Really enjoyed writing this.Thanks to @essaydaily.bsky.social and @angermonsoon.bsky.social for making a space for essays on essays!

And here we go: Dec 1 in the 2025 @essaydaily.bsky.social Advent calendar features Jodie Noel Vinson on The Golden Girls: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"at the time, it felt like each expression of private violence was an intimacy. A secret garden where most people wouldn’t tread" Day 2 in the @essaydaily.bsky.social advent calendar is Lily Herman on T2 Trainspotting: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"Tagged T-shirts have evolved into their own Linnaean taxonomy. The messages break down into specific genera or at least accents of fragmentary grammar and syntax." The most excellent Michael Martone in the @essaydaily.bsky.social advent calendar today: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"What you learn first: how to carry. Load the hod with bricks or blocks and carry it to the job site. Unload it and do it again, again, again." Today in the @essaydaily.bsky.social advent calendar it's one of my favorite essayists, Joni Tevis on a 1910 photo: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"I hate being the girl who watches boys play videogames, but I wrecked my wrists playing World of Warcraft in the aughts" Dec 6 in @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent calendar brings you @brookewonders.bsky.social on Bloodborne and a lot more: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"From a formal point of view, we share repetition, we share paper and canvas, and we share the robot." Dec 7 in the @essaydaily.bsky.social advent calendar: Emiland Kray on HR Giger: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

I am very mad that the world didn't tell me you could visit Serge Gainsbourg's house before today, read @cathydelacruz.bsky.social's essay on it at @essaydaily.bsky.social www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"Of course, a house, a home is an exhibition—a curated collection." Cathy de la Cruz in @essaydaily.bsky.social's Dec 9 essay: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"I am an equally untrained plantswoman—for all my botanical successes, uncountable victims have nonetheless ended up on the compost heap." Dec 10 in the @essaydaily.bsky.social calendar brings you @j-sukys.bsky.social on weeds and art and more: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"The first time I watched Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, I was twenty years old, and I felt the pin on the hand grenade in my head coming loose." Let's go @leahmensch.bsky.social, Dec 11th in the @essaydaily.bsky.social Advent Calendar: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"Polygamy is the paradigm of the patriarchy. Polyamory is the paradigm of the people.…Women are on TV talking about their sex lives." @nikwalk.bsky.social in @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent calendar today: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

As a die-hard RHOSLC fan I read @nikwalk.bsky.social ‘s piece for the @essaydaily.bsky.social Advent calendar on the city and its other TV exports — polygamy and polyamory — with great interest. www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"Watching Reservation Dogs, easily one of my favorite television shows of the past ten years, makes me think about audience" Dec 13 @essaydaily.bsky.social features @utopiaminus.bsky.social on the great Reservation Dogs: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

Thanks to @essaydaily.bsky.social for letting me hop into the Advent calendar project and write about "Dreamchild," an unsettling 1985 movie about the real Alice in Wonderland, featuring Jim Henson Creature Shop puppets, that we never talk about anymore. www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

Hoo boy today's @essaydaily.bsky.social advent essay by Isabelle Robinson about rewatching Scream after a school shooting hits pretty hard: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"I remember where I was when I first saw ads for The O.C. the same way my parents remember where they were when Kennedy was shot." Dec 16 is Ted McLoof day on @essaydaily.bsky.social: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"It is this scene that I want to spend time with." David Griffith on The Godfather at 50 in @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent calendar today: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"video games are, like all forms of narrative art, empathy machines." I love reading writers moved by games, and today features @charlesjensen.bsky.social on The Last of Us Part II (spoilers involved) in @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent calendar: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"One afternoon in the spring of 2022, my husband shooed our cat off the chair in my study, sat down, and said he had something to tell me. He had just completed an application to be on the reality show Alone." Sharon Wahl in the @essaydaily.bsky.social calendar: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"I don’t think we give enough credit to weirdness in games as a source of mystery and power." New essay up on @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent calendar today on the video game NORCO from @geographyofrobots.bsky.social and advocating for weirdness (minor spoilers): www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"There's a scene near the end of the last episode of Midnight Mass that seems so clearly a pietà in its arrangement and prefacing..." @pcmadden3.bsky.social in @essaydaily.bsky.social's advent on his traditional 12/21 date: www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

"I don’t know why I binge watch. I grew up in the fifties." In today's @essaydaily.bsky.social advent essay let @alisondeming.bsky.social sell you on the pleasures of binge-watching (Poldark): www.essaydaily.org/2025/12/dec-...

