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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 23/08/2026

late summer prairie, Wisconsin; whenever I see the phrase "the door into summer," this is the summer I imagine beyond the frame

purple thistles and goldenrod in a Wisconsin prairie; behind, an aspen grove just starting to turn and deep blue sky

golden window through an oak savannah onto a wet prairie

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

TIL Wisconsin has an official state soil (Antigo silt loam) & there’s a song about it

text and music to the Antigo Silt Loam song by F.D. Hole

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

using this as an excuse to post an extraordinary description of shearing a sheep from Wescott's 1924 novel The Apple of the Eye. such perfect minute observation--the click of the shears on dried dung! the pith color of the inner fleece! even the choreography of sheep and human bodies is so exact

The shearer clipped down where the wool was thin over the belly, folded back the matted fabric, and cut between the skin and the two lapels thus formed, widening them quickly. When he came to the legs he slit open the bedraggled fringes, and as if he were skinning it, freed a tapering limb of wool. Where the ankle was hung with lumps of dung as large as birds’ eggs, the shears made a brittle click. The wool, solid like a hide, began to separate from the ewe’s body, and at last was attached only to her sharp back, from which it hung limply. Then he twisted about, pressed the head and forefeet in the crook of his arm, and worked downward along the spine. The wool, on one side grey with dirt, and yellowish on the other like the inner skin

of an orange, sank in a soft heap on the floor. He straightened up and stepped indifferently away. The sheep staggered a moment in her semi-human position, and fell forward on her feet; the pointed hooves struck the floor; the ankles crumpled forward and straightened; she kicked out her hind legs nimbly, and stalked helplessly forward. Her yellow, emaciated body, planed and pitted by the shears, looked raw and unfinished between the wedge-shaped head and the bony grey feet. She stumbled, and nodded her head sickly. The two men, moving forward, herded her toward the stall. On the floor, dented and crushed into splinters by the feet of the horses which had been driven in with loads of hay or grain, the fleece lay bright, warm, and limp like a skin.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I had forgotten that Djuna Barnes's Nightwood takes place in the Les Misérables extended universe

She strayed into the rue Picpus, into the gardens of the convent of L'Adoration Perpetuelle. She talked to the nuns and they, feeling that they were looking at someone who would neer be able to ask for, or receive, mercy, blessed her in their hearts and gave her a sprig of rose from the bush. They showed her where Jean Valjean had kept his rakes, and where the bright little ladies of the pension came to quilt their covers; and Robin smiled, taking the spray, and looked down at the tomb of Lafayette and thought her unpeopled thoughts. Kneeling in the chapel, which was never without a nun going over her beads, Robin, trying to bring her mind to this abrupt necessity, found herself worrying about her height. Was she still growing?"

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

also have some Wisconsin trans folks from the 1890s: Mrs. Howe, a Kenosha woman who ran a charity dancing troupe, and Frank Blunt, a MKE/Eau Claire guy whose wife threatened to take their case to SCOTUS

"Anna Morris, alias Frank Blunt, the woman who has tried to be a man for the last 15 years was sentenced to the penitentiary for one year... She was arrested several months ago in Milwaukee, charged with stealing $175... It was then discovered that the prisoner was a woman, although she had worn masculine attire nearly all her life... After the sentence had been passed, Gertrude Field, a woman who claimed to have married the prisoner in Eau Claire, fell upon the neck of the prisoner and wept for half an hour. This woman has furnished all the money for Blunt's defense and now proposes to carry the case to the Supreme Court."

"The society people of Kenosha are worked up over the discovery that a person known as 'Mrs. Howe' is not a woman but a man. He went there some time ago to get up a 'Kirmess' for a church, and several ladies joined in the performance. The peculiarity of her manners was commented on at the time, but none suspected the real truth. Now there is regret on the part of the participants that they joined 'Mrs. Howe's troupe of dancers.'"

