole who was actively turning the place into a cesspool. Off I went.
Two years on, I’m happy to say that I don’t regret leaving. One, and most obviously, I’m not wading in a dank hot tub of feculent right-wing bullshit, which is a positive for my mental well-being and my general ability to be online. Two, my career hasn’t suffered a whit for not being on the former Twitter; my book sales have chugged along rather happily and my other opportunities have not lessened at all. Three, those 200+K followers have been replaced by more than twice that number on Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon (there are repeat followers on each service, to be sure). So surely my ego is assuaged there.
That said, the business aspects of being on social media are not my primary reason to be there, although of course I do tell people when I have new books and other projects out, or when I’m doing appearances. Mostly, though, I’m just hanging out. And while none of the other social media services are perfect (he said, delicately and understatedly), none of the rest of the ones I hang out on are so aggressively tuned to be unpleasant as the former Twitter was when I left, and still is today. It’s possible to chat and hang out and have fun on Bluesky (and Threads and Mastodon) and not feel icky for being there. That’s the real win for me: I’m enjoying myself online more. These days, that is not a small thing.
I’m aware that people are still on the former Twitter and even prefer it there, for whatever reason, and they are welcome to their own karma. There’s nothing and no one there that’s so essential to my day-to-day life that I need to go back there. Likewise, outside of a few right-wing dickheads who like to snark about me, the former Twitter seems to have entirely forgotten that I exist, and I can’t say this bothers me greatly. It’s a pretty clean separation.
I don’t imagine I’ll do another update about this again; there’s not much point to it from here on out. But again, maybe I’m a useful anecdotal case study. What happens when you leave the former Twitter? For me, mostly, online life just got better. If you’re still on the site, maybe it’ll work that way for you, too.
— JS
nicola_griffith_feedRegular readers know I occasionally get focused on natural history and life science issues, anything from post-viral syndromes to ‘2019-nCoV, the new coronavirus‘, screwfly to bonobos, and tiny cats to sex-chromosome syndromes. Last autumn and early this year, I wrote extensively about highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), that is, bird flu, because I found it interesting. Like all flus, though, bird flu is seasonal. As the virus waned, so did news and therefore my interest. But, well, it’s baaaaaack….
Yes, as predicted, highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) is on the upswing again in the US. (If you’d like to refresh yourself on all things bird flu, feel free to read my Avian Influenza Basics post.) Most of it, also as predicted, is our old friend H5N1, slightly different variants of which infect wild birds (mostly waterfowl), backyard flocks, commercial flocks, livestock herds, and wild mammals.
I won’t bother listing all the different increases in various flocks and herds here in the US since September. If you’re curious, you can follow the USDA’s reports. But I will mention one recent report on one particular mammal. Communications Biology documents the die-off of half the breeding population of a key population of elephant seals from H5N1. By ‘key’ this population represents more than half the total numbers of southern elephant seals: over 53,000 seals were wiped out. This will affect the numbers of elephant seals through the end of this century, a massive blow. I would not be the least bit surprised to find there’s a lot of this kind of thing happening off the radar—that this report represents the tip of the iceberg.
Here in the US, there have been scores of human cases of bird flu, mostly mild, with one fatality in Louisiana—though none since February. Until now. Right here in Western Washington, in Grays Harbor, an older person is hospitalised with the virus. This is not only the first human bird flu infection in the US since February but, notably, the first-ever known human case of a different HPAI: H5N5. The hospitalised and severely ill patient older and suffers several underlying conditions. Health officials who have modelled the behaviour of the two different HPAIs think H5N5 poses no more of a risk to people than H5N1. Which is great. As far as it goes. The problem with flu models is that because influenza viruses mutate so fast, with both HPAI and the more usual seasonal influenzas on the rise, the odds of a combination of both and/or a novel reassortant of either that behaves in dangerously unpredictable ways increases.
To be super clear: right now there’s zero grounds for anxiety. I’m merely pointing out that it’s probably time to start taking some simple, sensible precautions. And please do get vaccinated.
oursinNot OK? Booker winner Flesh ignites debate about state of masculinity
No, really, you don't say? Can it be that - once again, or perhaps, still MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS?
Does it not sound as though the author goes in for 'dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension'? (Sigh.)
I am sorry to discover that an excoriating retrospect on John Fowles with particular reference to The Magus by DJ Taylor in the latest Literary Review does not appear to be fully accessible online, chiz, chiz -
[E]ach of his novels when stripped of its fashionable appurtenances - The Magus, for example, is rife with Jungian animas - is ultimately about male entitlement.... the books are all about men expecting to get the things they want and being mortified by their absence.
....
[A] series of exercises in what Maurice Bowra called 'the higher bogus'.
