Eleanor Glewwe's Blog

Earlier this year, I learned that speculative fiction author Naomi Kritzer of St. Paul was publishing a new novel this summer. Entitled Obstetrix, it was about an OB-GYN who was kidnapped by a cult. Kritzer was doing a book release tour, and I noted down a couple of the events, one at Uncle Hugo’s in Minneapolis and one at Sidekick Coffee & Books in Iowa City, in hopes that I could make it to one or the other. In the end, I spent most of the summer in Iowa, so when mid-August rolled around, I or...

Earlier this month, my family went on our annual trip to the Boundary Waters, which have been in the news quite a bit this year for various reasons (did my senators get tired of me calling them to tell them not to roll back protections for this most visited wilderness in the United States?). We were lucky we were able to go on our trip at all because in mid-July, the entire Boundary Waters Canoe Area was closed due to wildfires. When the closure was initially announced, I didn’t think we would h...

Last week, I moved out of the apartment I had lived in for almost exactly seven years and into my first house. I had not decided that this was the year I would buy a house (I was still in no rush to tackle homeownership, and besides, I was very picky about location), but the stars aligned in a curious way. In other words, the right opportunity came up, and I bought a 125+-year-old house from friends who were moving away. This has made for a pretty busy summer, and I am behind on all my correspon...

I recently returned from my annual trip to Meudon to visit Isabelle. The week before I left, I was at a party in Grinnell where no fewer than six of us guests were headed to France within a few days of one another. (Then, while I was in France, I learned through social media that another couple we all knew was also there!) It turned out that two friends of mine were actually taking the same outgoing transatlantic flight as me, so we hung out at the gate together before boarding and then went thr...

The title of this post is a little misleading because it implies this is a Writers@Grinnell post. While David Treuer was a Writers@Grinnell guest this spring, I did not actually go to any of his Writers@Grinnell events. Treuer was also invited to campus, however, as the keynote speaker for the Center for the Humanities’ symposium Climate Change, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Liberal Arts. (The symposium’s title has also been the Center’s programming theme for the past three years.) And I attende...

Last month I wrote about taking the train to and from Washington, D.C. over spring break. But what did I actually do on my trip? Upon arriving at Union Station in D.C., I had lunch in the food court with a former Grinnell librarian whose social media-documented train trips had actually inspired my railway adventure and who gave me advice about the long-haul train ride. Then I took the metro to Maryland to meet up with my college friend and host.

When this friend and I were seniors at Swarthmore,...

Over spring break earlier this month, I met up with a couple of college friends in the Washington, D.C. area (one friend lives there and two of us traveled there for a mini reunion). This post is not about what I did on my trip but rather about how I made the trip. There is a former Grinnell librarian who now works in D.C. with whom I’m still connected on social media, and I had observed for some time that she frequently took the train between Washington and Chicago. This inspired me to try that...

What did I wish for 2026 already? Peace, sanity, and compassion? This year has already shown us some of the worst and best of what people can be. But that’s not what this post is about. I’ve been to some great events on campus so far this semester, and I wanted to highlight a few of them.

Our Martin Luther King Jr. Day lecture this year was by Jamelle Bouie, the New York Times Opinion columnist. I confess that I wasn’t a reader of Bouie’s columns, but when I heard such a big name was coming to c...

I read 77 books in 2025. Seems like a lucky number! But even better, it means I finally reversed my recent trend of reading fewer and fewer books each year. To be fair, I read one book twice in 2025 and I’m counting it as two, but that’s fair, right? Let’s see if I can keep up the momentum in 2026, or at least choose my reading material well!

Here are the books I read in 2025, rereads bolded, with links to any related blog posts:

The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen Isaac Blum
The Fox’s Tower and...

Happy New Year’s Eve! We had a white Christmas and will have a white New Year’s Day in Minnesota. It’s been a December of snowstorms in the Upper Midwest. In any case… My comment on 2025 is: no comment. Let’s just say we have our work cut out for us in the U.S. and probably around the world too.

I am fortunate to have had another good year, though; here is what I did in 2025: