Quetzalcoatl

So, the first week of September, 2019. The first week of school and the first week of my first Maternity Leave begins.  The below suggestions are all about the baby books that I have loved and ones that I'm yet to ponder over: 1. The post natal workshop with @beccyhands and @candidmidwife was the best thing I have been to all pregnancy. Made me realise how important it is to look after me after birth. Thank you ladies and thank you for the gift of your incredible book. 2. Gift from @lilyhitch89 by @theunmumsymum (currently reading) and I hope it’ll make me feel ok to be a weird mum. 3. Our hypnobirthing journey with @londonhypnobirthing and the book by @theyesmummum has changed the way I think and am informed about birth. All new mums need this. 4. My first book that Oscar got us when we were first pregnant. Very special times have led to this point and this very special book by @mother_of_daughters is honest, chronologically satisfying and really comforting. ...

Moonrise by Sarah Crossan This is my first verse novel. For someone who loves poetry, I leapt into this and whizzed through it. 24 hours and my first affair with the verse novel was over. It was wonderful. As we decided to teach it to our Year 9s this year, I’ve unfortunately been contemplating how I’d teach it as I read through it. Even though I’ll be on maternity leave and won’t be teaching it this year, I still can’t help but think about how I’d teach it. So...I’ve read it differently.  I’ve read it in the eyes of a teacher rather than me. It’s almost impossible to turn that off. I now can’t read any dystopian fiction as I’ll automatically compare it to Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 like we have to for the exam. It’s quite frustrating. Maybe that goes one day. I’ll even read a newspaper and think which articles I could use for certain classes. Text and words are everywhere and that’s what I like to bring into class - new writing to enhance previous study. Anyway, back to Mo...

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones This one is for you, Emma ( @Comment_Ed ). I can’t help but compare this to To Kill a Mockingbird . Rather than ending the book on an innocent black man being sentenced for a crime he didn’t commit, this novel starts with it (a rape in both cases). Rather than the novel being about how white people live in their southern town, it’s about how black people live in their southern town. Rather than the black man being shot and dying before he got a chance of parole, it is about a man black man being set free. Not only does it show how America still judges people, and how the justice system may still be unjust, but it does show how it’s changing (albeit gradually) due to freedom being given. Structurally, the mirroring of character narratives is clever where the dramatic irony is that the reader can create their own version of events by knowing all the points of view. It’s intimate through the epistolary section at the beginning. We feel li...

The House on the Strand by  Daphne Du Maurier Ahhh...back into my old comfy shoes of Du Maurier's writing. Her patchwork quilted hills of Cornwall are like my comfort blanket. This book came into my hands through speaking to Dr Laura Varnam on Instagram ( @lauravarnam ). I saw she was a lecturer and writing a book on Du Maurier. Ever since I read Rebecca (I picked it up at Woolton Hill Church Fete about 10 years ago) I fell in love with her gothic writing. I guess I fell for it because I had recently gone through a break up and in a new relationship as an adult. I was starting to understand about how living in the shadow of a previous partner can be soul destroying and ghostly. The older we get, the more past we have to live with.  The House on the Strand was set in a very typical Cornish backdrop for Du Maurier novel. I spent every summer in the Cornish fishing towns of Portloe, Mevagissey and more, as my Grandparents moved there when I was 4 or 5. I have a comfor...

I discovered Ocean Vuong when he won the TS Eliot prize in 2017 for his first collection of poetry, Night Sky with Exit Wounds. I used this collection in class and picked out a poem which we annotated and analysed whilst studying modern poetry. When his new novel came out, I was surprised. I naively thought that poets are poets. However, the prose writer in Vuong is naturally poetic. The blurring of forms is beginning to form. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong I recently wrote in my journal that writing is all about revealing secrets and the reader is the person to uncover them - whatever their perception is. Here, in Vuong's novel, we are thrown into the mind of a man through a confessional letter that may not even reach its sender; but it reaches us. It has to reach us; it has to reach someone. One man’s story is another woman’s discovery and vice versa. Favourite Quotes:  ‘Only the future revisits the past’ ‘Sometimes I don’t know what or who we ar...

Here marks the first three books of my summer reads 2019. The reviews seem to get longer and longer the further into the summer I go (maybe my brain starts to be more productive after being zapped of any energy with the busy GCSE preparations). So, firstly, a parent of an influential, talented pupil suggested the following novel to me last year during Parents' Evening. The following week, I gave the book to her daughter as a present and I've finally got the time to read it. This young lady in particular is an amazing writer and I hope she continues to read, write, and love the cathartic sense of writing. 1. Room by Emma Donoghue A few days in to summer holidays and the first read was already finished. I clearly wanted to indulge into a non set text novel. I whizzed through in a few days whilst I recovered from a busy summer term. I was impressed with the narrative voice and the storyline is shocking. At the beginning, it was brilliantly written from a young boy whose ...

"Quetzalcoatl is all about my ponderings within the world of maternity leave and beyond. The symbolic nature of Quetzalcoatl represents how this blog will stand for discussions on change, books that inspire me (either as a woman, a mother, or a teacher), and any other creative contemplations." Continuing on from my script above that explains the blog, Quetzalcoatl comes from the name of my first poetry collection written during my university years. I chose the name as he was an Aztec God of learning and knowledge (symbolised through a feathered serpent, right). Learning and knowledge is something I've continued to be passionate about and believe is the core of improving yourself as a human. Being an English teacher helps me to pursue this passion but underneath it all, it's all about curiosity. This curiosity can sometimes be a downfall, but selected carefully and calmly, it can be the window into new worlds of knowledge where a path in life may be revealed or a...