iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

And a very good course it is, too; shining well-informed lights into (to me, at least) unfamiliar corners to see what darts out. And lots of additional material. Just what your October needs...

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

Quite disgustingly pleased with myself: I had never done lino-cut prints before, but my sister gave me a workshop on Sunday, and (under *close* supervision) I created four of these beauts, from a charcoal drawing of the view from my kitchen years ago, when I lived in North-East England.

Grey. black, and white lino-cut print of a snowy field at twilight, with branches of a larch (I think) on the left, and a shed beside a tall tree where the hill meets the sky.

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Reposted by Dr Susan Maxwell

James Bailey @drjamesbailey.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

Ticket sales have nudged up a fraction, which is great. I’d really love for next week to go ahead, so do snap up a ticket if you’re dithering. I do a pretty decent signature, too, if you like that sort of thing… www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/waterstone...

A signed copy of Like a Cat Loves a Bird: The Nine Lives of Muriel Spark. Next to my signature is a doodle of a cat, alongside a cat-shaped badge which has ‘Muriel Spark Fan Club’ on it.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

If you are in, or near, Liverpool, please go in my stead! I'm too far away....

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 04/07/2026

Well, that conference was magnificent. And I wasn't even in Loughborough, but attending remotely from the middle of Ireland. I may have found my tribe... Also, one of my favourite podcasts, @weirdstudiesphil.bsky.social got a mention in today's keynote. #WeirdModernism ❤️🙃

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

As an archivist & records manager - bwahahahahahahahaha!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Need more paradoxography in your life? Of course you do - here you go.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 16/02/2026

What Saturday would not be improved by hearing Gothic experts talk about Robert Aickman? I still have much of Aickman to read; I expect the TBR reading-order to change by Saturday afternoon....

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Reposted by Dr Susan Maxwell

Susan Maxwell @ Bibliothèque des Refusés @bibliorefuses.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

✴️ /｜\ //｜\\ ///｜\\\ ////｜\\\\ /////｜\\\\\ ｜ I hope that the festive season finds you happy and peaceful. If it is otherwise, I hope that the coming year brings relief, solace and better times.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 25/12/2025

Christmas brings many things, happily always including books. I greatly enjoyed Mervyn Wall's Leaves for the Burning, so look forward to the Fursey books. A snippet read from Bradbury, on writing being a tonic, was joyful. Schattenfroh...I admit trepidation, as well as intrigue.

Four books received as Christmas gifts: The Unfortunate Fursey, The Return of Fursey (by Mervyn Wall), Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, and the frighteningly large Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 02/09/2025

Already something to look forward to next year...!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

There's something about Autumn that seems to call for academic pursuits, and I have 10 Tuesday evenings accounted for in one fell swoop!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 22/05/2025

Not on social media recently (🌞🌞= busy👩‍🌾); today's the 10th anniversary of my last day at OPCW. 10 years of the occasionally hair-raising plunge into horticulture that followed is compressed, for your entertainment, into about three minutes. (Not the day job. You know what a desk looks like..)

youtube.com

10th Anniversary

YouTube video by Bibliothèque des Refusés

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Good Red Herring still popping up occasionally! Thank you @bookaneer808.bsky.social!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

Someone knows all the right things to say....also means I can borrow the loan of The Empusium!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Coincidentally, the birth and death dates of the outsider artist, Henry Darger, are also 12th & 13th April respectively.

Black and white photograph of the Outsider artist, Henry Darger, seated by some steps outside on a sunny day.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Publishers reject in different ways (apart from those who opt for lingering silence 😠); I have had some kindly ones, but one that still tickles is one that sounds *hugely* sarcastic but probably wasn't: "It is entirely possible another publisher might be interested". Definite "yeah, right" vibe.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

On a day off, transcribing/finishing up. Found short story notes stuck in the back of a notebook, with this in the margin: "Aim to do some sketchy sh1t, doo-dah, doo-dah/Hope I get away with it, o-de-do-dah-day". I'm not sure if this was my, or someone else's comment, on current public life, but...

