books and seasons

Earlier, I wrote a draft of a general post that encapsulated the past week, but I lost it when blogger glitched out on me before saving. In it, here were awesomely disturbing movies, new tattoos, and the usual ramblings about weather. But I don't want to write it all out again, so instead I thought I'd write about books and seasons. How mariana feels like the perfect project to be working on now, with all its sea and salt-drenched monsters. How my final ediits on ruinporn, which will be coming as soon as September arrives, is a very fall project filled with decay and crumbling houses, just as much as the carnival poems I just finished earlier this month felt very summery and swampy. 

Looking back, the fever almanac, though it was published in the fall was always a summer book, while in the bird museum was very winterish.  girl show and major characters... were definitely summer, but shared properties...was more spring.  salvage, with all its mermaids was summer, while sex & violence and little apocalypse were definitely autumnal. In newer titles I would say dark country, collapsologies, and granata are pure summer, while feed, automagic and animal, vegetable, monster are definitely winter or fall. 

Sometimes its about subject matter and imagery (Victorian inspired books def have a colder weather vibe while things like the Persephone book are more sunlit and Mediterranean.) It doesn't necessarily have to do with when it was written, but I suppose timing also may have some impact, since I tend to like to work on summer-ish projects during warm weather months.  This fall, I have plans for a couple things that may be winterish in nature, so will probably wait til November to start them. 

in which the poet returns to the sea

I've been fiddling away with the mariana fragments this past week since my rather auspicious start last weekend and am liking them so far. I initially thought they might be footnote-ish in style, but they are feeling more whole. As a writer who has probably written a hundred mermaid poems in her lifetime (including shipwrecks of lake michigan, which was a more modern interpretation of the lore, plus the entire segments of siren poems in GRANATA (though they were the winged, non-tailed, version of the original myths) it's a subject I return to often, despite living many, many miles from any sea beyond the vast expanse of Lake Michigan at my doorstep. 

I was recently telling J about my fascination with sea creatures that initially spawned my desire to study marine bio when I was 17--a complicated mix of low-key peer pressure, charismatic AP bio teachers, a desire to save the world, and endless environmental editorials in my high school newspaper. I quickly learned I was not cut out for science due to what I suspect, in hindsight,  is a serious learning disability when it comes to math and numbers, However, I lived briefly along the Carolina coast taking marine science classes and loved it.  Science's loss was ultimately poetry's gain.

This project is, of course, a little different. Inspired by that series of images I generated just on a lark, but now, as I progress through text fragments, is becoming an eerie story of a cursed seaside town whose houses keep collapsing into the surf and whose women become monstrous hybrids--not mermaids at all, but slimy, slithery, darker things.. If I manage to progress smoothly, I may even have it done in time to share during the lead-up to Halloween, when I have quite a few other surprises in store both here, IG, and in the shop. 

 

bird girls and bloodshed

 

We decided to invest in another theater monthly subscriber program in addition to Alamo, which has most new things we want to see (and lots of older stuff) , but not everything, particularly as we move into the high horror season of September and October and one-off tickets are very pricey these days. We can see 3 movies a week if we like for just slightly more than the cost of a single ticket each month.(we probably won't but even 1 a week is a steal) Thus, we found ourselves christening our first A-List tickets with this movie, which we had seen previews for this summer, but weren't sure what to expect. This was exactly the best kind of indie horror, in that it starts off with a mystery, but then slow builds, with lots of violence and body-horror, to a disturbing and relevatory conclusion, touching on themes of scientific ethics, experimentation, and fertility while also just being a good spooky romp though the disarmingly beautiful German Alps. Another case where you ask how can someplace so beautiful harbor such horror?

The setting itself, much like a French film we saw months back where people started inexplicably turning into animals. The monstrousness of the human/creature hybrid as well as the way such creatures fit into, or don't fit into, society. It also reminded me of one of my favorite horror films of recent years, which involves similar themes of motherhood and transformations.  There was also a lot of disorientation, for both the characters and the audience.

