E.B.'s Notes & News: June 2025 📚🏳️‍🌈📝🏳️‍⚧️☀️⛈️👯‍♂️💖🌈🐢

Happy summer, friends. Is this when life calms down?

Notes & News: June 2025

I love being able to give away copies of Good Grief in our Little Free Library. I hope that someone who really needs it finds it.

I remember seeing a tweet once that was something like being an adult is just saying “next week things will calm down” every week until you retire (or die?) and this is deeply relatable.

May 2025 was a mess. Luca kicked off the month with an ear infection, and then I had all the end-of-semester events at Wellesley including commencement and reunion (which I was both working as a college employee AND celebrating as a 2010 alum), and after that, Luca and I both came down with hand foot and mouth disease. (Got to love those daycare viruses!)

I have this small hope that now things will calm down a bit since June at Wellesley is (often, usually, hopefully, fingers crossed) more quiet than the semester, and I had this dream that over the summer maybe the daycare illnesses wouldn’t be as bad as they were this winter/spring, but Luca was a fussy disaster when I dropped him off this morning so I’m basically just sitting here finishing this newsletter and waiting for the text to tell me to come pick him up because he has another ear infection.

xoxo,

E.B.

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Hope Notes & News:

Image of Jonathan the gay old tortoise courtesy of ClaireMax on X (née Twitter).

Happy Pride, everyone! A lot of things certainly do not feel hopeful these days for LGBTQ+ people in America, but at least there are some great causes out there doing good work to help protect queer and trans individuals. Some of my favorites include:

• Lambda Legal

• Trans Lifeline

• The Trevor Project

• Lambda Literary

• The Okra Project

• GLSEN

• Transgender Law Center

• Housing Works

• Y2Y Network

• BAGLY

Which LGBTQ+ causes do you love? Please link to them in the comments on this post or in the subscriber-only chat.

Also, here’s something that is fun: turns out that the world’s oldest tortoise, Jonathan, is actually gay.

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Writing Notes & News:

Thanks for this spam, Zazie. You make me feel very professional!

Good Grief will be out in paperback in less than six months! (Please preorder it at your local independent bookstore, from Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, or even Amazon.)

• My wonderful friend Lindsey Bluher wrote a piece for readin’ magazine called “We’ll Prescribe You A Book: Self-Help Selects From Your Non-Fiction Besties” and included Good Grief in the section on types of unconventional grief. Thanks, Lindsey!!! She writes: Going through the loss of a pet is a special kind of experience because most people don’t talk about it outside of a tribute post on the ‘gram when their pet crosses the rainbow bridge. It can be isolating, and the considerations leading up to pet loss (like having to decide when to choose euthanasia for a sick critter) are sometimes filled with shame. Good Grief is a unique read for anyone grieving or preparing to grieve the loss of a pet—I personally found it so helpful even 2 years after saying goodbye to my first pup (RIP Mac).

• Thank you to Zazie Todd who is celebrating the upcoming release of her book Bark! in paperback by reposting conversations she had with me about Good Grief. You can watch the panel I participated in as part of Bark! Fest last September, and/or you can listen to it on her podcast. (She has also been posting things on Instagram, like the above quote, which makes me feel very wise LOL.)

For Wellesley, I wrote maybe my favorite story ever, about a small flock of sheep that visited campus to help with a meadow restoration project. I also got to report on the five-years-belated commencement ceremony for the class of 2020, which was extremely heartwarming.

Oh, and save the date! I have my first paperback event planned for this fall:

• Saturday 11/22/25, 1:00pm-3:00pm EST: Event with Karen Fine, author of The Other Family Doctor, and Ellen Finnie, author of The Ten Perfections: Spiritual Lessons from a Life with Dogs at Tatnuck Bookseller in Westborough, MA.