I note that there was a BBC programme last night on the 'manosphere': young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives. They sound rather sad and confused. (And historian is appalled at the persistence of a panic drummed up by an early C18th quack....)
Am trying to think of period when one could reliably say that masculinity was not in (some kind of) crisis.
brithistorianThis morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.
The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.
The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:
In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.
My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]
[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.
[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.
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Spice is the cat who is probably the closest to me on a day-to-day basis; she sleeps on the bed near my head, and frequently camps out on my desk whilst I type. She’s also the one who misses me the most when I travel and the one least afraid of offering her editorial comments to me about my absence when I return. It appears that my most recent trip was one trip too far: Spice rather pointedly peed on two of my travel bags this weekend, including, unfortunately, my new Exercising Demons bag from Calamityware.
The two bags are now irredeemably trashed, and Spice does not appear in the least bit regretful for her actions. We will have to have a discussion about this at some near point in the future. However, inasmuch as last weekend’s trip was the last one I had scheduled for the year, it seems unlikely there will be further editorial comment along this line. At least, hopefully. Anyway, it’s nice to be missed. Just not that way.
— JS
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The Curators is complex, brilliant, and original. It is eminently worth any reader’s time. It’s also difficult to summarize, and even more difficult to analyze in any succinct way. For the purposes of this review, it’s probably most useful to start with the historical event the book is about: the trial and lynching of Leo Frank in 1910s Atlanta.
The initial events of the case happened in April 1913, when thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan worked at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia. Leo Frank was her manager there. One morning, a night watchman found her body in the factory basement, and Frank was the last person to admit to seeing Phagan alive. The case became a flashpoint for many reasons: because Frank was Jewish, because Phagan was a white Protestant teenager (and therefore a symbol of white purity and victimization), and because the key witness in the case against Frank was Jim Conley, a Black janitor. It was highly unusual for a Black person’s testimony to be taken seriously in a Southern court, and so it’s particularly notable that the prosecution relied on Conley’s testimony. Many experts now think that Conley, not Frank, was probably the murderer, and even at the time, Conley’s story was notably inconsistent. But people were incensed, and Frank’s Jewishness was no small factor.
Mary Phagan became a symbol of white Christian innocence and purity, and Leo Frank a symbol of the evil enemy. During the trial, people mobbed the courthouse in hope of a guilty verdict. It took three weeks, but Leo Frank eventually was pronounced guilty, and was sentenced to hang. A New York Tribune article said that “Solicitor Hugh Dorsey, who conducted the prosecution, was lifted to the shoulders of several men and carried more than a hundred feet through the shouting throng.”
But Frank appealed, and appealed again, in a process that would stretch out for two years. Finally, the governor of Georgia investigated the case. The governor decided Frank was innocent, and commuted his sentence to life in prison, under the assumption that his innocence would eventually be fully proven. Once news of the commutation got out, a group of people kidnapped Frank from the prison and lynched him. The case directly led not only to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, but also to the foundation of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). (For a useful overview of the case, see the New Georgia Encyclopedia.)
The Curators begins during Frank’s trial. The trial is covered daily in the newspaper, and it captures the attention of all Atlanta. It especially captures the attention of five teenage girls, who call themselves “the Felicitous Five.” (NB: they’re fictional characters, original to the novel.) They’re infatuated with Leo, and they begin to collect as much Leo-related material as they can. Newspaper clippings and photos are an important part of their collection—their archive, really—but they also imagine places he might have been, preferences he might express, and what it would be like to be with him.
The Felicitous Five, like Leo, are Jewish. (Leo attended their synagogue, another special connection.) They become fascinated with Leo, and collect every piece of information they can about him in order to one day create a Leo Museum.
In the two years and four months that passed between Leo’s first appearance in the news and his lynching, we had learned his schooling (a fancy New York university) his dress (a club collar, always), his whereabouts (opera matinees on Sunday), and so many private things never printed in the paper: coffee black with brown sugar, Lucky Strikes, two gold-filled molars on the top left, an allergy to dogwood, a fondness for Nabisco wafers, dreams of us. (p. 12)
Along with curating the Leo Museum, the Five also prognosticate about his fate: Every small news item, even if it’s about the weather or the county fair, can be interpreted as a Leo-related omen. They draw up a set of rules: They are never to be without Leo (so they pin pictures of him to their clothes), they must meet every day to discuss Leo, and, most importantly, they must share all information they learn about Leo. Keeping secrets is a “serious offense.” The five of them are in this together, and their differences don’t matter in the face of the rules.
