As we move quickly through August at breakneck speed, fall is feeling imminent , especially since we finally hit a spat of cool for the month temps, I've been thinking of what's been happening this summer and what is coming in the next few months, including the new book in October as well as my #31DAYSOFHALLOWEEN offerings, which I am plotting already--video shorts and short fiction and poems. I'll be posting the last handful of the memoir series early in September and beginning to edit and layout the new book. There is also another possible fun little zine due for November, and of course, this year's art advent project.
As the new book prep begins, I've been staring at this spring's release, which turned out to be better looking and more successful than I'd dreamed here in this tiny corner of self-publishing endeavors. I'm a little shocked and delighted. Even though I now have full-time to devote to things I want to, I still get busy, and I feel like April was kind of chaotic before I settled into routines and appeased my $$$$ anxiety by taking on some more paid work. So the release of AVM felt like something that went down without much fanfare, especially since its not like you can really have a reading safely (or at least one I would enjoy and not be anxious about.) I feel calmer and less like I am crashing into things this summer, and hopefully that feeling will keep going through the fall.
I was thinking this morning about the EXTINCTION EVENT part of that book in particular since it's been a couple years exactly since I spent a couple days wandering with a notebook around the Field Museum and making notes for what would become a series of poems about climate change and museum diorama artists, about birds and dinosaurs and what we leave behind as artifacts. In many ways that series formed the spine of AVM more than any other series within, some written earlier, some later. Late 2019 was also a weird time for me.... a financial free fall after trying to pay the rent on two expensive spaces, the decision to move from the studio, general money anxiety that carried through the new year, and then, BOOM! PANDEMIC! I don't think walking through the evolution exhibit, I would have known how close we were approaching to our own life-changing earth-wide event in just a few months, or how disappointed I'd be when we got there about our subsequent behavior. Little did I also know that would be my last in-person reading for a while tucked amid the Hall of Birds cases there at the North end of the museum, so I am glad it was a highly enjoyable one.
