Inkwoven

1. Have you ever been to summer camp?

Yes. My mother was a single parent who worked full-time. Every summer from preschool through to eighth grade was spent in day-camp. I did two stints in a sleepaway camp where I could ride horses every day. By about fifth grade, I limited myself exclusively to theater camp (minus the one summer I limited myself exclusively to skateboarding camp; I was too afraid to get on my board, so I mostly just read Teen Vogue, learned Texas Hold ’Em, and became the little sister of the group).

By the time I was entering ninth grade, I threw a fit at the idea of one more summer spent getting tan and Mom reluctantly agreed to let me stay home. My “summer camp” that year was spent writing play-by-post roleplays on GaiaOnline.

2. Have you ever made a s’more?

No. Not a full one. I hate marshmallows, but I roast them for other people’s double-decker s’mores.

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)?

Yes. We did have a little half-tent just to keep the coyotes at bay, but we could look straight up into the stars. It was magical.

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleepover at your house?

Yes. In fact, he’s there right now!

My mom did start allowing my dates to sleep over when I was about eighteen/nineteen, so long as we stayed in separate rooms. ...There may have been some circumnavigation of those rules.

At this point, I have a fiancé, who lives with me. It would be very old-fashioned if he had never stayed the night.

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)?

A king-sized mattress with this simple, plush frame in gold and navy (no longer available). Both Thugboi (the fiancé) and I think the frame is simply too big for the room we’re in right now, though, and we hate our mattress. (Not that you can argue with a free, unused mattress.) So we’ll see how long this arrangement lasts!

Dear Reader,

Sing it with me now: It’s beginning to look a lot like summer!

As College 16 winds its way toward commencement at the end of this month, I can practically smell the most carefree season: the warm smell of freshly cut grass, the sooty ash of a bonfire, the way that salty ocean air seems to settle somewhere deep in your lungs.

Now, I’m not one much for the beach (or traditional “beach reads,” for that matter), but there is a certain magical quality a book you encounter in the summer possesses. It takes on some of that ethereal feeling that only summertime can bring: a narrative delight that, once completed, lingers in your bones and ignites you, makes you a little more alive. (Or is that just me?)

Plus, summer is the best time for ghoulies and ghosties, not to mention those long-legged beasties. Just deliver me a novel with something that goes bump in the night! After all, there’s a little extra light every day to keep any story from becoming too frightful. Nothing captures that quality of summer for me like reading, breathless and covered in gooseflesh, in a tent with a flashlight.

This is my first time in a long time creating a reading list for the summer. I normally go with that summery flow, reading whatever comes quickest to hand. But this year’s public library Summer Reading Challenge theme — not to spill spoilers here — is “Color Our World.” (At least that’s your theme if your library belongs to the Collaborative Summer Library Program.) I was trying to come up with a way to incorporate colors with my listed aims here but just couldn’t do it.

Until I remembered Crimson Peak (2015).

I have only seen twenty minutes of it. I am absolutely determined to finish it. I loved every single second of the movie right up until someone’s face breaks a sink. (And yes, I am exceptionally bad with horror movies because of violence.) I started wondering which stories influenced the script. del Toro generally does a beautiful job weaving stories, pulling directly from a wide variety of genres and media. What if he listed them somewhere? Wouldn’t it be lovely to see the inspiration for myself? Maybe I could read each over the summer and then finish with a watch party — just in time to ring in the spooky season. Knowing del Toro, many of the recommendations would even be the perfect literary friends for deep investigation here with all of you.

And that, dear Reader, is how #GothLitSummer2025 was born.

The Books

del Toro catalogs nine titles — seven novels, one short story, and a folio of engravings — that directly influenced the making of the film. Nine further novels are cited in conversation with the main seven.

I will reserve Guillermo del Toro’s remarks on each of the main books until I review them later this summer. For now, the list with a brief description:

Brontë, C. (1847). Jane Eyre.

A resilient orphan confronts frightening secrets, haunted mansions, and a tormented love that tests the boundaries of desire and morality.

Brontë, E. (1847). Wuthering Heights.

A tempestuous saga of doomed love and vengeful obsession, where the wild moors echo with the haunting passions of Catherine and Heathcliff, whose souls refuse to rest — even in death.

Dickens, C. (1861). Great Expectations.

A young orphan’s rise through shadowy twists of fate haunted by mysterious benefactors, decaying mansions, and the lingering specter of guilt and unfulfilled desire.

James, H. (1898). The Turn of the Screw.

A governess, isolated in a decaying country estate, descends into paranoia as she confronts — or perhaps imagines — malevolent spirits preying upon two unnervingly silent children.