But from the novel’s beginning, one of the Felicitous Five stands out from the rest: Ana Wulff. Ana thinks and acts on her own, and she has a glorious, expansive imagination. In fact, her imagination is a large part of why Leo grows into the icon he is: Ana is the one to suggest many of the group’s most important rules and activities, and to define the group’s perspective. “She was the baby, but also the scribe and scientist […] clever and thorough” (p. 25).
Sometimes the narrative is from the point of view of a “we,” which is clearly the Felicitous Five—but minus Ana. Sometimes it’s a third person that knows much more about Ana than her friends possibly could. Either way, Ana is always on her own, from the very start of the book. Ana is one of the Felicitous Five, but she’s also a separate entity, with her own name, operating differently from them, and even independently from them. And this is a problem for the other four girls. Something about Ana is particularly intense, particularly real. The other girls always seem a little bit aware of how Ana differs from them; they’re both intimidated by it and keen to knock her down to their size. (This is marked ethnically, too—Ana is the only one of the girls whose family is from Russia.)
Much of the book is about how the girls treat each other and interpret the intensely racialized environment they live in. And Ana’s interpretation is unique. She has no real understanding of what it means to be Black,. but she uses her powerful imagination to make sense of things, to tie things together with reason as best as she can, to try to find reason and truth even when it’s impossible because she lacks the guidance and maturity to do so.
At a crucial turning point in the story, Ana heads by herself to Darktown, the Black neighborhood of Atlanta, in search of a voodoo practitioner named Miss Zelie who can help her resolve a dare with the other girls. The person Ana knows best is Black: her family’s servant, Isaac, who helped raise her, and who made up stories about Miss Zelie in the first place. But she has no idea how to behave, or how her presence might endanger the people she’s talking to. She believes earnestly in magic, and is wary of it, so she treats the people around her as if they are flat characters from a folktale.
When Ana eventually does find Miss Zelie’s sister, for instance, she names the woman “The Night Witch” in her mind, after the “Night Witch” who’s referenced in the (real) murder notes found next to Mary Phagan’s body. Ana needles her for information and magic. Miss Zelie’s sister finally relents and gives her a tin of Nabisco cookies. Ana, earnest and enveloped in her own imagination, doesn’t doubt her for a moment, but she insists that the magic has to be powerful enough to save Leo. The Night Witch says, “Oh, I heard you. […] These are special magic Nabiscos. I did a witching on them just last night, so they’re fresh as can be” (p. 87). We can hear the tone of sarcasm and exhaustion, but Ana cannot. Ana grabs the Witch’s wrist and demands more information. A moment later, a cop emerges to beat and arrest Miss Zelie for grabbing Ana’s wrist. We can see the reversal that’s happened here, but Ana cannot. Only at the end of the novel, when Ana’s made many more mistakes, does she understand the harm she’s caused, and how many things in the world are inverted like this. The rest of the Felicitous Five seem never to get there at all.
In the next chapter, Leo Frank is lynched. The Felicitous Five are among the crowd that goes to see his body. Soon afterwards, they attempt to create a Leo golem using Leo-related newspaper clippings and the Night Witch’s cookies—and they succeed. Sort of: The Leo golem emerges as a vaguely man-shaped mass of dirt with blue flowers for eyes. But because Ana used her Night Witch magic (maybe), and because she gives the golem language lessons in her attic, the golem becomes hers most of all. And the Felicitous Five get quite angry about that.
The Curators is fascinating, perplexing, and difficult. This summary only covers about half of the book, and in much less detail than I’d have liked. It’s impossible to try to resolve this story into a single thread. But that’s part of what the book is about: trying to pull an enormous jumble of stuff together into meaning. Even if unification isn’t possible, and even if the most important answers can’t be found, the novel holds out the possibility that maybe some sort of meaning is still possible.
The girls do this with Leo, but they also do it with each other. They try to unify themselves most literally in their “spider game,” which they play a few times throughout the book. In the spider game, the girls lie down on the floor in a circle (heads in the center and feet sticking out), and braid their hair together so they can’t tell whose hair and limbs belong to whom. They’re together as one unit, sort of; but it seems like they’re also experiencing mixing and ambiguity, perhaps more than the experience of all coming together as one discrete being. Even so, they’re bound by ritual and a sort of intimate care, which is unification of a sort.
But they can’t stay this way forever. “We unwound our hair with great patience and the stored gentleness we withheld in our daily lives. But always, there were pieces so bound up and fused together they had to be cut free with a knife” (p. 47.) Once you mix all these pieces together (body parts, words and ideas, dirt), once you get lost, you can’t get entirely un-lost. Something has changed. They clean each other up afterwards and become “new” (p. 47), but they also remain tangled. That is, they can’t fully escape the tangle they made. In The Curators, everything is slippery. Other people determine who you are and what you do and what you mean, even when you don’t agree or want them to. The people, places, things, and ideas you get close to change you, and you change them, too. Severing yourself from those people (etc.) can be violent. It can be violent, too, to say that people are wrong about you, to say they haven’t affected you, to say that your perceptions of each other are wrong, either as particular people or as members of categories.
