I think I wanted to give language to the kinds of experiences that women rarely talk about and the kind of introspection that I think is necessary to, I suppose, find the life that you really want rather than the life that other people tell you you should want. Maybe there’s somebody out here that’s experiencing what I experienced and if they pick up this book they won’t have to go through it and feel as lonely as I did.
As long as I can remember living, public radio has been part of my life. I grew up listening to WBHM 90.3, our local NPR station. I always dreamed of some day, one day, talking about my writing on WBHM. That dream came true last week, when I sat down with Andrew Yeager, a remarkably kind, patient, and brilliant reader and interviewer, to talk about my new book, House Is an Enigma.
And I wouldn’t be a public radio nerd if I didn’t mention that you should definitely donate to your local NPR station. I’ve always appreciated public radio — at this point in my life, I listen to NPR more than I watch television — but, after being in the studio, I realized that I never quite appreciated it as much as I should have. Andrew’s a brilliant interviewer and editor, and watching the team in motion in the midst of a fundraiser was beyond inspiring. These people are doing the real work, y’all, and it’s really important — now more than ever — that listeners support it.
(See what I did there? In the title? It’s a pun. About space. It’s a space pun.)
If you enjoy awkward puns like the pun above, and if you enjoy people even more awkwardly over-explaining their already awkward puns, then you might be excited to learn that soon, very soon, depending upon your geographical location, you may in fact be able to see me a.) make awkward puns and b.) awkwardly over-explain my awkward puns in person.
I am proud, humbled, honored, super-nervous, and super-exciting to say that I’ll be part of Writers Week Symposium at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I am all of those adjectives largely because Writers Week was one of my very most favorite things about the MFA program at UNCW, which makes me even more proud and humbled and honored and super-nervous and super-excited. You can find the entire schedule here, along with a list of presenters. I’m still not sure how I’m on that list, and I feel a little bit like it’s an elaborate version of that One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other skit from Sesame Street (in case you follow that link, as you probably should, I am the big bowl of bird seed that has Big Bird so confused). I’ll be giving a reading from Maleficae with several of my favorite fellow alums — Xhenet Aliu, Yvette Neisser Moreno, and Kate Sweeney — on Friday at 2:00. I’ll also be speaking about life and writing and teaching and watching ANTM marathons and writing some more after graduation at 3:30. I can’t promise a Miley Cyrus karaoke session, but, given my other choices when I was at UNCW as a graduate student (those pink-and-magenta-striped spiked heel ankle boots, that homemade Sifl and Olly t-shirt, that weird phase when I dressed like an extra from Valley of the Dolls), anything is possible.
And the excitement doesn’t stop there! If you’re in the greater Statesboro area, then you should know that the third annual The Write Place Festival takes place next week. I am especially excited for the main event, which takes place on Thursday, November 14th, at 7 PM in the Emma Kelly Theatre. This year, six incredible local writers will be reading their work in the Festival. Readers include GSU faculty member and fiction writer Sarah Domet; GSU faculty member and poet Christina Olson; GSU alum, faculty member, and poet Zach Bush; GSU alum and novelist Jordan Fennell; and Maya Van Wagenen, a local fifteen year old and multi-category winner of last year’s Write Place high school literary awards competition, whose first book is coming out in 2014: Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek (you may be thinking to yourself, oh, how cute, she’s fifteen, but really you should be thinking to yourself, oh my God, she’s fifteen and she’s an absolute firecracker of a writer with a dynamic and original voice and just wow). I’ll be signing books after the reading, and am again proud and humbled and honored and all of the other adjectives to be part of this wonderful event and included in this group of writers, big bowl of birdseed or not. You can find more information about the Festival and see the dates and times for the full schedule of events here.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you probably know that the outside world and I don’t often get along, so I am not often out in it. But tonight? Tonight, outside world, it is ON. I’ll be participating in Show and Tell, which was my favorite class in grammar school, and reading an essay about an awkward date and my feet at the True Story! Reading Series. It’s at Kavarna Bar and Coffeeshop in Atlanta (well, the Decatur part of Atlanta), Georgia. It starts at 8 and Charles McNair and Benjamin Carr are reading too, which is very exciting but also makes me feel the need to breathe into a brown paper sack. But in, like, an awesome way.
