August 2020 Newsletter for Patrons
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Talia Franks
About Talia Franks
Posts by Talia Franks:
Percy Jackson Project: The Sea of Monsters Part I
Welcome to the Percy Jackson Project! Today I am discussing book two of Percy Jackson and the Olympians — The Sea of Monsters.
The Last Train
Flash Fiction. 707 words. Complete. CW: Discussion of domestic violence and suicide. Five strangers are waiting for the last train on a bitter winter night. One of them is Nat, a bubbly young college student who had just started her second semester at the local university in her hometown. She was trying to engage in […]
Book Review: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Call me dramatic but I swear this is true – it was a dark and stormy night and when I sat down to read Mexican Gothic, wine glass in hand and candles burning merrily on my altar. Captivating in the truest sense of the word, I could not help but be charmed by Noemí, our […]
Book Review: A Song Below Water by Bethany C. Morrow
Friendship & family bound by more than blood as the highest form of love? Check. Top-notch worldbuilding with fantasy fully integrated into the modern day? Check. Unapologetic acknowledgement of systemic racism and police brutality as more than just a metaphor? Check. LITERAL Black Girl Magic? Check. A Song Below Water is a balm on the […]
The Innkeeper: Part I
The following prose is the beginning of The Innkeeper. The story takes place roughly 2000 years in the future, in a world not entirely like our own. I eventually intend to expand it into a full-length novel, but for now I will be releasing it in serial format on this website for my patrons. The […]
Book Review: Poena Damni Trilogy by Dimitris Lyacos (Translated by Shorsha Sullivan)
The tricky thing about translating poetry is that poems often rely on the singular meaning of a word. Often a single word will stand alone, though perhaps accompanied by fragments of a sentence, and it is the task of the translator to imbue the meaning of that word or fragment into different words in the […]
For an Optimist I’m Pretty Pessimistic
A year and some months ago, in March 2019, my worldview was entirely different, both in its scope and in its perception of reality. I was taking a critical race theory class at the time, and I was quite frankly frustrated by it, partly because of the material (which was at times triggering) and partly […]
POST AND BEFORE a.k.a. I want breakfast
Many people have grown up reading the books of Theodor Seuss “Ted” Geisel, a.k.a. Dr. Seuss. Fond memories of The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham might come to mind. One book that I was particularly fond of was The Butter Battle. Coincidentally, The Butter Battle was required reading in one of my high school classes, because one thing […]
A Promise
This poem came to me in a dream. I was asleep one moment, and awake the next, this poem fully formed in my mind. I rushed for pen and paper, greatly disturbing the person sleeping next to me at the time, to write it all down.
Wizard v. Muggle Media & Thoughts About J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix used to be my least favorite book in the Harry Potter series, but as I have grown older, it has wiggled its way up to the top of the list. This book is long; at over 800 pages, it is the longest of any of the Harry Potter books, and the text is rich with details that make up a story that I have poured over many times in my life, and I continue to read and reread with care and rigor.
Gold
This poem is one that I wrote to play on the themes within Robert Frost’s famous Nothing Gold Can Stay. I wanted to explore the darker elements of the poem, and I think it is clear from the verse that while writing Gold the imagery of Eve, the apple, and the serpent were also vivid and top of […]
Hogwarts Pride: A Meditation on my Relationship with Harry Potter, Fandom, and Queer Identity
In many ways, Harry Potter taught me how to be. And yet, it wasn’t really the books that taught me that, was it? Because the thing is, so much of what I learned from Harry Potter, I also learned from outside Harry Potter. So many of the lessons I learned from the series were not quite things I learned from the books directly, but because I took my love of the books, and sought out others like myself.
BLACK. LIVES. MATTER. That’s Not Up For Debate.
I keep hearing people say that this is a terrible time. But for Black folx in the United States, the past four plus centuries have been a terrible time. I want to say the names of everyone who has been crushed beneath the knee of white supremacy, but with so many names lost to history […]