Stumpy the cherry tree and I wish you all a very happy spring (if in fact it’s spring where you are). Want to pay your respects to this DC arborial icon? Do it now, because Stumpy won’t be with us next cherry-blossom season. March sadness. :(
In between jaunts to look at blossoming things, I’ve had a busy early spring: cranking away on the book I’m editing (the ms. is due at the end of the month), nursing a back injury (self-inflicted at the gym in a misguided attempt to challenge myself), freelancing (no physical heavy lifting required).
Writing: I have two new articles out this month. The first is a reported story on my beloved library beat. EdSurge asked me to find out if the ALA’s recent survey on Gen Z (and Millennial) attitudes toward public libraries had any lessons for higher ed. As the parent of two Gen Zers, I was personally as well as professionally curious about that, so I talked to people who run and design academic library spaces about what Gen Z college students want and need from those spaces:
For undergrads with packed schedules, the campus library has become a sort of one-stop shop, a place to charge and recharge in between classes, get a snack or a cup of coffee, hang out and plug in. Gen Z students typically carry multiple devices (think laptop or tablet, smartphone, headphones) that need juice.
Also popular: natural light, flexible work spaces, socializing, and sometimes even access to print (especially course materials). Also bragging rights (really). That surprised me. The kids absolutely do give me hope.
The second thing I published this month: a review of Housewife: Why Women Still Do It All and What To Do About It by Lisa Selin Davis, a book I wish I had liked better. Short version: It felt like a missed opportunity.
The title may be the most provocative thing about “Housewife.” If you’re in need of a cathartic read that distills the anger and exhaustion of America’s overburdened mothers and wives, this is not the book for you. Instead, Davis offers a tour — part history, part sociology, part memoir — of the mucky middle where many women find themselves stuck, bogged down by sexist expectations, economic and practical constraints, and competing desires.
What I’m reading:
The Book of Love by Kelly Link. The magical-realist/fantasy writer Link has been on my to-read list for too long. I am making my way slowly through her new book, which is also her first novel. I probably should have started with her short stories, but I’ll get there.
Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore. Sparks fly when a fiery Oxford bluestocking with more brains than prospects crosses paths with an icy aristocrat who has the ear of Queen Victoria. I picked this up on a lark at the DC Public Library, and it’s frothy fun so far. First in Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women series of historical romances.
What I’m watching:
Shōgun:This FX remake of the 1980 miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel is a stunner. Gory but compelling.
Well, we made it to 2024. Happy new year, friends. January’s a fine time to let go of things (material or otherwise) that no longer serve you. Ditch the clutter. [While we’re on the subject, I wrote a book about that!]
As the old year gave way to the new, I observed the rituals of organizing and sorting. But lately I’ve been more interested in what we choose to keep. What makes a thing meaningful enough to hang onto? There’s a lot to unpack there, and I’ve been working out ways to do that. A book? A series of essays? A deep dive into preservation writ large?
“Some collectors get started because of a particular hobby or passion. Others want to capture a cultural moment or movement. Many have been bibliophiles since childhood. Whatever their backgrounds, budgets, or enthusiasms, they’re driven by love—of the objects themselves and of the conversations and histories their collections document. Deep pockets aren’t a prerequisite. Some of the most intriguing collections belong to students and early career professionals who don’t fit the image of a collector as a well-heeled, older bibliophile with time and money to burn.”
I was down with COVID (round two, ugh, cannot recommend in any way) when I reported the story in October 2023. Sick as I was, I loved the chance to talk with some fascinating and generous bibliophiles about their collections and what sparked their interest in the first place.
In birding, people talk about a “spark bird” that got them hooked. Some of the collectors I spoke with had a “spark book” that drew them in. For Emma Treleaven, it was a mid-century sewing manual given to her by a high school teacher to help her make vintage-inspired clothes. Treleaven, now a PhD candidate at the London School of Fashion, won the 2023 Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize for her collection, “My Own Two Hands: Books and Ephemera About Making Dress and Textiles Before 1975.” And just this week the Antiquarian Booksellers Association announced that Treleaven has won their 2023 National Book Collecting Prize as well.
