Culture Consumption: June 2025

Books

Alix E. Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered is a feminist retelling of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairytale. Zinnia Gray has loved the “Sleeping Beauty” tale since she was a child, mostly because she feels like a cursed girl herself. Zinnia is dying of a rare condition caused by an industrial accident. Celebrating her twenty-first birthday is a point of sorrow, because none of the other children with this disease has lived past the age of twenty-two. The time on her curse is running out — until Zinnie pricks her finger on a spinning wheel, carrying her over into a real fairytale.

I love this novella. It remains true to the original tale (multiple versions), while presenting new possibilities. So much of what makes this beautiful is how these girls learn to fight for each other and themselves, building hope out of belief and courage.

Enjoy me among my ruins by Juniper Fitzgerald is an experimental narrative, blending “feminist theories, X-Files fandom, and personal memoir.” The book is beautiful and confronting. As a sex worker and author, Fitzgerald is able to share her personal experience with a sense of poetic depth, offering a compassionate perspective of what it’s like to struggle and fight for a place in the world and what it’s like to be a mother when society harshly judges you for the work you do. The author’s love for her daughter and the friends who make up her family is so clear. This feels like an important book, even if it’s sometimes and uncomfortable one. (CW: sexual assault, child abuse.)

Mary Oliver’s poetry is fairly well known, with poems like “Wild Geese” and “The Uses of Sorrow” being widely shared across the internet. Her work has a compassionate quality to it, as an observer trying to connect with and love the world — even when it’s hard. Picking up Dream Work is the first time I’ve read Oliver’s work as a collection. I read these poems during my small retreat, turning each page and soaking up the words like a balm. There is so much beauty and wonder and hope here.

The Memoir Project by Marion Roach Smith focuses on the craft of writing memoir — not only for publication, but also as an act of love, such as a grandmother leaving behind her stories for her grandchildren. Although I have no immediate plans to write my own memoir, I was drawn by the book’s belief in this being “serious work” and the feeling I might learn something for writing life in general.

Smith works through the process of finding the story in the personal — especially difficult when dealing with one’s own life and the wash of memories and feelings involved — and then how to find focus, build out the structure, knuckle down to write, and then rewrite and edit, rewrite and edit. All of her advice is presented alongside brief memoir segments, in which she demonstrates how she pulls stories from the small moments of her own life and expresses it upon the page.

The subtitle describes The Memoir Project as a text for writing and life — and that is reflected in the importance Smith places on paying attention to one’s life. As much as she offers methods to connect with and actively engage memories, she also advises being more present in the moment and recording little moments that snag your attention, because it’s these moments can grow into a essay, a blog post, a book. Every small moment and strange detail matters, and paying attention with a focused mind can help the writer become more engaged with their life, instead of just drifting through it.

Books Finished This Month:

1. Network Effect by Martha Wells

2. Don’t Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

3. Dream Work by Mary Oliver

4. The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith

5. Enjoy me among my ruins by Juniper Fitzgerald

6. A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow

Total Books for the Year: 26

Still in Progress:

Never Whistle at Night: An Indigenous Dark Fiction Anthology edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr. and Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games, edited by J. Robert Lennon and Carmen Maria Machado.

Short Stories & Poetry

A selection of works I recently read in journals and online publications, with a few lines from the text shared here.

Poem: “Tree-Time” by Devan Barlow (Corvid Queen):

Fantasy: “Ex Cinere” by Christine Cohen (Flash Fiction Magazine):

"Skeleton Song" by Seanan McGuire (Reactor):

Movies

When I started watching The Dressmaker, I assumed it would be a quirky story about an outcast returning to her tiny hometown and reinvigorating the locals through fashion. As a child Tilly Dunnage (Kate Winslet) was cast out of town and sent to a boarding school, because the community believed she was responsible for the death of a fellow classmate. Her return is aimed at reconnecting with her mother, Molly Dunnage (Judy Davis), and figuring out the truth of what happened all those years ago. As she returns to the community, she begins to sew dresses based on the latest fashion for the women, bringing a brilliance of color and life that stands out in stark contrast to the bleak grey-brown town.

