notes & things | 5/30/2023

We find ourselves on the cusp of June--of full-fledged summer, though the weather has been mild and cooler and I still haven't properly opened all the windows just yet for any stretch of time.  Otherwise, I have been keeping my head down and working through writing assignments--throw pillows, sunrooms, garden design, chocolate, sci-fi classics. Making early promo materials for COLLAPSOLOGIES.  Making new collages and poems in tandem for a fun little bit of victorian-ish spookiness. 

I am knee deep in these last chaps assembly -- hitting the home stretch of late 2022 chaps and about to dive into this year's selections, which is exciting, as well as the promise of a new round of submissions in the inbox after June 1st. It is still difficult to believe that just next year, the chap series will be celebrating 20th anniversary, which is absolutely impossible somehow.  I swear it feels more like just a handful of years and not an entire two decades of issuing chapbooks by women authors.

I have a feeling summer will go by fast--it always does, especially since it feels like warmer weather has been slow to arrive here in the midwest, though I prefer that to the sudden transition and 90s in May. Especially once we hit the 4th of July and the summer begins to unravel. My plans for summer overall are small. Cocktails with a friend to catch up, nightly walks, some lake wanderings, a barbecue with J on the 4th. Summer always feels most like the season to be seized and savored and sometimes I forget it only to find myself missing it terribly in the dead of winter. I do love even the everyday parts of summer. The windows all open, the racket of birds, and that long stretch into the evening. Iced tea and raspberry sorbet. 

Creatively, I plan to finish up work on the victorian-ish thing that does not yet have a title, launch COLLAPSOLOGIES into the world, and then get to work on a new video poem project I hope to have ready for debut in August.  I recently finished up some edits on the home improvements stuff and sent out some submissions from a couple other recent series to various places, some larger circulation mags I probably have not a chance of getting into, but others to some smaller mags I have a nominal chance of getting into.