the final stretch

This past week has been devoted to doing another round of proofing for RUINPORN, which is getting closer to finished and a wrap and will be ready for release come just after Thanksgiving. It feels important it come out in November, however cursed with badness /blessed with goodness this coin-toss month always seems to be. I did one pass as an editor looking for anything amiss in the text, than another eagle eyed one looking for misalignments, punctuation anomalies, font weirdness, and any margin shifts. This is similar to my final pass on chapbooks before saving that final file. I'm confident this latest proof, which arrived today, probably only needs one or two changes and I am ready to order the first batch. I've already started sharing teasers for the book on Instagram, and next week, time willing I will be making some reels and a book trailer, as well as promo graphics. 

This is the longest full-length I've ever published, topping out at just over 150 pages. It seemed strangely unwieldy, and I almost removed one section before putting it back in place. My slimmest books are the book length project manuscripts like THE SHARED PROPERTIES OF WATER AND STARS and GIRL SHOW, both of which are just over 50 pages total. Everything else falls in between, the longest probably being DARK COUNTRY. Of course the borders between chapbook-length and full-length mean less and less. GRANATA was probably only 35 pages of poems with another 30 pages of collages, so a book, but as a manuscript more of a chap. THE POET'S ZODIAC was technically around 50 pages, but always felt like a chap, the printed version saddle bound and handmade.  

Occasionally I glance at the books on my shelf, soon to be 15 longer projects,  and have to pinch myself, thinking who knew I had so many words in me. Or maybe more who knew I could even get them out. That I could shake the body or the brain or the soul and out would fall so much language. Sometimes I am the girl with her teen bookshelf stacked high with horror novels or the college/grad student whose every surface held a little bit of everything. Poems, fiction, plays. It still seems surreal that I have written so much in the past 30 years. Or that it was published (half by traditional presses, another half my own hand.) Also that there is more to come--a whole other manuscript of smaller series called WILD(ISH) and the longer carnival project that feels like a sibling book to GIRL SHOW--all complete and just need some edits and a revisit--both of which I will likely release next year.  Also another book that the title just unveiled itself for that is about fifty percent written and a couple other projects we'll see if they get their wings. 

of hostile environments

One of the coolest things I've done as a poet was a reading a few years back at the Field Museum, one of my favorite spots in the city. A place that was sort of responsible, via an opportune 9th grade field trip, for making me intent on living in this city one day, where I've now lived longer here than not here. The task laid out by the museums poet in residence was simple. I would spend some time at the museum, with back area access to any collections I wanted. The goal was writing poems I would then present at a reading at my choice of spot in the museum later in the year.  August found me wandering the museum for a few hours each week..all my favorite exhibits and some new ones. Not only did I get free admission (though I tended to go on free Wednesdays anyway) but it was also paid and funded by the Poetry Foundation, which at the time, amid some tight money surrounding my move out of the studio, was a godsend. 

The results of those weeks at the museum were a series of poems, with a handful of  photographs, that became a zine eventually after the reading, which was held in the Hall of Birds one October afternoon. It seemed completely natural, being a poet who once wrote a whole book called  IN THE BIRD MUSEUM. The thing that stood out was that this wasn't really an audience of other poets as per usual, but random passersby and museum staffers, all whom asked some really interesting questions after I was finished with the poems. Did I consider myself a nature poet? What role did the midwest play in my work?  It was definitely was one of those creative highs, and its strange to think that was actually my last in person reading before covid (I've done a few via zoom over the past four years, but  nothing in the flesh yet again.)

Making notes and drafting the poems, I vowed not to dwell on birds (difficult for me) but to focus more on evolution and extinction. The markers in the evolution exhibit kept reminding us of massive wipeouts of creatures due to whatever reason., huge die offs of species. But more the idea of evolution to survive difficult environments.  I feel like the last decade the world is a difficult environment, as is life sometimes, so we must adapt and change to survive.

You can read the whole zine HERE, including the photos I took that summer in the museum tucked in among the poems.   

from the long lost xanga archives

It occurs to me every once in a while, come March of next year, this blog will be 20 years old. But of course, before this, there was another blog. A messier and more rough space but also more social. A short-lived Xanga from 2003-2005, into which I pored not only longer writing and poem drafts, but also the sort of stuff now you would relegate to social media instead. Quizzes and surveys and twenty-question type posts. Reading announcements, rants, poem drafts, life miscellany. There was no such thing as "content," then in the way we know it now.  It was more like a place you just gathered with people you knew from far flung locales. Some of the poets I got to know there became real life friends, and internet friends, many later authors I would publish or who would later publish me. 

I'd kept journals, sometimes fairly detailed ones, since 1994. and before that, sparse diaries starting at age 15. I have them tucked away here in the apartment, along with pretty detailed scrapbooks of the age before the internet.  While those are about documentation,  the journals were where I thought things out, took notes on reading assignments, ranted and raved about everything as 20-year-olds often do. As the blog became the main place I was chronicling and communicating in the early aughts, those marbled Mead composition journals became more sporadic and then stopped entirely.  This means that everything else was online, or at least once was. Xanga went caput a decade or more ago, but I still have the RSS feed files in my Dropbox should I ever need them. 

Last night, I was thinking about Novembers past and all their pitfalls and was trying to remember what was happening in November of 2004, somehow impossibly two decades ago. I decided to scan through the most recent files and see if I could get a feel for that fall. Its tastes and textures. .One thing that stood out to me was disappointment over the 2004 election and Bush's re-election. Little did we know things would get ever so much worse. 

Also, there was, at the forefront, my book fever struggles. At the time I had completed what I thought was book #1 in late 2003, but I was also going through a lot of evolution and learning new things as an MFA student. Just reading a lot more contemporary poets who were influencing me in various ways. I was coming into a fall where I felt like people were just beginning to notice my work, having won a fairly large contest in the spring and starting to do more and more readings. That initial book wound up being just half of the mss. that eventually got a publishing deal a year later. The work itself was rough, but getting better. I was working on the errata project for a hybrid class, which was changing my basic style in new ways. The version I turned in was a little corset book that you unbound to read it. A year later I also issued a chapbook version. 

