A guide to summer travel's selfies and snaps ... Image by Giorgia Daphne First published in Enchanted Living's Gothic-themed Issue #61 (Winter 2022). When you vacation among the cathedrals and ruins of Europe and even spend the night in a stateside Victorian B&B, it is natural to feel a certain anxiety: How will you preserve this time in a photo? Grinning with your bestie, making rabbit ears behind her head? Not you. You want to enter the spirit of the architecture the way yo

My electrician, overseeing the tape wires in the future kitchen. I started this wide stone dollhouse in 2021, from a discontinued Real Good Toys kit, the Newbury. I made a thousand little decisions to create a cottage in which I wanted to live. Or where I would want to live if I were a nicely middle-class person in a smaller town in England, Denmark, or some other place with nice, cool summers (as they used to be before climate change)--a cottage built maybe sometime in the 1

"With this new light in the sky, our cows have changed ..." Yes, I've been feeling hopeless lately. Way of the nation, way of the world, worst time in history, and so on. Thinking about harbingers of the end at various times in our recorded history, I wrote this story in a frenzy last August. It's a weird one that moves through history and is pretty unpublishable ... except that it was published this month in Pnyx, a fascinating magazine that's aimed at audiences interested i

I do believe that this issue of Enchanted Living is one of the prettiest ever, with some of my favorite artwork and rather nice writing ... plus a few articles by me. Come for the pictures by Henrietta Rae (her little-seen Apollo and Daphne is a FIND, my friends), John William Waterhouse, Gustave Moreau, and the three curious princesses of the cover. Then stay for my article about Ovid and his Metamorphoses (please!), plus the quiz that reveals what your own personal next m

This is the best one. Featuring the last peacock in the neighborhood, riding out the storm in our front yard.

... and the perplexities of a bilingual home library a feature from The Nerdy Book Club , March 2020 ​ When I was a child, I had no idea how many books there were in the world. I hoped there would be a lot of them; sometimes I imagined a version of a fairy tale in which I spread a blanket on the ground, whistled through my teeth, and watched a stack materializing. But I personally owned only about two dozen at most, and a good many of those were in Danish—sent by relatives wh

A plane descends through Balboa Park. Civilization from Époque Press's ézine , February 2025 In my twenties, I lived under the San...

I'm unpopular in a special new public way. I've made the American Library Association's list of 100 most challenged books of the last...

Ten years ago, it was Midge's birthday. Midge--Barbie's best friend, right? She had never had an essay or article devoted to herself. Was...

I've been sick lately, and the mini authors' inn has languished while I've made smaller things and waited for some trim to arrive and...

Yes, fancy endpapers are having a moment. Which is not why they are in my writerly mini-inn; I've just always liked them. Above is the...

On the second day of election 2020, I wondered what the front of my house was doing. I'd been sick in bed for six days (ongoing health...

I told my Danish aunt that I've been really into endpapers as part of my current craft project, a miniature inn for writers and readers...

Craftiness helps me deal with chronic pain and also gives me ideas for my books and stories, which give me ideas for little houses to build.