I call this “Rejection of Your Deliciousness, California Pizza Kitchen, In Favor of a Poetry Book (Which Appears to Be Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling, So Right On).”
I call this “Emma Totally Gets Caught Instagramming Someone In Line For The Ladies’ Room Dressed As A Shark, And Emma And Her Instagramming Are Summarily Rejected.”
I call this “Seasonal Appropriateness In Your Face, Supposed Springtime! You Are Rejected And It Is Always Christmas In Boston.”
I call this “Taken From A Very Comfortable Couch Rejected By This Group Of People Who May Or May Not Be Attending Either A Nametagless High School Reunion Or A Pharmaceutical Company Convention Who Preferred To Stand Awkwardly And Uncomfortably Rather Than Risk Sitting Next To A Bunch Of Writers.”
I call this “Rejection: Your Personal Space Is My Personal Space (Or At Least The Personal Space Of My White Jeans And Puffy Jacket) (Oh And Also All Of My Many Not-Pictured Bags)
I call this “Rejection: What Rhymes With ‘Escalator?’ WHO CARESALATER. Stairs For You, Poets!”
I call this “Rejection: Your Personal Space Is My Personal Space (Or At Least The Personal Space Of My White Jeans And Puffy Jacket) (Oh And Also All Of My Many Not-Pictured Bags)
I call this “Rejection: What Rhymes With ‘Escalator?’ WHO CARESALATER. Stairs For You, Poets!”
The first rejection (it’s kind of like the first Noel, only with despair instead of hope and all):
I call this “Rejection and Scandal: Nudity at the Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport.”
It all started a few months ago, when, during my bi-sometimes-tri-weekly trip to the local Rite Aid, I noticed a sad, rejected little shopping cart. It seemed to be hiding behind the wall, almost as though it felt embarrassed, almost as though it didn’t want the world to see it in its sad, rejected state.
I call this “It’s Still Rejection Even If You Try To Hide It, Cart Outside The Rite Aid.”
And then, as I drank my refreshing Diet Coke and made my bi-or-tri-weekly post-Rite-Aid trek to the Hobby Lobby, I saw it: they were everywhere. Sad, rejected carts. Abandoned half-smoked cigarettes. Uncapped and half-spilled glitter. I was surrounded by rejection.
And I continued to be surrounded by rejection, and couldn’t help but document it. Anything, it seemed, could be rejected, and rejection, it seemed, was everywhere. There was rejection at the Wal-Mart:
I call this “Rejection: Santa Claus by the Jarred Popcorn, Statesboro Wal-Mart.”
There was rejection on campus:
I call this “Rejection Outside of the Newton Building.”
There was especially depressing rejection on top of a random mailbox outside the K-Mart:
I call this “Rejection with No Further Comment Needed.”
There was even rejection at the happiest place on earth:
I call this “Rejection at the Kiwanis Ogeechee Fairgrounds Ring of Fire”
Over the past few months, I’ve become quite fond of rejection. There’s something lovely about the objects that have been left behind, and about the story that led to them being left behind.
Tomorrow, I’ll be moving through our modern world’s greatest bastion of rejection, the airport, on my way to the AWP Conference in Boston. I realized that there’s really no better place to look for rejection at a gathering of 10,000 writers, so I’m planning to post rejections as I come across them this week.
Get ready for abandoned Moleskines and Chuck Taylors, blogosphere. Rejection’s about to get real.
… 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.
PEOPLE OF THE INTERNETS! This message goes out to all ye dwellers of the greater Birmingham, Alabama area, which, I’m pretty sure, now includes approximately 4,242 cities, town, and/or municipalities — or, if ye dwell not in one of the approximately 4,242 cities, towns, and/or municipalities that make up the greater Birmingham, Alabama area and have been itchin’ to take a bitchin’ road trip, this message is also for you. For lo, soon Emma Bolden will board a plane and take to the skies on her way to her olde stomping groundes, where, on Monday, February 18th, at 7:30 PM, she shall participate in the Rock Awesome Indian Springs School Visiting Writers Series. It’s free and open to the public, and you can find out more about it here. She’ll be reading from her book, Malificae, forthcoming in April from GenPop Books. She’ll also be reading with Kate Greenstreet and trying not to pass out from the sheer awesome of being in the same room with her. There will be poems. There will be poems about witches. There will be awkward jokes and swigs from water bottles. And there will be KATE GREENSTREET.
Whistle wet? Here’s some more information about the series:
PEOPLE THIS IS ACTUALLY HAPPENING.
For a preview of poems from Malificae, you can go here and here. To hear what these poems sound like when Abraham Smith reads them, go here. To hear what these poems sound like when Emma reads them, go here. To pre-order Malificae, go here. And for a preview of why Emma might pass out from the sheer awesome of being in the same room as Kate Greenstreet, go here and look at everything. Seriously. Just be careful and put down a pillow or something for when you pass out.
This is a photograph of the massive mess I made in my home office.
Needless to say, I haven’t been blogging.
