Dear Internet,

I suppose we have been on break.

That is the kind way of saying: I broke your heart and now I'm back.

But I have been busy!

When last we spoke, it was April and I was excited about a trip to my alma mater, the land of eternal spring-time. Then I was completely and totally laid out by a bout of food poisoning at the 10th Annual Emerging Writers Festival (which is completely blameless and was actually a lot of fun. Up until that point, anyway.) You can guess which five of the six symptoms listed here I actually had!

Since then, there was the Juniper Festival where I met and fell in love with this man:

And by that, I mean his poems. I think you're romantic tricky, baby.

And then there was the Juniper Summer Writing Institute where I finally met and was hugged twice by this lovely lady:

Dottie Lasky (via Dodie Bellamy)

& reading "I Hate Irony" at Penn Sound

At long last, my review of Kevin Goodan's lovely second collection of poems, Winter Tenor, was published at Kenyon Review Online. While you're there, you should check out Hilary Plum's thoughtful blog posts on creating a sustainable, supportive independent fiction community--lots to think about there.

Also in the inter-sphere: the always good-natured, informative, and amusing No Slander podcasts hosted by Ish Klein and Greg Purcell. If you're in need of a summertime poetry pick-me-up.

So, you see, I've been out and about. Getting freckles. Chasing two-year-olds. And I've also been in, reading and writing and working.

I promise to pay more attention to you in the future!

xoxo Kristen

I am in love with Tiny Hermione

and with Kate Beaton, more generally.

(oh, god, the hair is still hilarious)

Head south! Head south!

Thank the lord, it is springtime.

Two big things are happening next week!

I'll be at the 10th Anniversary of the Emerging Writers Festival in Lancaster, PA checking out the jubilee and checking in with my alma mater. Springtime in Lancaster is basically heaven, so expect lots of pictures of blossoming dogwood and cherry trees, fried donuts from the Amish, large organic martinis, and affordable vintage shops...and I'll throw in some words of wisdom from the "up-and-comers," a rad group of poets, novelists, journalists, and song writers. The year I helped coordinate the festival, I met Lauren Groff, Jay Kirk, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Cynthia Cruz, and Kevin Moffett, who have all gone on to lead super interesting careers and whom I am still compelled to check up on every once in awhile.

Then I'm rocketing back to Amherst (north!) for the Juniper Festival, where I'm very excited to see Sommer Browning and Timothy Donnelly read, especially. But more on that later.

(See that building? That is where I used to work. EVERY DAY. Sigh.)

(Just to compare, this is where I now work, photographed on a good day--i.e. no snow is falling.)

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Hey, ladies!

Sad. Sad and so true.

Whiz! Bang! Pow!

If I had an extra hundred dollars, I would buy each of my friends a copy of Swamplandia! & send it to them in the mail with a letter:

DEAR FRIEND, 

I LOVE YOU, HERE IS A BOOK YOU WILL LOVE TOO. IF YOU LOVE ME, OPEN THIS BOOK AND START FROM THE VERY BEGINNING, THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF SWAMPLANDIA!. KAREN RUSSELL CAN TAKE IT FROM THERE.

This is only a sneak attack post (bam!) because I have been mondo-sick for the entirety of February (stupid February), and I am working up some energy to write an essay on the Vida statistics, Betty Draper, and the article/extended-punchline-with-a-buried-moral Tina Fey wrote for The New Yorker, and, side note, why I kind of hate The New Yorker (spoiler alert!).

Meantime, here's some material for you to peruse:

If you would like to listen to Karen Russell on NPR's All Things Considered, click here.

If you haven't already read the thoughtful correspondence on the Vida statistics Jessa Crispin & Michael Schaub posted at Bookslut, click here (and here and here and here and here).

If you would like to read an interview with Emma Straub, whose Other People We Married just came out from Five Chapters Books and is almost at my house, click here.

If you would like to see Aimee Bender in person, you should show up at 8PM, this Thursday, at Memorial Hall, UMass-Amherst. Where I think there will be lemon-flavored cupcakes, but this is only a rumor.