The folks at True Story! posted an excerpt from one of my essays as an incentive. I figured I’d double that incentive and post the next bit of the essay here. This isn’t the essay I’m reading tonight, but it IS the story of the most traumatic moment of my grammar school life that didn’t involve gym class. It also tells the story of why I didn’t get to go to the Young Author’s Conference in 1988, which was totally a big deal. Also, I should let the Internet know that all of the people involved in this situation ended up totally okay. No one’s brain actually fell out, and Christopher beat me in the egg race at Field Day every year after this. Enjoy.
In that second I imagined what would happen: he’d thud to the floor and look up, startled, and regret with the force of ten thousand Acts of Contrition the great and torturous pain he’d caused me for months. I imagined that he’d look at me as if for the first time, admiring my bravery and also my ability to be bad, really bad, as bad as he and Edric and even Johnathan Damiani were at their very worst, and stand up and kiss me the way he and every other boy on the junior varsity pee-wee football team, according to rumor, kissed Jennifer Williams when no one was looking.
It started the way it was supposed to start: Christopher’s knees bent. Christopher fell. His eyes rolled upwards and then, for a second, leftwards at me. Then his body thudded to the floor. And then there was another thud. And then I realized: he had hit his head against the corner of the desk behind him.
There was motion. Miss Hanks blurred into a run from her desk to our desks, then picked up Christopher’s head. Christopher’s eyes rolled around like he was dying. Jennifer ran for paper towels. Miss Hanks yelled “what the hell were you thinking”and the whole class gasped. No one knew what was worse: Christopher dying or Miss Hanks saying hell and not meaning the place in which we could spend all of eternity suffering. She pulled Christopher to stand and said that none of us, not a single one of us, were allowed to move or speak or anything while she was gone, and then there was the space on the floor where Miss Hanks and Christopher and his rolling eyes had been. And then I saw it: blood. Three small circles of blood, and inside of one of those circles, two small brown specks. They were from his brain. They had to be pieces of his brain.
This blog has been on hiatus. I’m sorry. There have been circumstances.
I’ll be back from hiatus very, very soon, but in the meantime, here’s a poem of mine published in B O D Y. The poem is about houses and how they know way too much about the people who live inside of them. I’m really happy to have this poem published because it’s one of those gifts, one of those poems that feels like it comes out of no where, a poem that’s completely unplanned but alters the course of your work. That’s absolutely true of this poem. Though it was the first poem in what would become a lengthy series, which then became the backbone of the manuscript I’m putting together, I have no idea where it came from.
Really.
See? See what I mean here? This house? Totally a secret-blabbing jerk.
I mean, I really have no idea where this poem came from. It just appeared. I suppose that my mind has been working on it for quite some time. I’ve always been fascinated with houses — I’m not sure how anyone who’s driven around at night and accidentally looked into an accidentally-still-standing-with-the-lights-on-and-without-the-blinds-drawn window isn’t fascinated with houses. They seem like such solid, impenetrable structures by day — they seem trustworthy, willing and able to keep all of your secrets — and then, by night — no way. Leave a single one of them without the blinds drawn, and that house is telling everyone what you’re doing inside. This is a problem, obviously, because I think it’s pretty obvious that we as a species began building and living inside of houses so we could walk around at night in extra-extra large t-shirts, knock-around-shorts, and knee socks, singing songs with lyrics
Gertrude Stein appears not to have the same anxieties about houses, possibly because she’d just be embarrassed by me.
altered to feature your cats’ names and hobbies, eating frosting out of cans and watching Snapped marathons (all of that is completely hypothetical, of course. Completely, totally, absolutely hypothetical. I mean, who would do any of that? Certainly completely, totally, and absolutely not me).