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Meant to mark 12th & 13th April: death & birth dates respectively of Josephine Baker & Samuel Beckett. Both born 1906, long-term residents of France, awarded the Croix de Guerre, and (the real biggie) characters in a short story I've just written. #AmWriting #Beckett #Baker #SpeculativeFiction

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 14/04/2025

Am having great fun reading these epistolatory stories, written as (so far) transcript of 911 call, text msg, email, a journal (with framing letter), missing person documentation, concurrent letters (w/struck-out text), 8th century 'writings', and docs released under FOI. #AmReading #GothicArchives

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

We have abruptly returned to a more usual April: after a month (more?) of sun and virtually no rain, we've just had a short shower of...hail. But with rainbow.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 13/04/2025

Latest book acquisition: Beckett's The Unnamable, purchased in @booksupstairs.bsky.social and read Eimear McBride's foreword in their café, snickering aloud at her description of Beckett's prose as having been "stripped to the bone and the bone itself boiled white."

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

It's cold, windy, and rainy here today, and I have laughed inordinately at this.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Book post is always good, but Contributor's Copy Book Post is particularly good. Literature, The Gothic and the Reconstruction of History: The Past as Nightmare; ed. D. Renshaw & N. Cocks, Reading University, pub. Routledge. Ch. 9 (archives, M.R. & Henry James) by the blurry figure in the photo.

Author looking pleased with self, holding contributor's copy of Literature, The Gothic, and the Reconstruction of History, with bookshelves in background.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Being on leave, splitting the day between horticulture and creativity, is just so...well, *me*. I can't think how the Good Fairy of Private Incomes managed to miss so ideal a recipient...Sleeping on the job, probably. Out partying with the Tooth Fairy. #WritingLife

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

And usually good to authors. I was ordering a book over the phone once, and heard the bookseller shout at a customer "Hey, X - you can tell your partner we just sold another one!" That's a creative ecosystem for you...!

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

Yet more! Never be stuck for a bookshop.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

...and excellent Sheelagh na Gig (Cloughjordan), Halfway Up The Stairs (Greystones, esp. for children's), & The Winding Stair (an actual Bookshop on the Quays); all deliver, all have v. informed staff who *love* books, & W Stair & Books U have food. @sheelaghnagig.bsky.social #BookshopsRock

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

St Patrick's Day seems an apposite one on which to discover (from James Joyce, as faithfully recorded in The Dalkey Archive) that the Holy Ghost is "merely an exudation of God the Father", the disappointment to the Holy Ghost Fathers having been acknowledged. #TheDalkeyArchive #FlannOBrien

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 16/03/2025

Good weekend so far: 1200 more words in my novella during a @britfantasysoc.bsky.social writing sprint yesterday, and 10 li'l tomato seedlings have germinated. Only 52 more to go. (Tomatoes. 52 more tomato plants. Quite a lot more words). Tomato pics from about 3 yrs ago. #AmWriting #Horticulture

Ripening salad tomatoes with rocket, borage, and deadnettle

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

It's not exactly June bustin' out all over, but very Spring-like here today in County Soggy, and an astonishing 2 weeks with no rain. #Springtime #GoHorticulturalists

A line of small trees just beginning to produce leaf

A single white flower against a bare tree (identity unknown, sorry), and a blue sky.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 12/03/2025

"Apples", (Emilia Hart Of the Flesh anthology): from ordinary life to odd to food-as-revenge (echoes of Stella Duffy's "Martha Grace"). Well done, sometimes funny (marriage recalled as "less a partnership than a process of mutual infantalisation"), but harsh on the lads. #AmReading #ShortStories

boroughpress.co.uk

Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror - The Borough Press

'Outstandingly weird and memorable' GUARDIAN'Deliciously creepy' NEW SCIENTISTFear never dies…

