This month, I am beginning to iron out my final manuscript of book #8 to send to Black Lawrence-- blurb gathering, cover art options, and such all due in before the end of this year. I know that next thing you know it will be April 2020. It's strange, since the book only came together barely a year ago, so it's been a fast process, even though the release is a couple years off. Meanwhile there is the apocalypse book, is still coming, and another couple manuscripts completed or nearing so.
I was writing up some process notes as a press promo efforts and got to thinking about how the book took shape. I tend to work on a number of small projects at any given time and realized late last year something beginning to constellate around similar themes—sexuality, love, feminism, toxic masculinity, violence against women. It was on the heels of some weird and troubling times for women in general, during which I’d been working on some prose poem series centered on some of my favorite things—Plath, horror movies, the work of Salvador Dali, while also working on a series of pieces about relationships and how difficult it is to reconcile love as a straight woman with male privilege and violence. I started to notice threads of ideas connecting all these disparate bits and suddenly had a manuscript that made sense thematically as an encapsulation of all sorts of anxieties that I foster as a woman in the world-about love, about violence and fear, about artmaking itself.
Normally I would have sat on it a while, but last November, I felt like I need to get something out of a really bad month in whic loss was the primary theme. BLP was open for submissions, so I distracted myself the latter half of the month, by pulling it together, giving it a final comb-through, and sending it along. Like major characters in minor films, there is something about it that feels more personal, especially with the love poem series in there that is more autobiographical. Those books always feel a bit more like opening your underwear drawer...