It’s possible that my mind has been rock-tumbling these ideas around for a while, without my knowledge, and polished them into a poem. Much as I’ll never know the source of most of my ideas and decisions, I’ll never really know. All I know is that I was in the middle of a Grind and wondering if I’d actually be able to finish the month, and then the poem appeared to answer my wondering. It was a pleasant surprise, and I’m happy to have received it — and happier still that the good people at B O D Y liked it and wanted to share it.
(While you’re at B O D Y, by the way, you should check out fellow Grinders Ross White and Matthew Olzmann, two incredibly talented and all-around awesome poets whose work has inspired me and then inspired me again.)
Are you going to be in the general Statesboro, Georgia area around, say 2:30 tomorrow? And are you looking for something awesome to do? Because there’s something awesome going on in the general Statesboro, Georgia area around 2:30 tomorrow — specifically, that something awesome is going on the Georgia Southern University campus, at the Georgia Southern University Museum, at exactly 2:30 tomorrow, April 19th, 2013. More specifically, the something awesome that’s going on is a reading from some of the Georgia Southern University Department of Writing and Linguistics faculty — including, yes, yours truly. I’ll be reading from my book, Maleficae, and I’ll be selling and signing the book as well. I’m super-extremely-very-much-for-real honored to be sharing the stage with two of my talented colleagues, who also have had or soon will have books come out: Jared Yates Sexton, who’ll be reading from his recently published short story collection, An End to All Things, and Laura Valeri, who’ll be reading from her soon-to-be-published short story collection, Safe in Your Head.
And just in the off-off chance that that’s not enough to bring you to the general Statesboro area around 2:30 tomorrow — and, specifically, the Georgia Southern University Museum — there’s the added excitement that there IS A DINOSAUR THERE (insert approximately twelve thousand exclamation points). Well, okay, it’s not a real dinosaur. Neither is it, as I imagined, a giant dinosaur sculpture that you can somehow operate through animatronics or get inside, as I had dreamed. Still, it is A DINOSAUR, which is awesome in general. Specifically, it’s a Mosasaur, which is basically like a giant dinosaur alligator eel (SO MANY EXCLAMATION POINTS). The Google Machine tells me the Mosasaur looks like this:
Meh.
But I think that this is probably more accurate:
TOTALLY ACCURATE.
That’s not to frighten you, of course, but just to say — things? Will be AWESOME.
Today, one of my dreams came true, and I say that without exaggeration: a piece of mine, from Inch magazine, is featured today on Poetry Daily. I found out about this a while ago but didn’t really believe it was actually happening until I saw it today, and I’ve had to look at it again and again to make sure that I’m not just dreaming. I mean, I’m not, right? You can see it too?
Here’s a picture of the beheaded cherub. I miss it, still.
I thought I’d write a short blog entry about the piece, since I’m always curious about the poems that pop up on Poetry Daily and, well, like, everywhere that poems tend to pop up. I won’t tell the whole story behind it because a.) I already did that, and b.) then where will the mystery be? Suffice it to say that the story behind this involves a huge move, which is a new beginning, and a huge break-up, which is, of course, an ending. Besides the relationship, a few things were broken during or missing after the move: a couch cushion, my bicycle, and the head of a cherub on this terrible and beautiful planter my grandmother had used as storage for cotton balls. It was a strange time, a time when beginnings were muddled with endings, and I could hardly tell the difference between the two anymore.
Flash to September of 2012, over a year later. A friend and I had just finished a stint on The Grind (explained beautifully here by Grind founder Ross White) and were following it up with a submissions grind. We promised each other that we’d send out at least one piece a day. One Saturday, I was poking around for places to submit short essays and I came across Press 53, (which, as it turns out, published a remarkable collection by fellow Grinder and all-around amazing poet and person, Shivani Mehta — Useful Information for the Soon-to-be- Beheaded) and then Press 53’s Tumblr, with their weekly 53-word story prompt. The prompt for that week was to write a 53-word story about moving. I read the prompt and the rules and then promptly shut down my computer and headed to Hobby Lobby for some emergency crafting supplies (the emergency, as always with Hobby Lobby, was just that it was Saturday, and they’re closed on Sundays, which always sends me into a crafting/quilting/crocheting tail-spin — what if I need very fine glitters on a Sunday? It happens more often than one would think). As I wandered around trying to figure out why there were so giant zebra-striped flowers, I found that my mind was working on a poem. When I got home, I wrote it: and word count showed me that it was, miraculously, 55 words. I cut two, and submitted it. Boom.