The book fever may seem, in hindsight that is 20/20, ridiculous--the poring over contests, the money and effort spent. I managed a couple of close calls and then found a publisher in a very old fashioned way. I queried, submitted, and they said yes. The result, the aptly named the fever almanac, was a beautiful book and a great start to my publishing career. Of course, all the handwringing about never finding it a home was bracketed by frustrations over suspect contest winners and bottlenecks. I was determined to self-publish if no one wanted my strange little book. Having both traditionally published and self-published these past two decades, its amusing to me that the latter is where I actually cast my lot these days, mostly due to control over when things are released and just making more income from my work than conventional royalties allow.  I also just write A LOT, which means finding that many publishers would be more exhausting than just issuing my own titles as they are completed. 

Overall, I was more trusting, more passionate, more enthusiastic in these entries, so they feel strange to have been typed out by my fingers all those years ago. Other highlights include local readings I almost forgot about entirely, that first crudely put together chap for the dgp series, editing wicked alice, and struggling through those first couple MFA semesters, the roughest ones by far that would get better as the next couple years progressed, though my experience and overall impression was already tainted. 

My 30-year old self now seems almost as unreadable as my 20 year old self, despite many things being the same--same apartment, same neighborhood. While my style has probably changed a little, and my hair is longer than it was then, I'm pretty sure I have at least a couple blouses and cardigans that are that old in my closet.  While I did a big living room rearrange circa 2010, most of the furniture I have is the same. In late 2004, I was still in the years of an open relationship that was far more cerebral than physical that would crash and burn a couple years later. This was after I'd already decided I didn't wanted the traditional marriage and family route, but a little before my years of debauchery and bad decisions.

The poems I was writing then were changing from the more straight laced work pre-MFA  to something new--more prose and hybrid work, more surreal and material. The way I wrote poems changing itself, from more dogged plotting to a more collage approach that sustained me for a few years.  In the next couple years, the poems that would become In the Bird Museum would start coming fast and furious. I was just starting my forays into collage and visual art as well, which would go on to endless inform my written work from then on. 

words and witchery

Last night found us at a short film screening with a company J has started doing some marketing work for in addition to his regular DJ-ing work. It was about alcoholism and accountability, and fit very well into their mission of making films that have weighty subject matter examined in new ways.  All along and all the way home, I was thinking about art and its role in this terrible, terrible, world that is also, quite deceptively very beautiful sometimes. About power and change, and how art is a statement whether it has a clear cut message or no. 

It's been easy to feel, and I know its not just me, that as creatives, what we create does not do much beyond, at its most basic level, distract. Or at its best, entertain. Maybe its just me as a poet. and a very specific poetry related thing. During Covid, and after, even though I was writing steadily as the year ended, it felt very much for naught. Like, who cares about poems when the refrigerator trucks are lining up to haul away the bodies because there are too many to store? When, you're hit with a wave of fear on public trans with every sniffle or cough, distracted so much you can't even take solace in reading on the bus anymore (or really any other time.) The day my book SEX & VIOLENCE arrived in my mailbox from the publisher, downtown Chicago had been on fire the night before and basically closed off for traffic after rioting. There was a city-wide curfew for the next couple of weeks and I spent those days methodically going through the motions of what library work I could do at home. 

The arts of course, were also hit horribly by the pandemic, though I am noticing fuller movie screenings and sold out theater productions these days, so hopefully things are on the rise. As for writing,  it seems harder to gain traction, either because of attention spans and social media and everyone pulled in a million different directions. Writing, at least creative writing, especially for me in 2021 when I was still working full-time, and even a little while afterward, felt useless and superfluous. It's something, as I edited the RUINPORN mss I realize I was obsessively hashing out in all those memoir in bone & ink poems written in the spring of 2022. 

But of course, that series ends with the line, "What use for padlocks and handcuffs, when we were staying all along?"  In those months, I was writing more and more for money, some of them, according to back end stats, with thousands more readers than any of my creative work. I was thinking of how I may need to pivot to other genres just to make ends meet. I was plotting writing genre fiction  as a more passive income string in addition to my content writing. But I'd read the poems, the ones I'd written, and somehow was still writing, and would love them so much more. Eventually I moved past it, saving my other types of writing as a journey, not an escape route.

In times like these, the most unprecedented (though many would say it holds the ghosts of authoritarian regimes past like the scent of something burning) it seems writers may be able to communicate what other things fail to. Maybe not poetry or fiction, but at least the words on the page or screen. I try to think about the times when the words, not really the creative ones, had made changes or garnered something more than their own existence. The national award the library won. The messy previous application dossiers written by librarians who were terrible at project management and making something readable and visually appealing.  (I did not do it entirely alone, but mostly it was me, with the help of one other department co-worker as a sounding board and a student staffer who provided illustrations that made us stand out enough to tip us into first place.) 

When the head of the organization who granted the award showed up for the swanky celebration, she responded with something like "Oh,. of course, you had a poet write it." I like to think it was just a compliment, but looking around at the shabby, definitely not state of the art spaces and limited resources, the tiny staff that is even tinier now, I realized that my application had made it look beautiful, like maybe putting a lipstick on a pig. A sparkling of fairy godmother dust in the form of words. For a long time, maybe even I believed them myself.  Poetry sometimes lies. Most of things we created, the idea of a library as artist community and resource, the focus weeks, the digital exhibits, the programming, went out the door with me.. What made us distinctive swallowed in one gulp by my leaving and my co-curator beholden to other stuff as a department head. 

But in those few years, another award app we wrote and won had a cash prize we got to keep. After a job level classification, I drafted a letter of appeal that actually bumped up our departments classification, but that never actually bore any fruit in getting us raises or new titles. (this also one of the reasons I left.) But the words had power, that under better circumstances for the college, may have paid off.  As someone who wrote poems that were like little whirlwinds of leaves, this felt like a windstorm. Almost like spells and witchery. 

But then again, my favorite way to think of poems is as little spells. As incantations that conjure something, even just a feeling. A whisp of memory. A nuggets of sense-making substance.  I think this may be where those minimalist insta poets succeed. In creating a little spell to hang onto,. even if its just sentiment or cliched slightly that fits the moment. Perhaps this is who poetry gets trotted out like the red-headed stepchild at weddings and funerals.  I got really excited a few weeks back when my tattoo artist and I were talking books, and she mentioned wanting to read more poems because she was loving Rupi Kaur. It was like a strange poetry thing spotted in the wild when I usually only hear poets talk about poetry. It was like a glimmer, a little whirlwind of dust rising off the ground. 

notes & things | election post-mortem

One of the hardest things about getting older, more than my inability to read in near-dark anymore, random aches and pains whenever I sleep wrong, or any visible signs that age may bring like wrinkles and graying hair, may be the loss of my faith in humanity. While 2016-2019 did not help maintain it, things that have been happening since 2020 seem to have dealt the final blows. I was relaying to J recently the story of how I found out there was no Santa Claus. My mother, cleaning the bathroom where I'd trapped her in with my 9 year old form, determined to find out the truth after a rather brisk day of naysayers on the school playground. She confirmed my suspicions, made me promise not to tell my sister, and it was only after a few minutes when I realized that not believing in Santa anymore meant that nothing--Easter bunnies, tooth fairies, ghosts, or probably even god did not exist. I was hit with a wave of sadness in what may have been the first moment of utter heartbreak in my young life. 

