mimsy and outgrabe

The following is a day-by-day log of my progress and thoughts throughout last week, as I completed an "Artist Residency in Motherhood" with my colleague at Stuffolk, and frequent collaborator (in teaching and in art), visual artist Meredith Starr . During the week I worked on revising a poetry manuscript and finishing one of my plays. M.S. has a year-long painting project she's been working on, and she spent the week catching up/getting back on track with that series.  This log makes for a long blog post, which may not be everyone's jam, but since I keep this blog more or less for my own edification, I thought I'd include this disclaimer at the top. If you like to read about other artists' processes, read on. (And, I highly recommend Daily Rituals: How Artists Work and Daily Rituals: Women at Work , both by Mason Currey both of which I read in the first weeks of this summer.)  Playwriting photos are not very exciting, admittedly. If ...

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...

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...

Spent three and a half hours writing just over 1500 words of Accountability Partners today (my non-verse play). And in the morning, before the kids woke up, I wrote another poem for the new manuscript. That makes over 60 poems written since the end of June!  Sorry for the blog brag, but I had to share my good news with the universe. I'm on some kind of unprecedented tear here, and thoroughly enjoying it. I mean, not all of those 1500 words are golden, and I sincerely doubt all of the poems are publishable (certainly not right now -- most need the benefit of time and careful revision) . . . but I'm so, so happy and grateful for the generation. And, yes, relieved. Because at this time last year, I was already having serious doubts about my abilities and future as a writer (even before the bad news/sabbatical debacle). After all -- while it goes a long way toward helping with validation, publication is not necessarily the thing that makes one feel like the genuine article. ...

Things are looking up for this old bird.  The first week of classes has come and gone and they were pleasantly uneventful, blissfully routine. I continued my morning writing ritual and wrote three new poems. And today I begin the first of what will be, with luck and perseverance and a little bit of selfishness thrown in, the first of what I'm calling Long Form Fridays. (Because, you know, like the true dork I am, I love to give everything alliterative titles . . .) Long Form Fridays are going to entail taking my butt to the Starbucks where I wrote while the kids were in camp and parking myself at a table to write for three hours. It seems like as good a place as any -- far enough away from my house and its chaos, definitely far enough from the campus and ITS noise and chaos -- where I can begin work again on my long-form projects: first, my Accountability Partners play, and after that, the verse play that's officially in Title Limbo (one of the reasons I need to sit ...

This is the last weekend of freedom before the new school year begins. I went into the office yesterday to clean it out -- there was so much junk stashed everywhere from last year's drop-and-run. I would come into the office with one pile of folders and books, place them on a desk or a table, and then pick up another pile of folders and books, and run off again. When I did work in the office it was often between columns of stacked files and assignments and general clutter.  I don't really want to do that again, if I can avoid it -- so I had a "purge day" wherein I went through all of the stacks and sorted through what needed to be filed and what needed to be recycled. When I left yesterday I had three or four boxes/bags of material to be recycled (which I'm doing at home because I don't trust that the school genuinely recycles -- I've watched our janitorial staff combine trash and recycling in the same cart and that's just suspicious  . . . I mea...

Grainy shot of my neighbor's zinnia. And butterfly. In the wake of Micro-Sabbatical Summer 2018, I've kept writing and done some small fine-tooth-comb type edits to poems that I've written this summer -- which happen to number FOURTEEN, if you're curious.  I know, I know, I'm just as shocked as you are.  My workspace in August, feat. coffee, sprinklers, bug spray, knee. I know that for other writers this isn't really a big deal, but I know also that there are some of you who understand this feeling -- this feeling of having been treading water for a really, really, really long time and then finally venturing toward some distant shore. The shore may be really far off in the fucking distance, but you're finally able to swim toward it. Maybe that's a lame and expected metaphor.  But I warned you -- I'm still rusty. Yesterday I met with M.S. and we shared with each other the work we've been attempting to eke out this summer, som...

Monday: Wrote just over 1400 words of "Accountability Partners," a play I began writing in the summer of 2016 as part of the Stony Brook Southampton Script Development lab. BOOM! I now have three complete scenes. If I accomplish nothing else this week, I will have had these three hours in the Starbucks off the service road of the Sunrise Highway. Living the dream, people. Tuesday: Ermagherd, peeps. Just over 1000 words today. Not that 1000 words really means anything significant. I'm not exactly aiming for word length with this play. But I'm thinking of word length in terms of commitment. Another three hours of concentrated work on the play today. And another three hours of sitting in a Starbucks. I'm cold and full of coffee and my teeth are on edge between the air-conditioning and the caffeine in my system. But I wrote! And I have another scene! Maybe I'll actually keep it! Who knows! So many exclamation points!! A noisy-ass coffee shop is the mos...

August is a month for slowing down and resting, or so a pop-up horoscope tells me. And we should all believe and be guided by our internet astrologers, ammaright? (Honestly, what did I click on for astrology ads to start appearing in my web browser?) These may be the only crop from my garden this year. I've spent my morning writing hours this week working on a poem (building and then destroying a sonnet, more or less . . . it's probably gonna take another week). And I reincarnated an old writing group for the month of August -- we'll met once or twice a week at different spots to escape our respective clutter-traps and care-taking responsibilities and concentrate on our work. I've picked up the play I began last summer, Accountability Partners , as my project to concentrate on for this last month of the break. I need to develop Act II of the verse play, too, but I wanted to work on something I have a good chance of actually finishing before school begins...

