notes & things | 7/31/2023
Another week has slipped past, filled with many good summery things, including catching the amazingness of the Barbie film, big luxurious breakfasts and homemade tiramisu, sleeping gloriously late, and wandering around the zoo yesterday for the first time in years. Today, however, it's back to work and press doings and a plunge into writing decor things tomorrow. Today, my first fall/spooky season article debuted, and there will no doubt be plenty more in this long slide toward the end of summer. The weather has cooled after a few hot days and was much more amenable to being outdoors, though even limited time in the direct sun for any period of time always makes me feel drained in a way I don't normally in my usually nocturnal wanderings (especially when edible gummies are involved). Resultingly, I went to bed early and slept all through the night. Of course, I was wide awake at 5am this morning and apparently wide-eyed and bushy-tailed at an unusually formidable hour (at least for now.)
I am still caught in a strange place with the new poems, unsure of what direction, if any, they want to go. There are about a dozen, but I haven't decided what sort of animal they will eventually be. Without daily writing exploits most of July, I have been directing more efforts toward the visual side of things most days, including just making random collage animations for IG in addition to more series-based projects (see above.). I will be working this month on recording and making video poems for the VILLAINS series, so keep an eye out for that in September, as well as a possible impending zine for that batch of HOME IMPROVEMENTS collages and poems, probably coming toward the end of this month. I have more diversions planned for fall, including another haunted dollhouse advent project, the Henry James-inspired governess zine, and more in the works over the next two months.
As we enter back-to-school season, once again the month of August feels disorienting, disconnected as I am to an academic calendar after decades of being firmly entrenched. My own nearly 20 years of schooling, then the library job at the elementary school, then over two decades at Columbia and an MFA program nested inside it. It's hard not to see September as a new beginning and August as an ending of sorts. It is perhaps why most of my autumn endeavors seem more serious than the writing I do in the spring or summer. How it feels like a time that calls for weightier projects. (Though, last summer I was just beginning HOTTER, which turned out to be not so serious at all, and then I took some months off from writing poems with everything with my dad.).) I've been kicking around a project inspired by Mary Shelley the past few weeks and maybe that is how I will spend my autumn, which seems fitting. Or maybe some other horror-driven divergence.
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