It would be followed by more, some global some very personal only to me. Some easier to move past, some not so much. The pandemic came from nowhere, and even as it happened, as we locked down and masked up, part of me felt incredulous. Like the real was not quite real. But then again, even little traumas can feel this way. Losses, disappointments, twists of fate.  At the beginning, I was just looking to make it through unscathed and without coming down with it By the end, something had broken in me, and apparently is still prone to more breaking as the events of Tuesday night and the following day played out. 

There's a reason that something global like that catalyzes people. One one hand many people had a moment to pause and reconsider what they were doing with their lives, especially amid a new threat to that very life or those around them. There's a reason we had things like the Great Resignation follow in its stead. Why the pandemic years are littered with divorces, broken friendships, and estranged relatives.  Why even I finally had the courage to leave a job that was taking advantage of me and I am pretty sure killing me with frustration and financial strife regularly. Working from home, new options in gig work, and other changes caused a lot shifting in how people worked either by desire or necessity. 

But in addition to those gains and changes, there were losses. I legit believed that people would follow medical guidance and protocols and the pandemic would be something we could move through with less death and minor inconvenience and then move past. Instead, it led to deeper divides, selfishness, crazy Karen disruptions, more lies on the part of an already shifty government. People always talk about 9/11 and how it rattled their sense of safety, and it surely did, but Covid rattled not only that, but our conviction of human nature being mostly good, something I stupidly still believed until that pandemic spring. I realize maybe I live a sheltered life through perpetually rose-colored glasses, combined with a sarcastic, but overall optimistic bent. 

Another chunk in that veneer came this past Tuesday as I watched those red states notch into place and even the popular vote climb higher than it even seemed possible. I know die-hard red-hatted dogs weren't going to be swayed by anything, but I did not realize the rates of gullibility nor hatred among the rest of the Americans. Maybe I should have. With the that veneer gone, more and more I can see right into the black, black heart. 

notes & things | election night edition

It's been warmer than usual, but still rainy and endlessly gloomy amid the shorter days. Today, it felt like a needed a lamp on even in the early afternoon to really see anything. Tonight, J is making soup as soon as he gets home and we'll be feeding our anxieties with that and a loaf of crusty and comfortable bread slathered in butter. I won a bottle of fancy riesling at horror trivia night last week and we plan to crack it open if things are looking good at the end of the night, though I am hesitant lest we jinx any propitious developments so maybe we will wait on that.

There is continually a moment when I click over to the news from whatever else it is that I am trying to do (work, write, put the groceries away) and those swathes of red states, even the predicted ones, make me remember how clueless I once was about basic sound sense and goodness in people. Like many kids that came of age in the glistening and sparkly 90s, the world seemed to be on such a good path toward sounder government, kinder government. I even understood, even if I did not agree, on many of the hot button issues that divided political parties, things like taxation and abortion (though what I used to think was a legit concern over when life officially began has been revealed again and again to be a way to control women.) Sure, I bit my nails and fretted when Bush was elected in 2000, which seemed like a backward step, and probably was compared to how if things had shaken out otherwise I also understood that every action has an opposite reaction. Obama's win made conservatives froth at the mouth and apparently completely lose any good judgment or ethics they had. The rise of social media allowed dysfunction and misinformation to spread wider than before. It became okay to be a monster, something reinforced by the events of November 2016.  You'd see in chat rooms, at rallies, in the (mostly) men who bullied and catcalled and swaggered their way through the first four years. 

Last election, I was careful to step lightly and not hope too much. It seemed more of a return to sense, wrought tooth and nail as it was out to the bitter end. I was too busy laughing at the foolishness of January 6-ers to be horrified in the moments splashed on screen, but that came later  as it sunk in how close we had come to the unraveling of democracy right there in full view. When J and I went to see Civil War this past spring, I spent the entire night in a deep depressive funk I couldn't get out of for days. I see a lot of disturbing movies on a regular basis every week, but that one rattled me to the point I didn't even want to talk about it here. 2020 was also a return to a better version of the timeline, but still much of the same when so many of us longed for something new and progressive, and maybe we will eventually get it (AOC has that same shine that Obama did in the early aughts, and I hope she stays the course.) I am a fan of Harris, and she has all the experience and qualifications to make this happen, but there is always the fear at the back of my head that we will never have a female president in my lifetime. I dared hope in 2016, but I am measuring my expectations tonight.  I still blame social media and the fanning of media outlets who tell lies like the truth at worst, or at best, fan the flames for clicks for the mess of it all. 

Still, I got a little kick of excitement at each projected state that comes in blazing blue. There is so much we won't know till a couple days have passed, so it's hard to be either hopeful or despondent tonight. Illinois feels like a sea of sanity in a red wash of midwest idiocy and apparently a mix of the very gullible and the very horrible.  Outside of the racists, homophobes, and anti-intellectualism, there are those who believe everything Fox News tells them regarding immigration and the economy, mostly convincing them that one is related to the other, when it's the usual villains in big business who price gouge and limit resources for all of us, especially since covid (including immigrants who should have an easier, not more difficult, time of it getting citizenship and entry in an ideal world, longer tables over higher walls and all.) There are factors I will never understand as to how we ever got in this position, but even more, how we find ourselves in it again.  I keep repeating under my breath every five minutes what they told us last time, Trust the System and hope for the best.

notes & things | 11/1/2024

November has slunk in amid warmer than usual temperatures here in the midwest,.though after a couple of snowy Halloween's the past few years, I will take the milder weather. Our plans for the drive-in were thwarted by a pipe repair issue in the apartment, so we decided to stay closer to home and see Terrifier 3 then get pizza then come home to watch J's ongoing introduction to AHS.  