And, of course, this comes back to the book’s political statements. What do people assume about Black people? About Jewish people? About teenage girls? About white Christian men?
Late in the book, in a fit of jealously, the rest of the Felicitous Five try to tie Ana up. Ana accidentally throws her lamp and starts a fire. The rest of the girls manage to escape by themselves. But it’s the golem who rescues Ana, along with Ana’s mother, by carrying them out of the house.
Mr. Fink (a father of one of the Five), and the Fiddler (a ne’er do-well reporter and gossip), both see this happen. The two of them have a horrible conversation that unspools in more and more hysterical directions as it goes. They decide that the dark-skinned unclothed figure who carried the Wulffs out of their house must have been Isaac, their Black servant—that somehow he lecherously entered the house and carried them out in an act of indecency. Isaac is forced to go “on the lam”—that is, into hiding—for the crime of being simultaneously Black and associated with the wrong house.
So the golem’s act of heroism is warped into the act of a malicious Black phantom: Isaac, who told Ana magic stories in the first place, has to go the run to avoid an angry mob. It’s sort of a warped version of the Leo Frank case: A Black man is blamed for a crime that doesn’t exist, when really a Jewish creature did something heroic. (In the Leo Frank case, a Jewish man is blamed for a crime that a Black man likely committed.) But this isn’t a perfect opposite, and it doesn’t produce any easy answers. Most of the book’s conundrums are like that.
The Curators refuses to answer many of its own questions. It’s a baggy book; it pulls together many disparate ideas and gestures towards what their combinations might mean. On first reading, that was sometimes frustrating. This is especially true of the book’s end, where Ana climbs inside the golem. From inside, she says she’s found the Truths she’s been searching for, but she can barely communicate any of them. Then she asks the other four girls to tear the golem apart. When they do, Ana’s gone. The other four girls simply finish tearing the golem apart. I wanted to know what happens after Ana vanishes, and who the girls become, and what all of these events and feelings come to mean. Instead, we just have a final violence and a collection of suggestions and attempts at meaning, without confirmation.
But in a way, that seems to be the point. This book is an archive (in a number of different ways), and it doesn’t present a fully formed meaning to us. We have to make that for ourselves. Ana does, too, and so do the remaining members of the Felicitous Five who narrate the book. Rachel León’s excellent review in the Chicago Review of Books suggests that “The Curators is above all a meditation on devotion. To friends, to girlhood, to memory, to religion, to golems, to truth. Even, perhaps, to language and its power …” I think this is right, and I think that devotion drives the girls in this story to create their own meaning out of whatever it is they have available. They can’t get answers from the Leo-golem because that’s not what devotion doe; the Leo-golem saves Ana and her mother from the fire out of devotion; and devotion cannot make it capable of saying whether or not Leo Frank is innocent, or any of the other questions Ana desperately wants answered.
In an earlier section about school, Ana says:
In the real world, there was danger and adventure and who knows what else. In our school, there were only lines to fill in and there was only one answer for each line, which didn’t make any sense at all. If there was only one answer, and no other answers could be considered, then even if you replaced the answer with a black line or a blank space or an empty box, it was still there, wasn’t it? Even if it couldn’t be seen, it couldn’t possibly be anywhere but there, and nothing could go there but the one answer. What was the point in asking the question? (p. 51)
This contrarian imagination is what makes Ana the focus of the book, and it’s what makes her treat the Leo-golem differently and more personally. But even her imagination doesn’t stop her from making grave mistakes with the golem. The girls create the golem hoping that a specific answer already exists: They want the golem to tell them that Leo was innocent. The golem could never have done that, have been that; the girls couldn’t have made it that way. They used newspaper scraps and photos and their memories of the funeral and their stolen fake hanging rope and maybe-magical Nabisco wafers from Darktown, and the web of understanding that they’ve made together over time. They did so as a group. On top of that, they have Ana’s made-up magic, the magic of the “night witch,” which is a combination of Isaac’s Miss Zelie stories, Ana’s misadventure in Darktown, and Ana’s desperate tale-telling. The girls hope that magic— as Ana presents it— would fill the gaps, and turn what they had into Leo. But, as Mrs Wulff says at the very beginning of the book, “The golem is nothing his makers are not also” (p. 9).