It’s a fascinating collection—kind of like a seed library, but for hands-on knowledge and technique. (Did you know that the UK maintains a Red List of Endangered Crafts? More echoes of the birding/conservation world there.)
One point I hoped to get across in the story is that almost anybody can become a collector. Passion matters more than deep pockets, and the value of something isn’t always reflected in the price tag. As Treleaven told me, building “My Own Two Hands” didn’t break the bank,:
“The great thing about what I collect is mostly it’s very cheap,” she said. “It’s not seen as highbrow. It’s not something most people collect. … The things that are used and written in and stained are not really seen as high-class literature.” But annotations like notes about sizing offer a direct line to the makers of past eras and add real value for a fashion historian and curator.
FB&C doesn’t publish its features online, unfortunately—even in this Extremely Online era, a few outlets stick to print—but you can buy a copy of the winter issue here.
Bonus: The Winter 2024 includes an update on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s big reopening, scheduled for June 2024.
The Library has been closed for three years for a major renovation to upgrade accessibility and exhibition space. I’m excited to see the results, which will include a gallery where 82 of the Folger’s First Folios will be on public view rather than stowed away in the vault. Tree lovers, take note: The reno included moving a huge magnolia—a process that took many days and extensive care—to make way for a new, accessible entrance. The magnolia survived and appears to be thriving.
The Guardian’s DC correspondent, David Smith, published an upbeat piece about the renovation a few days ago. I wish he’d skipped the DC-as-a-swamp opener—that trope got tired a long time ago—but I’m glad he included Folger director Mike Witmore’s observation that DC is a city of dual cultures, and why it makes a certain kind of sense that a library centered on a British playwright exists (two blocks from the Capitol, in fact) in an American city built to be a theater of politics:
“There are 22,000 linear feet of rare books and manuscripts here covering the beginning of the age of print all the way through to the creation of the Atlantic world,” [Witmore] said. “In the middle, kind of looking at all that, is William Shakespeare, living in a city, London, which has the monarchy, the law courts, entertainment. Much like Washington DC, it’s a city that has an official culture – and then there’s the culture.”
Maybe Mike, who’s a friend, will someday reveal where the Folger’s First Folios went to live during the renovation. (I would have loved to do a ride-along, but no dice.) Another DC secret.
If you can get beyond the headlines about dysfunction, crime, and congressional shenanigans—admittedly hard to do these days—Washington has a bit of magic in it if you know where to look. The Folger embodies some of that magic for me, and I’m excited to explore the revamped space when it opens this summer.
Spoiler: It’s not the one Hans Christian Andersen came up with in his 1845 fable “The Little Match Girl,” a portrait of poverty-induced misery and fatal neglect:
“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets.”
The assignment got me thinking and reading a bit about HCA, an odd duck if ever there was one. Among other things, he was a terrible houseguest, ruining his friendship with pen pal Charles Dickens when he installed himself in the British novelist’s household for five weeks in 1857. (Dickens’ daughter Kate called their guest “a bony bore.”)
Andersen found Gad’s Hill, in Higham, Dickens’s country home, too cold, a biographer has noted. And he was also upset that no one was available to shave him in the morning.
Soon his mood swings also became a problem. He lay down on the lawn and wept after receiving a bad review and then cried again when he finally left Gad’s Hill on 15 July.
Dickens was less glum on his guest’s departure, writing on the mirror in the guest room: “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks — which seemed to the family AGES!”
Though he overstayed his welcome chez Dickens, Andersen hasn’t lost his cultural staying power. He died in 1875 but remains a storytelling force, his tales (some of them anyway) retold time and again for new audiences. “The Little Mermaid,” most recently redone as a live-action Disney movie, has turned out to be especially durable. Certain fairy stories get told again and again for each new era—tale as old as time, etc.
I wouldn’t have picked the “The Little Match Girl” as ripe for retelling. Maybe readers of the 1840s felt uplifted by the visions of heaven the doomed girl sees as she strikes her last matches. In 2023, the news is too full of innocents suffering, in the streets at home as well as half a world away. Heavenly visions feel like cold comfort.
