Today is cloudy and rainy, but mild enough I didn't notice the cold as much as the past few weeks. Waiting for the bus, I was staring up at the magnolia trees outside the catholic school and the buds are just a little bit plumper now and will be bursting into flower in probably about three weeks if the temps stay fair.
The week in the library began with our Breton's Birthday festivities--the artmaking and a reading with some grad students. We're also collecting exquisite corpses and collages for a zine project that will debut in March. We'll be taking that, the Grimm box project, and whatever else we desire to the Chicago zine Fest come May, so that will be exciting. The other main project this week and next is selecting and hanging the work for the APOCALYPSE, USA exhibition and developing questions for the artists roundtable in a couple weeks. We got a huge bulk of work, spanning across genres, and so there was a lot to choose from.
The bad news of the week was that it seems, due to some financial issues, I will not be making it down to AWP and the alternative book fair after all. I finally had to cancel my hotel and succumb to the fact that much like my New Orleans trip last spring, I'd be hobbling myself financially for several months afterward (there was a lot of scrambling last year after the trip that didn't right itself until July, as a single person paying two rents, it was rough.) My anxiety since November is also a bit higher, and does not make flying or driving all that easy (and rail would be too expensive and overly-complicated a doing to Tampa) . I hate that I will miss it, but April and May versions of me will be thanking this decision and I suppose what money I save will be an excellent chance to get the mermaid anthology off the ground and out this summer. I will badly miss the chance at my little pink beachfront motel and hope to get there someday when things are a little more generous in the bank account arena. This week, however, I will be finishing up and mailing out so many books to authors who WILL be in Tampa, so you should find them and by them directly from their amazing authors.
Writing wise, I am still working on pieces from the hunger palace and the impossible objects series, as well as nearing completion (finally) of transcribing unusual creatures from it's original notebook. I'm pulling a usually quiet library shift tomorrow, so I'm hoping that might give me some extra time. That will also be coming together this summer and will require a few more resources than the usual chaps that it will be nice to have in pocket. March's release will be the honey machine centos and collages for the books & objects series, so keep an eye out for that soon.
I've also been thinking about the usage of social media when it comes to writing stuff and what platforms are most effective used in which ways. Facebook has seemed unusually quiet of late, so I wandered over to Twitter to set up camp (I've had a dgp account that autoposts from facebook for many years, as well as a few inside joke accounts with friends and last summer's mothman shenangigans, but no personal account of my own.) As a platform, I find it less easy to follow than facebook if you're not constantly connected and keep track of conversations, but I thought I'd give it another try. In my hunt last night for all the poets I wanted to follow, I did find a bushel of really cool litmags I had no idea existed. As I was scrolling through the dgp page followers to find people, I also stumbled across people like Carolyn Forche and Erica Jong following us and geeked out for a moment, mostly since when I was 20 and reading their work, I'd never believed that I would one day create something that authors, big famous-in-a-big-literary way like them, would take interest in. It's like making a small -independent film and finding out that Robert De Niro wants a part. I know they're just regular people, and we're all possibly a bit literarily famous on some scale as a look at my friends list will readily attest, but for someone who once looked from the outside/in at the literary world with awe, this is pretty awesome. You could probably only thrill me more if you dug up Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton from the grave and gave them a social media account...lol..