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 26/07/2026

yesterday I returned from 2 weeks of hiking in the US west w nearly no internet. like its ppl, this country is at once brutal & deadly & heartbreakingly beautiful. it's also parched, charred, clearcut, often over 100F. idk how the west will survive the 2030s. anyway here's me at the Badlands

guy in sunglasses against sweeping dun and rose hillsides of soft, eroded rock; the west is shockingly pastel

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 24/07/2026

ft the very wet, very green, & very beautiful Pukaskwa NP

rich green temperate rainforest coastline in grey fog

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/07/2026

old hyperlocal histories of small towns are such bizarre & fascinating reading & it‘s sad that the internet/death of print journalism means they’re unlikely to be printed anymore

Cover of Mineral Point: A History by George Fielder; mineral point is where Wisconsin’s nickname “the badger state” came from—not the animal but a bunch of 1830s lead miners who were so fixated on striking it rich they never bothered to build houses or grow veggies but literally lived in dirty scrapes in the ground, supposedly like badgers tho that’s an insult to badgers

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

the great folks @locusmag.bsky.social are crowdfunding a new best-of anthology--starting with 2025, a banner year for short fiction! In a time when traditional publishing faces so many threats, collections like this matter more than ever. support it at locusmag.com/anthology!

To the left side of the image, a hardcover book The cover of the book shows an illustration of a caped figure in front of a surreal landscape. The title reads: "The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Of the Year: Volume 1". Text to the right of the book says: "The Locus Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Of the Year: Volume 1. An anthology of recommended short fiction from 2025"

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

there was also this. mid-tier cursed object

pony made of logs in the middle of a rainy wood

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 09/06/2026

ok ok one last eerie thing about this. photo-referent for MC was toilet-horseshoe-guy, but the character is actually semi-based on Aldo Leopold, the famous WI conservationist. they don’t *not* look alike

toilet-horseshoe-guy, a disheveled white guy in thin glasses

Aldo Leopold, a seemingly older version of the same white guy, somewhat but not much less disheveled with similar glasses

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

Btw the novel is not about toilets but a WWI conservationist who discovers a magic power to grow plants, is drafted to grow war timber, & realizes that magic is Bad, Ecologically. Also about self-harm I guess, & it’s gay. If you want more it’s here: uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/D/Dry-...

cover of the novel DRY LAND by B. Pladek, a tree coming out of darkness

one more stock photo of the Kohler's toilet wall, because why not

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

only to find a *different* photo of the same horseshoe team from the same year—and a new photo of my MC—clearly the same guy! still no idea who he is. But he still lives with the toilets in the toilet museum. Bless him

my protagonist again, this time kneeling in a tam o shanter, posing with a horseshoe. it's the same guy! still no idea who he is

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 06/06/2026

the toilet museum and my MC: a thread. for my novel DRY LAND (2023) I found photo referents for chars. my MC was based an unknown guy in a 1930s horseshoe team pic I saw in the dinky basement museum of the Kohler Design Center—a bath/toilet showroom in Sheboygan WI that features a wall of toilets

my protagonist Rand Brandt, a weedy man in glasses and a collared shirt -- I don't actually know his name

the wall of toilets at the Kohler Design Center, featuring one of the many tasteful nude mannequins posed among the cans

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 02/06/2026

this weekend my husband & I visited Pendarvis, an old Cornish miner's cottage c. 1830 in southwest WI that was restored into a tearoom in the 1930s by an openly gay couple, Bob Neal & Edgar Hellum; a reminder that there's so much interesting queer history outside the metropoles

Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum standing in front of the Pendarvis property

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

learned this from an excellent talk by curator Robert Cozzolino about the vibrant group of c20 midwest surrealists working in/around the Madison-MKE-Chicago corridor that included Priebe, Gertrude Abercrombie, John Wilde, Dudley Huppler, & others; extraordinary stuff

John Wilde's "Wisconsin Wildeworld" painting, a blue-toned painting of a southern WI suburb filled with strange animals and classical ruins; the artist in bright red and checkered pants stands in the foreground

Gertrude Abercrombie's "Self-Portrait of My Sister," a self-portrait of Abercrombie wearing a green dress and long black gloves

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 29/05/2026

TIL that my uni has the papers & art of Karl Priebe, a fantastic c20 WI queer surrealist known for his detailed bird paintings & loving/celebratory portraits of the midwest's Black arts community, incl his lover, Ebony editor Frank Harriott, who died tragically young; Priebe was his caregiver

surreal nightjar perched against a teal-black background with an egg below, looking at a collection of colored moths

portrait of Frank Harriott, wearing a wry expression and a carnation boutonnière

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

an oak savanna in spring is the greenest green

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

hey this is tomorrow! @alexjennings.bsky.social, @lpkindred.bsky.social, and me are reading at Arts & Literature Laboratory in Madison at 7 pm! come through if you're around! details here: artlitlab.org/events/lab4-...

