Sometimes when talking about being a writer (which honestly for as much as I obsess about it, it happens very infrequently in the day to day life of jobs and commutes and daily grind) occasionally I get asked, mostly from non-writers, what I write about. It's a tricky question, almost in fact a trick question. And I can say I write about horror movies (/SLASH/), about taxidermy and robot girls (unusual creatures). About hotel ghost stories (postcards from the blue swallow motel). About childlessness (the science of impossible things). That in the past, I've written about mermaids, sideshow women, rural upbringing, the apocalypse, atomic-era america, zombies, bad road trips, pop culture, James Franco, Joseph Cornell, victorian women, ghost stories, urban legends, phobias. But sometimes I feel like getting to the root of it is a much more complicated answer, and maybe one I'm not even completely capable of answering. Sure, there are themes in there, most of them having to do either directly on tangentially with feminism I suppose. And lately, I've been trending toward prose poems more than lineated verse. But it's hard to give any sort of artist-statement worthy, nutshell description of my writing people seem to expect (or I assume they expect somehow).
I've been musing for a couple of years about perhaps starting an ekphrastic project devoted to Francesca Woodman's work. Friday during the Indie Press Fest I met a freshman poetry student who was super excited about ekphrastics and bought my Salvadore Dali poems zine. Her enthusiasm somehow fed my enthusiasm and my mind turned again to the Francesca-inspired poems, and then yesterday, like a sign, there was a volume of her photos lying on the table by the new books shelf, which I quickly snapped up and brought back to my desk. Mind you, it falls in line behind all the other plates in the air at the moment, but alas....
This weekend, I am library-bound, and declaring Saturday a layout frenzy day for the remaining chaps coming out this fall and winter. But I also want to get some things submitted to some places I've been solicited. Also some new venues. I'm currently working on a little resource zine of online markets for innovative work for the library, so I should have a good list when I'm done.