The golem can’t be Leo, then; he was made by the girls. But there’s still truth inside the golem that Ana can’t even express. Maybe the point (in part) is that there’s some kind of difference between being something/existing as something in the world and understanding what that is: Even if you know that something exists and what it’s supposed to mean, you still may not know for certain what it does mean. It’s that gap which Ana means to fill, and it’s why she jumps into the golem and lets it swallow her.
There is much more to be said about The Curators: the nuances of its racial commentary; its exploration of rape culture and gender; its take on personal relationships and intimacy; its depiction of parental trauma; the true nature of the Leo-golem and what’s inside of him; how all of these things intersect. I hope many people read and talk and think about The Curators. The amount of thought and attention put into it has created a novel which deserves our thought and attention back.
oursinAre they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:
Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.
Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.
Maybe this would have struck differently - jolly countryside japes? - if this had not been the same week in which there was
a) a review of the new remake of The Running Man:
Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.
b) this creep-making report: Italy investigates claims of tourists paying to shoot civilians in Bosnia in 1990s:
[J]ournalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a "manhunt" by "very wealthy people" with a passion for weapons who "paid to be able to kill defenceless civilians" from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.
nicola_griffith_feedToday is the Feast Day of Hild of Whitby,1 patron saint of learning and culture (including poetry), who died on this day in 680, having spent 66 years kicking ass and not bothering to take names. We believe she was originally buried at her main foundation of Streoneshalh, now known as Whitby, but sometime after Whitby was destroyed by Viking raids, her remains were, apparently, translated to…well, somewhere else. No one knows. Various religious foundations have claimed her—not unlike Arthur; saintly relics were (and still are) big business—but no one knows for sure.
There are several grave markers from Whitby though I have images of none of them (and none are for Hild). However, there are also several from Hereteu, or Hartlepool (where Hild was abbess for a while before founding and moving to Whitby). One intriguing stone, dated ‘mid-seventh to mid-eighth century,’ was found under the head of some skeletal remains. The runes spell out hildi þryþ, that is, the feminine personal name Hildithryth:
As we don’t know Hild’s full name, it might be tempting to assume this is our Hild’s stone.2 But I doubt it. For one thing it was part of a group of similar burials, and as abbess, saint, and royal advisor I doubt she would have been buried among others. Plus, of course, she was more than likely buried at Whitby. And as Hartlepool was also most likely destroyed by Vikings (as with mos records of this time and place, much was lost in the Viking raids from the late eighth through ninth centuries—all we know is that, after Hild, Hartlepool essentially vanishes from history) no one in their right mind would have transferred her there.
So here’s how I imagine her pillow stone3:
You’ll see I’ve made her cross round-ended and equal-armed, more like the kind of cross I think she would have worn, rather than the more traditional long upright and shorter crosspiece of the Hartlepool marker.
Enough about her death. Back to her life: Why is Hild patron saint of learning and culture/poetry? Learning, because she trained five bishops who became renowned for their own erudition—one of whom, John of Beverley, was the one who ordained and mentored the Venerable Bede—the only British person ever to have been learned enough to be honoured as a Doctor of the Church. Poetry, because she pretty much midwived Engish literature: the earliest surviving piece of Old English is Cædmon’s Hymn, composed at Hild’s behest at Whitby.
I’m not religious but I mark the day because Hild—and Whitby, its abbey, and ammonites—marked my life, in particular my writing life, indelibly.
My first novel was Ammonite, which was published when I was 32. The author photo I used for that book was taken at Whitby Abbey when I was 30. You can tell from the look on my face how much the place affects me. (And in fact I like this photo so much it forms the basis for the cover of my upcoming book, She Is Here.)
In my third novel, The Blue Place, Aud talks longingly of Whitby—now mostly known for the abbey founded by Hild in 657. In Whitby you can commonly find three species of fossil ammonites, or snakestones—the beach is littered with them. A whole genus of ammonites, Hildoceras, is named for Hild. This is Hildoceras bifrons. It’s what I think of when I think of ammonites.
Ammonites fascinate me. Their shell growth—developing into that lovely spiral—is guided by phi. And phi (Φ = 1.618033988749895… ), the basis of the Golden Ratio or Divine Proportion, has all sorts of interesting mathematical properties. The proportions generated by phi lie at the heart of myriad things: the proportions of graceful buildings4, the orderly whorl of a sunflower, ammonites, Fibonacci numbers, population growth, and more. (If you’re interested, a good place to start is Wikipedia.) Phi is what creates the underlying pattern in much of nature. I think phi is responsible for what Hild may think of as God.