poster of Alex Jennings, LP Kindred, and Ben Pladek: Speculative fiction is coming to our Watershed Reading, Saturday May 23 at 7 pm

poster from Art Lit Lab's facebook page

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

got my most anticipated 2026 read from @littlepuss.net today & I’m pumped for the moon prism power make-up of it all mecha nonsense w Lispector footnotes & buckwild incantatory typography, yes pls

Purple cover of plastic prism void by violet allen

truly wild incantatory typography inside the book

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/05/2026

sometimes the abandoned picnic ground is a liminal space

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 03/05/2026

Wisconsin spring is my favorite green

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 29/04/2026

& yet: my students/colleagues remain wonderful, & in strange synergy I finished a notebook tonight. I get to start another tomorrow. onto pastures new

a written-in notebook in scratchy cheap ballpoint pen, my favorite type

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 23/04/2026

one of my favorite portraits of early summer, from Glenway Wescott's 1924 novel The Apple of the Eye. I love hyperlocal nature writing, & describing horses as "mahogany" against green fields is so strikingly true of June in Wisconsin.

3. SUMMER CONVERSATIONS
Like the breaking of a dream, spring vanished. The pearl air, and the moisture and melancholy richness, and corollas of wet wax, and tart aromas, and the languorous dew, and dusk falling all afternoon, and the mist—their season was over. Disappearing, they uncovered a bright land in rectangles of graduated green, with trees immobile in straight lines like fountains of vegetation. Meadows of small flowers in flat colours—mullein, mustard, blueweed, and sweet clover; crowds of bees, glistening and mechanical. It was June, the morning month, trodden by bronze cattle, horses of mahogany. Slowly the eminent, poised sun arose, and sank deliberately.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 21/04/2026

Auden's "In Memory of Ernst Toller" been jangling in my head lately "but existing is believing / We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving."

In Memory of Ernst Toller
The shining neutral summer has no voice
To judge America, or ask how a man dies;
And the friends who are sad and the enemies who rejoice
Are chased by their shadows lightly away from the grave
Of one who was egotistical and brave,
Lest they should learn without suffering how to forgive.
What was it, Ernst, that your shadow unwittingly said?
O did the child see something horrid in the woodshed
Long ago? Or had the Europe which took refuge in your head
Already been too injured to get well?
O for how long, like the swallows in that other cell,
Had the bright little longings been flying in to tell
About the big friendly death outside,
Where people do not occupy or hide;
No towns like Munich; no need to write?
Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among
The other war-horses who existed till they’d done
Something that was an example to the young.
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
It is their tomorrow hangs over the earth of the living
And all that we wish for our friends; but existing is believing
We know for whom we mourn and who is grieving.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

husband took a pic tonight that’s probably the coolest I will ever look, thanks horrible 2026 Milwaukee floods I guess? also pictured: stairs to nowhere

middle-aged trans man sits by flooded river

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

teaching a Romanticism class in the fall again and keep thinking about how we're doing PBS's "England in 1819" as a checklist www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45118/...

England in 1819

By Percy Bysshe Shelley

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 01/03/2026

1. offsite reading on Thursday night w a ton of rad SFF writers:

Proxima arcanum reading, current space at 421 north Howard, doors 5.30 pm

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

The end of "Scars Poetica," the penultimate poem in Patricia Smith's magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:

I feel like I’ve been collecting answers to the question "what good can poetry do?" for years now, as I think about it a lot and even wrote a historical novel (RIP never sold) kind of about it. It's striking how so many poets respond with some version of Auden's "poetry makes nothing happen." This is Smith's version, from the penultimate poem in her magnificent 2025 collection The Intentions of Thunder:

"On the F train in New York, a woman was set on fire.
Click for the photo. She stands in the train car, sways
like a bone-tired commuter, fully aflame, alone. It was
decided that the controlled burn was best. All I am is

poet. I am small, just one enfeebled fist, a whimper
beneath the weight. I am seventy years of witness that
poetry can change your life, but changes nothing else.
No unleashed havoc calms to my quatrains, no ghazal

coaxes our earth from her cliff's edge. I write because
it's contrary to kill. Because anemone sounds the way
it does. I write because George Floyd cried out for
his dead mother. I write because she answered him."