It was particularly good intellectual fodder, both for the current project I am working on with mariana, a new series/story about a cursed seaside community sliding into the Atlantic that features a lot of sea creatures and monsters, and for something that may be on the horizon for the winged things images I generated a month or so back. I will be starting to share some pieces form the former after the first of Sept. so keep an eye out for those on IG. 

emergelings

 

I go through cycles of hopelessness when it comes to writing. Well, at least writing creatively (I am pretty content with the how and what of the writing I do to pull in a paycheck.) But poetry is slippery, and sometimes feels not like poetry at all, especially when buried in more prose-centric projects,. I often say I am a fiction writer trapped in the body of a poet., meaning my mouth and my hands work out what is happening in my brain, but they don't always work together well. And poetry, specifically, as I see the publishing community, often leaves a distaste I cannot always describe. I used to be much more enthusiastic and enjoyed certain things I no longer enjoy at all. But the poems, they still want to be born somehow.

A couple weeks back, I stumbled on this Brenda Hillman piece and laughed out at the mention of a poets audience, the five people and one of them a tree. I have no idea how many people read or are interested in my work, and its probably better I do not know the smallness or the largeness of it. What frustrates me perhaps more is that as I feel I've gotten better at the art of it, that my skills have gotten keener, it feels like the world's interest in poetry in general, and of course interest in my own work, has gotten narrower and narrower and smaller and smaller. Claustrophobically so. 

So I started the year, wanting nothing from the work but its own rewards--aside from audience or sharing or readership, however small. Whatever dime I am dropping into the ocean of work being produced at any given moment. It's a kinder place, but far lonelier sometimes. I try to go back to when I was just starting. When I was 19 and writing terrible slender poems and submitting them to vanity anthologies in the back of Writers Digest,. Or later, when I was moving in on something like good writing and sending out work to publishers. That girl would be grateful that anyone was interested enough to want to read or publish her work at all. But that girl also want to play the game, which had nothing at all to do with the poetry itself. the awards, the book deals, the acceptances. I played for a very long time with minimal results (but then even those results would have astounded baby poet me. )When you take those things away, there is just the work and trying to share it. 

Unlike cicadas, our emerging isn't an identifiable thing with a start and end date and life cycle. We are emerging all the time...

beginnings...

 

Yesterday I was up unusually early at 9am and decided to embark on a new writing project, having pulled the carnival series to something like a comfortable close the latter half of this week. It was a rare few extra hours before I had to turn my attention to a lengthy Thanksgiving decor article, so I seized it. an, in a rare frenzy, wrote about 9 fragments I was happy with for some bits to accompany the fauxtographs below I am newly obsessed  with (we will forget there are other writing and art projects in the queue, some for a couple years, but this new shiny is working, so lets do this. ) 

It also was a reminder of how difficult putting the first few words down on the page are for a new project. It's a moment in which it feels like all the weight of the world rests on the pin of that first sentence, which is totally not true at all, but FEELS like it is.   This is probably true for all kinds of writing, though I give myself a little more leeway and just dive in on other things. That initial sentence can always be cut or replaced or rewritten once you know where you're going. But so often it feels like taking that first step out the door for a long journey. You are excited, but also a little dreading it. 

I've talked before about endings, about when a project feels like its complete and whole. I was aiming for something around 40 in that last series, but with some of the poems/prose fragments I've cut along the way, it wound up more like 30, but it did feel like the last couple pieces put a lid on it. I've been working on it over the course of the summer, so I suppose August is as good a time to wrap it up as necessary. There will still need to be some edits when I return to it, probably later in the fall, but probably not any major trimming by then. 

Starting out, there is always the excitement of not really knowing the destination, even if you think you do. But even then, that is part of the fear. The worry that he horses will tire or the engine will run out of gas, and maybe you'll abandon the project by the side of the road. A road that is, in fact, dotted with a number of half-conceived manuscripts and zine projects that go back more than a decade. I think only once have I been successful in picking something up once it idled for too long. And that project (unusual creatures)  had many elements, the written text, but also collages and an installation piece at the library, all of which occurred over a decade before the written segments were wrapped up. I really only finished it because I needed those poems for a longer project manuscript that was coming to a close where they were too perfect NOT to include.  

mariana

see more here...

notes & things | 8/11/2024

It seems fitting that my very first seasonal piece dropped for HD this morning. The same morning, in fact, that we woke up to milder, cooler weather outside the windows, less humidity, and that certain slant of light that foretells autumn. We have a few more weeks of summer obviously, but I feel it every August, that slight shift.  Other Halloween specific content is already up from the last few weeks (here and here) so we might as well call these final days of summer a farewell. Call it a wrap on the slowness of early August as it turns the bend and heads briskly toward September.