You know what's awesome? I'm now eligible for old-lady poetry awards. That's right. Not that there are a ton of over-40 awards, but when they come around, I could totally throw my purple hat in the ring. * A quick internet search has corrected me. I would throw my RED hat in the ring. Also, I don't recommend doing that internet search. The results are so saccharine you'll have to bleach your eyes. I took one for the team, ya'll. * Anyway, I'm still working on submitting my full-length to lots of places (i.e. just throwing my hard-earned money at the universe, essentially) AND today is the last day of classes/office hours before Spring Break, so I'm looking forward to my micro-sabbatical next week. * If it happens. My dad's health is a little precarious at the moment, and we might have to take a quick trip south to help out. * I plan on working on "Accountability Partners" -- my play that is not my verse play ...

I'm in a weird head-space. Tomorrow I'm hosting and taking part in an event that feels much bigger and important than it really is. Maybe this is because I haven't organized a reading or participated in one for a long time, and maybe this is because there will be people there (friends, colleagues) who haven't read or heard my work before, and maybe this is because the work I'll be 'presenting' -- it's weird using that word -- is so unlike other work I've put out into the world. It's two scenes from a new play I began this summer, and it's being read by two people who aren't me, and it's a comedy, and it's not written with poetry, and it's crass in a way that makes me feel really vulnerable -- because I fear that it will be too crass for some of the audience, and really not enough for others -- I don't want to push boundaries in a half-ass way, but I'm probably going to offend some people and I just have to get over ...

This summer has been motherfucking intense.  I'm not complaining. (Yes, you can breathe a sigh of relief.) I'm just trying to accurately describe the period of time in which I required my squishy, ill-used mom brain to be suddenly very active this summer. (I'm in year three of coming off those pregnancy hormones -- fingers crossed that maybe my brain will return to full capacity by the Christmas season.) July's Southampton Writers Conference and its Script Development Lab was extremely useful and productive. (So yes, I'm glad I listened to A. and didn't back out. Don't tell HIM that, though.) My experience with the Script Development Lab this year was really outstanding -- not least because of the feedback provided me by the dramaturg assigned to my play (William Carden of the Ensemble Theatre Studio -- who is brilliant and lovely), and its actors and director, but also because, perhaps, I came to the conference with a piece of writing that is work...

I took the week off from writing. More or less. It began promisingly with a lunch date with A.P. to discuss our projects (his novel, my play) and then took a big nosedive from there. After last week's frantic and frenetic push to meet deadlines (the A-form for my final promotion, a somewhat-workable draft of the play for July's script development lab) I think I needed a solid break. Not that I can afford to take a break at this point. The graduate class (and script development lab, and conference) begin July 6. I'm going to have to use this weekend, and next week, to get some serious work done. I guess there are two things that left me needing the break and also just kind of deflated me: one, I turned in my promotion paperwork and instead of feeling elated and happy because it's (supposedly) the last time I'll have to go through this process, I felt deflated and weary. And then I found out that my application was far less substantial (like, it probably wei...

At the end of last week I attempted to create a small writing group that will meet once a week during the summer -- to do NOTHING but write. No workshops, no craft talk, just gathering in the semi-comfortable chairs of the local library for three hours, away from the messy houses and the kids and the talking spouses, and attempting to get words on a page on a regular basis. Everyone was in, excited, ready-to-go . . . and then no one could meet this Wednesday. (Including myself, because I fell ill YET AGAIN (read: another/thesamethatwon'tgoaway stupid sinus infection) and had to ply my system with antibiotics.) 1) I am falling apart. 2) I fear this is a sign of things to come. Both my falling apart (more), and the inability of the writing group to get together. Still, we'll see.  On Tuesday I saw an amazing reading of an equally amazing play by Boo Killebrew, this year's winner of the Leah Ryan's Fund for Emerging Women Writers. The acting was incredibl...

So, one thing I'm discovering in The Year+ Orientation to Having Three Children is that, surprise, you have to super-duper plan and prioritize. Priorities go something like this: Are the children dressed? Am I dressed? Does anyone smell or show visible signs of yesterday's sandwiches/spaghetti dinner/backyard dirt pile debacle? Will any of the speaking children complain audibly about not being fed? If the answer is yes to the first two questions and no to the last two, we can leave the house for school/camp/store/violin lesson/sports practice/babysitter etc. The bar is lower than it's ever been before, people. This is probably not a surprise to anyone with half a brain, but you should remember that through the course of giving birth to the aforementioned three children, I've lost an incredible amount of brain power. I believe it was A.P. who pointed out that -- three years after having The Boy -- I was just beginning to regain myself, to become more clear...

One of my poems was chosen for the April edition of Stirring: A Literary Collection , guest edited by Margaret Bashaar, the editor of Hyacinth Girl Press. Shamefully, maybe, I didn't know anything about this magazine until M.B. invited me to submit a few poems to the issue she was guest editing -- and I like the journal a lot. (Not just because they chose one of my poems! Although, you know, it helps.)  I like its approach -- it's monthly, but it doesn't publish a ton of work at once. There's just enough here to read, to ruminate on, to appreciate or dismiss -- but either way, the work printed here doesn't get lost in a sea of other pieces. While I like many of the printed, perfect-bound journals out there, many of them are on my "to read" tables (that's right, I wrote tables, the plural!). I just can't manage to move through each issue quickly. But a magazine like Stirring: A Literary Collection is easily digested in a sitting -- and can le...