It’s been a bit over a year since I returned to Irish dance, so I thought I’d talk a little bit about my relationship with it and how that’s changed. Irish dance is, at its core, a competitive art form. It’s a sport. It’s notorious for the pageantry that goes along with these competitions: the bedazzled dresses and curly wigs and far too much makeup. The trophies are large and usually tasteless, and the whole thing is completely bizarre to…
This is just a quick note to say that my second poetry collection, Fleeting Ink, is currently free on Kindle. This should be worldwide (I checked US and UK and they’re both showing up as free, but I don’t know about other Amazons), so wherever you are, if you’ve been wondering about reading some of my poetry, now’s the time to do it. I haven’t written poetry in a long time. I haven’t written any all year, as far as…
When I came out on my blog over four years ago, I didn’t think I’d need to do it again. It was an all-encompassing, non-label-specific post about my queerness that, barring a few details, has remained true even as my understanding of my identity has changed and deepened. Mostly. But in June 2014, in the midst of my A-Levels, I started questioning my gender identity. It wasn’t really the best timing to have a major crisis about fundamental building blocks…
So, following my blog post from the other day about why I’m unhappy with the name Miriam Joy as my professional name, I decided to do some work towards changing it. However, I’m a very indecisive person, so I decided to enlist some help: Twitter polls. I chose Twitter polls for the very simple reason that I don’t know of any other website that I currently use which would allow me to ask a multiple choice question in that way….
One of the things I learned during A-Level English Literature that I hadn’t come across before was the idea of different readings of a text. I mean, I think I’d been doing it unconsciously already, but the terminology hadn’t crossed my path. I didn’t know you could do a ‘feminist reading’ of a text, let alone a ‘queer reading’. I didn’t know it was legitimate to look at material through a certain lens and see what it uncovered, and discovering…
Today’s poem is a little bit of an odd one. I think it might be on the Sample Poems page that is lurking on this blog somewhere, but no matter, I may as well post it here as well. It’s from Crossroads Poetry, and it’s called ‘My Lady Reaper’. I first wrote this poem in about 2012, or rather, a poem that had a few things in common with this one. A handful of the lines were the same, but…
I mentioned in my post about Quicksilver that the protagonist was asexual and that I’d never seen that in a book before, but I know for a lot of people the concept of asexuality is still a little bit confusing with quite a lot of misconceptions and misinformation, so I decided to write this to clear things up. Before we start, a few things to say. 1) I’m not a world expert on the subject. In fact, most of the…
I don’t know when it happened, but at some point in the last year I turned into one of Them. The angry feminists. The ones who see you being misogynistic on your blog in the dark depths on the internet and WILL call you out on it; the ones who contradict your assertion that the Bechdel test is worthless; the ones who sit there and fume about the patriarchy. It happened. I don’t know how. I mean, I do know:…
“Isn’t she bisexual?” “No, she’s pansexual.” “What the hell is that?” “It’s what picky bisexual people call themselves.” “Isn’t it what non-picky bisexual people call themselves? You know, they’ll sleep with anyone?” “Well, anyway, what she’s confused about is whether she’s a girl or a boy.” “Are you kidding? How hard can it be?” “I know. Like, anyone can tell that.” “We-ird. So is that why she dresses in boys’ uniform now? And why she cut her hair?” “Hmm, I…