Pride Month 2022 – Christine de Pizan

June 4, 2022

Well, I said I was going to share some notes for Pride Month, didn’t I? Here they are.

I’d like to start with an amazing author and intellectual: Christine de Pizan, an Italian poet who worked in France at the beginning of the XV Century, is considered one of the first female professional writers and have us one of the most important accounts of a transgender character in Medieval fiction.
She indirectly features in my novel because one of the main characters was reading her Livre de la Mutation de Fortune and was forced to leave it behind while fleeing the French court.

Why did I pick her? Easy enough: her Livre de la Mutation de Fortune, authored in 1403, is considered one of the earlier texts featuring gender transition and my novel features a reading on shapeshifting that has a lot to do with self-affirmation.

You can read the whole story on my Patreon profile: it’s free.

comics and illustration

Leo Ortolani, Tapum

A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l’unica. Com’è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest’opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni

August 9, 2026 9:00 am

Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

August 9, 2026 6:00 am

books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

August 8, 2026 9:00 am