To say that a lot has been going on would be an understatement. Lately, life has been — well, it’s basically like Life started throwing lemons at me, and then I was like, Awesome! Lemons! Hey, thanks, Life, and I made a ton of lemonade, which is delicious and, incidentally, prevents kidney stones. Two birds, one citrus fruit. But then Life was like, Oh hell no, and started lobbing grapefruit at me, and I was like, WTF Life? Grapefruit are never delicious, except with mounds of sugar or vodka, both of which would ruin my low-carb diet, and besides, even the OED doesn’t know the plural of the word “grapefruit,” so how I am even supposed to talk about this? And then Life gave me this creepy Joker-esque grin and lobbed two grapefruit(s) directly at my face.
Thanks a lot, Life.
And so I have turned to what I always turn to in times like these: organizational projects that
This is a photograph of Gertrude Stein in the middle of freaking LOVING the massive mess in my home office, which is probably the first symptom of super-angry cat rabies.
are so obsessive that they probably show up somewhere in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, so I tend to not talk about them until they’re finished and people will say things like You are so organized! Good for you! instead of Hey, Emma, would you like to go get a cup of coffee and have a conversation, perhaps about hownice it would be to hang out for a while in a calming, white, padded room where someone comes in three times a day with a Dixie cup of pills?
Now that my projects are nearly finished, I feel better about blogging and talking about them, though I admit that a padded room would probably be a
good idea because let’s face it, I’m really clumsy and walls are hard. I separated the books I need for teaching from the books I need for home reading (and listen, there are a lot of both. I’m pretty sure everyone in the world who works for a moving company regularly wakes up screaming after a nightmare about my books) and took them to my office, and organized the rest according to the spectrum (which I’m pretty sure shows up on page 46 of the DSM-IV).* I built a cabinet for my sewing supplies and filed my fat quarters according to color (DSM-IV, page 72). I developed a color-coded filing system in a series of binders, complete with plastic sleeves to hold spare items that can’t be hole-punched, like pattern pieces and receipts and all ten thousand of my cats’ rabies shot collars, which I’m pretty sure just gave both of my cats super-angry cases of rabies (for color-coding and plastic
This is an after photograph. Some of my fat quarters are now out of place. This makes me nervous.
sleeves, see DSM-IV page 52; for paranoia about super-angry cat rabies, see
page 12).
The organizational projects have helped a lot: not only am I now able to actually find that handout about Dean Young’s lecture on surrealism and quickly locate the perfect red calico to complete my current hexie quilt stripe**, I actually feel like I have some control over at least some part of my life. Obsessive, hole-punched, color-coded, magnificent control.
As a writer and a teacher, I admit that I look for metaphors in everything, and hole-punching and color-coding is no exception. It all goes back to the lemons, really. Here’s the thing about Life: it’s going to lob lemons at your forehead, and grapefruit(s) and ugli fruit(s) and kumquats and tangelos and whatever else Life can find in its produce aisle. The only thing you can do is put concealer over your bruises, pick up the
This is a photograph of actual lemons I actually made to make actual lemonade, FOR CONTEXT.
citrus fruit(s) fallen and themselves bruised by your feet, and make one helluva citrus punch. And that’s going to be messy — you’re going to have to roll up your sleeves, get out the knives and the juicer, and pulverize a bunch of lemons. But when you’re done, you’ll have a beautiful pitcher of a refreshing citrus cocktail — and sometimes, when Life seems unfaceble and no action seems possible, sitting back and sipping on a cool citrus beverage is the best action you can take.
Especially if you add mounds of sugar and vodka.
*NOTE: I have no actual knowledge about the DSM-IV, so if you do and you’re thinking to yourself Hmm, page 46 is actually the page about women who watch too much Dateline and think Britney Spears is a feminist icon, sort of like a contemporary version of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, that’s totally just a coincidence.
** NOTE THE SECOND: I also probably have no actual knowledge about actual quilting or actual quilting terminology, so this might not at all be what this is called. For information about actual quilting and/or actual quilting terminology, I suggest that you refer to this book, WHICH ACTUALLY EXISTS:
No, seriously. THIS BOOK EXISTS. And you can BUY IT. NOTE: there are still two days until Valentine’s Day. YOU’RE WELCOME.
If there is one thing I cannot deny about myself, besides the fact that my hair is unmanageable and that I miss Tyra Banks having a talk show so we can all talk about how often she does that weird baby impression, it’s this: I love a craft project. I always have. Whether it was making beads from the pages of my mom’s old Victoria magazines to making little drummer boy ornaments from clothespins to pasting giant picture of giant frogs on the inside of my Trapper Keeper, I grew up crafting, and I’ve never stopped. Though I hate Christmas, I have to admit that I do love that it gives me an excuse to pull out my hot glue gun and power drill and my extensive collection of glitters. People have asked me to post a tutorial for one of my favorite Christmas crafts, the Mason jar snow globe, and in the spirit of holiday crafting and peer pressure, I give you just that.
