Jenny Gaitskell
LightNews LightNews
banner
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
Jenny Gaitskell
@jennygaitskell.bsky.social
4.4K followers 2.7K following 3.1K posts
Small and/or speculative fictions. Old dictionaries. Shingle beaches. Everyday magic.

she/her

https://www.jennygaitskell.com/

https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/jennygaitskell
Posts Replies Media Videos
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'But by reading their books, I saw the other side of them - their humanity. Somehow I was sure that if people were willing to read each other, and see the light of other cultures, there would be no war on earth.'

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, The Mountains Sing

#BookWormSat
🎨 Jeannie Kinsler
Painting called 'Laura reading'. Seen from above, a woman lies on her back on a rug, absorbed by a book held up before her face. Shadows and refractive light give a magical feel. The rug is traditional reds, the workman dressed in monochrome, the light and book a sage green.
November 8, 2025 at 9:28 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.'

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching

#BookWormSat

🎨 Gwenda Morgan, Midnight Madness - Witches on Night Flight
Wood engraving print in sharp black and white. Seven raggedy witches and their black cats fly on broomsticks, mid left to top right. Below them, tiled rooftops, gnarled treetops, church spire which lean, seeming to recoil. The witches grin gleeful, their cats stare at us, and the moon peeps doleful through jagged cloud. A zigzag feeling of wild speed or storm. In the foreground, an owl and white cat also observe us. In the distance, crows or bats alight from the church.
October 25, 2025 at 2:11 PM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Out of all the seasons, it is the most honest about time... autumn is not shy about things coming to an end. It welcomes it, waving leafy flags of red, yellow and gold.'

Samantha Sotto Yambao, Water Moon

#BookWormSat (autumn)

🎨 Carole Garland
'Autumn Leaves'. Abstract painting of gold and ruddy fallen leaves floating or reflected in still water. A cool blue sky and golden light are also reflected. Daydreamy, perhaps. Which way is up or down?
October 18, 2025 at 7:56 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.'

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

#BookWormSaturday
(is celebrating short stories)

🎨 Jennifer Moses
Painting of sunrise or sunset over a calm sea. Lemon yellows and blue- greys. The sun peeps over a thick line of cloud above the horizon. It is reflected on foreground ripples. Suggests maybe a moment of unexpected happiness.
October 11, 2025 at 10:01 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
can't talk
for this shy moon
please
leave your
message

#TankaThursday (message)
#DailyHaikuPrompt (hunters moon or pink)

🎨Bet Low
Moon and clouds. An abstract painting of a night sky in monochrome. Diffuse brightness of moonlight through thin high clouds.
October 10, 2025 at 7:40 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Books have souls,’ repeated the cat softly. ‘A cherished book will always have a soul. It will come to its reader’s aid in times of crisis.'

Sōsuke Natsukawa, The Cat Who Saved Books

#BookWormSat 💙📚
🎨 Eva Fialka
Painting of a grey cat with yellow eyes. It gazes out from the page of a book, looking past us, ears erect. Despite a serious demeanor, it wears a red bowtie with white spots. The page is printed in French and washed in shades of gold.
October 4, 2025 at 3:54 PM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Life is a train that stops at no stations; you either jump abroad or stand on the platform and watch as it passes.'

Yasmina Khadra, What the day owes the night

#BookWormSat

🎨 Carol Leigh
"Train Art Abstract #4". Abstract photograph in yellow and red. A thick vertical stripe, a triangle into bottom and right edges. Scuffs and cracks, perhaps rust. Suggests a painted metal panel of a train.
September 27, 2025 at 10:43 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
those fools write HOPE
over the moon's sad face
at which we lose it

#ScifaikuSaturday (hope)

📷 Andrew McCarthy
A high resolution colour photo of the moon in space. The moon's left/lower half is in near darkness. The right/upper half shows details of seas and craters.
September 27, 2025 at 8:01 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and the world is suspended there, and I in it.'

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain

#BookWormSat
🎨 Jane MacNeill
'Loch reflecting winter mountains'. Oil painting in hazy blues, sandy golds and brilliant white. The still waters of a loch stretch light-filled away. Three quarters up the painting, a darker wave of distant foothills. Mountains shining beyond against a cold sky.
September 20, 2025 at 8:47 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers.'

Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

#BookWormSat
🎨 Caroline Ashwood
Abstract painting of a tree. On a pale turquoise background, splashes and splatters of orange, gold, red, white suggest a tree bursting upwards with life.
September 6, 2025 at 10:23 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'My memories don’t feel as though they’ve been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls.'

Yōko Ogawa, The Memory Police

#BookWormSat (dystopias)

🎨 Aya Takano
'Unveiling the Earth of Reversed Evolution' by Aya Takano. Stylised Earth and planets cluster in purple night sky. Around them, a dreamy swoosh of zodiac and Milky Way. In which, a naked pale fawn and mermaid swim. Around the whole, pastel yellow and pink flowers watch on, as does a fish, scarlet deer, a dark-eyed ghostly seed.
August 30, 2025 at 8:22 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair.'

Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living

#BookwormSat
🎨 Courtenay Kusitor
'There is a power in being courageous' by Courtenay Kusitor. Abstract painting. Overlapping blocks of poppy red, sunshine yellow, black, white and sky blur. White and black line geometric shapes draw the eye in an upwards arc.
August 23, 2025 at 8:35 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts.

With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions.'

