Last one of the year! Has 2025 seemed to anyone else like it lasted 1,000 years?
Anne of Green Gables fans have been queering the title character’s passionate friendship with bestie Diana for a long time, but do you know about her genderqueer son Walter? In this essay at the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s CBC Arts website, “In Anne of Green Gables, I found the kindred spirits and queer prophets I needed,” Julia Smeaton takes a deep dive into the sequels.
Just like Anne, Walter was creative, upstanding and judged for being overly sensitive to both beauty and horror.
To the characters in 1900s Prince Edward Island, Walter’s unconventional masculinity was a problem that needed fixing. Anne didn’t see it that way, and it seemed Montgomery didn’t either.
As an imaginative and sneakily morbid kid, I saw myself in Anne’s fevered affection for Diana Barry and related to her fear that growing up would irreparably change their friendship. I liked that she kept Gilbert hanging for so long, even when society pressured her to accept his proposal.
Similarly, Una Meredith’s love for Walter is unrequited, and he simply doesn’t grow out of his passion for poetry. When he confesses to his younger sister that he feels he should’ve been born a girl, I was reminded of Anne arriving at Green Gables when the Cuthberts were expecting a boy…
…In the spring of 1942, Montgomery wrote The Blythes Are Quoted — a disturbing, bleak collection of short stories, poetry and dialogue involving murder, infidelity, antipathy and deception.
One of the lighter stories, The Cheated Child, set when the Blythe children are still young, is about a neglected orphan named Pat who feels a “strange kinship” with Walter. Pat’s aunt does not approve of the boys’ friendship and calls Walter a sissy. Pat, in turn, feels “that he loved Walter Blythe with all his heart.”
Walter was my favorite character in the later, lesser-known books about Anne’s children. I was crushed when he died in World War I at the end of Rilla of Ingleside, a weak entry in the series (in my opinion) because of its advocacy for that war. Author L.M. Montgomery had a complex life with personal tragedies and mental health struggles, leading her to create those sensitive outsider characters that we love. Her prolific fiction is touched with a realistic darkness alongside its cozy settings and sentimental endings.
I think Walter Blythe would have appreciated this poetic fable about the short life of the Luna moth, “Seven Nights’ Flight,” written by Ann Collins on her blog Microseasons. I learned from this piece that the moth only has a week to live and find a mate once it emerges from the chrysalis.
Moth cannot fly. He hangs beneath a Hickory leaf, feeling time bearing down on him the way a candle consumes its own height. His caterpillar hunger still churns, but he has no mouth now. No means to add one more hour to his life. The fuse continues to burn, even at rest.
Beneath his leafy shelter, beetles climb up from the wet darkness. They’ve come to keep vigil with him. Moth of Green Fire, they ask, why do you burn without moving?
My wings only know how to spend themselves, he answers. And Beetles understand.
They also have invisible work—love that no one counts.
Laia Asieo Odo’s story “Where Memory Meets the Sea” was reprinted at Electric Literature from the new anthology We Will Rise Again: Speculative Stories and Essays on Protest, Resistance, and Hope. In this painful but uplifting story, citizens of a war-torn country are made to forget their lost loved ones and the violence that took them, but recover the knowledge temporarily when they are in the water. Going to the sea becomes an act of defiance and faith. The conceit reminded me of how Israel cuts off Palestinians’ access to the sea, preventing them from catching fish for food and livelihood, at the same time as opponents of the genocide are being silenced by false accusations of antisemitism.
On that note, I appreciated Josina Manu Maltzman’s essay “Protective Presence in the West Bank,” which won the Plentitudes Prize for Nonfiction. The author was part of a team of Jewish volunteers shielding Palestinian shepherds from abuse by Israeli soldiers in Masafer Yatta.
This shepherd and his brother Mosab live on the edge of the village, closest to the encroaching Israeli settlement Ma’on. I’ve spent many hours with Mosab. His accounts are disturbing. Around ten years ago the settlers laid out poison in the fields where he grazes his sheep, killing many, along with wild animals who also ate the poison. Then last year, settlers broke all the legs of the sheep in his neighbor’s flock, killing them. This finally drove out his neighbor. One settler told Mosab, “If I see someone open the gate to your sheep, I will kill them all.”
…This whole area of Masafer Yatta is only about twelve square miles and is comprised of twenty Palestinian villages. The region is considered Area C, which means that Israel has legal jurisdiction over it. Near the end of 1999, Masafer Yatta was declared a closed military zone and Israel began imposing eviction orders to all the families who had been there for generations. At the same time, Israeli settlements—open only to Jews and illegal under international law—began expanding in the closed area.
The residents of Masafer Yatta have banded together to fight the eviction in the courts, and to try to stave off settler expansion into their lands by refusing to leave. During this over-twenty-year-long court battle, the residents have been denied permission to build on their lands: no wells, no additions, no improvements. The Israeli military regularly issues demolition orders on people’s homes, livestock pens, solar panels—anything that is part of day-to-day living for this community’s way of life—while at the same time settlements with pools and playgrounds grow and grow.