Plus stay tuned for more events celebrating the paperback edition of Good Grief which comes out 11/11/25! I have things in the making with the likes of Sangamithra Iyer, Sy Montgomery, Matt Patterson, Melanie D.G. Kaplan, Carla Fernandez, and more!

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Reading Notes & News:

Having Luca hand me a book and then climb into my lap to have me read it to him is the best feeling in the world.

I’m still mainly reading picture and board books these days (above, you can see me and Luca reading You Are New by Lucy Knisley, one of my favorites), but here are a few other titles I’ve read or started reading since I last emailed you:

• Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams (I listened to the audiobook and many times found myself yelling “No!” and “Oh my god, WHAT?” in the car.)

• Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton (currently reading; almost done, I love it!)

• A Living Remedy by Nicole Chung (currently reading; I was supposed to finish it for my book club on 5/29 but I ended up being sick for our meeting, UGH!)

• Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness by Kristen Radtke (currently reading; bought this one a long time ago and I just started it but I like it already!)

• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (I also listened to the audiobook of this one, which is the only way I could read a 658-page book right now, and the narrator Sunil Malhotra was SO good and oh my god the book itself — this is one of those ones popular books that I missed because it came out in February 2009 when I was in Russia and missed all pop culture, and I only started reading it because my friend Mary Cate Zipprich was reading it and kept talking about it and she was only reading it because her dad and stepdad are both obsessed with it, and so I decided to see what all the fuss was about and WOW WOW WOW!!!)

• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (I just started listening to this one yesterday because I am a Verghese fangirl now apparently. The man is an accomplished doctor, an novelist with a degree from Iowa’s Writer Workshop, and he also READS THE AUDIOBOOK and is a great VOICE ACTOR TOO???)

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Friend Notes & News:

The “Plant Connections” show is currently on display at the Global Flora greenhouses at Wellesley College.

You people are amazing!!! Look at all the cool shit you’ve been doing! And please share in the comments or in the subscriber-only chat other accomplishments you want to brag about.

• Two of my friends have art in the “Plant Connections” exhibition at the Wellesley College Botanic Gardens! Grace Ramsdell and Shannon O’Brien (whose image was used for the art show poster, see above) both have photos in the show, which is currently installed in the Global Flora greenhouses on campus. The greenhouses are closed to the public for the summer, but if you want to see the show, visit me on campus on a Wednesday or Friday between 10am-4pm and I can swipe you in and we can look at the art together! :-)

• Speaking of Shannon O’Brien, she also just had a painting on display in the Worcester Art Museum’s student art show! She has been studying Chinese brush painting, and I so admire her making time for creative outlets outside work.

• This essay by Frances Dodds about her parents raising her sister’s kids for The New York Times made me cry.

• Regie Gibson, with whom I had the great honor of teaching GrubStreet Young Adult Writing Program (YAWP) classes with back in the glory days of the old Steinway building, was just named the first ever Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. This is SO well deserved. Regie is an incredible poet, educator, and I am so happy for him!

• Lit Crawl is happening next Thursday 6/12 in Somerville and I have many friends who are doing very fun and cool things for it! In particular, there is a Generation Queer Book Party celebrating Kimm Topping’s new book, and Danny Elfanbaum of the Two Page Tuesday reading series is hosting Two Page Tuesday Presents Three Para-stanza Thursday!

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Menagerie Notes & News:

So, who’s going to break the news to Luca that they are tortoises not turtles.

Luca has been talking up a storm — we swear he learns a new word every day! — and in news that will be surprising to absolutely no one, one of his first words was “turtle.”

He has figured out that Terrence and Twyla live in my office, and now every morning he points at my office door and shouts, “Turtle! Turtle!” until he can go in there and check to see how theofficialmrt is doing. He likes to stand and watch them clunk around, and when he has had enough he waves and says, “Bye-bye!” and then we go have breakfast. It’s a very cute and fun morning routine.

There are a lot of things about being a parent that you can’t predict and that have really surprised me. But the fact that my kid already loves reptiles? Called it.