A Tribute to "Wild Geese"

October 11, 2020 by Editor-in-Chief in Arts & Culture, Identity

by Emma Sullivan ‘24

CW: sexual assault

After I read Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese at the onset of quarantine, I thought, Yes, I just need to let my body “love what it loves.” I’d always brushed off the jokes about liking girls from the boys at my lunch table, or once from my father at Thanksgiving dinner. While I dodged the thought, I compiled a Straight-Girl-History for myself as refuting evidence. Now that I was in forced meditation, I had to address that, Yes, boys were fine, I guess. But girls made my breath hitch. I thought maybe, this is the thing I love and need to let myself love.

Just Girly Things, But Kombucha

October 02, 2020 by Editor-in-Chief in Arts & Culture

by Christina Lin ‘21

The connection between kombucha and Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies isn’t immediately obvious: how can a jar of sour tea possibly be philosophical? The baseline of comparison is its structure—the starter tea is Lady Justice, the pellicle is Lady Reason, and the yeast is Lady Rectitude. Pizan’s descriptions of the nature of women parallels conceptions we have of kombucha, but it may allow us greater insight into the nature of the inherently variable.

Time

October 02, 2020 by Editor-in-Chief in Arts & Culture

by Jill Mankoff ‘21

After finishing Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, I’m left with that powerful sense of discomfort that comes with closing a book and still having questions. It’s a good sense of discomfort.

Womansplaining Mansplaining

October 02, 2020 by Editor-in-Chief in Arts & Culture

by Vanessa Ntungwanayo ‘21

I think this is what makes mansplaining such an insidious phenomenon. To partake in it is to have the privilege of knowing that should you be wrong or appear abrasive, you have nothing to lose.

On Anna Karenina, Loving Literature, and Wellesley

May 09, 2019 by Editor-in-Chief in Campus Life

by Samantha English ‘19

I have marked my time at Wellesley in books. When I recall the people, lessons, and love I’ve experienced during my four years here, I always remember a novel I was reading or a paper I was writing alongside them, a character I was falling in love with or an image I was tracking. Jane Eyre undercuts my Wellesley experience, illuminating every image in every book I read until I found my senior thesis topic of birds and women in Victorian literature. Other books are scattered, left behind in past semesters with only memories to speak for them.