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

having written upwards of 90k, fiction & nonfiction, about-or-thinly-veiled-about my favorite Modernist antifascist wife-guy Bryher (pictured), there's now the possibility I might get to publish a bit of it in essay form this/next year. fingers crossed it happens, & grateful for the chance.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the mid-late 30s, a decade she spent doing a great deal of heartbreaking psychoanalysis to try & cure herself of--or at least explain--her lifelong belief that she was a boy trapped in a girl's body (her words, circa 1920). Using "her" because Bryher did, though if he'd been alive today he would have been an insufferable bro with a weightroom set-up & a despicable job in finance. At the very least he would have boxed & told you too much about it.

Bryher, a butch white person with dark hair, in the 1930 Paul Robeson movie Borderline alongside Charlotte Arthur. They're standing in a bar. Bryher got a slouchy double-breasted coat situation happening, and Charlotte, in a wrinkled housecoat, is pretending to be, or is actually, smashed.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

Kenneth Macpherson, “Big Dog” to Bryher’s “little dog” (also briefly Bryher’s kept husband), often got elaborate w his furry sign-offs:

a sketch of a dog in a thong with an umbrella

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 12/12/2025

back to the Beinecke for a sliver of sneak research today & Bryher’s power to convince everyone in her circle to adopt & sign letters with fursonas continues to amuse: this is her analyst Hanns Sachs, aka Turtle

A letter signed with a dorky turtle drawing

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

my beloved "sad man tries to crack dream-Mary Renault's egg and she says no" story from 2024's @strangehorizons.bsky.social just got a lovely podcast treatment, produced by the excellent @darthj.uno and read absolutely beautifully by @ardenfitzroy.bsky.social! strangehorizons.com/wordpress/po...

Opening of "The Spindle of Necessity" on Strange Horizons: "Andrew was convinced the writer had been trans. By this point his friends were tired of hearing about it, but he had no one else to tell besides the internet, and he was too smart for that. That would be asking for it."

cover of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, a young white man with reddish hair in a green coat

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

...& who should be better known for writing hundreds of bitchy, brilliant letters* chronicling trans life between the wars via the proleptic trifecta of lay psychoanalysis (excessive), cock puns (bad), & fursonas (elaborate). *now housed in Yale's Beinecke library -- 200+ boxes, neatly typed.

Bryher signs a letter as "Fido", addressed to H.D, who is "horse" (alternately Lynx, Kat, Cat, Mog). The picture is of a griffon terrier; "griffon" was one of Bryher's 10+ code words for cock.

Letter from Bryher to H.D, signed Fido, with an addition by Kenneth Macpherson, then H.D.'s husband, writing as "Rover" and written in truly excruciating doggy baby-talk: "Darlingest, wuffs from the bogger i mean bugger i mean bigger if not better dawg. Lovely letters from the Lynix. Tell Gayog to come orf it and be 'human. Sounds too bloody awfyl, I know him like that too, one feels like crushing a damp ice cream on the nape of his nuque. Prague in Tibbalds Road sounds positively underworld." "Gayog" is Bryher, "Rover's" fellow dog.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 09/11/2025

Midwest queer scholars: if you’re at this year’s MMLA at Marquette, I’m giving a paper on my mild obsession Bryher, the 20thc transmasc bajillionaire semi-known for being H.D.’s wife-guy, funding every Modernist ever, & saving people from nazis… www.midwest-mla.org/digital-prog...

black and white photo of Bryher, a butch English person with an Eton crop situation going on

Bryher and H.D. sit on a bench bouncing Perdita, H.D.'s daughter who they raised together, on their laps. Bryher is wearing knee-length breeches and long socks; H.D's wearing a dress and squishy hat

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

[whispers quietly] you weren’t a good boy. you were the best

gritty green hiking bag busted in most places

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

WI/Madison folks: come out to @roomofonesownbooks.bsky.social next Wed, Nov 5 at 6 pm to celebrate the magnificent new short story collection from @syr.bsky.social, WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE, out now with @stelliform.press! It includes an OPEN MIC, so come read! <3 roomofonesown.com/event/2025-1...