I did manage to finally get the ghost box artist book edition under wraps and release the e-zine version, which you can always read for free HERE. I am always torn between wanting to make work freely available (because, hell, in this economy) but also give people who want to get a physical thing the opportunity to get something tangible or collectible.  In terms of other soon-to-be shop offerings, I was able to get the final tweaks done in the layout and design for RUINPORN and am eagerly awaiting the proof copy. No word on when that is shipping, but I did get a notification that the finalized stack of Elizabeth Devlin's chapbook Milk Spine I ordered a couple days before that one went out this morning, so it is sure to follow soon. Her book turned out lovely with the perfect binding and I plan to do more for unusually sized volumes in the future in addition to my own project and the handmade volumes. Since the color and image printing was so good with granata, I might also use it for books with a lot of art going forward, which while a little costlier, the difference is made less by the amount I end up spending on color toner for those books.  I plan to just charge a little more to offset the printing cost difference. The covers and interior paper were glorious on Devlin's book and all the ones I've done so far on my own. 

As I've mentioned, November will always be a rough month. The sparkle and spooky of Halloween fades, the Christmas glitter isn't quite set yet, so I always felt a plummet in my mood as daylight savings took hold and the trees gave up the ghost on their leaves. Always, I am tired at 5pm, and never know quite what to do with myself now that the days are so short and I find myself struggling with my energy levels and just needing naps I never need in summertime. I'm definitely a night person, but as in 8pm and after, when I am most productive and awake. Good things have happened in November--my move back to the city, my job at the library, my first book acceptance, moving into the studio initially. Of course all shadowed by losing both parents in the same span of weeks, albeit five years apart.

I feel a little loose around the edges for a few weeks, at least til the holidays are over and we're in the endless drag of January through March. There are some good things coming up, including some more musicals like next week's production of Little Shop...out in Skokie I am looking forward. We may hit the drive in tomorrow night as well if we feel up to it since they have an entire weekend of horror programming planned. 

I am working a little on some flash fiction-ish pieces (or at least that's what I think they are, they are a little longer than my usual prose poems but not quite a lyric essay. I will probably share some of them as the month goes on. 

scenes from the ghost box

October's bonus zine has arrived just in time for Halloween, along with the accompanying limited edition artist book you can find in the shop., featuring poems, fauxtography, illustration, and more...

Or, you can read the free-zine version, HERE....

2024 horror roundup

Though technically the year isn't over and there are still a few more highlights on the horizon, including the upcoming HERETIC and NOSFERATU, but I thought I'd post a roundup of my faves so far in honor of Halloween that have been released in theaters this year. Since we have subscriptions to both Alamo and AMC, most of these were seen there, some more limited in screenings than others. Some of the things I was most looking forward to this year, like BEETLEJUICE, BEETLEJUICE or the remake of THE CROW, I wasn't all that thrilled by or skipped b/c of bad reviews) but these are the best among what I did manage to catch.  

1. STOPMOTION

This one obviously involves some amazingly creepy animations, as well a slow and yet fast descent for its main character into the macabre. 

2. LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL

Delightful with cheesy 70s pastiche and a horrifying storyline.I was surprised I loved so much since demonic possession films are not usually my favorite sub-genre. 

3. MAXXINE

I've been waiting for this one since i fist heard it was coming back when I was writing for Game Rant. Set  in seedy 80s LA, its a good topper for the trilogy with X and PEARL. Mia Goth is also one of my favorite new final girls. 

4. THE SUBSTANCE

This movie....I don't quite know what to say except you have to see it for yourself.  Gore soaked, out of control, delightfully unraveling, and every second more shocking than the next overlaid with commentary on the beauty and youth industry.  

5. BLINK TWICE

This may be my favorite from the year and not at all what I was expecting when I went into the theater. It also had one of those most terrifying reveals followed by a terribly satisfying ending for a psychological thriller / horror film. It's one of only two we went back to see a second time (the other was THE SUBSTANCE above.)

6. LONGLEGS

The very creepiest Nicholas Cage outdoes himself in this strange tale of an FBI agent trying to solve a string of inexplicable murders while being stalked by the person responsible. 

7. SPEAK NO EVIL

I hated the Norwegian version of this passionately, but warmed immediately to this one, which had a much more satisfying ending amid slowly building horror and weirdness of unfamiliar people and places. 

8. LISA FRANKENSTEIN

A nostalgic romp with the tale  girl that brings a dead boy back to life filled with 80s music, decor, and fashion. What's not to love?

9. CUCKOO

Set in the beautiful Alps, this one seems like its too pretty to have such horror lurking underneath, but all sorts of weirdness and scientific experimentation  prevail. 

10. STRANGE DARLING

More of a thriller than horror, but there was lots of blood. This one is told wonderfully out of order, resulting in a glorious disorientation that only makes it better.  

cover design sneak peek | ruinporn

 

the houses we haunt

Several days before my father went into the hospital and never walked out, I wrote a single word down in a notebook in all caps as I was working on a home decor article. 

“RUINPORN” 

The piece was on beautiful abandoned homes intended to inspire your interior design. Mostly the images I found to accompany the piece were filled with delightfully chipping paint, lowly decaying wood, paneless windows, and beautiful light, sometimes filtering in through ceilings that no longer existed. Shrubs and vines encroached through windows and wound around stair banisters. They were the kind of places you imagined were inhabited by ghosts that  shook the broken chandeliers and rattled the doors barely on the hinges. Sometimes there were relics–an old book on a shelf. A dingy bathrobe hanging in the closet. The spaces  were far more vast than any house I’ve ever lived in, but appealed to me for their open and dilapidated spaces. Their vacancy and beauty.

The small house my father left behind was filled with so much.  Broken furniture. Half-eaten bags of chips in the pantry. Over a couple of months, we emptied out as much as we could. I spent the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a few weeks later, cleaning out his office, which had always been stuffed to the gills after my sister moved out.  It was a space my mother routinely pretended did not exist behind the closed door, filled with large dressers and desks, all full and littered with random things like old clock radios and Cubs hats. The room, as I found it that fall, was filled with scads of paperwork and bills. With books and magazines he’d likely never read.  An entire drawer full of remotes from devices he no longer owned. Small notebooks filled with tallies of golf scores, grocery spending, and horse racing stats in his messy, mostly unreadable, handwriting.

