The May Archive

In May, anything seemed possible. If only I could learn to harness time itself. To make every month like May! (T.A. Barron)

some recommendations based on what i’ve been reading, watching and using in the month of may.

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to read —

• When I Sing, Mountains Dance written by Irene Solà. (2019)

(you can read my review here)

I wrote this poem for a good friend of mine. I look around at everything: the footpaths and the trees, the sky and the sun, the mornings and the nights and the stones and the stinging nettles and the cow patties and the peaks, and the rocks, and the distant smoke, and the boar paths — all of it, rhyming. I've got poetry in my blood, in my veins. I keep all my poems in my head as if inside a tidy drawer. I'm a vase filled with water. Simple, fresh water like the springs and runnels. I lie down and the verses just pour out. And I never write them down. That would kill them. Because paper is sweet river water that gets lost at sea. It's the place where all things fail. Poetry has to be free like a nightingale. Like a morning. Like the thin air at dusk.

Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to “reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain.” He gathers black chanterelles, attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he’d harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.

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(articles corner)

• You Want to Be a Better Writer? Observe Chicken Behavior — Malia Márquez on Learning to Tend and Feed Writerly Impulses.

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• We need boredom to live better lives. But social media is destroying it — Ross Pomeroy.

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to use —

1. Avène Cicalfate+ Restorative Protective Cream

2. I Love Life, Thank You — Mac Miller

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to watch —

• Theater Camp directed by Molly Gordon & Nick Lieberman. (2023)

Peters, Foster, Streisand, LuPone

Give us a role we can make our own

Audra McDonald, Idina Menzel

We are gay witches and this is our spell.

After the indomitable and beloved founder of a scrappy theater camp in upstate New York falls into a coma, the eccentric staff must band together with her clueless “crypto-bro” son to keep the thespian paradise afloat

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• The Assessement directed by Fleur Fortuné. (2025)

Everything you take from nature someday somehow she’ll take it back.

In a climate change-ravaged world, a utopian society optimizes life, including parenthood assessments. A successful couple faces scrutiny by an evaluator over seven days to determine their fitness for childbearing.

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(youtube corner)

• A Visual Poetry — Music for minimalist minds

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see you next month!

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