February was a busy month outside of school. My presentations at LTUE 42 went well and I had fun meeting up with old friends. I read from my essay “Through the Wardrobe: Inhabiting the Divine Story” at the Wayfare issue 3 launch party; I’m always impressed by the quality of writers they find, so I’m very humbled to be among them. Check out the previews of issue 3 (including this amazing art combining The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Kirtland temple that was commissioned to go with my piece) and consider subscribing to get one of the beautiful print copies.
This month I’ll be presenting a paper on using CS Lewis’s interpretation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to understand the poetry of another early modern poet, Amelia Lanyer, at BYU’s English Symposium. I’ll also be travelling to Florida to attend the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and read my paper on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and using speculative fiction to cope with trauma. So many conferences this semester! Remind me to limit myself to one next time.
The podcast has been a little dormant due to grad school, but we did release a short today on a short Pixar film called Self. The episode is twice as long as the film itself; we do some interesting twisting of the short into a religious reading that the filmmakers certainly didn’t intend. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it, and we’ll get back to more regular episodes soon.
I also made a concerted effort this month to revive my non-school related reading. I find that reading for school becomes more interesting when I have things from my own interests to connect with it. So even though February is a short month, I’ve got 10 book reviews for you. Let’s jump to it!
Continue reading “What I Read: Feb 2024”