First, you’ll need to gather supplies. It will probably take you four trips to Hobby Lobby to gather all of said supplies because you keep forgetting what you need once you get in the store because there’s so much glitter there that it’s mind-blowing, and you also keep forgetting to make a list of what you need before you go to the store and see the mind-blowing array of glitters. Said supplies include: Mason jars, glycerin (which is completely impossible to find, so it’ll take you about a week of going to every drug store possible looking for it until you find it in the pharmacy across the freaking street from where you live, for Chrissakes, next to the hand lotion and Tincture of Merthiolate because apparently that makes sense), glitter, and festive stuff to go inside the Mason jars.The most important supplies, really, are the festive things that go inside the snow globe, because that’s what makes the snow globe festive and festivity? It’s important. Here, I’ve gathered a plastic deer (because it was the cheapest little plastic figurine at Hobby Lobby that made any sense in a snow globe) and a bunch of little trees which are apparently called “bottle-brush trees.” That’s your craft fact for the day. You’re welcome. I read somewhere on the Internets that these can discolor the snow globe water, so I sprayed them with acrylic top-coat sealer. I’m not sure if that’s actually going to be effective, but it made me feel useful and pro-active and really, let’s be honest, it’s the holidays, and anything that makes you feel useful and pro-active is important.Arrange your festive stuff on the Mason jar’s lid. This is important so that you can make sure your festive stuff will actually fit inside of the Mason jar. It’s also important to make sure your festive stuff is festive enough. Here, I’ve created a scene in which a deer is frolicking in a bottle-brush tree forest. Frolicking? Definitely festive. Other suggestions for festive snow globe items include: snowmen, non-terrifying Santa Claus figurines (if you can find one), tiny recreations of Dickensian town squares, velociraptors covered in Christmas lights, velociraptors covered in Christmas lights attacking tiny recreations of Dickensian town squares, and tiny replicas of your enemies wearing only their undergarments so that they’ll be forever trapped in a freezing, watery, festive globe of terror.Now that you’ve created your festive scene and made sure that the Mason jar can handle all that festivity, glue the figurines to the jar lid using the superglue you accidentally left out of the photograph you took of necessary supplies.At this point, you’re totally impatient and really want to get this snow globe assembled. Tell your horses to hold their festive selves — you are about to put these things in water and if you don’t let the glue dry, it’s going to be a bad scene. Let the jar lids dry overnight. You can take this time to make other holiday crafts, like yarn-covered-styrofoam-form-Christmas trees or voodoo dolls of all of the relatives who will soon ask you embarrassing and relentless questions about why you’re not married and have so many cats.Once you give the figurines time to dry, it’s time to take another look at the directions for making a snow globe and notice that they call for distilled or boiled water. Realize that you are too cheap to buy water because it is water, and you’re also too lazy to change out of your owl pajamas and Muk Luks to go to a store to purchase said water. Boil the water instead. Just don’t watch it. See how this water isn’t boiling? That’s because I’m watching it. So don’t.Once the water has boiled and then cooled back down to room temperature, you’re back in snow globe business. Pour the water into your finest glass pitcher because this sh*t is going on the Internet and you don’t want people to see how you live. Now, pour the water from this fine glass pitcher into the Mason jars. It’s probably a good idea to make sure you have enough water to fill the Mason jars, too.Add a dash of glycerin to the water, even though you have no idea what a “dash” is and you don’t really know what glycerin’s actually supposed to do here, except that other actual craft bloggers said stuff about how it makes the snow not fall as fast and you guess that’s about right, plus who are you to argue with actual craft bloggers? Also, while you’re adding the glycerin, you’ll freak out thinking that your fingers are bleeding. Your fingers are not bleeding, they’re just covered in pink Glitterblast spray paint. Don’t panic.ADD GLITTER. The craft blogs will say you can add as much glitter as you want, and you want A LOT OF GLITTER.Put some superglue around the edges of the Mason jar. If you spill some, you might think it’s a good idea to touch it with your bare fingers. It isn’t.Put the lid upside down on top of the Mason jar. This will probably be about the time you remember that you bought some sealant from Lowe’s like a year ago because your duplex is, let’s be honest, a little tragic and the sink didn’t want to stay in the hole where the sink was supposed to stay. You’ll think to yourself, well, better not let all that sealant go to waste, but you’ll also panic before you use it and Google eleventy combinations of sealant + superglue to make sure you’re not going to make your duplex explode because even though it is slightly tragic, it’s still full of you and your pets and things.Screw on the Mason jar’s outer lid and wipe away any excess sealant with a picture of a monkey you have laying around because you forgot to bring in paper towels and you are the kind of person who has a picture of a monkey just laying around.You will want to turn the snow globe over immediately to experience the hand-held wonder of winter. DO NOT TURN THE SNOW GLOBE OVER IMMEDIATELY. Actually, it might be okay if you do this, but you’re kind of obsessive when it comes to crafting and you want this craft to be right, so you decide to wait until it dries overnight. Again.And there you have it! A tiny deer frolicking amongst a tiny copse of tiny bottle-brush trees in your own hand-held winter effing WONDERLAND!Now you can display your snow globe with all of your other festive holiday crafts on a little table in your hallway where you keep all of your favorite books, because really, what says merry Christmas and happy holidays more than a collection of books by poets who died tragically and/or committed suicide? I’ll tell you what: NOTHING.