However, the movie takes a sharp turn at the middle, with a terrible tragedy that proves all her efforts to uncover the truth and build relationships are meaningless. The second half of the movie is unrelenting in its heartbreak and brutality — leaning more deeply into dark humor and charging toward an acerbic ending. And I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it.

Regardless, the high point of The Dressmaker is the relationship between Tilly and Molly Dunnage. They begin in constant conflict, then slowly transition to support of one another as mother and daughter, and as they begin to realise how much this terrible town has damaged them both.

Television

I’m still loving Murderbot. Over the past several episodes, the show has more fully expanded the characters and their relationships. In particular, there are a couple of interesting changes from the book. First is the introduction of Leebeebee (Anna Konkle), a survivor from another research group on the planet. Since she’s from the corporate rim, Leebeebee presents an interesting foil to the Preservation team. She doesn’t see Murderbot as a person and reveals a variety of contrasting perspectives. Specifically, the Corporate Rim views everything in terms of profit and expense, while Preservation views everything in terms of how it fits into the common good.

Second, Murderbot kills a human enemy in front of its clients — which does not happen in the book. However, it’s an important moment, since it reveals to the Preservation team that yes, Murderbot is capable of killing — thus, creating friction, since this action is against the team’s values. It makes the act of choosing to trust each other even more challenging, which is an important hurdle to overcome for their friendship to be true.

Only two episodes left from here, and I’m excited to see if the show can pull off the end of the season.

I turned to Inuyasha for a bit of comfort watching lately. The anime is about a fifteen year old girl being whisked away to medieval Japan, where she joins up with a half-demon to find all the pieces of the Shikon jewel (a magical stone) and combat terrifying demons. It has a fun cast of characters and a light-hearted tone, and its full of action, romance, and comedy. Taking out all the intros, outros, and filler material, the episodes are also rather short, making for a quick watch.

Games

Blue Prince (Dogubomb) is probably the best game I've ever played that ultimately is not for me. The game is wonderful in so many ways. It opens with an interesting story premise — a young man inherits a mansion, which will only become his if he can find the mysterious 46th room — and features beautiful illustrative-style art with muted undertones.

The gameplay is also quite fun, allowing the player to figure out how to play through the process of playing. As you enter the mansion, you are given a brief note and then open a door and are presented with a card draw of three rooms to build, and from that room (as long as it’s not a dead end), you build more and more rooms, constructing a path deeper into the home. You are able to continue building, exploring, and collecting supplies and zeroes until you run out of steps and are forced to take a rest, resetting the entire house to zero — creating a roguelike feel.

As you naturally explore and build the rooms, you learn about each rooms exact attributes (sometimes benefits or disadvantages). You also start solving a variety of puzzles — some of which are tied to a specific room, others involving finding clues, keys, and objects across the array of rooms in order to move forward.

And it is this specific combination of spread out puzzles and the roguelike restart at the start of each day that caused me to slowly loose interest in the game. When I started playing, I had a blast. I was captivated by the puzzles (which felt intuitive) and the story — and I fell in, the hours slipping by.

Over time, though, as the puzzles grew more complex, having to restart every day created a frustration point. I would figure out solutions to moving forward only to be blocked by the fact that I needed to obtain a very specific set of rooms and/or items in order to follow through on that solution. Every time I figured it out, made the connection, and solved something, it was immensely satisfying. However, those moments of satisfaction started to grow further apart, and I found myself spinning my wheels, performing run after run without being able to make any progress.

Eventually, I reached room 46 and rolled credits on the game, with the full knowledge that I’ve only solved a fraction of the puzzles and discovered a small portion of the overall story. Alanah Pearce describes reaching this point as completing the tutorial, which is fascinating. But at this point, I’m good with what I’ve done — and I’m ready to move on to another game.

