I’m just going to leave this here: www.adirondackexplorer.org/environment/...

Photo of 6 kids + the text of a poem accessible at the linked PDF

Photos of 6 kids + the text of a poem accessible at the linked PDF

Merry Christmas from the Heiss family! Here's our 20th annual family newsletter by @nancyheiss.bsky.social, with links to all sorts of blog posts and extra features!

Full PDF: files.heissatopia.com/Christmas%20...

With my sad attempts to be a plant person in the background of each. 😂

Poultrygeist
The Little Woman who was not afraid of anything
Coraline (graphic novel)?
Prunella

Story time and book making with the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club at The Wren’s Nest.

I have a new poem out at Segullah this month! segullah.org/verdigris-va...

My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post:
bsky.app/profile/nsou...

<whispers_in_poet> The syllable count in haiku is a myth… </end_poet_whispers>

But your haiku are great! 😊

Level of parental exhaustion: through the roof

Joke’s on us. Multiple children made it to county. Two more weeks of winter…I mean swim season.

From the parent still at the swim meet…truuuuuuuuuuuth! 😂

Family outside the Capitol holding signs

Toddler holding a sign that says UGH

No Kings in Atlanta

Community Surveillance of Respiratory Viruses Among Families in the Utah Better Identification of Germs-Longitudinal Viral Epidemiology (BIG-LoVE) Study

Chart showing the proportion of the year a household has a viral infection, by household size. The proportion increases as the number of children increases

with 6/8 of the family out with some sort of not-COVID summer sniffles, I once again turn to this wonderful study showing viral prevalence by household size and the fact that families with 6 kids have a viral infection present 87% of the year (or 10.5 months!) academic.oup.com/cid/article/...

Our poster on creative ethnography and poetic exploration in research was awarded first place in Language and Literacy Education at UGA’s MFECOE Research Conference!

That is so sweet! I’m glad I’m not the only one whose child adopted a squash! 😂 It was wonderful to find a story that so paralleled our own. As soon as I closed the book my little one opened it and said, “Now read it again!”

(…and we have a couple pumpkin plants sprouting in our garden!) 🌱

Two small children in pyjamas sort through a pile of orange yarn to find the tone that best matches the pumpkin in the foreground.

A pumpkin knitted out of orange yarn beside a real pumpkin.

A toddler in penguin pyjamas, with messy blonde hair, grins as she hugs a knit pumpkin toy. Lego is scattered around her in a playroom.

I found @patzmiller.bsky.social's "Sophie's Squash" the other day and had to bring it home to read to my pumpkin-loving toddler who'd kept a pumpkin in her bed from October until January when I finally convinced her to drop it in the garden (in exchange for a knit pumpkin). She loved the story!

Not sure how I’ll read the whole thing out loud, but we will power through. 😂 I’m sure there’s a beautiful ending.

Children playing ping pong on a dining room table

Reading @reemfaruqi.bsky.social’s “Call Me Adnan” with the kids. We’re enjoying it—and playing ping pong—but I am already dreading where the foreshadowing is leading my mind…

Party! At the blood moon

😂

Irreantum 21.4 - Irreantum

The latest issue of Irreantum (21.4) came out today.

My poem 🫐 "In which my toddler eats forbidden fruit" 🫐 is the first piece. Enjoy!

And Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃

irreantum.associationmormonletters.org/_21-4-start/

The Holiday Lit Blitz: The Longlist Thank you to everyone who submitted to our specialty contest, the Holiday Lit Blitz! The pieces were judged blindly, without any identifying author information. We loved so many of the short stories, ...

I’m excited to be on the long list for this year’s Holiday Lit Blitz! www.mormonlitlab.org/post/the-hol...

Wait…you had a “TAYLOR!” moment, too?

The Mystery of Doll's Head Trail by Zoë Heiss The late October sun cast an auburn glow on the grotesque dolls, making the Doll’s Head Trail seem even more ominous than it really was. Elaina walked on the trail, stooping down to see a moldy doll with one eye missing, moss growing on its moth-eaten petticoats. Elaina thought that this doll was scarier than all the others, somehow more intimidating than its peers. She had the feeling she had seen it before. As she watched it, the doll’s lone eye blinked. Behind her, Elaina heard the crunching of disturbed leaves. She spun around, her black hair whipping her face as she turned. She looked down and saw a doll’s eye rolling toward her. She stared confoundedly at it. It stopped and stared back. She let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding, relieved. It was just a doll’s eye, rolling down the hill. Her breath caught in her throat again, though, when she heard a whisper surround her. “Need to kill! Need to kill!” The whisper seemed to be emanating from the eyeball, although it had no mouth. Without thinking, Elaina started to chew the ends of her hair, a nervous habit of hers. Ring, ring! Ring, ring! Her mom was trying to call her! Elaina answered her phone. “Hi mom! What’s up?” “Elaina, you need to get—the dolls are—please come back now.” “Mom! I don’t understand! What do I need to get?” Elaina was in a frenzy. What are the dolls? Why does she need to go back home? She had so many questions coursing through her head as she waited for an answer. “This number has been disconnected,” a robotic voice answered, not a hint of emotion in its words. The lock of hair Elaina had been chewing on was now a soggy knot. She bent down to touch the one-eyed doll. When her fingertip grazed the doll, everything started spinning. She felt her hair being pulled, her limbs went stiff, and it felt as if her fingers were welding together. When at last the spinning stopped, Elaina looked around dizzily. Everything was big…

A beheaded and be-mossed doll

A dirty, creepy doll

A headless doll sitting on a pile of bricks

Heyyy my 9-yo daughter won the Georgia Writers Museum's 2024 Spooky Story Contest with "The Mystery of Doll's Head Trail"! www.georgiawritersmuseum.org/the-mystery-...

Inspired by Atlanta's own weird Doll's Head Trail

Hate to break it to you but *that* is a painting…

That was dreamed up by the 7 y.o. himself.

van Manen, M. (1990). Human science. In Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (pp. 1–34). The Althouse Press.

Page 12, in case anyone is wondering.

You see the way I read my article on phenomenology? Very demure, very studious...until a paragraph citing Heidegger uses the words thoughtful, mindful, and heedful in rapid succession. Then I get a little cutesy...but still demure.