Lewis, M. G. (1796). The Monk.

A pious abbot succumbs to forbidden desires, spectral horrors, and diabolic forces within the labyrinthine shadows of monastic Madrid.

Piranesi, G. B. (1745-1750). Carceri d’invenzione.

Colossal architecture, endless stairways, and arcane machinery evoke a sublime and terrifying dreamscape of confinement, isolation, and the uncanny.

Poe, E. A. (1839). The Fall of the House of Usher.

An ancestral mansion crumbles in unison with the minds and bodies of the tortured Usher twins. Are they consumed by madness or the supernatural?

Radcliffe, A. (1794). The Mysteries at Udolpho.

The virtuous Emily St. Aubert plunges into a world of crumbling castles, spectral terrors, and cruel villains, where reason and imagination wage war amid the eerie shadows of the Italian wilderness.

These can be read in any order at any time during the summer. And if you read faster than I do, you can enjoy the other nine books that are mentioned in del Toro’s recommendations.

The Schedule

My local public library starts Summer Reading on 21 June and ends on 23 August. While that is typically plenty of time, I am taking two independent study courses this semester, which will bring a truckload of reading with them.

To give myself a fair chance at the seven required books, I’ll be starting on 10 May. (What better way to celebrate a half-birthday than new books?) I expect to end on 31 August, too — just in time for the new academic year.

Reader, I wonder: What are your plans for summer reading this year?

Let’s enjoy a summer of books together!

This post directly inspired by ObligatoryLangblrBlog’s Tumblr post, ”What Intentional Language Study Actually Looks Like.”

Dear Reader,

I should have known I was in for it when I decided to start learning Cherokee (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ or tsalagi) this year.

Y’see, on the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) language difficulty scale, Cherokee is considered a Class IV language. Like Greek, Lao, or Russian, it features significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English. Learners need 1,100 hours — roughly six and a half weeks, if you never slept – of study to gain general professional proficiency [Level C1]. (The FSI itself generously suggests 44 weeks for a program of study, presumably for better survival rates.)

So how do we best structure our study sessions to get the most out of them?

Xefjord did an amazing job with this study schedule template. They even used the correct FSI time adjustments below each category. They recommend using the Casual, Regular, or Serious schedules during the weekdays, hitting the extended schedule for your chosen mode on weekends.

As with everything, your mileage may vary. Beginners (in the A1-B1 range) will want to focus more time on building grammar and vocabulary. Intermediate/advanced learners (B2-C2) should shift their attention to immersive content. You’ll also need to modify your schedule to take advantage of your resources, talents, and interests.

The great news is that you can address most of these areas of study — for free — in Overhill Cherokee.

Vocabulary

We’re starting with vocabulary because Xefjord recommends using this time on the schedule to learn syllabary as well. Cherokee is a primarily tonal language that changes spellings pretty frequently from my understanding, so it’s important to get comfortable with this to move onto grammar more easily.

Mango Languages has a two-chapter, eleven-lesson, course on Cherokee. You’ll learn how to greet, part, and introduce yourself among friends. I get ML through my local public library, but you can pay $11.99/month (or $119.99 annual) for a single language account. If it’s available through your library (or university), you will need to log in through that portal instead of the website.

Ed Fields teaches the online courses through the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (CNO). His Cherokee courses are available to everyone in 20 classes each on YouTube. Each course is an hour-long and taught in the traditional Cherokee way, giving each topic the time that it needs to take. Such a slow pace should be great for first-time learners of a language. Others, usually with another language under their belt, complain that it’s a very slow way of teaching. Cherokee 1 is mostly focused on phonetics and pronunciation without introducing the syllabary. Cherokee 2 introduces the syllabary. Cherokee 3 is completely in Cherokee syllabary, “covering a broad range of topics.”

There is also the Rogers State University 48-course class, in conjunction with the CNO. Wade Blevins has a more American approach to teaching the language, imo. That may be more comfortable for folks with previous language experience. Depends on your learning style. It seems the classes progress to become more immersive than grammatical, but a solid foundation of grammar is set up in the first dozen lessons. You are also introduced to syllabary right off the bat.

No matter who you choose (and I vote for both!), each will introduce you to the tonal nature of the language, which is key to parsing the grammar.

If you’re using the Fluent Forever technique, See, Say, Write [download] can provide a lot of practice with the pronunciation of phonemes. It will begin with one syllabary character and build an entire sentence based on it. mp3 audio is included with the text. Durbin Feeling’s Cherokee Reader may be the same book without the audio (but I haven’t perused either much past Lesson 1). In any case, it’s the same building-block concept as SSW.

