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...