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. The days left for perhaps a visit to an apple orchard, mostly for the donuts and cider, much less the actual apples. 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