mimsy and outgrabe

This week has been a busy one.  First, I've been traveling with the kiddies, and we discovered that the newbie gets car sick. (Yay!)  Second, I had two different writing deadlines. The first was for a guest blog post over at Carly Pizzani's Fine Fit Day , which went live today. I haven't done this kind of expository writing in a long time, and it was fun to flex those muscles again. Of course, I had to rely on a ton of help from my mom, who walked the baby and distracted the older kiddies while I typed away to meet the Wednesday deadline. Third, I had to write a final, last report for that Leadership Academy I participated in last August. The rules were: write a final report, earn a Certificate of Completion. Miss the deadline for the final report, earn a Certificate of Participation. I decided I'd be damned if I was going to earn some lame Certificate of Participation after sacrificing two weeks (one last August, and one this upcoming August) to the Lea...

Not a lot of writing has been done, obviously, but there has been a lot of internet surfing. And reading. I'm not going to put all of it here, in one post, because it would go on forever. But here's a sampling what I found that I thought was kinda interesting: This article at The Poetry Foundation by Afaa Michael Weaver titled "My Walking Shoes." Clearly there is much in Weaver's experience that I cannot relate to, as he focuses on being an African American writer who went from being a part of the working class to attending an Ivy League university (none of which I've come close to), but something clicked when I read this line: "I realized travel as the interface with self, and in that space, I was able to turn my lyric eye onto myself in a way that I had previously dismissed as bourgeois." I never even thought of the "lyric eye" turned onto itself as being "bourgeois" (I actually thought of it, if I thought...

Let's face it. People can't write well about dogs, or use them in any sort of significant way in their writing without seeming drippy and precious. Paul Lisicky is the exception . I hereby declare him the only one allowed to use dogs in writing. **** In other news, I've been busy, but not necessarily in a good way. HR at Stuffolk royally fucked up when it came to my non-maternity-leave maternity leave (we have "maternity disability" because, of course, having a child is JUST like having a gimpy leg), and informed me a week ago that I wouldn't be receiving my salary for all of July and August. Luckily, for everyone involved, we came to some agreement that I would work all of the 7.5 days I missed in May and didn't have enough sick time to cover (for, you know, my "disability") by the end of June. So I've been in the office. Working on stuff for our annual Creative Writing Festival. With my baby and my mother, who came for a littl...

It's here! My little fable/collection of poems is now available as a chapbook from Hyacinth Girl Press .