Other necessary vocabulary tools will include:

• A dictionary. I love this one because you can search Cherokee words either phonetically or in syllabary. You can also choose which source you are pulling definitions from (including the Bible), which will give example sentences with which to practice.
• Word lists. The CNO has a ton of language posters (!) grouped around various topics. These are especially great because you can use the icons on your flashcards to prompt recall instead of doing a one-to-one translation. The moon cycle poster was hanging in my office for ages because it’s cute.
• Flashcards. If you’re using the Fluent Forever method, the Cherokee Dictionary has a list of the first 625 words you should learn. These are elementary words around categories such as the days of the week, parts of the body, etc.

And don’t forget the CNO Consortium Word List from 2024!

Grammar

We Are Learning Cherokee is a grammar-forward textbook that starts with the conjugation of personal pronouns with present-tense verbs. The syllabary is only introduced in the epilogue, so you may want to start this as soon as you are done with Mango Languages and/or Ed Fields’ Cherokee 1.

Handbook of the Cherokee Verb uses the syllabary alongside phonetic spellings. Unfortunately, it’s also very “crunchy,” grammatically speaking, so I wouldn’t recommend it until you’ve gone through a few classes and/or We Are Learning Cherokee. The highlight of this book (besides a thorough explanation of verbs) is the exercises at the back. It also comes with a companion guide, Learning to Use the Cherokee Verb, which takes you through the verb tenses of 30 words, including four of the five versions of the verb “to have” (Living, Long, Flexible, and Liquid, ignoring Neutral).

Reading Practice

Things get a little trickier here. Unfortunately, a lot of the reading resources are in Middle/Kituwah dialect thanks to the intensive efforts of the Eastern Band of Cherokee (EBCI). I was able to borrow a copy of Charlotte’s Web through my university workplace. Because I’m still at the start of the A1 level, I have no idea how dis/similar the two dialects are. I hope that I can report back in a year or two’s time.

For easily obtainable Overhill dialect materials, the only resource that springs to mind is The Cherokee New Testament. This is completely in syllabograms, although I might use this to work on my phonetics at some point (which I can post for folks’ use/reference here).

The only other resource I can think of that is readily available is the Cherokee Phoenix, which will occasionally print articles either in full or in part in the syllabary (like this article about Miss Cherokee 2008). If you check out their Language Section, you’ll find articles that start in English and are then translated to Cherokee at the bottom, with audio files for further practice.

If I find any other free resources, I will post them here.

Listening Practice

Is this the part where I can share one of my favorite singers? Agalisiga “Chuj” Mickey is a country-folk singer who writes his songs in Cherokee. They’re a little mournful, delightfully complex, and apparently win second-graders second-place at the Oklahoma Native American Youth Language Fair. His first album, Nasgino Inagei Nidayulenvi, was released in October 2024. It’s available on Spotify, iTunes, and Bandcamp. You can listen along and write down words (or eventually phrases) you recognize, filling in lines you don’t with the liner notes as needed. Sing along to practice speaking!

I also really love Inage’i, which featured its 25-minute debut episode on YouTube. This is a kids’ show, with great animation, completely in Cherokee. We follow a bear, a rabbit, a wolf, and a deer as they learn lessons about the world around them. This first episode features a delightful lesson about being respectful of Kvli’s medicinal roots. I don’t know if there are other episodes out there, or how you might find them, but I really hope that I can stream an entire season very soon!

The OSU television station, Osiyo.TV, has published ten seasons of Let’s Talk Cherokee. The first six seasons are comprised of minute-long episodes that go over one specific phrase. After season one, these videos feature cute little kids. Seasons seven and eight introduces animated elements into the one-minute format. Seasons nine and ten are the real gold: The episodes range from three to five minutes, focused on specific topics (eating, stickball, the story of the first fire). They should inject a ton of new words into your lexicon!

Any words you can’t recognize should be added to your vocabulary practice!

Speaking Practice

This is probably the hardest for folks on the East Coast, mostly because I am unaware of any Overhill speakers at this end of the country.

You can absolutely hire Cherokee tutors (not that that’s “for free,” like I offered at the beginning of this post). However, I would be remiss not to mention it! There’s nothing like live feedback and guidance to help you practice the natural fluidity of speaking.

Like ObligatoryLanguageBlog mentions in the original post, there are some options for those of us who are estranged from speaking resources: Reading out loud. Responding to questions or statements in your textbooks to simulate off-the-cuff conversations.

What about you? Do you think this language study schedule template could help you with the language you’re learning? Which section would you most look forward to and which would be the hardest for you to accomplish?

And if you’re learning Cherokee (like me!), can you think of any free resources I might have missed?

Happy learning!