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Joy Chalaby

@fullnessofjoy16

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Writer🖋
Aussie Coptic Christian
Book hoarder, tea drinker
Literature PhD (loading...) | researching Dostoevsky
Substack & Youtube (linktree)

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Hello hello friends!! So...
… I’m on substack! 📝📖✨

What's a substack, you might ask? Put simply, it is this online platform that supports digital subscription newsletters sent directly to your email inbox. I really do hope you subscribe to my little space, Fullness of Joy! (link in my stories and in my bio via Linktree!)
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I’ve been a bit quiet online for the last week or two. June has just been packed and it’s not even quite over yet! Often I find when life gets really hectic, it is hard to dedicate my energy or emotions to being very present on social media at the same time, much as I truly miss chatting about all the bookish things with you all. I am sure many of you can relate to this? At the same time, I have been storing up a lot of bookish content, things I've been reflecting on and considering and wanting to explore through written communication.

Since I started my job back in November, my life has held very little space for writing, though writing is always something that makes me feel more myself and alive! I've felt this ache to strengthen my writing muscles a bit, and grow in my ability to reflect and express those ideas and thoughts whirling like little wisps of cloud in my mind. To deliberately slow down and put down in words the observations we see and let it sit with me. Instagram is great, because it allows me to do this even when I'm in a hurry and on the go. I'm so grateful to have found so many lovely kindred spirits through it too.

But there's a special something in the expanded writing form, I think, that can't be replicated. Remember the good old days of blogging? My Substack, Fullness of Joy, hopefully will be an extension of the sharing I do here on Instagram and on YouTube too… It will be something like a blog, I think, a space to read and think deeply (with delight), cultivate with others a beauty-filled vision for life and celebrate the goodness of joyous, cozy, or adventurous things.
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Please join me on this new online adventure for conversations on literature, art, faith & the writing life!
✨📚 by @fullnessofjoy16

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3 years ago

Over the long weekend, I made the deliberate choice, while recovering from a particularly nasty bout of the flu, to begin a new book for pleasure, and so far I am enjoying it thoroughly #theodorasteashop @christyannejones
What book are you currently reading? by @fullnessofjoy16

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7 days ago

"Art is feared by tyrants because it gives weight and interest to what is various, obvious and ordinary. Tyrants fear funniness." Iris Murdoch, from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. by @fullnessofjoy16

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8 days ago

September photo dump 📸🕯🪶 by @fullnessofjoy16

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9 days ago

My choice for "Read Your Own Woolf" September for my in-person bookclub. So grateful I get to have this precious community of ladies, where we get to be and discuss our love of literature and story, but oh so much more through it, about our lives, experiences, struggles & fun too! Each of us picked our Woolf of choice and discussed our thoughts and experiences with it (from The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway to Flush and A Room of One's Own). We talked about Woolf's writing style, her ability to express those fragmented interior thoughts of human experiences in such tangential yet profoundly necessary ways. We talked about women of the past, writers and poets, who were denied recognition (anonymous has been a woman), the powerful necessity of education and resources to write as women and have freedom and how women have historically been denied that, & still do sometimes (got mad thinking of being denied access to libraries!). We then got to talking about how now our literacy crisis seems dispropetentially impacting boys (at least in our local communities) and why might that be the case. I came out of our chat just so grateful for the human gift of curiosity and hunger for learning and creativity that is not forever quenched because society says you should or not pursue it. I haven't quite finished it yet but my specific book choice was "A Room of One's Own" and so far I am loving it! Here are some quotes that have stood out to me so far:

Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
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One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
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Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
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So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say
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Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
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For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. by @fullnessofjoy16

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18 days ago

When The Early Church read and used ancient myths and stories to exhort followers of Jesus to not be discouraged by the trials in the journey of faith: "Let us then avoid mere pagan custom as we would a dangerous headland, or the threatening Charybdis, or the mythic sirens ... A heavenly spirit comes to your help: pass by Pleasure, she beguiles ... Sail past the song; it works death. Bound to the wood of the Cross, you shall be freed from destruction. The Word of God will be your pilot, and the Holy Spirit will bring you to anchor in the haven of heaven." (Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation to the Greeks, §12) #theodyssey #christophernolan #classicscommunity #bookstagram #earlychurch by @fullnessofjoy16

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20 days ago

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
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#TheWasteLand #tseliot
My teaching week gets exponentially more surreal and challenging and beautiful when T.S. Eliot is on the reading list. by @fullnessofjoy16

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25 days ago

*from least to highest order
This is my personal Dostoevsky ranking (keeping in mind I have yet to read in full A Writer's Diary, Adolescent, Netochka Nezvanova, Notes from Underground, Eternal Husbands, some of his other shorter stories and I am currently reading Devils/Possessed for the first time). But doing my phd on Dostoevsky's influence means his works are constantly, in the words of Zendaya's song... "on replay"!!
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If you have read any Dostoevsky, do you have a favourite and least favourite? And if not, which one are you most excited/intimidated to pick up? by @fullnessofjoy16

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a month ago

All she talks about is Dostoevsky... #phdthesiswriting #dostoevsky #literaturephd #literarystudies #zendaya by @fullnessofjoy16

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a month ago

Absinthe, decadent green or just really good matcha gelato? I love when what I am reading, teaching and living all interconnect. #thedecadentmovement
#phdlife
#literarystudies

*Mikhail was Anton's nephew not son by @fullnessofjoy16

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a month ago

Adieu, August 🌜✨️🏵 by @fullnessofjoy16

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a month ago

"...However, Tess found at least approximate expression for her feelings in the old Benedicte that she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough." - Tess of the d'ubervilles
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Teaching Thomas Hardy always fills me with a mingled sense of excitement because of how rich a text it is to analyse and the topics it brings up and dread at the heartbreak of it all. He writes so beautifully but oh! his stories are so tragic and in his bleak critique of the hypocrisy of his time, the unbelievable "ache of modernism" overwhelms any articulation of hope or redemption. But it is such a powerful text to explore the feelings of the time, nonetheless. I particularly enjoyed spending time with my class examining the scene in chapter 44, when Tess takes off her thick walking boots and replaces them with her pretty thin ones of patent leather and the themes and symbolism and critique of society in this scene. Have you read either Tess or any other Hardy novel? What are your thoughts?
#penguinclassics #ThomasHardy #tessofthedubervilles #literaturephd #phdjourney by @fullnessofjoy16

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2 months ago