You won’t find me active on Instagram or suggesting you pay to read. I write reviews on Goodreads and in literary journals (CALYX, The Humanist, Strange Horizons, etc.), but this is my primary writing space. I am stubborn and opinionated and I read all over the place. I might be done with certain memoirs—estranged parent, illness, or child’s illness—for the foreseeable future, as in the rest of my life. I am loving Tana French (Ireland) just now and working my way through foreign authors such as Emry Humphreys (Wales) and Halldór Laxness (Iceland). It is reading translations that makes me wish I had some affinity for languages other than my own. A dreaded year of French and two years of Latin (better) convinced me to let go.
I read about a book each week, sometimes two, sometimes I read aloud to my husband, and I have read wonderful work by Tessie Word aand D.S.G. Burke. I have an ARC from a former student to read and blogs I enjoy. David’s Lists (books) and Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American (history) are the only Substacks I read with any regularity. Both will send content without a paid subscription, though I do subscribe. I am a presence on that and several social media websites but I don’t recommend any of them.
My weaving goes all the way back to childhood. My grandmother was a weaver and gifted me a table loom when I was eight or so. The quilting is relatively recent, something I began in the 1980s because it was safe to do around my young children.
In 2024, I reentered a metal shop for the first time since college and fabricated a sterling and gold ring for my husband. It replaces one I made for him while I was still in high school and was lost more than fifty years ago on the day we married. When I went to solder the seam perfectly aligned, I change my mind and knocked the band off-center, and played with those narrowed and chased ends. You can’t see this bit of play, but it’s there on the inside of my husband’s hand. Took my breath to be handling hammers and solder again. If I find my way to a kiln, enameling again? Or a ceramic space to make animal heads? Finished the carved wooden doll I began in 2022? Or just go on writing? All of the above? So much making, so little time!
I have tried to weave down my stash of yarn, but just now I’m piecing a quilt with batik fabrics. I’ve had some of them for twenty or thirty years.
There are a few other JAN PRIDDYs in the world. I am the only one in Oregon; the only one who runs and writes, I think. I was in my 30s before I met another person with my last name, and she is entirely unrelated to me, but maybe related to my husband’s family.
My family of Priddys has about died out. Our sons were hyphenated but our grandchildren are all Andersons.