The house, itself, perched on land once owned by my grandmother, was not exactly as grand as the abandoned spaces in my article photos. An 80’s ranch whose details told its age after 40 years of a family living very much within it. Hollow core doors were broken and warped. The carpet, while it had been replaced at least a couple times, was stained. There was a spot in the floor near the front door that was soft from bad sealing under it.. The years had been hard on her, as had we. The doors I’d broken slamming them in teenage rage. The hole me and my sister put through the living room still visible despite patching. The door jambs scratched with more than a dozen cats who had lived and died there. The kitchen drawers, mostly busted and barely opening for over a decade. 

 

*

Five years before, I had lost my mother, not as suddenly as my dad, and after a rough year. But still somehow just as much a shock.. A year later, I finished a book about our relationship called feed, dealing with the complexity of growing up in an environment that fraught relationship between a mother and daughter,  both my own and through things like fairy tales and myths. Strangely, for my father, there didn’t seem to be a book on the horizon. That particular relationship being much less wrought with artmaking material. Or at least I thought at the time. 

What emerged instead were poems that were modeled on decor writing headlines about haunted houses. About how we leave the ghosts of ourselves behind in the spaces we inhabit. 

While I could not have told you at the time what I was writing them for or towards, later it became clear that that particular loss had its fingers all over them. I was already calling it ruinporn long before I compiled the manuscript.

Having been a person who has lived in remarkably few houses compared to others my age, I always found myself weirdly attached to them. They crop up in poems occasionally and often in dreams.  My grandmothers’ little red house. The trailer I spent the first four years of my life in with its wood paneling and green shag carpets. The small house in town we lived in before the last with the enormous oil drum behind the garage and the backyard where I’d spend entire afternoons on the swings with my headphones. The tiny Lincoln Park studio I lived in through grad school with its bathroom only accessible through the closet. The gorgeous Rockford apartment with the sleeping porch and farmhouse sink I had to leave when I didn;t find a job swiftly enough to pay for it the summer after.  Even the cinder block dorn room I inhabited for a semester in North Carolina.  They strangely feel tethered, even after all this time. To my own history. . Sometimes, I think, to my body. Even this apartment, which I have lived in for more than two decades, moving about its rooms. Where I’ve written countless poems, made art, made love, made a mess.  Me and my fiance occasionally talk of getting a bigger place with an office for both of us. With a bigger kitchen for him and an outdoor space for both of us. But I dont know if we will or can just yet. Or even if I want to.    

*

At the time I lost my father, I was just finishing up the first year after leaving my full time job in a library to write freelance work and devote more time to the shop and press I ran on the side. It was a year of change. Of fear. Of relief as I cobbled together numerous gigs and got my footing.. That November’s losses, however, knocked the wind out of me.  Parentless for the first time, I was adrift and vulnerable to all sorts of nasties. Untethered was the only word that seemed apt in those months afterward for how I was feeling.

Being the person I am, I dove into work, into the holidays that were now unrecognizable to me. I barely remember the months after the new year, but I was writing a good bulk of the poems from RUINPORN. They are filled with advice for living in a haunted house, even when you yourself are in the haunted house. Fittingly, that fall before I had bought a fun Halloween sign on Amazon that said “She Herself is a Haunted House.” . I felt that very much that dark season as we cobbled new routines and new traditions from the broken pieces of the old. 

In the past two years, I’ve watched other people my age begin  to go through many of the same things. Ailing parents, frantic rushes to hospitals, calls that rattle the middle of the night. Actually sometimes much worse than my own. I suppose parental loss is something which afflicts everyone if you live long enough. Some younger, some older, but by the time you reach your 40s or 50s, that clock is ticking. Before each loss happened I imagined I would never be able to survive it. And yet, I did. 

ruinporn feels like a reckoning of sorts. A book I would not have imagined writing even a decade ago. A grappling with grief and writing. With loss and that adrift sensation that makes your bones shake sometimes. Not all the poems are about houses and ghosts, but other are about destruction and rebuilding in a post-pandemic world.

As for my father’s house, the bank wound up owing more than any of us could pay, and since neither of us wanted it, back to the bank it went.  The last few times I was there, I was convinced it was haunted, not by ghosts or the supernatural, but by memory and grief. And it's strange to think all houses, or at least most houses, are haunted in the same way. The places we build lives in that eventually crumble under our feet like sugar when shaken. 

notes & things | 10/20/2024

Tonight, the air smells like bonfires and there was a ring around the moon. While not as chilly as a few nights this past week, I found myself craving hot cocoa. I realized, as I rummaged in the cabinet, I have finally reached the end of the box of the raspberry cocoa packs my dad bought me the large bulk box of Christmas 2021, the last one he was alive for. It made me a little sad as I heated the water and stirred the cup. As we edge up on November, my mood is sure to plummet, no doubt, unless I can keep myself sufficiently distracted. Losing your parents in the same month , albeit several years apart, can make you hate November. 

After a short round of D&D and dinner with friends today, I found myself alone for a few hours at home while J hosted his usual Saturday night karaoke. I was determined to push off my other writing work til tomorrow to get the wrangling mass of RUINPORN edited for the final time, as the design schedule is creeping up on me if I want to at least have things finalized by the end of November.  So much happens before the official layout begins, since its easier to make rearranging and changes in the text before I start sizing and formatting the final version for printing. I have gotten speedier with each new book, much in the same way of chapbooks. the bulk of any chap these days is edits and back-and-forth more than the initial design. There will also need to be 2-3 passes through before I finalize, then possibly 2 or more after I have a galley in hand. To avoid ordering and paying shipping for proofs, its best to have everything but minor tweaks in place now before I upload. I am using the same printer for a couple upcoming chap projects that needed different trim sizes than I can do at home (one, a very boxy 8 x 8 inches) and its much the same process, just in collab with the author. It's not something I can afford to do with every chap, but its nice to have the option. I am also very close to having everything from GHOST BOX in hand to release both eth e-version and the artist book/box project that will be available in the shop, possibly by Tuesday. There are some fun elements going in, including the above lil' baby Ouija boards I found on Etsy that are so fun.  There is still more coming for #31daysofOctober over on IG, so look for the launch of it there. 

This week will be busy with tattoo appointments and Shakespeare productions, and a couple films, including Cronenberg's The Brood. With just a couple weeks til Halloween, I reserved our rooms in McHenry for the drive-in outing, which actually spans two nights, one a triple feature topped off with Halloween: Season of the Witch. Meanwhile, those nights are starting to feel more encroaching as we round out the month, each night requiring the lamps earlier than the last. 

notes & things | 10/15/2024

Octobers are always far too short. Spooky season and we turn to horror movies and pumpkin-flavored treats. Decorate with skulls and fall things and suddenly its over as quickly as it begun. The days getting shorter and the dread of November following fast on its heels. There have been falls where the month was so busy, I look up one day and realize that the trees have changed their color, or worse, that the leaves of some are nearly gone. Months when the steady shortening of days seems incremental until that plunge into darkness come the daylight savings changeover. 