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

A moment's thought for The Dalkey Archive's Mick Shaghnessy; his speculations and questions "made his head feel like a hive full of bees", a sensation with which I am familiar, and for which I don't even have the excuse of St Augustine, Joyce or De Selby.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 11/03/2025

Finding new writers with @jonathangibbs.bsky.social 's A Personal Anthology. In Souvankham Thammavongsa's taut "Mom is in Love with Randy Travis" a refugee replaces creation with consumption to manage the new world, while her husband hopes she sees "his silence was love, his restraint was love".

electricliterature.com

Mom Is in Love with Randy Travis - Electric Literature

“Randy Travis”by Souvankham Thammavongsa The only thing my mother liked about the new country we were living in was its music. We had been given a small radio as part of the welcome package from the r...

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Have staggered back in from the field. If you need me, I'm the one holding a gin martini...

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

For International Women's Day, random fav. novels that are by women: Piranesi (S Clarke); Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead (O Tokarczuk); The Abbess of Crewe (M Spark); The Woman in Black (S Hill); Moominland Midwinter (T Jansson); The Haunting of Hill House (S Jackson); To The Lighthouse;

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 08/03/2025

Robert Lautner's story "Shade" in which a child miner in Bolivia's Cerro Rico, the Mountain That Eats Men stays on the good, if terrible, side of the underground god, El Tío.

boroughpress.co.uk

Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror - The Borough Press

'Outstandingly weird and memorable' GUARDIAN'Deliciously creepy' NEW SCIENTISTFear never dies…

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

A Personal Anthology: weekly guest selection of 12 stories. Great way to find new ones, or be reminded of old favourites. Clare Reddaway included Calvino's delightful "The Distance of the Moon" & Perkins Gilman's classic "The Yellow Wallpaper." #AmReading #ShortStories @jonathangibbs.bsky.social

apersonalanthology.com

A Personal Anthology

Writers, critics and others dream-edit a personal anthology of their favourite short stories

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

It was the Sheffield Gothic Reading Group, & the short story was Bridget Collins' "The Fruiting Body". I did not enjoy it as much as others, but both it and The Metamorphosis have a little vampiric something in the way that someone/thing is thriving as someone else dies.

sheffieldgothic.home.blog

February Reading Group: Beginnings

We invite you to join us for our first reading group in 2025! Date: Thursday, February 27Time: 17:00 – 18:00Place: either in person in Hub 4, Jessop Westor online: meet.google.com/ptn-shvp-yg…

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

I don't usually choose horror, but I bought this so as to read one of the stories to be discussed at an on-line reading group (the other text was Kafka's The Metamorphosis). Then had a distracting day at work and MISSED THE GROUP. Sigh. Enjoying the collection, so there's that.

boroughpress.co.uk

Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror - The Borough Press

'Outstandingly weird and memorable' GUARDIAN'Deliciously creepy' NEW SCIENTISTFear never dies…

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Sometimes your chosen book is going that extra mile for you...

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

J K Chuku's "Flight 2212" in the Of the Flesh anthology: corporate-gothic, peer pressure, yet more beauty standards, and a last-ditch response to enforced consumerism.

boroughpress.co.uk

Of the Flesh: 18 Stories of Modern Horror - The Borough Press

'Outstandingly weird and memorable' GUARDIAN'Deliciously creepy' NEW SCIENTISTFear never dies…

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

At a talk this morning (Joem Antonio, Robin Sebolino and Laurence O'Bryan), about writer's block, turning up, and kishōtenketsu, of which I was completely ignorant. You never leave a chat with writers without learning at least one new thing. #WritingLife #IDWF en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kish%C5...

en.wikipedia.org

Kishōtenketsu - Wikipedia

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

RIP indeed - an admirably individualistic artist.

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Dr Susan Maxwell @muinbeoarchives.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Speaking of classics that helped define...a sight that cheered me many times when I lived in London and used to go to the BL.

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