If you would like to listen to Christy Crutchfield and CS Ward read some awesome fiction/poetry, you should come to Live Lit, this Friday, at Amherst Books.

Transmission ended (pow!).

The ice storm cometh

I had one of those nice, leisurely writing days planned.You know: get up, caffeinate, write and read to your heart's content for as long as you can go, but for at least the whole morning before your brain implodes.

BLAMMO! Totally woke up with a cold. Now I am half-heartedly poking around in poetry land and falling asleep on my notebook. Forget that I wandered around all hours of the night on the New York subway system. Forget that I spent yesterday clearing my car off in freezing rain. How on earth did I get sick before the semester even started?

Amidst my grumbling I googled "Julianna Swaney," this month's cover artist for Tin House. I'm completely beguiled by her ethereal drawings and watercolors--straight out of a fairy tale with all the right, weird, humorous notes. Swaney seems to keep track of everything that inspires her online--her drawing blog, Oh My Cavalier!, is chock full with her latest work, while she keeps track of a burgeoning vintage paper scrap collection over at Ephemeratopia, which is definitely worth a visit.

I've been working on some fairy tale poems that are taking their sweet old time to figure themselves out--Swaney's art makes me feel like trying to suck it up, eat some soup, and get cracking.

Besiege the spirit

I keep running across the idea of writerly obsession--as an impulse for finishing a longer work, as an impetus for writing anything at all.

--

ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [haunt, possess,] referring to an evil spirit): from Latin obsess- 'besieged,' from the verb obsidere, from ob- 'opposite' + sedere 'sit.'  The current sense dates from the late 19th cent.

--

DFW had tennis. And drugs, the altered experience. David Mitchell, to some degree, has Japan, and gallivanting about with a matryoshka storytelling structure. Arielle Greenberg has being Jewish, being a mother. Ben Lerner had war. Then physics and love and a different kind of war.  Mavis Gallant wrote a whole book of stories about Paris. Susan Howe wrote a whole book about Emily Dickinson.

--

If you're a typographer, perhaps you're besieged by the persistent use of double-spacing after a period.

(Guilty).

--

Photographer Neil Krug took a series of 60s-inspired pulp portraits, featuring the long legs of his wife, who is holding a bad-ass gun.

--

Being a curious neurotic, I always wondered about how diffuse my thinking is. I am never obsessed with any one thing in particular. Images, though: a tree, a certain kind of light, walking in the snow along the river. A long, empty prairie.

--

Being in an MFA program gives you the freedom to be obsessed with one thing. Or, maybe less often, with a bunch of things all at once. As soon as you wear one out, you're done with your draft, you move on. Most likely it'll sneak up on you again in a different form.  But you're already trying out the next fascination.

--

Over at The Millions Cathy Day wonders if we should be teaching the short story as definitively as we are, if we might be killing the urge to create in longer forms. Whether the workshop indefinitely kills a productive discussion about a longer work.

Maybe this is also a roundabout way to think about cultivating longevity of thought. Of continued fascination with one evolving idea. To stick around for awhile.

Now with more winter (and a little Aimee Bender)

I haven't forgotten you, internet.  I've been enjoying the cold.

And storing up for the New England winter.

I missed all of the end-of-year booklist blog-mania, so I'll try to make up for it with a flurry of new posts over the next few weeks before I head off to AWP. 

School caught me by surprise and so did the Aimee Bender reading, coming up this Thursday, January 20th as part of the Visiting Writers Series at UMass. {Edit: the Visiting Writers Series did a massive bait and switch! Aimee Bender will not read until February 24. Sorry for the misinformation. I'll post another excited entry when she actually does come to read.} I enjoyed An Invisible Sign of My Own as I enjoy all new versions of fairy tales--unfortunately The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is beneath a teetering to-read pile.  The only way to get it out is to play what will certainly be a losing game of Jenga with a tower of three-pound hardcovers.

Time to shake off my post-holiday-travel-and-epic-television-slash-nonstop-reading-hobbit-hole-brainfreeze.   Even if it does mean more teaching and cold-ass weather and squeaky boots on the bus.