Welcome to the Nest!

Here, you’ll find an assortment of things that shine. The publication is so named because of a question Joan Didion posed in her essay On Keeping a Notebook: “What kind of magpie keeps this notebook?”

Are you someone who also loves getting weird about the expanses of the known universe and the mundane miracles of living? Great! Me, too! Subscribe now (it’s free!) and you’ll never miss a post.

Magpies, huh?

Magpies are members of corvidae, a family of birds with an outsized mythology due in large part to their intelligence. Whether it turns out to be true*, magpies have a reputation of compulsively gathering shiny objects into their nests. Coins, jewelry, soda tabs – anything that might catch the light.

Here, at the beginning of our relationship, I need to come clean with you: there are no magpies in Georgia where I call home. My yard is full of other corvids including bossy blue jays and a very adorable crow couple who make gentle little “gwrolk, gwrolk” sounds at each other while I drink my coffee in the mornings. But whether it’s their iridescent wings or their spicy reputation, I have a real soft spot for this bird I only meet when traveling.

Let me introduce myself…

Hi – I’m Kimberly. For a time, I focused my creative energies on running a hands-on, education collective called The Homestead Atlanta. Our educational programs promoted human-scale technologies and preserved an inheritance of ability in the face of a cultural skills amnesia.

The metrics of The Homestead Atlanta’s successes were preserved in Mason jars, hammered into shape on the anvil, carved out of hardwood. They were measured in skills shared, ideas exchanged, goods bartered, resources preserved. Our workshops reacquainted people with a vocabulary for entering into dialogue with the physical world; stitches in a scarf become as comprehensible braille, woodgrain read like a weather almanac.

When Covid dictated an end to our in-person gathering, I turned my energies to exploring the intersection of craft, the human spirit, and the natural world through writing.

Your Magpie-Minded Guide

I’m also an inveterate collector: of ideas, trinkets, interesting people. A gleam catches my eye, and it’s off to the races. These little flickers are the way some holy inspiration nudges me to pay attention. And I’ve noticed that the best way to encourage that blessed, generous, unnamable thing to keep whispering, “Over here – look!” is to make something from those moments.

So the posts you’ll find in What Kind of Magpie are a gesture of courtship, a little love letter, to this kind of inspiration. You’ll find musings on whatever happens to be rattling around my skullbox: so probably craft and craftsmanship, the wild revelations of the natural world, how we commune with our ghosts. Nbd.

Consider this your invitation to a weird and wonderful nest full of bits of treasure and trash that catch the light. Come make yourself at home.

*A 2014 study suggests that not only might magpies have gotten a bad rap with the whole thieving thing but that they might actually be afraid of things that reflect light. This study, however, involved scientists placing a pile of shiny objects near nuts to see how the magpies would react. So it might just as likely demonstrate that magpies have the sense to distrust humans when they’re acting weird and leaving little piles of metal near their food. Go figure.