There is a legend that ammonites result from Hild getting pissed off one day and turning all the local snakes to stone. The legend was so well-established after her death, that, in the later middle ages and even up until Victorian times, enterprising locals carved heads on the stones and sold them as the snakes she petrified.5
Here’s what H. bifrons looks like as a snakestone:
And here’s a much more finely carved specimen:
When I was working on my black and white zoomorphic series, I tried to draw a snakestone. It turned out to be remarkably difficult to get the proportions mathematically pleasing. I started with a different genus, a ceratite, with a kind of wavy division to each of its segments, because they seemed to grow in more mathematically predictable ways. They’re just not what I think of as a classic ammonite; they seemed a bit, well, boring. I tried jazzing them up a bit—make them look as though they’re dancing to form a kindof ammonite triskele inside a Lindisfarne Gospels style interlace wreath. Better—but not great.
So then I tried yet another genus, a…well, actually I forget what it’s called, maybe a baculite? Anyway:
You won’t find these in Britain, but I like the crinkly look. It had possibilities. So I copied that, and then turned it into a snakestone. Much better!
Earlier this year we were at Worldcon, where we bumped into a friend, Wendy, aka MaudPunk, and got talking about all things metal work—Wendy loves to forge Early Medieval replicas from bronze, silver, copper, etc. (She’s made me several things, including this brooch.) She was wearing a great pendant she’d made, based on the Fairford Duck. Kelley really wanted one. No, she wanted two—one silver, one copper.
I like the duck well enough, but that’s not what fired up my neurones. Ever since Tor commissioned a lovely enamel brooch/pin for Spear, I’ve enjoyed wearing it on my jacket lapel. I get many compliments (“Is that Tiffany?”). The Spear pin is boldly coloured, which I love, but it does occasionally limit my sartorial choices. So I’ve been subconsciously looking for something more neutral. And I thought: A snakestone! In silver! And wouldn’t you know, Wendy had already designed a snakestone pendant; it did not take much persuasion to commission one as a pin.
And, lo, just in time for our birthdays, we got a package with what we’d asked for:
And here’s the pin in all its glory—straight out of its lovely linen pouch:
It’s hand-carved in wax then cast in the metal of your choice, then ground and polished by hand. Here it is on my jacket lapel, where it will stay for at least a couple of weeks, after which I’ll probably alternate with the enamel pin:
So Hild and her ammonite are still bringing me enormous pleasure, and still—as is only fitting for the patron saint of culture and education—helping me learn new things.
Tonight I will raise a glass to Hild, to ammonites, to Whitby, and to all things beautifully made and perfectly proportioned. wes þu hal! Or maybe wæs hæil! I dunno, Old English is not exactly my forte—but drinking and merrymaking is :)
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james_davis_nicollWhich 2022 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles
0 (0.0%)
A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
30 (93.8%)
A River Called Time by Courttia Newland
0 (0.0%)
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
3 (9.4%)
Skyward Inn by Aliya Whiteley
2 (6.2%)
Wergen: The Alien Love War by Mercurio D. Rivera
1 (3.1%)
file770_feedfile770_feedconulyfile770_feedfile770_feedkmankiller_feedI had a great conversation with Sheryl Stahl on the Nice Jewish Books podcast!
Sheryl says:
Sheryl Stahl sits down with author Katherine Villyard to discuss Immortal Gifts, a historical fantasy starring Abraham, a Jewish vampire trying to balance immortal life, Jewish identity, and his love for his mortal wife, Destiny. But peace is hard to come by—Abraham is relentlessly hunted by Thomas, a radical Christian vampire, and must rely on his loyal friend and patron Ludwig to help him stay one step ahead with new identities and safe passage.
Abraham and Destiny also have to deal with the humorous—and not-so-humorous—complications that arise when Abraham turns one of the terminally ill family cats into a vampire.
You can listen here: https://jewishlibraries.org/immortal-gifts-tales-of-a-jewish-vampire-with-katherine-villyard/
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I found out late Friday night that Alice Wong had died an hour earlier in a San Francisco hospital. Others will write better obituaries, finer eulogies, but Alice—the woman herself, the activist, the co-conspirator, the mentor and encourager—had an outsized impact on my journey through to and understanding of my identity as a Disabled writer.
We met on Twitter. I long ago deleted my Twitter account and archive and so can’t trace the exact beginnings, but I think it was probably sometime in early 2015, after she has started the Disability Visibility Project and I was beginning to accept that elbow crutches were no longer sufficient to living a full life: that it was time for me to investigate, buy, and start using a wheelchair. I could feel my own resistance to that, and I knew it was ridiculous. I’d already been talking to Riva Lehrer, so I was already waking up to it, but it was reading the conversations with and/or facilitated by Alice in various venues that really helped me begin to wrap my head around how the tentacles of ableism didn’t affect just my immediate day-to-day life but were coiled about and strangling almost every aspect of disabled peoples’ lives, including—especially—our interactions with the world.