Of course, the micro-essay (though I guess now I should probably call it a prose poem) was rejected. I revised and sent to another magazine. Rejected. Repeat. Rejected. Then, I saw a call-for-work for an all-micro-essay issue of Inch, one of my favorite magazines, and I sent to that. Miraculously, it was accepted — and so began the road to Poetry Daily. I’m especially happy that this is the poem that made it, since Inch is a journal I really love and a journal that shines light on oft-ignored micro-forms, and since they were willing to give this triply-rejected piece a fourth chance.
Sometimes, I’ll end up with a poem or essay that just feels like a gift. It feels like a well-made thing, though I don’t feel like its maker. This poem/essay was just such a thing: I hadn’t intended to write about this part of my move — ever, really — and I didn’t set out to focus on the beheaded cherub. But there it was, and then it was on the page, called into being by forces which didn’t seem entirely under my control.
I suppose, when I think about it, it does make sense that I wrote this poem at this time. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing, again. My relationships changed, my friendships changed, my health changed and therefore my body changed, and therefore my world and the way I lived in it changed. I didn’t make a move, but the world around me moved. It was a time of muddled beginnings and endings, and I again couldn’t tell which was which. It was the beginning of a moment of great change, from which I am only now starting to emerge, to look around, and to assess what was damaged beyond repair and what remains.
And this, I suppose, is the greater gift, the greater dream come true: to have a poem that acts like a lens and focuses on what damage is, and what beginning and ending, for me at least, really means.
Here’s my call-in radio show call-in station. Please note my fourth cup of coffee. Please also note that telephone. Children, that’s called a “land line.” It’s an ancient artifact from the days in which people didn’t need everything to be so terribly confusing and realized it was totally gross to have your phone with you in the restroom.
So, on Friday, I called in as a guest on Katrina Murphy’s excellent radio show, Questions That Bother Me So. I must thank Katrina for what was, all in all, a totally awesometacular experience (I’m thinking at some point that the archives will pop up here, so keep an eye out) (keep an eye out — that’s a really, really weird thing to say, isn’t it? I mean, if your eye was out, you wouldn’t really be able to see, would you?) (that’s not a tangent, as it keeps with the theme — I mean, if any questions bothers you so, it should probably be that one).
I have to admit that I love talk radio, especially live talk radio. There’s something about the cadence of the human voice, the magic of language happening in real-time, that’s absolutely captivating. That is, it is as a listener — while there is a fascination with how you are the human whose voice is cadencing over the Interwebs and the air, and it’s your language that’s happening in real-time, I have to admit that, as a participant, I was a little terrified.
This could be due to the fact that I prepared for my on-air appearance by drinking five cups of coffee and attempting to lure my overly vocal feline companions into other rooms by plying them with treats. Or it could be due to the fact that I spent all morning obsessively repeating to myself the following mantra: for God’s sake don’t say um and don’t say like, for God’s sake, please. Or perhaps I was nervous because I was wearing owl pajamas and Muk-Luks, as I often do, because I am a grown woman, which of course I knew no one could actually see, but perhaps they could just sense it.
This is what I suppose Alice B. Toklas was doing when I was talking, when she wasn’t creeping out the neighbors or eating a stack of firewood or something.
Thankfully, I was in very good hands, and Katrina calmed my nerves immediately. Gertrude Stein, who’s part Siamese and really loves to talk about that, did make her way into the living room, but somehow managed not to meow and to only bite me once. Alice B. Toklas, thankfully, held to her belief that watching whatever the neighbors are doing and chewing on cardboard boxes is way more interesting than anything I’m up to. And I found myself letting go of my fear and just having a great time talking to someone — which is also, I think, why I love talk radio so much: it’s like eavesdropping, at its best, on a really juicy conversation.