Still, there are horror movies aplenty. A screening of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I had probably not seen since my teen years and that what stood out this time was the masterful set decoration, whose attention to detailing was not at all what you would expect from early 70s horror. An eager second viewing of The Substance, a brilliant takedown of the beauty and youth industry that unravels into gore soaked madness at the end. Phantasm, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid, a late 70s bit of weirdness. The week before my favorite slasher film, Sleepaway Camp and the first time I've ever seen it on a screen and not a scratchy dubbed VHS. We have more planned for the month, including a Halloween trip out to McHenry for drive-in horror, and a Wednesday night viewing of the original Candyman at the Logan late nights series.  

Where there haven't been movies, there have been plays. Noises Off at Steppenwolf last week and tonight, Into the Woods. This, after all, is my favorite musical of all time, cemented when I was 17 and saw it at a theater conference downstate and it surpassed Les Miz I had seen a couple months before. While that was a very traditional proscenium theater, tonight's happened in the black box lower theater at The Chopin. It had the feel of a cabaret performance, piano only, in an old attic filed with chandeliers and gilt mirrors and charming old chairs and sofas for seating. I loved the play even more for that. Kokandy, a small company, is strictly musicals, and every production I've seen has been amazingness. (in the summer, Alice by Heart, and last winter, American Psycho. )  The benefit of having some nights free from work, J's nights being more open, and just having more discretionary income as a freelancer than I ever did as a full-timer, is that we get to see all the plays we like, up next Pericles at Chicago Shakespeare and Little Shop of Horrors out in Skokie in a  couple weeks. And of course, Les Miz in December, which I am extra stoked about. 

Work continues on the vampire poems, as well as a few flash fiction pieces I am wobbly and uncertain on. Today I had a moment convinced of my own brilliance when writing a poem that was, mere minutes, later, a spiral of self-doubt die to a rejection from a fun little horror journal I had found of Instagram. It was actually for one of the flash pieces, and had less to do with poems, but it only bumped the funny bone of  my tiny poet ego.  Fiction is still sticky and new and doesn't quite have its wings just yet. I will write something I love and come back later and hate it. Poe is on my mind a lot every fall, especially when I'm doubting my abilities,  and I always remind myself he spent his whole life churning in alcoholism and self-doubt and look at the endurance of his work even now.  We are also coming up on Plath's birthday, which always reminds me that she barely lived into her real adult productive period. At 30, she had created so much already, but was still a young poet forever and eternally. 

There have also been long marathon writing days and pot roast and blueberry cake. Production days for the chapbook series that leave my arm sore from using the paper cutter. The kind of fall nights where its colder, but the window stays open and you add more blankets. The last few times we've gone out, its required a real jacket after months of a cardigan at most. Tonight the kind of damp cold that had me climbing into bed early after we got back from the theater, sleeping a few hours, and then of course, because I went to bed too early, awake in the middle of the night writing this post and listening to the radiators clank their way to warmth for the fist time this year. 

notes & things | 10/6/2024

Steadily, the nights have begun to feel more autumnal. Even with the windows still open, we find ourselves reaching for covers far more frequently and burrowing further down into them. Today, I pulled out the box with Halloween decor and put everything in place for the next month or so, that is, everything that was tucked away (sometimes Halloween decor doubles as all-year-long decor. ) Tonight I closed the window and made a pork chop crockpot concoction that my grandmother used to make and got pretty close to the same flavors (oddly this was a dish my mother did not remember/could not tell me how to make but I remember it vividly.)  

I've been working steadily on the vampire poems and a little on some flash fiction experiments. Also a little on plotting out and the first portions of the thrifting and writing book I've been saying I'm writing, though its much less writing and still more getting my ducks in a row (I guess I have "concepts of a plan" at this point, lol). Like all things, planning only takes me so far and really I should just dive in and see what happens.  

I've been buried in freelance work otherwise, working this weekend steadily on what will likely be some of the last of the Halloween specific things I will be asked to write as we move further into the month. Thankfully, the few Christmas pieces I was assigned have paused. They were causing a whole lot of temporal whiplash, especially the days I was sitting working on them with the A/C humming behind me. I am also hung up again on some chaps that are a bit more difficult in layout, so have been working out the kinks on those and getting the final versions prepared to start printing.  They're a handful of last season's books to get out, as well as the beginning of this year's list. Plus submissions from the summer for the next round that will begin next fall. I've fallen behind on some content things I hoped to make for my own stuff, so will hopefully be able to chip away at them--including some reels I want to make for #31daysofHalloween.  

I am trying not to let the more shortened days make me feel like I am rushing to get things done, but they always do. Meanwhile there are still little bits that are not work---quiet breakfasts, plays, lots of horror movies to get me through a busy month.

 

morning in the witch house

 

About a year ago, amidst the steadily darkening days of early October, I was making some decidedly witchy collages just randomly to animate for IG and suddenly had a bunch. I decided to write some poem-ish things to accompany them. They turned out nicely spooky and atmospheric and very witchy indeed, which solidified the concept of the whole text and image morass. I've been sitting sitting on them for many months (they are a part of another poetry mss that won't be making its way into the world til 2025) but I wanted to share them during this month of all months. 

They are the very first goodie in the treat back that is #31daysofoctober that you can read HERE. Enjoy!

the paper boat sails again

Ever since TINYLETTER went caput earlier this year, I've been waffling about whether to still do a monthly newsletter that goes out, but today, I finally sat my ass down and made a Substack.. Since I am a Blogger girl for the past 20 years, this is more just a digest of things, including book news, links to stuff I've written, I'll posting each month for anyone interested.

(you can also get an advanced look at the first October zine and a snippet of my newly minted NOLA vampire girl poems...)

You can read and subscribe here for more shenanigans:

https://open.substack.com/pub/kristybowen/p/october-paper-boat

confronting past selves

Last night, we got to see the wild ride that is THE SUBSTANCE, a grotesque take on beauty and youth standards in which an aging TV aerobics instructor is promised an alternative, cloned youthful version of herself two weeks out of the month with very specific directions. Whatever could go wrong? All the rules of course are eventually broken and delightful chaos ensues in a bloody, gory, mess of a movie that may be one of the best things I've seen all year.