This of course includes our cultural lives. Alice and I were chatting on Twitter about writing: disabled writers, disabled characters in fiction. ‘We need a hashtag,’ I said. And #CripLit was born. Within a few weeks, Alice—the organisational powerhouse behind so very many crip community efforts of the early 21st century—and I were ready to announce the first-ever #CripLit chat for 23 July 2016. We announced simultaneously on here and on The Disability Visibility Project:
From the very beginning the chat was massive—almost overwhelming. Each chat took a lot of work to prepare—finding occasional co-hosts, working out the questions, scheduling, the intensity of the moderation—but they were worth it. We did one every couple of months for two and half years (they are archived here).1 I firmly believe that those chats moved the needle regarding disability literature. And though the hashtag and idea were mine, it was Alice—her drive, her organisational ability, her sheer forward momentum and refusal to let any barriers stand in her way—who made it possible; it was her energy that was the spine.
Alice was one of my two crip godmothers.2 She was fourteen years younger than me but decades wiser in the ways of disability, ableism, and the power of community engagement. I learnt from her constantly—sometimes in long conversations where I asked many (I’m guessing, looking back, rather tedious) questions, and sometimes just from watching how she handled situations. Alice was smart, brave, clear, definite, kind, and able to able to focus on and lead others to those from whom we can find and draw hope–because it’s hope that sustains us in hard times. Rage is vital—crip rage is powerful; and, oh, we have so much to be angry about—but Alice understood that it’s as important to talk about joy as about difficulty. It helps to be reminded of the positive things we’re fighting towards, not just what we’re fighting against. We don’t just want access; we don’t just want representation; we want power, real power over ourselves and our lives.
When I wrote So Lucky, Alice was kind enough to interview me for her blog.
We connected on Twitter several years ago and are co-partners in #CripLit, a series of Twitter chats about writing and disability representation with a particular focus on disabled writers. What have you enjoyed so far from these chats? Why do you think there is a need for these types of conversations? What do you see for the future of #CripLit?
Nicola: What I like best about #CripLit is a building sense of excitement, the disability community come together and beginning to flex. We are 20% of this country, maybe 20% of the electorate. We are amazingly diverse and fine. There are some incredible groups coalescing around different focuses; social media is a powerful way to connect. #CripLit is just one of them. Now we need to find a way to bring all these groups together to form a critical mass, a tipping point. We need to catch fire, to join in a roaring, creative inferno, to pour forth.
Part of that is to start putting together the scaffolding we need to build cultural connections; that scaffolding is story. We don’t know who we are until we can tell a story about ourselves. Stories help us understand we are not alone.
But to write stories we need to know that we’re not just a voice crying into the void: that others are crying out, too. Once we know others are there, to help, to learn, to teach, to support, we can sing out in harmony, build a chorus that will change the world.
That’s what #CripLit is for.
When she published her anthology of essay of crip wisdom, Resistance & Hope, I returned the favour and interviewed her here. I really hope you’ll go read that interview. It is pure Essence of Alice.
As a disabled activist and media maker, who or what are you most determined to resist? And where do you find hope?
I resist policies and programs that keep disabled people from living the lives they want. I resist low expectations and tokenistic attempts at disability diversity by organizations and institutions. I resist the feelings of shame and isolation that still plague many of us, including me. I resist the idea that nothing can change and that every system is broken. I resist the idea that representation is enough when what we really want is power.
I find hope in my friends and family. I find hope in the amazing ways disabled people create and get things done interdependently. I find hope and joy in the simple things—excellent conversations and meals. And cat videos.
I miss Alice, her clarity, bravery, and joy. I wish she were still here, but her work continues.3
︎︎︎oursinLast week's bread actually held out pretty well, though was rather dry by the end, however, that meant there was enough left to make a frittata with pepperoni for Friday night supper.
Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, which for an experiment I tried making with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain, fairly pleasant but I think nicer with strong white.
Today's lunch: bozbash, with Romano peppers, aubergine, okra, baby courgettes, fresh coriander, crushed 5-pepper blend, dried basil, and finished with tayberry vinegar. Was going to serve couscous with this but I was not impressed by the way this turned out given the instructions on the packet. Not really necessary, anyway.
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For all my Dayton and Cincinnati readers, I have an excellent small business recommendation for you today if you find yourself in need of a makeup artist or esthetician! A few weeks ago, I was a bridesmaid in my friend’s wedding, and she had a makeup artist from West Chester come up to Englewood to do all of our makeup. As someone who never does their makeup, I love having the opportunity to have it professionally done for me, and usually the only time that happens is when I’m in a wedding. So I always hope that it turns out well since it’s such a rare occasion for me.
