511: revisiting a prior post (news)

I finally was able to re-publish 500. The announcement is up: My humble chapbook, The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake, won the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award, which means it will be published. In about two months, in fact, if all goes well.


The above is the cover my sister designed.

My ISBN is 978-0-9788931-7-0.

The publisher's website is here, where you will eventually be able to order copies online. I'll also have my own set to sell at readings and through local bookstores and whatnot.

Edits are coming along, blurbs are being written, and I'm thinking about author photos and short bios. Thinking about these things and impending due dates and the thumps of the minnow and writing a thesis and keeping up with grading and getting a full night's sleep. It's a fantastically busy time. I feel calm and quiet and good.

500

What lovely news for a 500th post: this morning I received a phone call, letting me know my chapbook manuscript, The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake, won the Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award (which comes with a cash prize!). My brain is, of course, abuzz, with this news, with my lack of sleep, with my first day of teaching, with five months of incubating the baby, with the I'm getting a chapbook published celebration in my head. This afternoon, I turn in a first draft of my full-length manuscript. I feel as if I'm on a trajectory I only imagined when I was younger, as if I'm doing all those things to make myself A Poet, and I've stepped out of myself, a little trembly and enthralled.

487: two anthologies

There are two anthologies I want to call your attention to:

1. From Orchards, Fields, and Gardens, edited by Kerstin Svendsen, which will be available in mid-August and is $4 off pre-orders. Of course, I'm extra-excited about this project because I have three poems inside: the title poem to my chapbook (which is still making rounds, but I promise an update, even when it's a bridesmaid again) "The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake," as well as "Kitchen" and "Palming Earth."


2. The other is a collection being published by Harper Perennial, and my tattoo, done by the lovely and talented Shawn Hebrank, will make an appearance in its pages. You can read more about my specific tattoo in this post, and you can check out the book's webpage here. It will be released October 12th.

338: a weekend on the lake

This was the weekend of the annual MFA retreat; this year we headed to Borde du Lac Lodge, which has a dozen cabins and we all had our own beds in our own rooms, to snore and wheeze away in. This year I was witness to more chaos than last, including a quick skinny dip by five of the male MFAs at the edge of the bonfire in what must have been moderately painful waters.

I am still very much so drowning in work, despite my earnestness and well-behaved intentions. I did get work done--a new poem for the chapbook draft I'm plugging away at and I read an entire book of essays in preparation for the interview with Adam Zagajewski I have later this week. But still: there are student essays, Emily Dickinson, comments on manuscript drafts, an incredibly overdue review to write, an abstract to sketch out, and the contents of my truck (for I drove several other MFAs up to the retreat) to sort through on my dining room table. Anyone have need of some high school teaching materials? Or perhaps a sweater I started to knit and cursed and threw into a ball, thinking I'd never find it again?

Some good news upon my return: two poems, "Breaching" and "Axis" now have homes at an online literary journal called The 13th Warrior Review.

305: news bits

I have plenty to show and tell from the weekend, but for now, as I'm organizing my thoughts, I thought I'd share some writing / photography news:

- Two of my images have been published in BluePrint Review. You can see one here and the other here.
- Cerise Press has launched, and they were able to use one of my shots of Thomas Lux in an interview, as well as a review I wrote of Maxine Kumin's recent book of poems
- And the news I'm most excited about: it looks like I'm going to BreadLoaf! I'll know more later, but I just got the e-mail today, and I'm busy making awful squealing noises in my head.

293

"This is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams // Married to the Sea

Tonight I fall asleep to the words of Sei Shonagon, to the sounds of crickets after rain.

`

Some things to tell:

+ One of my images of Martin Espada has been used in an article on a reading in this news magazine.

+ My review of Sleeping With Houdini by Nin Andrews has been published by ColdFront Magazine.

+ I have an image of Thomas Lux and a review of Still to Mow by Maxine Kumin coming out next month at Cerise Press.

+ My husband has revamped my homepage. I designed it, wanting something hugely simple, and he did all the confusing coding.

227

Hello all:

I have a few poems and an image up on this month's issue of This Joy + Ride. Stop by and check it out! The poems are from a series I've been working on related to loss and memory based on my grandfather's suffering and subsequent passing from Alzheimer's.

In conjunction, I've put some new postcards in the shop; proceeds from this postcards will be donated to an Alzheimer's organization of my grandmother's choosing. They're some of my favorite images I took from Ryan and my one year wedding anniversary visit we made to my grandmother; this lake also figures into the series, though maybe only a little in the poems on Shari and Sheri's webpage.

Also, don't forget: I have a poetry reading this Thursday with Greg Watson at Barnes and Noble Har Mar (that's Roseville). Seven o'clock, and if things haven't changed, in the "events corner," which is to the back and left if you are entering from the street.

My friend Meryl, who is a second year poet in the program, told me about the phrase "in the weeds" while we were waiting for a table at a good Asian restaurant in Chicago on Saturday. (Wow. Lots of prepositions there.... while, for, at, in, on.) She said this is a term common in the food service industry--that a waitress juggles several steps ahead, all timing what might be ready in the kitchen or the bar or what the customers might be ready for, and when there's a moment of passing maximum capacity, of being fully overwhelmed and unable to track what to do next, then that person is "in the weeds." (This makes me think of Jonah's "messing up my swing" metaphor. I'm loving these phrases to connect our lives to that over other professions.)

My friends, I am, indeed, in the weeds. The Palm Beach Poetry Festival set me up to be behind by a week, but I caught up, much to my insanity, and then this AWP convention occurred, so I am again, slightly behind, and when I returned, I received another jury duty summons, this one I won't get out of (does it stop if you finally show up for a tour of the courthouse?)--it's supposed to be over April 5th, and I do want to do my civic duty, but most of all, I want to be a good student who can take advantage of this time in the MFA program, and that won't happen if I'm flitting around the country or deciding the justifying of small complaints.

I have a feeling I'd still be strung out and jittery without these setbacks: my semester is more demanding this time around. Teaching a lit class means keeping up with reading, and the way I set up my twenty pages of writing for these forty four students means I'm grading a mini-essay a week (silly me, thinking of the benefit of regular writing practice would help them become better writers, but this is such a time-suck). Taking two seminars, one of which has us reading fairly dense (non-poetry) things, and the other has us regularly writing reflections and large creative non-fiction pieces. Busy. Busy. Three days on campus, but seven days a week at work in some way.

(And the reviews! I have reviews I need to write!)

My friends, my friends, I am in the weeds, which means I will make humble attempts at being quiet here. I've never been truly able to restrain myself, but the hope is that I will.

In the meantime, buy some postcards.

xo