Author: Andreae Callanan

Writer and doctoral student in English literature at Memorial University of Newfoundland. I talk about poetry, academic life, and neurodiversity.

20 February 2023

Andreae Callanan
Glittery, ice-covered, leafless birch branches against a pale blue winter sky.

2023 has been a real journey so far. I spent the week between Boxing Day and New Year’s with the worst, longest flu I’ve experienced in, well, possibly ever. Then a week into the year, my awesomely cool and inspiring badass of a grandmother passed away. That’s been rough. I miss her. I’m sad that she’s not around any more. Her funeral was in Gander, which is in the central region of the island, and there was a phenomenal ice storm for the two days we were there. Power flicking on and off all over the place. My grandmother was born during a tsunami, so it only made sense that her send-off would be in the midst of Big Weather. I took dozens of photos of trees covered in ice:

Unidentified tree bent over with ice. There are other ice covered trees in the background. The sky is a foggy grey.
An apple tree, still laden with apples, coated in ice.
A close-up of two small crabapples from an ornamental bush, encased in ice. The drips, instead of going straight down, are frozen at an angle, indicating how intense the wind was during the storm.
A stand of birch trees, bent down under a heavy coating of ice.

Then a few weeks after that I got covid-19 and was miserable for two weeks — the actual illness wasn’t as bad as the Boxing Day flu, but it’s taking me ages to get any kind of energy back. Meanwhile, my dissertation draft languishes. My supervisor’s notes are brilliant and incisive, and I have so little work left to do, but my brain just can’t handle the full sentences required of the task.

Hoping that this whole “taking it easy” thing pans out, and that I can get back to something like normal before too long.

I haven’t been totally idle; I did read Jillian Tett’s Anthro-Vision, which is not something I would normally pick up, but Tara Brabazon recorded such an impassioned endorsement of Tett’s writing that I couldn’t pass it up. I agree with Brabazon’s analysis completely. Now I’m reading DEI Deconstructed by Lily Zheng, partly so I can follow Zheng’s book club videos they’ve posted on LinkedIn where they go through the book chapter by chapter. Very keen to get further into that.