writing and devouring

This weekend, a few of the governess poems written this spring landed in the latest issue of GRIMOIRE, one of my favorite witchy vibe mags. which is definitely a great home for the dark little kernels of these poems inspired by Henry James and the Brontes and other gothic delights. Reading through them again during proofing late last week, I was surprised to find I still like them as much as I did during the spring--perhaps a little more even. With my recent waffling on whatever may be next and finishing off the crypto poems even more slowly than planned. I was surprised. Especially since I've spent all late summer and early autumn wondering why anyone, even me, writes poems when there are a million other ways we could be focusing energies. These poems, however, were sound enough that for a glimmer of a second, there was no doubt I was doing exactly what I should be doing. That my energies have, and continue to be, well-placed.  This feeling may fade in a day or a week and I'll go back to questioning, but for now, I cling to it like a tiny thread.

We took in a screening of Adaptation last night, which I had never seen, but which J promised I would like for all its perspectives on writing in general. I am always interested in writers on film, the good the bad and the ugly. Of course, they probably crop up all too often, as heroes and villains, sometimes as monsters.  Content of all kinds. including film, relies so much on them and their own interpretations of self and story. That stories of course exist without them. but there is a sense-making that filtering through writers makes happen. We closed out Haunting of Hill House this morning, when the eldest brother, a writer, is taunted by his wife that things do not really exist until they have been eaten, processed, and spat out (I believe she said shit out) by the writer in a story.

This space is a lot of that processing and sense-making, but it happens in poems, though perhaps less intentionally. With the anniversary of my mother's death falling yesterday. I think particularly of FEED. and how that book was very much a processing and sense-making in the months after her death, even though some of it was written and conceived before that.  Last year, through the winter and into spring, the home improvements series served a similar function for losing my dad, but was much shorter and less winding than what the longer book became. I do not know if I am done with it, but perhaps for now, I am. 

Even my freelance work, though I do not always choose what to write about. feels also like a way of digesting and interpreting the world, whether its DIY projects or art lessons, restaurants or home decor, I feel like sometimes experiencing the world is not quite real or tangible until I write it down, turn it over, make sense of it in keystrokes and pen marks.