Bark Snark and Warm and Woofies: Turns out your dog doesn’t trust you when you’re angry (and other emotion-dependant behaviours), and this is a great way to deal with work-day stress!

Being the Mean Girl, and Not Being The Mean Girl’s Mum/Mom: over at our little-sister site, RubyGirl, Abigail wrote frankly about being the mean girl at camp – and how she changed using the examples of women around her. Then, this mother realised she was inadvertently raising a future-mean girl – and writes on what happened then.

Getting Better at “human-ing”: being willing to have an opinion open a conversation instead of end it increases our skill at “humaning”, as demonstrated by this considered, calm list of why not to be afraid of trans-friendly bathrooms, and how reading fiction can make us better, more empathetic people, especially if we widen the net for people reading “girl books” – and even save the world by doing so.

ENCORE! To be or not, to read or not:  Out for an encore, some brilliant actors and well-knowns argue over how to best say the first line of Hamlet’s soliloquy, and then a discussion on why “girl books” and “boy books” should not be categories we use, or read by.

First Draft Poetry: this week, I’d like to talk about First Draft Poetry. The idea behind sharing a first draft each week is to show that anything can spark the idea, and there is worth in whacking, sticking, jotting, daubing or whatever-verbing something down.  Because it not only means that you’re engaging all sorts of energy and processes into creation, but that you’re not getting stuck behind the glaringly loud, obnoxious, or silky quiet voices saying it’s not good enough.  Of COURSE first drafts aren’t good enough – but they’re DRAFTS! They are the beginning of something.  That something may be as clunky as a Clydesdale tapdancing in custard, but it’s real, it’s definite, and it’s ready for whatever happens next. Next may mean chewing on for a month, or killing your darlings so you’re just left with one line of the original, but it’s a beautiful nub to be working on.  Segullah is a literary blog, a literary journal, and the pulse, the rioting lifeblood behind it all is to create, to write, to knit the shadows and syllables together into something wondrous, funny, heart-wrenching, or any other generosity of options out there. So please, today, this week, consider creating your own First Draft Poem. Limericks count, so do sonnets, any verse or rhyme that strikes. Write it down, drown the discouraging voices, and hear us cheering you on!