Gertrude Stein decided to help me with the poem I needed to read.
I think that part of my nervousness, too, has to do with the fact that in conversation, I’m not very focused. That’s because everything is interesting. Seriously. I could talk for three hours about the Statesboro formal wear store, Frills and Fancies, on the corner of Main, Main, Main, and Main, and then for six more hours about how, in Statesboro, there’s a corner of Main, Main, Main, and Main. Every single detail — from the revolving mannequin in a feathered prom dress to the fact that their Hunger Games-themed prom window display seemed to be made Hunger Games-themed only by the edition of an old-fashioned big screen TV — is interesting to me. That’s largely why, I think, I was drawn to writing in the first place: in writing, every such detail has a place. It has a weight and a significance and it works with other details to build an entirely new world. And I think, too, this lack of focus is why I was drawn in particular to poetry: it’s a form that, by its very nature, demands focus. It’s a way I learned to sift through the details I collect every day and weigh their significance. It’s how I learned to learn from them, and how I learned to focus enough to find the words to show other people what I’ve learned.
And if I end up with a collection titled Frills and Fancies, well, now you know why.
It’s April fourth. I live in south Georgia. Like, coastal south Georgia. And it’s cold. It’s cold and awful and rainy and generally so terrible weather-wise that Gertrude Stein has been inspired to spend all day and night singing her “Cold and Awful and Rainy and Generally So Terrible
This is a picture of Gertrude Stein, taken as I type. She’s this close to my face. And singing. It’s a lot to deal with.
Weather” aria, which is the saddest song in Gertrude Stein’s entire repertoire, besides the “You Didn’t Set You Alarm and I Realize You Want to Sleep In But Hey, Treats?” aria.
However, it’s April. It’s National Poetry Month, and if poetry celebrates anything, it’s anything that’s cold and awful. Therefore, I’m making the best of the weather and looking for the best in today — and one of the best things is this announcement: I’m going to be on the radio tomorrow.
No, really. Someone is actually going to let me talk on the radio without the FCC present.
That someone is the wonderful and talented and generally amazing Katrina Murphy, who’s invited me to join her on her wonderful and talent-filled and generally amazing radio show, Questions That Bother Me So. The show will stream live tomorrow from 1:00 – 3:00 Eastern time (I think — Eastern time, right? Like the one that the East coast is on? Time zones are confusing and I can’t think about them too much because I start thinking about how time is just a construct and then I get confused). You can listen along here (go to “shows,” then “Questions That Bother Me So”), and I’ll be live-Tweeting the experience from my Twitter feed. There will also be a chat room. It’s going to be totally meta. Topics to be discussed may or may not include poetry, National Poetry Month, Maleficae, witches, witch trials, witch burnings, writing poetry about witch trials and burnings, cats, velociraptors, sloths, and more poetry. It’s going to be awesome. The last time I was on the radio, I had pink eye and a kidney stone, and I still managed not to drop an F-bomb, which was a major triumph, as you know if you’ve ever had a kidney stone or, like, been in a room with me. This time, I probably also have a kidney stone, but hey, no pink eye. Let the F-bombless awesome commence.
And there are other exciting things afoot, so please keep your eyes on this small section of the Intertubes. In the meantime, here are some pictures of how I tried to make the best out of this gray and cold and awful day.
If there’s one thing I’m very good at, it’s losing my reading glasses. I had a gorgeous green pair that I left somewhere in the Charlotte airport, or possibly on an airplane. Or somehow in the sky. I still miss them. I was thrilled when I came into my classroom today and found that my glasses were still where I apparently left them on Tuesday. Rainy day triumph number ONE.Seriously, the weather today? TERRIBLE. I decided to make the best of it by making it into an exercise. My students had to complete this sentence — “The weather was ____” — fifteen times. If they used weather words, like cold and rainy and awful, they had to use a simile. I did the exercise along with them and ended up with my poem for today. RAINY DAY TRIUMPH TWO.A few months ago, Alice took this Purr Pad out of a chair and pushed it across the room, right next to the front door. Today I found out why: she sits here to wait for me to get home from work. RAINY DAY TRIUMPH THREE. CUTENESS TRIUMPH INFINITY.Chinese take-out once again proves it’s the best boyfriend ever. RAINY DAY TRIUMPH FOUR. Well, plus Chinese food in general, and food that’s delivered to the door, both of which are always triumphs.
