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.