mimsy and outgrabe

I solidified my Mother of the Year status by forgetting I'd volunteered to help at the Holiday Cookie Decorating Party in Little Miss Talkalot II's kindergarten class Friday morning. BECAUSE I'M A GENIUS AND A GOOD PERSON. She wasn't traumatized. I think that by now, at the wise age of 5, she recognizes that everyone else's mothers are far superior, better and more capable of this parent-y stuff, than her own mama. The missed cookie appointment put an appropriate cap on a very very very tiring week, as I attempted to manage my own anxieties about the end of the semester and also talk my students off of various metaphorical ledges.  One of the more mystifying aspects of this semester is finding out how many of my students just didn't bother to submit major papers. Like, finally going through the grades and seeing the holes, and then going back to those students (who are usually "good" students in the sense that they keep up with reading an...

This week featured only one day of teaching, thanks to a fantastic virus that struck Little Miss Talkalot II. I guess her body was already kind of run down from having that 24-hour stomach virus the week before, because she came down with a fever on Monday and it didn't leave until yesterday. 72 hours of fever is a little extreme in the kid-world. After a week with me, she's ready to return to school now. As a result, I've worked a little bit on my play (reformatting, mostly, into an old-fashioned standard script form -- which is really, really counter-intuitive and highly fucking annoying, but necessary if I'm going to start submitting the thing) and very little on poems. The rest of my time has been divided between running between the kitchen and the living room for Little Miss Talkalot II, who -- despite being feverish and congested and generally miserable -- still had an immense appetite, and sending and answering emails in an effort to keep the last weeks...

Kristy Bowen, founder, editor, and publisher of dancing girl press , wrote this blog post about her writing habits since earning her MFA, and even though Bowen and I lead very different lives in terms of particulars, I found this passage resonated with me especially: Other related things were happening during this time- -girl show , my thesis mss, which was rendered adrift when Ghost Road went under in 2010, was picked up by Black Lawrence and slated for publication.  Noctuary solicited shared properties.. . and released it in 2013.  The JF poems were a huge success when Sundress published them as an e-chap.  All of which drew me out of the funk I'd been in for awhile and made me less likely to doubt my commitment to sparkle motion. I felt more like a poet again--so I guess I started to act more like it. But even still that pace, since around 2013, has been much slower and less productive than this year all by itself, and I feel like it's for a very simple...

11.13.18: Just logging this here, as one does when one keeps a blog that tracks one's writing process: I've reached a weird, uncomfortable place with the poetry manuscript. Here's a list of my ridiculous fears/problems: I fear I've jinxed myself by calling this collection of poems a manuscript. I've written myself into a weird space with the narrative arc. I don't know where to go next. I'm not having as much fun writing the poems, which tells me they probably aren't good. Part of this is because my mind feels pretty divided. Feeling like I should be grading instead of writing really squashes creativity. Blergh. Little Miss Kindergartner is learning to write. 11.15.18: Feeling better. Did some whining in the above notes, got that out of my system, and then managed to write another two poems I kinda like. So. In one of my "I-don't-know-what-to-write-lemme-look-over-what-I-already-have" moods, I noticed that since September, I...

ERMAHGERD, you guys. I am so so so excited about M.S.'s latest art for our sketchbook project. (Which, by the way, we're still working on, even though the deadline passed.) I wrote a poem (which is, in itself, kind of exciting  . . . to me and no one else . . . but whatever) and then M.S. took the book and made this gorgeous drawing in response this morning and LOOKIT ISN'T IT AWESOME? Text by Yours Truly, Art by Meredith Starr It makes me so happy. Welp, in other good news, after all of my griping and whinging and whining, the universe has thrown me a bone. I've been accepted into the Bread Loaf Sicily program for September 2018, which means that while I may not be doing a sabbatical or a true residency next semester, I will be granted five precious days at the end of the summer to concentrate on my writing. In Sicily. Thank you, Universe. Obviously, it's been uplifting to receive good news. On the other hand, I am seriously veering into burnout. ...

Vampire Kid has been sick for a month, seriously, with some kind of gross disgusting congested ear/nose/throat thing, and on Wednesday she had a reaction to the antibiotic we gave her, ON THE LAST FINAL EXAM PRESENTATION DAY for one of my classes, and my ass had to be saved by M.S., who kindly and with no small amount of trouble took MY students into HER classroom and videotaped their presentations for me while also providing feedback/art crits to her own students while I stayed home and fielded questions from Vampire Kid while grading a sum total of three papers all day. She's pretty much an American hero . . .  M.S., that is, not Vampire Kid. This time of year blows, and I hate writing that, because I actually kinda love the holidays. But it's always complicated, for me, by End of the Semester Madness, and I reach the end of the year exhausted and grumpy and demoralized and that's . . . not great. I mean, sometimes I bounce back quickly and by New Year's I...