More responses than retellings, The Little Match Girl Strikes Back and Hans Christian Andersen Lives Next Door find possibilities in the source material that HCA probably couldn’t have imagined, living when and where he did. Both novels hand the story back to the girl and invite her to see if she can write a happier ending for herself.
Note: If you’re looking for a gift for the middle-grade reader on your holiday list, I especially recommend The Little Match Girl Strikes Back. It features both a corker of a workers’-rights plot, inspired by a real-life factory strike in 1888 London—match girls can be not only active but activists!—and fabulous, textured illustrations by Lauren Child, modeled on photos of the period.
My first book baby turns 3 today! (They grow up so fast.)
Happy birthday to Clutter: An Untidy History, which popped out into the world Sept. 1, 2020. Three years and three editions later, it's earned out its advance and is still finding readers. (Clutter’s always with us.) I hope it won't be an only child too much longer, but I sure am grateful for it.
Thank you to everyone who bought it, read it, listened to it, borrowed it, shared it, posted about it, or otherwise supported it (and its author). I heart all of you, maximalists and minimalists alike. May all your things spark joy.
(Psst: If you want to pick up a copy, go for the paperback. It’s got fewer typos and a shiny afterword that wraps up the story, though of course the story of clutter is never-ending.)
I have more to say about how my relationship to and strategies for clutter have changed in the last few years, but I’ll save that for another installment. Before I sign off, though, I want to recommend this article by my friend Alexandra Lange on home-design manuals that have stood the test of time. Some of my favorite research for Clutter: An Untidy History involved Victorian household manuals, so I found the piece fascinating. “The lesson is that there is a design manual for every taste, and your taste doesn’t have to change with the times,” Alexandra writes. Amen.
I’ve ordered a copy of one of the classics she mentions: The Not So Big House Book by Sarah Susanka, which came out in 1998. Alexandra says that it “walks readers through design choices that allow them to create a house that is intimate and tailored to their needs, spending on materials rather than square footage.” To this rowhouse-dweller, that sounds like a living space worth creating and keeping clutter-free.
Cheers,
Jen
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If I were in Ireland or some other Celtic locale, I’d have observed Lughnasadh, the Gaelic festival that welcomes the start of the harvest season, yesterday. (It’s a bank holiday in Ireland, for one thing.) Here in Southeast DC, we’re celebrating our own harvest rituals as midsummer tips toward fall.
The human residents of the city don’t love the hot, humid weather, but my backyard basil plants sure do, which means batches of fresh-from-the-garden pesto. The cherry tomatoes are going gangbusters in the community garden.
And the fig tree in our front yard has exploded, once again, with figs. They don’t hang around for long, but that short peak of perfection makes them even more special. The birds and squirrels think so too. Luckily, the tree produces enough fruit for everybody who wants some.
I admire the fig tree. Now at least twice my height, it got its start in our yard about 15 years ago as a two-foot-high sapling from the local garden store. My husband planted it in a sunny spot, and we watched it grow and grow—until an epic snowstorm (remember those?) half-killed it. I took the drastic step of pruning off the dead half. We hoped for the best but braced for the worst. And it came roaring back. There’s a writing/editing analogy in there that I won’t torture you with. I’m too busy enjoying the figs while they last.
I have ambitions to make fig jam (please share recipes if you have faves!), but in the meantime I discovered an amazingly easy and delicious thing to do with fresh figs. This recipe from The Kitchn for yogurt with caramelized figs takes all of 10 minutes to put together, and it’s fancy-delicious and company-worthy—but why save it for company? Fresh figs don’t linger. Enjoy them while they’re here.
What I’ve been up to lately:
I spent part of the spring doing interviews for a Fine Books & Collections feature on Willa Cather’s sesquicentennial. I used Cather’s peripatetic life—her childhood in Virginia and then in Nebraska, her working days in Pittsburgh and then New York, her travels in the Southwest—as a throughline for the piece, which ran in the summer 2023 issue of the magazine. (The story’s not posted online, alas, but if you’re so inclined, you can buy a copy of the issue for $8.)
