mimsy and outgrabe

The REALLY good news? I managed to teach the first two parts of Anna Karenina to my Intro to the Novel class yesterday without having thoroughly re-read the material. And I don't think I screwed up my students! In Kermit the Frog fashion, can I get a big "YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY . . ." Hello? Anyone? ANYWAY. William Kelley Woolfitt generously published my verbose answers to his interview questions yesterday on his wonderful project, Speaking of Marvels . You can find my specific interview here , but I would recommend scrolling through the site and reading the interviews from all of the other chapbook authors. It's interesting to see inside other people's writing processes. Also, I like that he provides a sample of each poet (or fiction writer's) work at the end of each interview. ALSO, that he interviews authors of fiction chapbooks, and non-fiction chapbooks, which are a little more rare than poetry chaps.  So it was pleasant and exciting to see...

The reading went really well -- a lovely, sizable audience (the IOTA Poetry Series has been going on for well over a decade, and has a dedicated following), and a good opportunity to read poems outside of the context A. and I established with our "Poets on Childlessness and Parenthood" tour. Instead, we could just read poems. I read about 10 minutes from the chapbook and then 10 minutes of poems from the rest of the Fabulous Beast ms, and A. read a lovely selection from his book, Little Songs and Lyrics to Genji .  Here we are in action: (HA!) Isn't this backdrop kind of amazing? Photograph of me and this guy's bald head courtesy of my baby sister, Lil' K. Also, I had a snifter of Bourbon Barrel Stout. Drinking beer out of a snifter is pretentious and really shouldn't be condoned, but sometimes it has to be done. It was worth the risk of looking like an asshole. It was delicious. Beer and poems aside, I'm amazed that I managed to g...

Yup -- still around. This semester's not quite the kick in the pants that last semester was . . . er, YET . . . but it's been keeping me busy. The elements have been conspiring to keep me from seeing my creative writing class. Since this semester began, I've seen them TWICE. And because I'll be away in Virginia this weekend for a reading Sunday night, traveling back on Monday, I'm not holding class until Wednesday. The last I saw them was LAST Wednesday. So when I DO finally meet with them, it will have been two weeks since our previous meeting. Crazy, huh? Of course, the college will cram a whole bunch of make up dates into the last week of school, which will make grading finals absolutely maddening unless I start moving things around on my assignment schedule drastically. Our phones and internet and intranet have been all sorts of compromised by the snow and ice, too, so I haven't had access to my computer files all week. I get to the office and I ...

Good god. It's been a while. Welp! Today is the first day of the new semester. We're supposed to get a lot of snow tonight, too. So that should make the beginning of classes go smoothly. At the very least, I can say that my family is 80% healthy. Maybe 75%. At least, healthy enough that my children can go to school and/or the babysitter and I can go teach. I feel like I'm JUST beginning to get my life back from babyland. Vampire Baby, as of last week, is finally sleeping for most, if not all, of the night . . . AND if she wakes up around 5 or 6 in the morning, most of the time I can convince her to go back to sleep! IT ONLY TOOK 10 MONTHS. This means that last week, after realizing I'd slept for more than 5 hours, uninterrupted, I woke up early and managed to work on both my verse play and interview questions I'd been sent by the curator of a lovely blog about chapbooks, Speaking of Marvels .  It took me nearly two months to answer those questions ...

Stuart Downs, one of my undergraduate instructors at James Madison University, died on Saturday. It was unexpected (at the age of 63) but he died of natural causes. I'm sure this doesn't comfort his family much. I'm not sure it comforts me. I miss Stuart. I did miss Stuart, while he was alive and we were in different parts of the country, but I kind of thought I'd see him again on one of my trips back south. Our communication over th e years since I left JMU was brief and sporadic but it meant a lot to me. He was an incredibly generous and gracious instructor, mentor and friend. He treated his students with respect, while he challenged us, and he was unfailingly supportive of our endeavors. Above all, he was kind. I adored his Open Studio class. It changed the way I looked at art and writing and collaboration. He treated me as a peer. He treated us all as peers. From Stuart, I learned what it means to be an artist – it means you have to acknowledge the a...

The view from my office. I have an ungodly (I just typed undogly, har har har) amount of work to do and so I really shouldn't be trolling around the internet, but I just read this and I love that last paragraph and crap I wish I could spend this whole lovely, cool rainy morning just reading and writing and thinking. Instead, I'm going to spend the morning grading really godawful drafts of things and completing obligatory committee work. I feel like my soul is shrinking.

As you may have guessed from the stunning lack of posts on this blog over the past few months, I haven't had a lot of time for outside reading. I did, however, have a few minutes in the middle of the night (while feeding Vampire Baby) to catch up on some of my blog reading, and I stumbled on this lovely and sad piece of flash fiction by Jen Knox. Also, one of my former colleagues (now happily retired and writing full time), interviewed me about Fabulous Beast: The Sow over at The Best American Poetry Blog, and the post went live this week. I babbled on for way too long and L.E. probably should have edited my answers, but it was fun to talk about the poems and be forced to think about the process of writing them, and why I made certain aesthetic choices. (I should note, too, that it took me over a month to answer six simple, direct, good questions from L.E., who has endless patience with me. He's a good friend.) Anyway, onward and upward  . . . or sideways and backwa...