Title: St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves | Author: Karen Russell | Publisher: Vintage (2014)
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Round 1
Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Then, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal.
-Bluets, Maggie Nelson
Our mother performed in starlight. Whose innovation this was I never discovered. Probably it was Chief Bigtree's idea, and it was a good one--to blank the follow spot and let a sharp moon cut across the sky, unchaperoned; to kill the microphone; to leave the stage lights' tin eyelids scrolled and give the tourists in the stands a chance to enjoy the darkness of our island; to encourage the whole stadium to gulp air along with Swamplandia!'s star performer, the world-famous alligator wrestler Hilola Bigtree.
-Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.
-Circe, Madeline Miller
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Karen Russell - Growing Up With Privilege and Prejudice, June 14, 1987
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Leopard Ray
* * * *
"To be a kid requires detective work. You have to piece together the entire universe from scratch."
— Karen Russell, "The Ghost Birds" in The New Yorker (2021)
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Swamplandia! by Karen Russell / Home from Beetlejuice / Haunting Olivia from St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell
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She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, "I wanna go home! I wanna go home!" Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.
Karen Russell
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“Because I love her, my hunger pangs have gradually mellowed into a comfortable despair. Sometimes I think of us as two holes cleaved together, two twin hungers. Our bellies growl at each other like companionable dogs. I love the sound, assuring me we’re equal in our thirst. We bump our fangs and feel like we’re coming up against the same hard truth,”
from vampires in the lemon grove by karen russell
reminded me of bones and all and @mothercain
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Fresh air, the sight of trees--these are birthrights and pleasures that we seem bent on extinguishing. Some animals we've turned out to be. We have never in our species' history respected Nature's limits.
Karen Russell, Sleep Donation
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“She used to suffer these intense bouts of homesickness in her own bedroom. When she was very small, she would wake up tearing at her bedspread and shrieking, “I wanna go home! I wanna go home!” Which was distressing to all of us, of course, because she was home.”
— Karen Russell, from St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves
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Good, good stuff.
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The pack was worried about Mirabella.
Mirabella would rip foamy chunks out of the church pews and replace them with ham bones and girl dander. She loved to roam the grounds wagging her invisible tail. (We all had a hard time giving that up. When we got excited, we would fall to the ground and start pumping our backsides. Back in those days we could pump at rabbity velocities. Que horror! Sister Maria frowned, looking more than a little jealous.) We'd give her scolding pinches. "Mirabella," we hissed, imitating the nuns. "No." Mirabella cocked her ears at us, hurt and confused.
Still, some things remained the same. The main commandment of wolf life is Know Your Place, and that translated perfectly. Being around other humans had awakened a slavish-dog affection in us. An abasing, belly-to-the-ground desire to please. As soon as we realized that others higher up in the food chain were watching us, we wanted only to be pleasing in their sight. Mouth shut, I repeated, shoes on feet. But if Mirabella had this latent instinct, the nuns couldn't figure out how to activate it. She'd go bounding around, gleefully spraying on their gilded statue of St. Lucy, mad-scratching at the virulent fleas that survived all of their powders and baths. At Sister Maria's tearful insistence, she'd stand upright for roll call, her knobby, oddly-muscled legs quivering from the effort. Then she'd collapse right back to the ground with an ecstatic oomph! She was still loping around on all fours (which the nuns had taught us to see looked unnatural and ridiculous--we could barely believe it now, the shame of it, that we used to locomote like that!), her fists blue-white from the strain. As if she were holding a secret tight to the ground. Sister Maria de la Guardia would sigh every time she saw her. "Caramba!" She'd sit down with Mirabella and pry her fingers apart. "You see?" she'd say softly, again and again. "What are you holding onto? Nothing, little one. Nothing."
"St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" by Karen Russell
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Love has infected me with a muscular superstition that one body can do the work of another.
Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove
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Hell High (Real Trouble, 1989)
"Let's get out of here while we still can."
"No."
"You're pushing our luck. She's had enough!"
"I said I'm gonna finish it."
"It's no good, man!"
"What do you owe her?"
"Look, there are limits. There are certain laws we can't break. This is real trouble, real jail. Our future!"
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