With the Epstein Files in the news, Jewish Currents re-shared this 2019 article by Ari M. Brostoff and Noah Kulwin, “The Right Kind of Continuity: Jeffrey Epstein and the sexual politics of Jewish philanthropy”. Their thesis is that mainstream American Jewish nonprofits, largely male-led, have emphasized a patriarchal, pro-natalist kind of intergenerational Jewish continuity. Such organizations are then not well-positioned to call out sexism among their big donors: “the Jewish philanthropic world’s own ongoing attempts to engineer reproductive behavior within the community have deeply stultified its sexual politics.” I learned from this article that Victoria’s Secret founder Leslie Wexner was both a major Jewish philanthropist and a close associate of Epstein.
The demographer Steven M. Cohen, who produced countless statistical reports on the community at the behest of the donor class, liked to put it bluntly: if institutions wanted American Jewish life to continue, they would have to prioritize the goals of “creating more Jewish marriages and filling more Jewish baby carriages.”
Feminist critiques of continuity discourse have become increasingly audible within the mainstream Jewish world, intensifying last year after Cohen himself was accused of serial sexual harassment. “How surprised can we be that a man whose entire worldview hinged on women having more babies turned out to have no respect for women when it came to personal sexual boundaries?” the writer Rokhl Kafrissen asked in the Forward.
Meanwhile, D.L. Mayfield and Krispin Mayfield have a relevant series on their blog Strongwilled about the similarities between Christian purity culture and pedophiles’ self-justifying belief systems.
On her Substack, Feminist Killjoys, philosopher Sara Ahmed returned to a fairy tale that has become iconic for her work, “The Willful Child” by the Brothers Grimm. This Teutonic authoritarian fable tells of a child who was so disobedient that her dead hand reached out of her grave and would not rest until her mother had given her hand the beating she deserved. Ahmed has reclaimed this story as an image of continuing to protest injustice.
The arm inherits the willfulness of the child insofar as it will not be kept down, insofar as it keeps coming up, acquiring a life of its own, even after the death of the body of which it is a part.
Willfulness involves persistence in the face of having been brought down, where simply to “keep going” or to “keep coming up” is to be stubborn and obstinate.
Mere persistence can be an act of disobedience.
That’s why there is nothing mere about persistence.
The most persistent people in my email inbox don’t actually exist. Humorist Daniel Lavery speaks for me when he writes, “The Worst Part About Publishing a Book in 2025 Is the New Kind of Spam.” AI has made it possible for bad actors to turn out fake book club solicitations that momentarily raise your hopes that someone read your book:
Once I see the email is signed “Curator Miracle,” sent from “el*************@***il.com,” or contains a sentence like “It’s both a celebration and a diagnosis of community” I know where I’m at, of course, but those five seconds make all the difference in the world. I don’t yet have a protective spam filter for someone emailing me to say that they just reread something of mine. It’s not that AI has made spam emails significantly better, but they do read significantly differently, especially at first glance, and it’s taking me just long enough to catch on that I’m reliably devastated a few times a week.
And they’re negging me! They’re hinting darkly about how other people just don’t understand Women’s Hotel, which has led them to feel sorry for me and want to unleash their bot army (of “40 new, deeply considered responses which reframe how readers engaged with the work”)…
And now, here are some good poems and stories that I’m pretty sure came from real human brains.
The great and powerful Ariana Reines, occultist and feminist poet, has a poem from her newest collection The Rose (Graywolf Press, 2025) at Poetry Daily, “The Hanged Man”:
After lust comes meditation
After love, hallucination
Not all of us seek the same thing
When we kneel here, & “that has to be
Okay”
Like when I fisted X at the mini golf
Course at Mount Sodom campground
Which he chose, of course, for its name
…
I loved the formal inventiveness of “Poem Wedged into the Brittlebush or Poem That Eats What Happened” by Anna Flores, a prizewinner at Frontier Poetry. She uses repetition to break down and rewrite the story of her brother’s death in battle, mimicking how the bereaved family might obsessively pick apart a memory to make sense of it, in vain.
At The Masters Review, Annesha Mitha’s short story “Valedictorian” depicts a 14-year-old Indian girl’s self-initiation into the contradictions of womanhood, with a decision that brings her closer to understanding her traditional mother, while opening a fault line between herself and her best friend. The competitiveness and uncomfortable power differentials between the girls felt really true to my experience of friendship at that age.
The Missouri Review’s online Blast featured these humorous and angsty flash pieces from Crockett Doob, “Social Media Proxy” and “Lukewarm Mess”. A taste of the latter:
Three guys sitting around a table, talking about our love lives. We’d just left a group therapy about this and had been encouraged to bond after.
So here we were, bonding away, sitting in a cafeteria-like restaurant in Brooklyn, waiting for our food.
The new guy sat across from us. He was small, muscular, wearing a tank top to show off his arms. He told us about his ex, his heartbreak, how he was still in touch with her even though she was on another continent.
“I’m back on the apps,” he said. “But the apps suck.”
This was exactly what I feared when I started going to these groups: sitting in dark restaurants, listening to musclemen complain about the apps.
But who was I to judge? Just because I didn’t do the apps, I was no better. I was in my own pickle.
I also recommend these Missouri Review Poems of the Week by Bruce Bond, “Incursions of Light 13 and 14”.
Finally, enjoy Ally Ang’s “Autoerotic Abecedarian,” an alliterative amazement.
…Beneath the shawl of
darkness, I shape my flesh like a block of clay, all its
excess overflowing onto the sheets. The smooth
flat landscape of my chest ballooning with breath, teeth
grinding like derelict machinery. In the slick heat of
here, I become my self: an embodiment of purest
instinct.