The hilarious thing was we thought we might pair it with Aubrey Plaza's newest. MY OLD ASS, in which a psychedelic mushroom experience winds up with a teen girl confronting a nearly 40 year old version of herself. Sort of a flip on the SUBSTANCE, but side by side, the first looks like a Disney movie, it was so wholesome and earnest--the message being to enjoy your youth and your family because you will never be in that place again. 

The movies feel like a weird distorted flipped upside down version of each other, though I am glad we saw the much calmer one first and the crazy one second. In one, the younger gets a chance to talk to her older self with all the warnings and wisdom but in the second, that younger version becomes the monster that destroys the middle age version wholly and completely. Bit by bit, and then all at once. 

I keep stumbling across articles on middle age and invisibility, and maybe its just that, as a Gen Xer, we've all just been invisible for decades, but I can't say that I feel any more or less invisible than I ever did. Of course, I am not exactly fitting in the beauty standards that women, like Demi Moore's character in the film, whose paycheck depended on perkiness, thinness and smooth skin.  I always used to feel like my physical self was just a vehicle, a container for what was going on in my head .My teens were a whole lot of diets and disordered eating, while my twenties was just floating in the world as a disembodied brain through college and grad school and first jobs.  I've gotten better at living as a physical being in later years, but really only in my 30s and 40s. 

I guess I eventually embraced my curves and learned to maximize the "assets".  But even using that word is a nod to currency, of the body, of the male gaze. In certain arenas there was attention, like on dates or at parties, but mostly I coasted in a lot of spaces under the radar thankfully. (really, I don't think I would have wanted as much attention as some women get just existing.)  Even if under other circumstances I would have been interested, male attention in places where I wasn't looking for it (stores, the bus, the sidewalk outside the library) really just made me angry and annoyed. There is comfort in invisibility. I have a few more shadows and lines on my face, but I am otherwise the same. I worry less about the cosmetics of aging, and more the health issues that sometimes accompany it. Not really that I am losing my beauty. Unless I am specifically thinking about the passage of time or trying to see small print in dim lighting (my one very noticeable physical change in the last decade--something I used to be able to do) I don't think about my age much at all. 

The lesson of date night last night was that confronting your 18 year old version could be a great way to pass on wisdom and change your destiny. Or your 18 year old self could try to kill you. Be prepared for either. 

notes & things / 9/22/2024

The fall equinox, and despite the weather, I feel the change. Several times over the last two days I have looked out at the sky and thought the light was so odd. Not really different, and not really summer or fall, just clear blue sky or maybe a few straggly clouds, but it hits the buildings and bounces in a way I've not noticed as much.  For many years, these were hours spent in the windowless florescent glow of the library, so the courtyard still has ways of surprising me. The bedroom A/C was on the fritz, so we removed it for the year last week and it currently sits in the middle of the living room until I can make a space for it somewhere else until we get it fixed. I do like sleeping with the window open and the fan on for the first time in a while. We thought maybe summer was, in fact, on its last days, but this week has been close to 80 or above each day, so I still sit here with the dining room unit buzzing away at my back writing once again surreally about Christmas things while J makes canna butter cookies in the kitchen with the oven on. 

When I got paid this week, we procured more theater tickets for the rest of the plays and musicals we plan to see before year's end. Wednesday found us at the Goodman for Inherit the Wind, whose premise, though it was written in the 1950s still feels relevant today as the Christian right tries to enforce its authority in red states and who knows what will happen, despite best efforts, in November. This week we get to see Henry V at  Chicago Shakespeare, which should be good. I am not as acquainted with the histories as I am with the tragedies (my favorites) or the comedies/romances (of which I took a seminar devoted to as an undergrad), so I only know bits and pieces of the plot. Me and my sister saw a lot of Shakespeare every fall in the 90s at the community college theater in Rockford, including an outdoor Shakespeare festival in 99  that acquainted me with the bloody awesomeness of Titus Andronicus, one of my favorites. 

Fall, as always, brings lots of retrospection. I found myself thinking that my sophomore year at RC was 20 years ago, when, with horror, I realized that it was, in fact, a decade more. I was 20 and barely remember myself then. I know that was the semester I started working backstage on shows and in the scene shop. That I had a lot of reading heavy lit courses that fall, mostly novels and plays. Otherwise, I would have to check my journals to fill in the details it was so long ago. Twenty years, I was 30, and that fall working on the very first DGP chapbook that wasn't my own, getting ready to release it in November with not a clue what I was doing. I was also white knuckling it through my MFA classes (it would get better the next spring) and working on the last poems that would go into my first book even as my style was changing a  little in what would go on to be my second. That poet, for all her bitching and complaining, seems very far away. 10 years ago, I was 40 and dealing with romantic situationship drama and pinched nerve drama and drowning in the usual chaos of too much happening and not enough hours in the day. So 50, at least, feels quite calm despite occasional ripples on the water and the sink into my best season (October), but also my worst (November). 

filles a la cassette

I am deep in the research phase of the new project, so happily spent the late morning sipping coffee, eating bacon and egg sandwiches prepared by J, and delving into New Orleans ghost and vampire lore. When I was there the two times previously with my sister, we visited the highlights like the Death Museum and the French Market, stayed in the French Quarter, walked the cemetery in the Garden District. ate all the NOLA things I was interested in eating and drank a lot of giant daquiris and hurricanes. My favorite was a bookstore/novelty shop devoted entirely to vampire things that seemed to be run by women who were way too obsessed, as I was, with Anne Rice in the 90s. The laudanum poster that hangs in my bathroom came from there, and one night walking by, I spotted the women who maybe were its managers (?) disappearing into a garden and up the stairs to an apartment above in their long skirts and flowy velvet tops..  

There is a certain charm to the research process for me. When I was in college and grad school, I loved the initial phase of gathering information and amassing sources. It's the latent librarian in me I suppose. My enthusiasms would soon dwindle when I actually needed to get things down on paper or the screen. Creative projects are a bit different, and I can usually sustain the excitement to get the project drafted. The projects that involve the most research are often the most engaging for me, long after the initial gathering is finished and all my notebooks closed. I always think I'd have much rather been taught in academia to synthesize information through creative projects rather than 10 page essays. When i got my MFA, many projects evolved this way--errata, archer avenue, at the hotel andromeda, even girl show to a degree, though that was over many semesters.  

