alas...

I don't have time in my life for my blog. I hope to someday have time in my life for my blog. I hope to also have a blog that has some structure and purpose beyond the smorgasbord that this one is (you know you love it, though). Maybe some day my reflections will mean something. Maybe someday I'll offer you more than self-referential lists that don't really tell you much. Maybe someday I'll remember to post photos on the blog as much as I upload photos to Facebook. Maybe all of these things will come true... but right now with everything going on (like teaching and writing and Phoebe and trying to have a life) I'm not sure I have the time to make it happen. So... I'm preemptively signing off, to be picked up again (I hope), in some better form.

I will miss you much more than you will miss me.












I suppose that's a lie... if that was true I would be making better effort to keep this up. Sorry. Forgive me for lying.

Love you, M

October 3rd Candid Yak

I fail - FFTB Day 3

I did not go to Fall for the Book events today. I was grading papers all day so I can return them to my students tomorrow morning. They're pretty smart, those students of mine. I learned all about blogs - about Kanye West's blogs, MTV's blogs, Ian Crocker's Blog... if I wasn't so sleepy I'd link you to all of them.

I missed Catherine Bowman, Charles Baxter, Katie Ford, and a few others I'd wanted to see. But damn, my comments are good and my students will (I hope) appreciate them.

Worth the failure in trade for a success, I suppose. 

But I heard Katie Ford was great, despite some kidney ailment. 

And I heard Charles Baxter is an all around nice dude, and that he talked for a little while, and then read from some new work. 

That's nice.

Blogging Fall for the Book - Days 1 and 2

The 10th Annual Fall for the Book festival kicked off on Sunday and will continue through Friday of this week. I'm going to try to say at least something about all of the events I attend.

Sunday evening was the fellowship reading sponsored by So To Speak, the international feminist literary journal housed at George Mason University. The reading featured members of the faculty (Kyoko Mori, Sally Keith, and Helon Habila) as well as recipients of fellowship awards, including my good friends Sarah Klenakis, Robb St. Lawrence, amongst others. The reading took place outside in the new Fairfax Old Town plaza on North St. - a lovely spot next to a bubbling fountain, Panera Bread and The Austin Grille. No seriously, the setting was really lovely, as were the readings. Most read excerpts from their thesis projects or recent publications. It's always good to hear what my more accomplished peers are up to.

Today included Mason's alumni authors, including Brian Brodeur, whose book I featured in a previous post. It was a joy to finally hear his work. We have been friends for a while but somehow our own poetry has escaped our orbits. Fortunately we have traded poems and will get to talk in depth about them relatively soon (we hope). The reading also featured two other alums, Mel Nichols and Robert Drummond.

Today also kicked off the Candid Yak season. We, along with student media, featured Fellowship poets Ethan Edwards and Danika Stegeman, whose readings I always enjoy. My roommates are seriously talented.

Forgive me for not being able to say much intelligent tonight - it's been a long day. Needless to say I enjoyed the readings and hope you go google searching these friends' names on a regular basis to keep up on what they are up to - because they'll be big, I'm sure of it.

"We enlarge and linear at the same time"

This is a line from William Gass's short story In the Heart of the Heart of the Country which we are reading in Sally Keith's Poetry After Prose course, where, you guessed it, we read prose and then write poetry.

It seems to encompass a lot in my life at this moment. This post has nothing to do with what's really at the heart of Gass's story, which is, frankly, quite depressing and all about weather (noun), and how a house and a body weather (verb), and love, and the Midwest, among so many other things.

But... I like it anyway and I'm going to take it out of context and make it my own. Because I can.

We enlarge... our scope grows, we take on more. I am already more than who I was a year ago. I have acquired titles, like "Instructor of Composition" and "Assistant Poetry Editor" and "Writing Center Assistant" as well as categories, such as "poet who will be exhibited in a gallery" (that's right! Two of Steph Rozene's stacks of dinnerware and two of my poems will be at the UICA this Fall), and "girl who cuts her own hair" (chopped it off again, gave myself some bangs), and "girl who helps train new TAs," and "girl who wears too many hats" (it's true, not literally, but figuratively)... but also, just bigger. Life is wider, the world is full of possibility... and yet...

We linear... things come together, form a straight line, have a trajectory, move forward. I have a clearer sense of who I am as a poet, and that comes from writing, from working to find my place in the larger trajectory of poets in my program and elsewhere writing now. My work is, I hope, improving. Things are happening. New friendships are forming, old ones are strengthening. Things narrow. Time encourages greater punctuation, clearer thoughts, a sense things are moving forward. I have no great evidence for this except for this sense or feeling that it is true.