We have just two more essays to go in the @essaydaily.bsky.social 2025 advent calendar. If you've missed any of them (understandable; it's a busy time of year), they're all linked here: www.essaydaily.org/p/the-essay-...

over at @essaydaily.bsky.social we’re gearing up for our annual Advent Calendar (the only time of year we actually post daily); send us yer stuff if you want to join in the advent adventures!

"When the internet told me what Justice Alito had said, my first response was What’s a Gore Vidal?" @andrew-maynard.bsky.social on Pornhub, Gore Vidal, and other Epsteins www.essaydaily.org/2025/10/reth...

"the longer I write, the more interested I am in riffing and being kind of spontaneous": Matthew Morris in conversation with Hea-Ream Lee: www.essaydaily.org/2025/09/the-...

TUCSON ESSAY ALERT

"I’ve left nearly every person I’ve dated. I’m not just someone who leaves, but I am someone who feels compelled to leave. I feel it deep in my body." @beatroxel.bsky.social on leaving, returning, collecting, and The Free Table in Tucson: www.essaydaily.org/2025/08/bea-...

For @essaydaily.bsky.social I wrote about the power of flash as feminist reclamation, Jamaica Kincaid’s genre-blurring “Girl,” and writing my flash collection ABBREVIATE. www.essaydaily.org/2025/06/sara...

new @essaydaily.bsky.social piece from @sfmontgomery.bsky.social on Kincaid’s “Girl” and the flash essay www.essaydaily.org/2025/06/sarah-fawn-montgomery-though-she-be-but.html?m=1

Read @sfmontgomery.bsky.social in @essaydaily.bsky.social on her new flash collection ABBREVIATE and on flash CNF in general: "an essay does not have to be big in order to be expansive"

Submission opportunity for essayists (deadline 7/27): theseventhwave.org/announcement...

Fine, @leahmensch.bsky.social: tucsonessayclub.org/product/i-to...

An interview with Tucson essayist and poet Katherine Larson and an excerpt from her new book The Wedding of the Foxes: substack.com/profile/3663...

Tucsonans consider signing up for the free or paid options with @tucsonessayclub.bsky.social to keep in touch? This is a great essay by Katherine Larson. Pick up her new book Wedding of the Foxes too now from @milkweededitions.bsky.social

"We want affirmation but dislike the people we become to get it. We doubt it when it’s real and clutch it closest when it’s fake." Just read this good essay by Thomas Dai in @yalereview.bsky.social from a couple years ago: yalereview.org/article/thom.... If you like this his first book just dropped!

nice

"there’s a typical narrative arc for a lot of grief books that I resisted and don’t believe in": @madnor.bsky.social and Matthew Morris in conversation at @essaydaily.bsky.social: www.essaydaily.org/2025/01/this...

"I mean, besides the tedium of such a futile exercise, there's the inevitability of missing something or losing count and guessing or having to go back to the beginning and start again." Love to see @pcmadden3.bsky.social at @essaydaily.bsky.social. www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

CATS

My newest essay, “Enough,” on @essaydaily.bsky.social’s Advent Calendar: www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

"The only response you hear is a distant groaning, a giant media machine rising slowly to full height…The pile purports to know the right answers about damn near every human question." Lydia Paar, Dec 23 @essaydaily.bsky.social: www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

"On this first visit to my country my children have a tiny window into my past and it’s about to close…. How then do I bring them in?" Noam Dorr, Dec 20 @essaydaily.bsky.social: www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

"the act of reading revives the things written, happens them again." Dec 21 is the traditional date for @pcmadden3.bsky.social to join the @essaydaily.bsky.social Advent Calendar, and he delivers: www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

Every time we open the front closet it's like a beacon goes up, alerting him that the opportunity to climb the slatted doors and trap himself at the top has arrived. He can't get down by himself, yet will bite those who attempt to help him.

I wrote an essay on becoming nostalgia, dressing funny, and buying old shit on eBay to make me feel better. Thanks to @essaydaily.bsky.social and @angermonsoon.bsky.social for the chance to share! www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

“By the time our senses reach our brains, we’re already perceiving the past. So we’re left trying to reconcile our forward moving bodies with our backwards looking minds.” 🚨🚨🚨 @jasonsepac.bsky.social on ‘00s nostalgia for @essaydaily.bsky.social advent!!!!!!!! www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

ruminations on safety signs, sugar eggs, and standees. Many thanks to @essaydaily.bsky.social and @angermonsoon.bsky.social for inviting me to the annual Advent Party. www.essaydaily.org/2024/12/dec-...

An essay on Mick Foley? Merry Christmas to me.