Much of the stuff I'm reading focuses on what may or may not have happened at the Ursuline Convent., the stories and legends that are probably wholly untrue but make for a great legend featured on some of the city's haunting and vampire tours. We never caught a ghost tour, but one evening resting on a bench in Jackson Square, watched numerous of them depart. The last time I was there for a poetry conference, I stayed up most of the night reading about the war between the square's artists and soothsayers, the psychics and tarot card readers who set up daily folding tables, mostly staffed with women whom look and dress like Stevie Nicks, and who always seemed way too hot even under the April sun. But the tours were numerous and for every predilection and interest--far more than even Chicago's which has its fair share. 

There was, in fact, a time when I wanted to live there after every visit--would scout apartment and house rentals in neighborhoods that had been brutally gentrified in the wake of Katrina, which left a sour taste in my mouth. In the end, I am a midwestern girl, so in the midwest I'll likely stay, where the winters are endurable and the summers, while not mild, are not quite as unrelenting as the south ((and the bugs not quite so big and airborne), I've wanted to get back for a visit, but somehow 7 years have passed and time and money just hasn't made room for a trip. We've discussed going there for our honeymoon, though definitely not in June right after the wedding, but maybe in the fall around Halloween. 

I will definitely be putting a spooky tour on the itinerary this time for sure.

poetry and narrative

 I've been thinking a lot about narrative and purpose when it comes to the writing I do, whether it is more prose or verse-like in formatting and appearance. So often narrative seems to be talked about as either/or. Either your verse poetry has a narrative line, or your prose has a poeticness to it, but no one really talks about the kind of thing I like to do, which is narrative, but prose, but also fragmented and written with "poetic" things in mind. The result is it's harder to find people who write the same kinds of things or are doing similar work, who have the same goals in common. One foot in one sphere and the other in another. But then again, as someone who also uses visual art, it's a feeling I am used to, though the boundaries seem much clearer (though with book arts, text installations, etc, maybe it's similarly brackish water.) 

I am a story writer more and more, but I use poetry as that vehicle instead of prose. But the poems rarely look poem-ish or maybe even work the same way the poets I see around me do. They do not have a consistent sense of voice or structure. They are serpentine, unreliable, fragmented. They would like frustrate the casual fiction writer, as well as the poet who expects poetry to be other things entirely. And yet I feel I have more in common with fiction writers than I ever have with poets somehow, a fact that becomes more and more clear to me every year. The good thing is in feeling a little isolated I've also been granted a better view of the science and alchemy that goes into how and why I am writing, which is something. (though it makes it harder to find readers, perhaps, in a field where they are already in short supply.)

There is also the frustration of finally having that vision and being really happy with what I am creating and yet feeling like there is less and less of an audience for it-be it everyone being fixed on the flaming dumpster fire of the world or other shinier, flashier things. When I was a baby poet, the things like acceptances and approval sustained me, but take that away, whether it's being ignored by them or choosing to not pursue them, you wander around in the darkness for awhile. That has been how everything so far this decade has felt, like a dark room bumping into things. I once blamed the poetry, but I've learned to be kinder to both the writing and myself. To feel out the darkness by touch.  Occasionally you fall down a flight of stairs or wake up with bruises on your shins. But still, you continue. 

pretty dead things

fauxtography, 2024

 

As I've had an eye toward finishing up the short series of MARIANA prose poems, I've been flirting with something new for the next month or so's writing endeavors after I  saw a mention of French girls who were brought over during the 19th century from France to the New Orleans who were rumored to be vampires (a confusion perhaps in their name "casquette" girls who carried all their belongings and dowries in trunks, but also involvement with mysterious happenings at a convent after they arrived to marriages that did not go so well, most of them being between 14 and 17 years old and all alone in a new country). It being about one of my favorite cities and to boot, about the supernatural, it caught my imagination completely and I've been furiously doing research and scribbling notes the past week or so. NOLA has such rich vampire lore that goes far beyond even Anne Rice. My favorite bookstore in the French quarter is devoted entirely to vampire books and goods. It seems a very appropriate project be starting as we near Halloween, and if all goes well, I would love to show it off as part of this years #31daysofHalloween offerings, which I already have many things coming down the pipeline, including a couple collage zines that I was working on last fall that are finally ready to share.. Also, perhaps a physical artist book in a tiny edition I will be putting in the shop. I will also be making some new spooky art things, video poems, some recordings of both new and old poems, and other Halloween and horror related content I've been saving up for October, including a couple pieces here on the blog, so keep an eye out for those...

notes & things | 9/12/2024

fauxtography experiment, 2024

Sometimes, the weeks vanish and fold in on themselves. These last couple have been busy, with trips to McHenry to the drive-in, the cool, mildish weather of September, more films (including delightfully bad 70's zombies, religiously-inspired comic characters, domestic terror about horrible in-laws, and a 20th anniversary screening of Sean of the Dead. )  Last night we also caught Book of Mormon on tour, which was of course, hilarious given my long time love of South Park. We have a bunch of theater nights planned this month and through the fall, including some Shakespeare coming up and a couple of my personal favorites (Les Mis and Into the Woods.) Otherwise, there have been pumpkin spice flavored things (coffee, muffins, late night ice cream), glorious breakfasts cooked by J, and the usual things of life like plotting my fall wardrobe switch out, Halloween costumes, and my autumnal decorations.  

I have been otherwise keeping my head down and working furiously in writing and editing things when I'm at home--less creative stuff like decorating and DIY pieces, but with occasional snippets for the mariana series. I have also turned my thoughts to getting a final draft assembled for RUINPORN to begin combing through and getting ready for proofing and design, but am waiting to finish a few more delayed DGP chaps before really digging in toward the end of the month. I also have some fun ideas for new journals and paper things over in the shop I would love to launch this fall. 

We were out Tuesday nigh, but caught a recording of the debate later in lieu of our usual late night streaming (we are a little ways into Breaking Bad, which I am watching for the first time.) It went about as suspected, with a whole bunch of WTF moments and both Harris and the mods having to keep things on the rails. It is alarming that many do believe the nonsense from the far right wholeheartedly, though I think its becoming less and less whatever your political leanings. Or at least I hope so. 

broken places

 

It's September, which means new month, new zine project filled with poems and fauxtographs  You can read BROKEN PLACES here...

books and seasons

Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, here were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don't want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I'd write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final ediits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy. 

Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish.  girl show and major characters... were definitely summer, but shared properties...was more spring.  salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall. 

Sometimes its about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn't necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months.  This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them.