The Wingback Workshop

What I Read in 2025

Does it feel like there are more wrap-up posts this year than usual? It seems like every magazine, blog, and newspaper I subscribe to wrapped up something. The usual best-of and worst-of lists were present, but there also seemed to be something else going on. Like the stats were intended

WIP Word Count: 3,559

It has been a while since I added any words to this project. I did some research, I made some notes, I thought and thought and thought. But I did not add any words to the actual manuscript. In the meantime, I read "Bach Is a Strange Loop"

Nothing New Under the Sun

Everything old is new again. History repeats itself. I'm sure you have your own favorite aphorism or bumper sticker for the cyclical nature of time. I'm reading Dante's Divine Comedy for the third (I think?) time, pencil in hand as usual. Today I read

Simon Okotie's Writing Day

I have Simon Okotie's The Future of the Novel waiting for me to read it, and his Twenty Questions entry in the TLS is a good enough reminder to push it toward the top of the TBR pile. As a freelance editor and writer who also has a

Total Word count: 2,643

A solid writing session this morning, after a rough start to the week. Leaving a note to myself saying what I need to write next goes a long way toward getting started every day.

Today's Total Word Count: 1792

I slept horribly last night, and I wasn't sure if I should write or nap. I chose write, and it was the correct choice. I nearly doubled the word count on this version of the manuscript, and the words are mostly good. I even remembered to leave myself

It's Impossible to Read the Right Things

I happened to read two articles back to back last night, and the only conclusion I could reach is that when it comes to reading literature, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. First I read Brady Brickner-Wood on performative reading in the

Brandon Taylor Writes a SENTENCE

I have only just started reading this essay, and I am already moved to share this with you (and I trust that reading a Taylor essay all the way to the end is never a bad idea and is probably a good recommendation): I’ve started to suspect that what’

Today's Word Count: 895

I started working on this novel project on November 1. Officially NaNoWriMo is dead, but lots of people still set a goal of writing 50,000 words in the month of November anyway. I didn't have a word count goal myself, but I did want to get back

How to Cancel Spotify

Yesterday, I posted about ditching newsletters, including mine, and using an RSS feed reader instead. This morning, Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine newsletter shares how (and why) to ditch Spotify for another streaming service. I switched to Tidal years ago, but now, thanks to this little round-up

Messing Around in the Workshop

When I switched from sending my newsletter via my self-hosted website to Ghost, I needed a new URL. My website is, quite cleverly, my name (kristenhallgeisler.com), which meant that I needed to come up with something to call this newsletter. I love reading in a wingback chair, and I

November 2025 Reading

I was going to write that I read shorter books after making my way through a couple of long ones, but then I realized that I finished DeWitt and Gridneff's Your Name Here this month. That book was both long and strange, and I liked it. It has

October 2025 Reading Roundup

Hello! You may have noticed that I haven't been sending out so many missives from the Wingback Workshop lately. I'm looking for an agent for my nonfiction book about Ancrene Wisse, a medieval text that morphed quite a bit over 200 years, and I'm

Review: The Book of I, by David Grieg

I'm going to be honest with you, readers: This is a quick little book review because it was drafted as a pitch to review outlets. No one picked it up, which is fine. That's how pitching works. But then the ebook advance reader copy that I

September 2025 Reading Roundup

Only three books this month! And yet more than a thousand pages. Thank you, Ms. Mantel. I started reading A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel, a 750-page doorstopper that was clearly a runway for the Cromwell trilogy. He's even mentioned a couple of times. If you

Cover Reveal! Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 4: Payback

Memoirs of a French Courtesan Volume 4: Payback is coming January 27, 2026! Preorders aren't set up yet, but you can of course buy the first three volumes direct from my publishing site, www.practicalfox.com, or from any bookstore you like, including Bookshop.org. This is the

August 2025 Reading Roundup

It was a month of short books, so it looks like a read a whole lot, which I guess I kind of did. A few of those books were read quickly and with a particular purpose. And as readers of my sort-of-secret email-only diary-esque newsletter know, I'm already

Happy Women in Translation Month!

Apparently, August is Women in Translation Month. I hope you are all celebrating while I am deep into revising my translation the final volume of Mogador’s Memoirs of a French Courtesan. There are two large cogs in my metaphorically mechanical brain that make translating fun for me: hyperlexia and

Review: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis

In The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, five orphaned young sisters who are living with their grandfather outside Oxford, England, in the early eighteenth century are rumored to be able to turn into a pack of dogs. Witchcraft. So far, so familiar. Narratives from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to Rivka

July 2025 Reading Roundup

July kind of sucked, everybody. There was a medical emergency with my aging cat that we're mostly out of, and my friends and family had a dizzying array of struggles that I could only sort of help with. But there were also, as always, books. This month, a

A Room of One's Own in an Age of Interruption

We are, we are repeatedly told, living in an age of distraction. There is much woe regarding the state of the children and their short attention spans, much lamenting poured over our own inability to focus. But like so many other issues, I’m not sure this is a personal

June 2025 Reading Roundup

I planned to write this post yesterday, but I tripped over a tree root during my hike with the dog yesterday and scraped my knee and tore a tiny hole in my favorite multipocket tights (from Janji, FYI) and I was miserable about it (just ask my friends, who got

Review: Homework, by Geoff Dyer

Review: Homework by Geoff Dyer Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, June 2025   I know I am not alone or even original in thinking a lot about artificial intelligence and large language models lately. My considerations of the use and meaning of AI have been seeping into everything, whether I like it

May 2025 Reading Roundup

A busy book reading month for me, including two for review. Let's not waste time, then. I did a reading in March at Bold Books and Coffee in Portland, Oregon, and I sold a couple of books. Hooray! Then I bought Doppelganger by Naomi Klein, which brought my

Review: Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue

Review: Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue Yoko Tawada New Directions, on sale June 3, 2025   We are living in a time of great concern about borders. This is most prominent in the United States, where in 2025 people who have legally immigrated to the country are being taken off