Thankfully, Kelsi is a very talented makeup artist, and everyone ended up looking amazing! She was able to do a variety of looks, as I wanted soft glam with false lashes, while the matron of honor wanted a very natural, subtle look with no falsies. Everyone was a little different, and Kelsi listened to everyone’s requests perfectly. She totally nailed my eyeliner wing and sparkly rose gold eyeshadow, and I felt so pretty.
While I was in the chair and Kelsi was working her magic on me, we ended up talking a little bit and right off the bat I really loved her energy. She was friendly and accommodating and I found her to be very funny, as well. I enjoyed talking with her and decided that I would really like to book a facial with her at her studio sometime. So I did! And I drove all the way down to West Chester this past week to get a Pumpkin Spice Facial.
Let me tell you, this facial was totally worth the drive. I loved how cute Kelsi’s studio set up was, it was very comfortable and relaxing. The bed was heated and the blankets were so soft and comfy. Though the Pumpkin Spice Facial comes with some pre-determined items like the Pumpkin Perfecting Mask by Circadia as well as the Hydrating Marshmallow Mask, she customized some of the other items based on my skin’s needs. I was particularly dry from the colder weather, and she adjusted the facial accordingly.
Plus, I added on a dermaplane, and it was a totally painless and comfortable experience! Not that a dermaplane should ever really hurt, but Kelsi had a particularly gentle approach when using the blade that was much appreciated.
Before starting our session, Kelsi asked if I wanted a “yap sesh” or a “nap sesh,” and I love the consideration of this question. Do I want to chit chat or do I want to relax and drift off? Normally, I’m more a fan of the latter, but I enjoyed talking to Kelsi so much at the wedding that I wanted to converse more, so I went ahead and ordered a Yappaccino (aka I opted to talk to her more).
In between sharing recommendations of where to find the best espresso martini in Cincinnati and talking about weddings, I was treated to a truly excellent facial that felt incredible. Between Kelsi’s massage techniques and her running jade combs through my hair, I was becoming more destressed by the second. It’s so nice to find an esthetician who has immaculate vibes and provides amazing service! At the time I got my facial, I just so happened to catch a promotion she was having. It was a 50% off special on the Pumpkin Spice Facial, and I felt so lucky I managed to be included in that window when the special was happening. Thank you for the amazing deal, Kelsi!
Kelsi also agreed to a mini interview, so please enjoy these couple of questions I threw her way:
Q: What got you into the makeup and skincare scene?
A: I’ve always had interests that were adjacent to the beauty industry; I was always the girl with my nails painted in middle school (even though we weren’t allowed to have them painted) and I was definitely a victim of the 2016 makeup craze! I have a friend that does hair who pitched me the idea of being a makeup artist for her bridal team in 2019, and everything took off from there!
Q: What’s your favorite look to do on a person? Glam? Natural? Halloweenie?
A: I love a good solid soft glam that reflects the personality of the person wearing it. Makeup is so personal, it’s always so fun learning what makes someone feel beautiful. Whether it’s the waterline black liner you’ve been rocking since the 90s or a signature red lip that you wouldn’t feel like yourself without! My favorite glam is a look that makes my client feel like the best version of themself!
Q: What’s been your favorite part of having your own business?
A: My favorite part of owning my own business has been being able to customize the services I offer so I know I’m only doing things I’m passionate about. I love being able to offer fun seasonal facials, I love doing bridal makeup, and I love a good lash and brow transformation! I think it’s so important when you’re in a creative industry like this to only do things you’re passionate about so your heart can really be in it and your work will reflect that sincerity.
Q: What’s something you’ve really enjoyed about your work, and one thing that’s challenging?
A: Something I’ve really enjoyed about my work is being able to connect with so many lovely people! It’s so easy these days to feel cynical about the state of the world and the people in it, but I’ve found that there’s so many beautiful people out there if you let yourself find them. One thing that’s been challenging has been pushing myself harder on slow days when it’s easy to be lazy and pessimistic. I knew when I opened my suite this year that things would be challenging to start out on my own, but I’m constantly reminded how lucky I am to be where I’m at, and I’m so excited to see where I’ll be 5, 10, and even 20 years from now!
There you have it, folks. If you have a kid going to prom in the Spring, you’re an Ohio bride in 2026, or you just want to treat yourself to a lovely self-care moment and get a facial, Kelsi is your girl.
You can book a facial service through her website, or follow her on Instagram, Facebook, and Tik Tok. I know I definitely need to book myself a Peppermint Hot Cocoa Facial for the holidays.
Have you been part of a wedding before? Do you like getting your makeup done? Would you try the Peppermint Hot Cocoa Facial? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
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