I have been taking a few more walks on cooler evenings before the sun goes down since the past week has been rather home laden, taking photos of flowers and bushes I encounter along the way. The Loyola students come back this week, which means the streets around me are about to get a lot more crowded amid move-ins and classes starting. 

Today, I made blueberry cake and coffee and worked a little on some carnival pieces before diving into the very last of the delayed dgp layouts from last season. A rare day where I do not have to be writing other things and am not pressing up against a deadline. I also turned my attention to a a new set of generated images based on a conversation J and I had as we drifted off to sleep high on edibles and groggy about creepy Chthulian-inspired houses rising out of the sea (and which I'll be sharing soon.) 

spill

Sometime back in the spring, my image generating experiments led me to pull together a fun little series of Alice in Wonderland inspired fauxtographs.  At the time, I intended they be just that, some fun visuals I could share on IG and the blog. While I was never that into the Dineyfied version of Alice, and came to the Lewis Carrol original as an adult, not a child, I was fascinated by the actual Alice Liddel and the world that Carrol created for her. I did a deeper dive a couple years back for a lesson I was writing and made notes for a project that took quite a while to happen and kept getting shoved aside for more pressing things. 

This April, as NAPOWRIMO dawned, I decided to finally take my notes and scribbles and see if I could shake out some Alice pieces to go with the images for a zine. At first it was harder, then it was easier, and while I did not devote the entire month to writing them (another series took my attention the latter half of the month) but I wound up with 15 or so pieces I was happy with and have spent the past couple months tweaking them and working on a version for this latest zine. 

It was serendipitous that we were planning on seeing another Alice adaptation on stage at the end of July, so I held off on the final design to see if that inspired me further, and it no doubt did. In that case, Alice is a teen caught in the middle of war who sees Carrol's strange world as a refuge from adulthood and reality. My version moves back and forth and back again from child to adult Alice echoing themes that are true to the original and superimposing other themes like body image and domesticity on top of them, with a slightly more macabre take on magical world. 

While this was intended to be the July zine, I've been a little tardy since I was slammed with freelance stuff and then out of town for a couple days over J's birthday festivities, which means we get not one, but two zines this month (watch later this month for BROKEN PLACES before we move into full-on spooky for fall.)

You can real my little Alice project , SPILL, here... 

notes & things | 8/4/2024

Things have slipped down the rabbit hole since my last post, with more freelance work (including some more spooky fun pre-Halloween content and a mammoth article on world-famous paintings that should be dropping this week.) I've also put the finishing touches on and created all my promo bits for SPILL, which, though tardier than I like, will be out tomorrow. The last few days have a been a whirl in the best way. We went out to McHenry for a drive-in visit (the movies, the latest Deadpool and Twisters, kinda meh, but watching them fun)  and then stayed a couple days at the Waterfront, visited friends for dinner and a round of D&D, and then spent last night at karaoke for J's birthday celebration, in which I met some of his friends, many for the first time since we officially decided to get hitched. I still feel socially awkward like I crawled out from under a rock since covid (which is unfair, I've always been awkward, just its more acute now.) But it was still fun and lasted late into the night, after which we secured all-night Mexican and crawled into bed at dawn.  So it's been a slow afternoon filling orders and making poetry stuff on the one day I do not have any writing obligations afoot before diving back into the breach tomorrow. 

And somehow, its August, which still, even after a couple years out of the academic cycle I was part of my whole life, feels odd to not be preparing and gearing up, either as a student or librarian, for the fall semester. You would think I would have been used to it by now, but no. I certainly don't miss those rises and swelling in workloads and routines, but they are embedded bodily somehow. August also feels so much like the end of summer, even with plenty more summer days, although having run around in the heat more this past week, I am longing for September this time of year, when everything feels sort of straggly and overgrown.

This month brings some throwback movies I'm excited to see on the big screen, musical version of Back to the Future, and a tattoo appointment for some more butterflies at the end of the month. I am hoping to finish the carnival poems if possible and get a working version of RUINPORN printed out to begin book prep for November, when it will be making its way into the world most likely if all goes well. I have a lot of fun things planned zine-wise for fall, though, as well of the spooky and horror-ish nature, including zine releases for both morning in the witch house and ghost box.