Why ‘octothorp’ (besides the fact that it’s a super cool word)? Apparently I have a punctuation fetish I’m sublimating – ha! My husband and I have ampersand tattoos because of Y The Last Man (the whole section about ampersands being used to denote partnerships that are collaborative as opposed to typing the word “and” if each person did their own work resonated), I used to post in the early days of the mothership as ellipsis, nearly named my kid Thorn with a plan to get […]

You read a wide variety of genres. How do you decide what to read next from your TBR list/stack? It’s really just based on my mood at the time. I try to alternate between fiction and nonfiction, or between something pretty dense and lighter fare, but it depends. Often, I just stand in front of my bookcase and see what grabs me. Right now, I’m reading Frankenstein because I recently watched National Theatre Live’s production, which they are currently streaming, and that put me in […]

Where does ‘blauracke’ come from? When I decided to sign up for CBR I had just read a newspaper article about the Blauracke (the European roller), which is a beautiful bird but unfortunately almost extinct here, so I chose it as my handle for CBR. It was really just a spur-of-the-moment decision. You have been reading some heavy stuff lately! (Lots of plagues; Chernobyl…) What author/genre do you turn to when you need a comfort read? One of my favourite authors is Leo Perutz who […]

How long have you been volunteering with CBR, and what is your area of expertise? I just volunteered at the beginning of this year. My areas of expertise are mostly physical, if I am going to say that I’m an expert at all at anything, haha. I worked in theater for a long time – doing both props and set design- but it was a terribly stressful environment. For the last few years I have been teaching other adults behavioral and trauma informed interventions to […]