The poet Kathleen Jamie wrote in 2008 for the London Review of Books about romanticising landscape and male nature writers. She more recently, in 2019, revisited the topic in an interview for the Guardian: "Nature writing has been colonised by white men". Jamie was the Scottish Makar (national poet) from 2021-24, and some of her poems are online at the Scottish Poetry Library.

Thinking about writing a book and doing it are two very different things – so how to get started and follow through?

At some point in their lives, many people are confronted with a big question: what if I wrote a book?

Writing a memoir, murder mystery or steamy romance is an accomplishment. Like running a marathon or successfully filing your taxes, it speaks to grit, determination and hours of research and effort.

How to start meditating

How to start weightlifting

How to start budgeting

How to start running

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© Illustration: Carmen Casado/The Guardian

© Illustration: Carmen Casado/The Guardian

© Illustration: Carmen Casado/The Guardian

In a sense, Vollmann is Sacramento. "He's weird, he's quirky, he's got his own kind of thing going," Lytle said. "He doesn't really care what anybody else thinks about him. He's just living his life the way he wants to live it."

where to find me in the afterlife is a densely interconnected collection (or carrier bag) of personal writing, digital ephemera, and quotations, loosely themed after an archaeological dig site. Created by @jordantyranny.bsky.social, it's the kind of thing the web was made for.

There's a lot to dig into (ha ha), and full disclaimer I've only barely scratched the surface myself. The "tools" and "intro/tours" (scroll down past the map a bit) are a good starting point. The accompanying thread on Bluesky is a fun rabbit hole as well.

That Will There, Transcription, and Down Time each tease out the confluence of ambivalence, exhaustion, and over-compensative compliance that underscored pandemic life is compelling. Their characters' lack of clarity about Covid and its consequences is, ironically, its own form of clear-sightedness. It speaks to a very contemporary feeling of unease about Covid and the recent past and what this ultimately says about where the culture is heading.

The Prix Goncourt has removed a book from its longlist. This is another in a growing series of AI-writing scandals. Earlier in the year it was the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. The Ai detection service used is Pangram, notable for its extremely low false positive rate. These awards required that the artistic works be human-generated. But what about outside the prize arenas? Should authors use Ai in their writing? Some have embraced it.

Annie Dillard has died, but she is not dead. This is a time to read This is the Life. In it she says...

"What would you do differently, you up on your beanstalk looking at scenes of all peoples at all times in all places? When you climb down, would you dance any less to the music you love, knowing that music to be as provisional as a bug? Somebody has to make jugs and shoes, to turn the soil, fish. If you descend the long rope-ladders back to your people and time in the fabric, if you tell them what you have seen, and even if someone cares to listen, then what? Everyone knows times and cultures are plural. If you come back a shrugging relativist or tongue-tied absolutist, then what? If you spend hours a day looking around, high astraddle the warp or woof of your people's wall, then what new wisdom can you take to your grave for worms to untangle? Well, maybe you will not go into advertising." And then finally: "Will knowledge you experience directly make you a Buddhist? Must you forfeit excitement per se? To what end? Say you have seen something. You have seen an ordinary bit of what is real, the infinite fabric of time that eternity shoots through, and time's soft-skinned people working and dying under slowly shifting stars. Then what?"