The Cather story gave me a chance to dust off my humanities-reporter hat and get on the horn with scholars, curators, and archivists working on different facets of Cather’s life and career. They included several folks at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, home to the Willa Cather Archive. In 2013, when I was still at the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I wrote about their effort to digitize and annotate Cather’s letters. That work’s been chugging along for a decade, and it was neat to hear how much progress they’ve made in those ten years:
As of this spring, about 2,600 out of some 3,000 known letters had been scanned, annotated, and posted online. The work “probably will never really end, because new letters keep getting discovered,” said Andrew Jewell, professor of digital projects in the UNL libraries, the archive’s home. “There are likely to be sig- nificant collections of Cather materials that have not yet come to light.”
[snip]
The archive team has added valuable context, too, notably annotations about people, events, and places in Cather’s vast social and creative world. A familiar figure like Shakespeare gets a brief note, while a more obscure person, like a Bohemian immigrant neighbor, gets “a more elegant, lengthier annotation to give a full picture of what that woman’s life looked like,” said [Emily J.] Rau. [She’s the archive’s current editor and an assistant prof of DH at the UNL libraries.]…
Such recovery work supports Cather’s appeal as a writer, “with compassion and attention and carefulness about the Great Plains and the Eastern European immigrants trying to make lives here, especially the women,” Rau said.
This summer I came to the realization that I need to get out of my house more. It’s been almost three years since my first book came out, and I have a couple of next-book ideas I want to nudge along in the months ahead.
Coffee shops have long been my go-to third places when I want to get work done, and I’m not giving them up. (I’m parked at one now.) But sometimes I need less white noise and fewer distractions. I don’t have a dedicated home office at the moment. So I signed up for the DC Writers Room, a co-working space across town where a number of writer friends have worked from time to time. It’s a trek (honestly not a terrible one, since it’s almost door-to-door via Metro), but the chance to unplug and focus, and to encounter other writers toiling quietly away, has been worth the commute.
What I’m watching/reading:
Another bumper crop this season: big films meant to be seen in an actual theater. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of going back to the movies this summer. (Another communal experience worth keeping alive.) So far I’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part I, and Barbie, all worth the price of admission. Next up: Oppenheimer.
My reading’s been eclectic, as it usually is: some YA, some SFF, a literary classic or two, some Serious Nonfiction and some less serious NF too. I post mini reviews on my Instagram feed if you’re curious. I can’t tell you what I’m reading at the moment because it’s for a review assignment (yay!).
The vegan diet used to be associated only with eccentric hippies and tofu-loving activists who shop at co-ops and live on compounds. We’ve come a long way since then. Now, fine-dining restaurants like Eleven Madison Park cater to chic upscale clientele with a plant-based menu, and Impossible Whoppers are available at Burger King. But can plant-based food keep its historical anti-capitalist energies if it goes mainstream? And does it need to?
Pub date is Aug. 15. Check it out.
A(nother) social media update:
The Muskmelon keeps thinking up new ways to mess up Twitter. I’m still there, kind of, only because it remains a useful way to share and absorb information, but I’m far less actively engaged than I used to be. Which makes me sad. Twitter really did matter, in substantial as well as frivolous and sometimes dangerous ways, and I mourn that.
FWIW, I agree with Platformer founder and editor Casey Newton’s assessment that EM’s ownership of Twitter has been a deliberate act of destruction, the ransacking of what has been an essential (though fraught) public space. Newton argues that to ask why EM bought it in the first place
misses the true shape of Musk’s project, which is best understood not as a money-making endeavor, but as an extended act of cultural vandalism. Just as he graffitis his 420s and 69s all over corporate filings; and just as he paints over corporate signage and office rooms with his little sex puns; so does he delight in erasing the Twitter that was.
What will replace it? Trying to answer that question has created platform fatigue for me and a lot of other people as we try out alternative sites. Many have proved disappointing or worse, with too few good conversations and too little moderation.
I have some hopes for Bluesky, which I’ve now joined; come find me there (@jenhoward.bsky.social). You can also find me on Mastodon and, as I mentioned above, on Instagram.
Happy harvesting,
Cheers,
Jen
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