Kid A Mnesia Exhibition, a free interactive audiovisual experience developed by Radiohead Namethemachine, and Arbitrarily Good Productions, is a digital museum space incorporating music and art from Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac albums. Exploring the exhibition spaces is a transcendent experience, combining deconstructed and reconfigured songs from the albums with halls and rooms that feel both grounded in reality and impossibly surreal, stretching the possibility of architecture, space, and void. Although the game was only about an hour or two long, I loved exploring the labyrinth of the corridors and lingering with the art. Wonderful.

A more detailed exploration of my experience with the game can by found in my essay, “This is Not a Game: The Kid A Mnesia Exhibition,” published in Counter Arts.

I finished up the last few hours of The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog), which were the most harrowing hours of gameplay I’ve ever experienced. So much of this game requires the player to put themselves into brutally uncomfortable situations — not only as a figure having to witness and survive violence, but also as someone seeking to enact violence on other people. At several points this game forces the player to press buttons — and thus actively participate — in moments of heinous violence. The end of this game is another one of those moments, and I hated it, and I was deeply moved by it. In the final climatic fight scene, everyone and everything is so exhausting, and I found myself powering my joystick, begging my character to just, finally, stop.

The Last of Us Part II is a brilliantly designed game, with fascinating narrative design that doesn’t allow the player to sit comfortable in a form of escape. It is definitely a game that requires a certain amount of mental preparation, because it is a grinding trudge through dark places. And at the same time, I loved it — and will probably play it again, because I’m fascinated by its structure, design, and incredible gameplay.

Finally, I played well over a dozen tiny games released in browser on Itch — some released during the Neo-Twiny Jame and others just because I was falling down an Itch rabbit hole.

The longest indie I played was "versuri" ("verses") by kit riemer, a text adventure game about working on translations of obscure poetic texts in a dystopian future. The game uses a simple mechanic of clicking on words to reveal translations, demonstrating the layers of meaning from literal to more figurative and poetic translations. As the player continues to delve deeper into the work, a strange opening of perspective occurs, bringing with it new horrors.

"Strange Signals” was created by a small group of developers (including my fellow Narrative Department alumni Patrick Knisley and Dan Stout) for the Pursuing Pixels Game Jam. When a geological surveyor Orion Renaudin becomes stranded on a strange island, he seeks out strange radio signals to help determine a way home. For the short time span of its jam-length development, the game feels like a complete experience, presenting an interesting mechanic in the form of time travel, which allows for some fun nested puzzles.

I also played the following games, which are all just a few minutes long — packing wonderful experiences into tiny spaces:

• "Never Have I Ever" by Katie Canning - An interactive fiction about a drinking game that grows terribly dark

• “saltwater” by Kit H.J. - An interactive fiction about taking a walk along the beach and meeting something in the dark waters.

• "The Ocean View from the Keiyo Line" by Air Gong - A relaxing visual fiction about decisions made on a train journey.

• "Letters to Strangers" by Jean-Sébastien Monzani - A charming series of random letters.

• "No Wizard" by Jean-Sébastien Monzani - A beautifully illustrated Bitsy adventure about connection with others.

• "Summer Rain" by Jean-Sébastien Monzani - A lovely poetic journey through the rain.

• "Tiny Shovel" by Anna Anthropy - A micro-Bitsy adventure about digging up treasures on the beach.

• "A Special Box" by Zhanko - A young child seeks escape through playful distractions.

• "How to Haunt" by Rae White - A text adventure that uses shifting text to evoke a haunting.

• "The Last Node" by Maciek Stępniewski - A tale of a computer node looking to hibernate – or seek self destruction.

• "cat friends" by MeowUsername - Just a couple of cat friends on a journey for good eats.

• "黃鶴楼" by publicdomainfriend - A memoir in game format focused on translating Chinese poetry on a wall. The complexity of translation is well illustrated here.

That's it for me! What are you reading? Watching? Loving right now?