* Bonus points to anyone who catches the reference in this post’s title!
People, here’s the thing: it’s April. That means it’s National Poetry Month. That means it’s National Poetry Writing Month. That means I’m writing a poem a day. That means I’m participating in a poem-a-day writing challenge.
NaPoWriMo FTW!
And that means I’m writing a poem a day along with my fellow writers on campus.
Publicly.
As in, where everyone can see.
Yes, those were the sounds of panic you just heard.
Here’s the thing: sometimes, you hear people say that those who can’t do, teach. Here’s the other thing: that’s totally wrong. I mean, sure, maybe some people who can’t do teach, but I think there’s a qualifier there: they may teach, but they probably don’t teach well. And I’m not saying that as a teacher, really — I’m saying that as a student. I’m saying that as someone who learns, which I will, God willing, always be, teaching or no teaching.
Here, I guess, is the thing I really mean: I learned how to teach from those who taught me, and I praise everything out there that those who taught me taught very, very well. They taught very, very well because, well, they did. And they weren’t afraid to let me watch them doing. My writing teachers wrote with us: if they gave us an exercise in class, their pens were always moving, and they read their drafts when we read our drafts, no matter how terrible or wonderful any of our drafts were. They read poems and puzzled through poems and thought through problems and they did it all out loud, in front of me. And from their thinking, I learned how to think. From their writing, I learned how to write. And I learned, about writing, about everything, the most important thing: keep doing. Do and do and do. Yoda was right: there is no try, there is only do — because trying is its own form of doing.
If there’s one thing I have learned as a teacher, though, it’s that that? That’s not easy. Writing along with my students means that I could write something that’s terrible, and reading along with them means letting them know I wrote something terrible, right then and there, before their very eyes. Sometimes, it’s easier to hide behind the screen, like Oz trapped in a cinderblock room. Sometimes, it’s easier to pretend like I’m the expert, the all-knowing, and they should listen to me just because I’m in the front of the room.
Easier doesn’t mean better when it comes to most things, teaching included. When I first started teaching, I was so terrified of doing and failing that I came into class every day with a full script, sometimes one that I’d rehearsed in the bathroom mirror beforehand. I even wrote out jokes, which, of course, failed, as the classes themselves tended to fail. I told myself that perhaps my humor was just too awesome for my students to get, but eventually, I had to realize that they just weren’t funny. They weren’t spontaneous. They were fake, and rehearsed, as was everything that happened on my end of the classroom — I wasn’t doing anything except reading lines, and when unexpected things (like, say, questions) came from the other
This is how I know my writing’s going well.
side of the room, I hadn’t rehearsed a response. I didn’t know what to do.
All right, I’ll say it: my classes sucked.
And I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Within three weeks of my first semester teaching, my name popped up on The Website That Shall Not Be Named, and there was a nauseously green frowny face next to it. One student wrote that she would rather jump out of a building than be in the same room with me. I drove to the gas station up the street, bought a bottle of cheap red wine, and sat on my couch and cried.
Looking back, that comment still has its sting, but most of the sting comes from the fact that I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to be in a room with me either, especially a classroom. Not long after that, I realized that I couldn’t keep up being a robot in class, even if being a robot was far more comfortable. I realized that in order to teach, I had to do. I had to show my students how I think, how I work, how I write. I had to get comfortable with acting out that process instead of some lame script, and I had to get comfortable with the fact that sometimes, I would falter. I’d be wrong. I’d fail. And I’d recover. I had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable — because what else would I ever want to teach?
Now, I’ve reached the final frontier of discomfort: writing a poem every day and posting it for my students and colleagues — and, well, the Interwebs — to see. Sometimes, I will falter. The poems will go wrong. They’ll fail. I’ll recover. And in doing, I’ll do the most important thing: I’ll learn myself and let the language teach me, which is, after all, all I could ever want to teach.
