Autumn, the thick of it, always makes me nostalgic and backward looking. Last week I found myself looking forward to getting some Thai Food and maybe watching some Buffy and realized this was pure late 90's ritual for me..Every Tuesday night when the show was on, sometimes with my sister, I would order takeout (usually pad thai but sometimes pizza) and throw ourselves down the futon and floor or my tiny Lincoln Park studio to watch the show. In some ways it made me think that my existence is not so different from then, my life not so strange to that 24 year old self. Sure, my apartment is bigger, and I traded grad school classes for library work, but that was the first fall where I felt like poetry was at the center of things. the fall where I plunged into writing and for the first time, it was actually promising. When I fell in love with the Wasteland in a lit seminar and it opened a door for me that changed everything. When I began writing the poems that would go into that very first forgotten, horrible, book manuscript I vowed to finish before 25.
I had come out of a weird depressive funk the first couple months of the year, having begun to realize teaching was not for me, but with no clue of any future direction that did not include that fall back plan I'd always held in place. I was untethered for a while, but in the fall, began to feel a bit more anchored by the writing process. The hours I spent not in class, I was working on poems. I would kill to have that sort of free time these days, that sort of impulsive energy. The words came fast and furious that fall, some of which would wind up in my first chapbook from Moon Journal and other online publications a couple years later. (though none made into my first book.) Perhaps this is why fall always seems like a very serious time to write very serious things--moreso than other seasons. When I want to hide among stacks of books and do research for projects that are just beginning to take shape.
There is something about the drawing in, the waning daylight, that makes me want to hunker down with projects. I am still working catch as catch can through taurus, but I need to spend some time on the weekend rearranging and sorting the newer pieces into something like coherence. It's running a little longer than I intended, so seems a little vast and unruly, which needs a little work. I think I am scheduled to work Sunday, so maybe I'll get a little time in then to arrange.