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

🎨 Holly Van Hart

#BookwormSat (trees and taverns)
Abstract painting of a forest in greens, browns, blues, ochres. The sky is pale and flat, the canopy and understory are painted in floaty quadrilaterals, giving a pixelated dreaminess.
August 9, 2025 at 10:54 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Matter, that thing the most solid and the well-known, which you are holding in your hands and which makes up your body, is now known to be mostly empty space. Empty space and points of light. What does this say about the reality of the world?'

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

#BookWormSat
Star Maker by Remedios Varo. Mid-century reimagining of a medieval illustration. A tower rises through misty cosmic swirl, within which, a woman in monkish robes sits at a desk, studying the crescent moon in a bird cage.
August 2, 2025 at 8:25 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'The sweetest and the saltiest flavors, fireworks and moonless nights, scary stories and love movies, resonant words and ancient ideas. I aspire only to small, common miracles.'

Almudena Grandes, Malena is a tango

🎨 Maruja Mallo

#BookWormSat (Spanish literature)
Surrealist painting, perhaps of a woman or womanhood. Around a central burst of beach flora, idealised seashells suggest body parts. In pinks, lilacs and oranges with blue double shadows on a pale background.
July 26, 2025 at 11:11 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'It was on days just like this--dog days--that boats went sailing off all by themselves. Large, alien objects made their way in from sea, certain things sank and others rose, milk soured, and dragonflies danced in desperation.'

Tove Jansson, The Summer Book

#BookWormSat

🎨Sara Huxley
Mixed media painting by Sara Huxley. Two stylised rowboat prows on calm turquoise waters, with mooring lines heading up through the image. The paint and paper boats are red, orange, lilac and white. The sea includes strips of news and other papers.
July 19, 2025 at 8:01 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.'

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

#BookWormSat 💙📚

🎨Takahisa Yumeji
Illustration in 1920s style of a woman plucking a firework from a blue circle of night sky. She has a shingled dark bob, and wears a flowing red shift that matches her blush. She stands on a white veranda or balcony amid dark green plants.
July 5, 2025 at 2:26 PM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
I say
blooms like fireworks
without the bang
you say allium
(knowing your onions)

#TankaThursday (firework)

🎨Wellcome Collection
Watercolour of a red allium bloom, like a spidery firework, against a plain white background.
July 4, 2025 at 8:16 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.'

Mary Wollstonecraft, The Collected Letters

#BookwormSat
(The Enlightenment)

🎨 Barbara Regina Dietzsch
Parrot Tulip with Butterfly and Beetle. Painting of a multicoloured tulip bloom with curling leaves on a dark background on one petal is a butterfly with reddish closed wings. On one leaf is an iridescent beetle.
June 28, 2025 at 8:34 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'The briefest and slipperiest of the seasons, the one that won't be held to account - because summer won't be held at all, except in bits, fragments, moments, flashes of memory of so-called or imagined perfect summers, summers that never existed.'

Ali Smith, Summer

🎨 Alma Tipton

#BookwormSat
Summer Holiday by Alma Tipton. Abstract painting which suggests a beach from above. Blue cresting white washes up the canvas towards a sandy above that's dotted with bright colour. Might be parasols or seashells, might be sweeties, bubbles or balloons, but probably magic.
June 21, 2025 at 9:28 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Egypt... dreaming herself through the centuries. Dreaming us all, her children: those who stay and work for her and complain of her, and those who leave and yearn for her and blame her with bitterness for driving them away.'

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love

#BookwormSat (Egypt)

🎨 Sabah Naim
Multimedia image. Three pale hairless mannikins, wearing white cotton shirts. They face in different directions, seem to pass before/through a fine cloth decorated with golden leaves like herbs. In the foreground, to left, is an object that may be a lampshade, and the sleeve of a mannikin departing.
June 7, 2025 at 9:56 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'Ghosts are invisible to those who breath, invisible like guilt or gravity or electricity or thoughts. Thousands of unseen hands direct the course of every life.'

Shehan Karunatilaka, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

#BookwormSat
(ghosts and witches)

🎨 Geordanna Cordero
Book cover of an Italian edition. Illustration of a demon's staring face in hot pinks, lime green, blood red and indigos.
May 31, 2025 at 12:41 PM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'When she listened to songs that she loved on the radio, something stirred inside her. A liquid ache spread under her skin, and she walked out of the world like a witch.'

Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

#BookwormSat (music)

🎨 Andrea Helm
Painting of a vintage radio. It's plum coloured with yellow switches, on a grey-green background. The numbers on the tuner at the top of the radio are kinda imprecise.
May 24, 2025 at 9:51 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'He is climbing the spiral staircase of the soul of Gormenghast, bound for some pinnacle of the itching fancy - some wild, invulnerable eyrie best known to himself...'

Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake

#BookwormSat (castles and dogs)

🎨 Alan Lee
Gormenghast, by Alan Lee. The castle depicted in hazy dawn colours. A complexity of towers and turrets, open staircases and flying buttresses, tall arches and high windows, beams of light and deep shadow. To the right, the outside world - a river valley in mist. To the left, kittens play on the statue of a king. In a distant chamber below can be seen three tiny hurrying figures.
May 3, 2025 at 10:21 AM
jennygaitskell.bsky.social
'In a world full of wonder, even the smallest of creatures can have the grandest of dreams.'

The Phoenix and the Carpet, by E.Nesbit

#BookWormSat #amwriting

🎨 Maria Hristova-Alepou
Painting of a phoenix. On a dark background, flames rise in the shape of a bird to fill the picture. The bird observes its new wings. Mostly reds, golds and oranges, with electric blue and green sparks.
April 26, 2025 at 10:24 AM