… and when things are exciting, dear denizens of the Blogosphere, I like to share them with you. One of the best things about the Internet, besides the seemingly endless and ever-regenerating number of photographs of cats wearing fruit on their heads and of sloths Photoshopped into the middle of the Crab Nebula, is that the Internet gives us the ability to share in IRL experiences we wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend IRL. For people like
This is a photograph of me reading. I’m taking off my reading glasses but it looks like I’m doing something dramatic and meaningful. In fact, forget the part about the reading glasses. This is a picture of me doing something dramatic and meaningful.
myself, whose bodies periodically refuse to work and who are, let’s face it, always like two and a half at the most seconds away from dressing all in white and living in somebody’s attic (because really, what’s the fun if it’s your own attic?), this is the definition of a blessing, a word that can so often feel insincere and general gives me a queasy case of agita, but which, in this case, absolutely applies.
Another part of The Great Blessing of the Internets (ugh, there’s the agita again) is that it allows people whose bodies periodically refuse to work, perhaps because they’re never much more than two and a half seconds away from Emily Dickinsoning up some unsuspecting nuclear family’s attic, to share with others the times they make appearances In Real Life. Such is the case with my reading in the Indian Springs School Visiting Writers Series, which you can hear here.
The first reading in the recording isn’t mine, it’s Kate Greenstreet‘s. If you listen to it, you’ll see why my knees were positively shaking because, seriously, how do you follow that? You’ll also see why I’d ordered a copy of Young Tambling, her newest collection from Ahsahta Press, before I’d even left the building that evening. I’ve been hungrily devouring the poems and people, this is one of Those Books — by that, I mean this is a life-changing book, the kind of book that leaves a reader wowed and restless and with a completely new way to look at poetry, books, art, life, everything. That’s because, in many ways, the book isn’t really a book. I mean, yes, it is a series of pages with words printed on them sewn together and bound. But it doesn’t solely exist in that form, in that bound structure. Greenstreet’s reading shows this: she re-orders the text and the text slips seamlessly into a new narrative, a new sequence of development. Each re-ordering creates a new story, a new series of images, a new work of art. Like she writes in the end of the collection, next to an insanely amazing oh my God seriously photograph of this book in a different incarnation, as pages of
This is a photograph of Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling. It’s been Instagrammed because its unfiltered awesomeness would make the Interwebs EXPLODE, and then where would Al Gore, astronaut sloths, and fruit-hatted cats be?
typeset and photographs arranged (and, presumably, re-arranged) on the wall:
Although I was thinking in two-page spreads, at some point I realized that I wasn’t actually (physically) making a book. I was making a
big rectangular piece of temporary art.
Which is SO RIDICULOUSLY INSANELY AMAZING OH MY GOD I CANNOT EVEN TALK ABOUT IT. It’s like she’s created a work of code-based electronic poetry without the code. Which, seriously. AMAZING.
And there are MORE EXCITING THINGS, the first of which has to do with my actually leaving the house and going to another location, specifically Boston, where I will be talking about writing and working and how those things go together at AWP 2013 (HOLLAH). I’ll be moderating a panel on the academic job market with three lovely friends and colleagues, Hannah De La Cruz Abrams (you should totally read her book, The Man Who Danced with Dolls, which is so beautiful I can’t even talk about it and is one of the few books I immediately read again after finishing), Sarah Domet (author of 90 Days to Your Novel) and Jared Yates Sexton (author of An End to All Things). The panel’s called Navigating the Track: The Writer and the Nontenured Position. It’s at noon on Saturday in Room 104 and should be pretty awesome. You can find more information about it on the AWP Website, here. Keep scrolling ’til you find it. I’ll also be a’signing books at the Toadlily Press Table in the Bookfair on Friday at 11:30 am. Come and find me and say hello! I will probably desperately need some coffee too, so if you’d like to bring some my way, that would be great.
See? EXCITING THINGS. And God bless Al Gore for inventing the Interwebs so we can all share in them.
