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.

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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.

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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.

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

(Guilty).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Readings galore!

Oh boy, it's the end of the semester, and I'm flying by the seat of my pants trying to get everything done.  Which explains why this post is too late to do anyone any good, but here you go:

Went to a fabulous jubilat/Jones reading this past Sunday in Amherst, featuring the phenomenal Ben Lerner, as well as Kimiko Hahn, both of whom were gracious readers.  I got up the nerve to shake Ben Lerner's hand & later apologized for asking for a signed copy of his book (::head desk::).

He's only 31.  The world is unfair.  (I promise I have intelligent commentary about his latest book, Mean Free Path, forthcoming in the next issue of Rain Taxi).

Natalie Lyalin is also reading TOMORROW at 7 PM with poet Michael Earl Craig in the Augusta Savage Gallery, New Africa House, UMass.  I'm excited to meet the woman behind GlitterPony & the author of Pink & Hot Pink Habitat.  Her chapbook from Ugly Duckling Presse, Try A Little Time Travel, also hits the spot.  If you you're in the Valley (& shouldn't you be?), I hope you can come!

Spirit of the Occasion

October's over & Tavi's what I have to show for it.
Oh, & one highly successful Rachel Zoe costume & a bunch of beautiful hand-made objects about which, more later.

Happy Halloween, folks.

New GlitterPony! More Internet! More Fall!

It's October & I've needed an umbrella all day so far.  My gutters are giving up.  But the internet is not!

Exhibit A:

GlitterPony's latest issue, with poems from yours truly, natural wonders Anne Ceceila Holmes and Lily Ladewig, & lots of other fabulous people.  Please take a look!

Exhibit B:

My good friend Adam Cogbill is/was Mr. Story of the Week at Short Story America.  Mr. October?  Maybe.

Exhibit C:

Mr. October of the Century.

The Internet might be giving up 'cause Gabe Durham said so.

This Is Where I Do My Best Thinking