Eleanor Glewwe's Blog

At Grinnell, every incoming first-year student takes a course called Tutorial in the fall semester. Tutorial is meant to introduce students to college-level reading and writing, and their instructor is also their advisor until they declare a major. Faculty take turns teaching Tutorial, and each Tutorial has a unique topic chosen by the professor. This fall, I’m teaching my first Tutorial, and my chosen topic is language revitalization. 

Language revitalization refers to the efforts to restore or...

Toward the end of the summer, Grinnell made a big advertising push for a public event it was sponsoring. There were Facebook posts and posters all over campus and seemingly in the window of every shop downtown. And I put that event on my calendar right away because it was…a bagpipe concert! (I kind of can’t believe this blog didn’t already have a bagpipes tag?!) Specifically, the Red Hot Chilli Pipers (I didn’t choose the name, okay) were giving a free performance in Central Park, with food truc...

I’m excited to announce that I recently published another short story! At 10,000 words, it’s technically a novelette. “Limue’s Alphabet” is free to read now in Issue 74 of The Future Fire. This is my second appearance in The Future Fire; they published my short story “Mijara’s Freedom” in 2020. Pieces in The Future Fire are illustrated, and “Limue’s Alphabet” features art by Barbara Candiotti.

This story is one of my favorite things I’ve written. I finished it a little over a year ago. I don’t r...

About a week after I came back from , my family and I went on our roughly annual trip to the Boundary Waters. We returned once again to Lake One, a BWCA entry I previously wrote about here. Like last time, we drove north from the Twin Cities on a Friday, but instead of heading straight toward Ely we took our more usual route to Duluth and the New Scenic Café just up the road along the shores of Lake Superior so we could enjoy a fancy dinner before several days of camping rations. Duluth wa...

Earlier this month, I went to France to visit Isabelle. Unusually, I was there for Bastille Day–not sure I ever have been before. From Isabelle’s apartment in Meudon, I glimpsed military planes flying low over Paris during the morning parade (one flew over our building afterwards!) and the spectacular fireworks and drone show around the Eiffel Tower at 11:00pm. But this post is really about Isabelle’s and my Paris outing a couple of days later.

First, we had lunch at Kiwamiya Ramen in Boulogne-B...

It’s been a while since I’ve treated this like a French Canadian music blog, hasn’t it? Today I bring you another post about musical connections (or really, textual connections) among songs, this time all by the Québécois group Le Vent du Nord. Specifically, I’m interested in the song “Adieu du village” (Goodbye from the village) and how its text has little snatches of overlap with other songs. I should warn you that a couple of the songs discussed in this post are violent and gruesome.

In “Adi...

This was the academic year I returned to in-person conferences. After attending the Annual Meeting on Phonology in the fall, I closed out the spring semester with back-to-back conferences in May (one at the end of the last week of classes and the other at the end of finals week–this is why I was grading till the night before grades were due!). Both were conferences I had attended in the past–Chicago Linguistic Society (CLS) and the Annual Conference on African Linguistics (ACAL)–and it was fun t...

Since moving to Iowa almost six (!) years ago, I’ve had fewer opportunities for shape note singing. When I’m in Minnesota, I can go singing once a week, and back in Los Angeles I had access to a monthly singing and the occasional all-day or convention (or even shape note singing at the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest!). But while there are shape note singers scattered across Iowa, regular singings are few and far between. Possibly there were none that were active when I first arrived in the state; ...

I hope you’re all hanging in there. Spring is coming. May it bring renewal.

As usual, I’m very behind in my chronicling, but I wanted to recount the loveliest days of January, when Isabelle came to visit me in Iowa for the very first time. I’ve visited her in the Paris region most summers since we finished at UCLA, but she hadn’t been back to the States since and so had never seen where I live now.

One of our primary goals was to make of her visit a relaxing vacation for both of us, so we didn’t...

Happy February! I’m delighted to share that I have a new short story out in the world. “The Otter Woman’s Daughter” came out on Sunday in Cast of Wonders. I’ve been calling it a classical music-inflected selkie story set in Minnesota (mostly in the Boundary Waters, in fact, but it starts in the Twin Cities). Also, Cast of Wonders is a podcast, so you can listen to my story instead of reading it on their website. I don’t listen to podcasts, so I’m not sure how to direct you, but the audio version...