Zoe Tuck's Blog

I really wonder how this list looks out of context! These are authors or texts that have appeared so far in the “Reading as Refuge” chapter in my reading book. (Definitely more texts than we’ll be reading in my upcoming Reading as Refuge class!) Mostly in order of appearance and they might not all stay. This is a snapshot of a work-in-progress and also tells on my habit of working ready-to-hand sources into my work.

W. Somerset Maugham
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Phenomenology,” David Wo...

I’m in Denver, Colorado at Nafas Residency, working on my book about reading as a spiritual practice. (I despair of finding a good title—for a while I was thinking of it as The Angel and the Dragon, which makes sense to me, but feels a little crystal wizard, no?)

The big focus of my working time here (other than pausing to write a review of So Mayer’s Bad Language, which I’ll share when it’s published, but suffice to say: you should read it) has been the chapter called “Reading as Refuge.” As a w...

What did I do in the hour before? Walked with M and found cool sticks for hanging necklaces from, then went to Lichter & Levin, which was giving away free sandwiches if you have an EBT card. Met the neighbor’s husband, who gave us stickers for his band and stickers he made because he loves the 90s Super Mario Bros movie. We were listening to one of the CDs we got from the library before the walk and now after. It’s called “Even A Tree Can Shed Tears: Japanese Folk & Rock 1969-1973.” I don’t know...

Remember how I told you friend Joan Tate is starting a new monthly reading series called MEMORY SILO? Where people read original work and covers of other poets?Well, the first iteration is TODAY aka Wednesday, October 15th at Unnameable Books in Unnameable Falls, MA, doors at 6pm, reading at 6:30pm, and features Deja Carr, Lotte L.S., and Hunter Larson.

Photo of silos and the sky above them, superimposed with the text, “MEMORY SILO 10/15 Deja Carr Lotte L.S. Hunter Larson doors @ 6pm reading @ 6:...

Welcome to my new subscribers (and welcome back to them that have stuck with me over the years)! Usually this is is space for my literary-cum-philosophical shower thoughts, but I also like to be a town crier and there’s some stuff coming up that I want to cry about (to be clear: with joy).

On Saturday, October 11th at 6:30pm (reading at 7), there’s a reading at Unnameable Books in Unnameable (aka Great) Falls, MA featuring Miriam Saperstein, Ebs Sanders, and Stephanie Cawley. Three great readers...

I’ve been longing for some uninterrupted writing time. I am frequently thwarting myself, and I imagine that I could reconfigure my time—“optimize” it—or eke out more time by emulating one of the many writers who have either stayed up late or woken up at 4 am every day to write before their other labors commence. Discipline is one thing but a bootstrap theory of writing puts me off.

Interruption contains rupture, the break. After a month of playing in it, my reading group finally asks out loud wha...

Wednesday, 17 September 2025

Today I read snippets of Borgel (fig. 1) to Miriam, who was also very shaped by reading Daniel Pinkwater growing up.

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Still I had my crazy dream that somehow I would get to be a time tourist. When I was eleven years old, my father performed the rit...

It’s been a pleasure to read Dreaming in the Fault Zone by Eleni Stecopoulos with a small group. We extended our reading time so we could luxuriate in the text a bit longer, but in October we’re embarking on reading a new text together: Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine.

If one way of conceptualizing reading is following threads wherever they lead, one of my current threads leads me from poetics, prosody, literature, reading, and ...

This is a poem made in collaboration with the book excerpts I posted yesterday (and a conversation with a friend, and the news of the day, and the other beings and voices—many unknown to me—which flow into poems) who passed by my table .

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[We take our orders from the letters of the alphabet, “which were designed purely around an infinite pillar of something that w...

We know that to remember is to call upon something like time and for everything to move in response like a mirage. It was our dead who sent us this far out to sea. We came this way when The Torment forced us into a nakedness that rose up, past the frozen hills, into the sky, to the moon from which our new skins grew. Here in the sea, we no longer needed clothes or to be spared from the heat of the sun. Before that day, we had done everything we could against the laws of the ten centuries of The ...