Cover of WHAT A FISH LOOKS LIKE by Syr Hayati Beker: a mermaid and a fish with legs about to make out on a background of black floatiness and stars

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Le Guin here rhyming closely with a line from Auden's Yeats elegy that I think about daily: "for poetry makes nothing happen... it survives, / a way of happening, a mouth."

From Le Guin's Orsinian Tales:

"Du holde Kunst, ich danke dir.

He sat still a long time. Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 27/06/2025

It's still pride so I should mention, if anyone on here liked "Spindle," that I wrote a gay little novel about a man whose magic power to grow plants cannot, to his dismay, save nature. Also WWI and Wisconsin history! Get it from the lovely @uwiscpress.bsky.social: uwpress.wisc.edu/Books/D/Dry-...

the cover of DRY LAND: white text on a black background from which a green tree sprouts.

PRAISE FOR DRY LAND:
“A winning combination of history, magic, and science.” —Kirkus
“B. Pladek’s Dry Land is a quest narrative, seeking forms of renewal for ravaged ecosystems and fraught human relationships. With quiet grace and a fearless gaze toward the entanglement of preservation and destruction, this meditative novel questions both the romance of landscape and the landscape of romance.”
—Sofia Samatar, author of The White Mosque and A Stranger in Olondria

“A gorgeously imagined, deeply personal story of love and war, of the places we make and the places that make us. But most movingly, Pladek has written an ode to the ordinary magic of our extraordinary world.”
—Karen Joy Fowler, author of Booth
“Rand is not interested in becoming the war hero everyone wants him to be, but he’s beguiled by the idea of becoming a savior of nature. These glorious but unreal fantasies come into conflict in the midst of Pladek’s lush, evocative descriptions of Wisconsin plant life. As a meditation on our place in the wilderness and our capacity for hubris, Dry Land feels especially relevant.”
—Charlie Jane Anders, The Washington Post

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

queers, if you want a book to hold your heart through the current awful, preorder this magnificent collection by @syr.bsky.social, out in September from @stelliform.press. it's a guidebook on how to love a world (& each other) through constant, unendurable loss. www.stelliform.press/index.php/pr...

Cover of Syr Hayati Beker's What a Fish Looks Like: black, with two silvery-blue merpeople gently cradling each other at center (one human-head-fish-tail, the other fish-head-human-legs).

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Hey Milwaukee folks, Anodyne coffee is unionizing! You should send an email to support them. Details below / in alt text.

Flyer: Anodyne Workers Formed a Union! Support us in our fight to preserve and improve our standards and culture. How can you help? Send an email to hello@fairwave.com saying 1) that you support the workers, 2) urge them not to engage in union-busting, 3) don't waste our tax dollars on an unnecessary election when 94% signed cards, 4) voluntarily recognize the union NOW. For more info, contact us at info@mashworkers.org.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I didn't know the @locusmag.bsky.social awards had an actual ballot (thought it was all write-in) and realized today that "The Spindle of Necessity" is on it! it's still the trans story of my heart, so if you feel moved to read/vote, I'd be honored. link: strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-...

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 23/03/2025

so excited to dive into Dennis E. Staples's newest!!

Cover of Dennis E. Staples's novel Passing Through a Prairie Country, a black book cover with a red skull on it.

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

everything's still shit & I'm trying to focus my fight-back in non-social-media spaces---but good things still happen. eg: I have an ARC of A/S/L!! one of the epigraphs is from FFVII! I'm an FFVIII girlie but still, respect

Cover of A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton: black with pixellated buildings a la early Zelda or that one King's Quest I played to death, I think it was IV

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B. Pladek @bpladek.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Hugos are open, so I'd be honored if you considered "The Spindle of Necessity" @strangehorizons.bsky.social, my only piece of fiction this year & the trans story of my heart. strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-...

The Spindle of Necessity first lines, white text on a black background.

Cover of Mary Renault's The Charioteer, a young white man in a green coat on a yellow background.

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