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.