mimsy and outgrabe

Two things, my lovelies, and then I have to take Vampire Toddler to the doctor for a Mystery Rash. AND find someone to cover for me at work today. My life is nothing if not exciting. ANYWAY: The fall 2015 issue of the online publication Menacing Hedge was released on Sunday, October 11. It includes five chapters of my fairy tale poem as well as three of the "conversation" poems that interrupt the narrative between chapters. Kelly Boyker is an amazingly generous editor and I'm thrilled that the staff gave my poem so much space in their magazine. It's really gratifying to see this work out in the world, too. I'm still making my way through the rest of the work in the issue, but I'm quite in love with the conversation between Sarah B. Boyle and Sonya Vatomsky right now. It reminds me of the "interviews" in BOMB magazine, which I've loved since my undergrad days: two artists speaking with one another, people who are more or less sympatico. (N...

Before The Boy became bored and stopped cooperating. Toward the end of July, P.T. (pictured to the left, doing his tech thing) and I began work on our poetry video collaboration. We recorded the audio, then discussed various images and the sequence in the video, looked at some stock footage, brainstormed, etc. Last week, we met on campus with my little helpers, Miss Talkalot and The Boy, and we managed to film a couple of shots of them as the characters from my fairy tale poem, and then also some shots of the surrounding pine barrens, which are lovely.  This exercise is fun but strange and confusing. I have this idea of the poetry video as a piece of art unto itself, separate and distinct from a printed poem, but as we're creating this piece I feel like we're making a poetry video like people make music videos -- which can be an art unto itself but is also just as often a simplified representation, with visuals, of what happens in the narrative of a song. I'm rea...

Sunrise as viewed from my deck. Not bad! I took a break from the blog when I traveled with the kiddies down to Virginia at the end of June, and then never quite returned to it after we came back. Part of this is because I've been busy with making/going to doctor's appointments that SHOULD have taken place during the school year, chipping away at the clutter in my house and attempting to right all the wrongs in my housekeeping habits, and sometimes actually working on those writing projects I mentioned a month ago.  But also: I just haven't had as much to say. I'm feeling a little quieter. I kinda want to curl up and disappear from the world. And by world I really mean people. I'm rethinking/revising not only the way I write but the way I approach the different facets of my life all the time, and sometimes I feel overwhelmed, as if talking about those changes will put them all in jeopardy. It's a crazy-person kind of paranoia, really. I mean, somet...

It's been a week of recovery! And Plan-Making Lite, meaning that I'm beginning to think of the best way to tackle all of the things I'd like to do with these next few teaching-free months. My summer class was under-enrolled and didn't run, which is probably more good fortune for me than bad: I'll have less money, but now I can use the next month (the one where my children are still in school) to do prep for the fall at a leisurely pace, and to work on the things that I'm feeling starved for, like reading and writing. And exercise -- even the simplest kind, such as walking through my neighborhood or stretching. And sleep. Lots of sleep. I've begun reading this week, as a kind of segue between Disaster Semester and Disaster Semester Prevention Planning, Lynda Barry's Syllabus . It's really marvelous. Lynda Barry is one of my new favorites. I discovered her via my colleague D.W., who studied with her at University of Wisconsin-Madison (and is actu...