Subscription Drive over at Weave, SPF, publishing, etc.

First, if you have not yet checked it out, I would like to direct you to Weave Magazine's subscription drive. We're attempting to get 30 subscriptions in 30 days and we've fallen a couple subscriptions behind, so we'd really appreciate the purchase if you were to make one! Subscriptions are at a discounted price for the next 4 days only! $12.00 gets you two issues of Weave. $19.00 gets you issues 1-3. So go forth and purchase!

I'm also very excited to say that four of my poems are going to be published in an anthology edited by Naomi Shihab Nye titled Time You Let Me In: 25 Poets Under 25. I'm thrilled to get to be a part of this anthology and cannot wait to read the rest of the anthology. The book is to be published by Greenwillow Books, which is an imprint of HarperCollins. Exciting stuff.

In some local poetry news, Pittsburgh will be hosting a small press festival called SPF this upcoming July. The festival is being directed by and was conceptualized by the good people over at Open Thread. If you have a small press and are in the area you should consider getting a table before the July 1st deadline. There are a lot of presses already signed up and, of course, Weave is happily one of them.

I am so very thankful that it is Friday and I am no longer at work. It is a bit sad that I go through the entire week anticipating the weekend. Don't get me wrong - I am extraordinarily grateful for my job. I like my boss. The work isn't terrible. But auditing is certainly not something that makes me get up in the morning all excited. Ever. Maybe some day I'll be able to afford to go to graduate school and get my career redirected somewhat. Or perhaps it's just a grass-is-greener sort of thing and I should be happy with the work I am doing. I'm editing Weave with Laura, I'm running The TypewriterGirls with Crystal, I'm writing, and I'm publishing. Really, I've got nothing to complain about. I just get so despondent at work sometimes. This heavy feeling between my chest and my stomach. If only I could just get past it.

On a less depressing note, this weekend my friend Bill and I are sitting down to talk about the cover art for issue 03 of Weave. I've sent him a bit of the poetry we've accepted and he may be creating a response to the work as the cover. He also does portraits with the poet Huang Xiang that you can take a look at through the above link, and we're also talking about potentially using one of those. I'll also be heading to Windber this weekend for my friends' performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is bound to be an interesting time.




I've noticed I'm terrible at titling my blog posts. Perhaps I should just abstain entirely.

Busy busy busy

I finished up two drafts of poems this weekend, which is quite a lot for me. I usually don't work on more than one poem at a time, either, so this is sort of a breakthrough in a moderately pathetic kind of way.

I know I don't write nearly as much as I should and this has been proven by the fact that I am literally out of poems that I am happy enough with to send out the door in hopes of publication. I have five poems that are in varying stages of completeness, but none that are truly submission-worthy right now. And of course there is the glut of poems that will never see the light of day.

I was looking forward to doing a round of submissions to a number of literary journals I really like that are open during the summer months, but, barring a miracle, this will clearly not happen. My writing hasn't been able to keep up with my submitting.

Submitting is so easy, so, so much easier to do on my lunch break when my mind is still half auditing. It's quicker, it gives me an instant sense of accomplishment, and it doesn't involve switching from that part of my brain that deals with numbers and the rules of hospital accounting to the part of my brain that works creatively. I also get a weird sort of high from having five to ten submissions out at a time, even when they come back as rejections. I can't quite explain it, but I definitely get some kind of rush from it.

Lately I've been feeling pressure (from myself alone) to produce more, as though I am not busy enough already between the TypewriterGirls, Weave, being a mother, working for 8 hours a day, the Pittsburgh Small Press Festival (SPF), and the writing that I do do. Clearly I need to put more pressure on myself.

There is just so much that I want to do, so much that I want to write. I don't have enough time each weekend to get it in and still relax a little bit, and I certainly don't have time during the week.

This is all very frustrating. And let's not even get in to my chapbook angst.

In other new altogether holy crap Gary Snyder is going to be at next year's AWP. I must shamefully admit that I have only recently begun reading Gary Snyder's work, and in part because I saw him in a documentary on Buddhism, but really The Call of the Wild is just as lovely a poem as my dear friend Crystal assured me it would be.

I'm in a panel proposal for the 2010 AWP, so there's a decent likelihood that I will have to be there (oh, the tragedy). Crystal and I are already looking into plane tickets. Hah.

I feel like something is about to happen.

Wow, it's June

And I haven't written here since March. So much for actually being a blogger.

I've never been good with keeping up with a blog. I have these ideas that seem grand when I come up with them and then for one reason or another they don't work out.

But I will persevere! I will try to be more reliable!

The past few months have been very busy for me. I got married. Bit of a time-devourer, that. We had a very fun wedding after party and were fortunate enough to also have a Buddhist ceremony, in addition to the legal ceremony. I cried a lot.

There have also been two TypewriterGirls shows (The TypewriterGirls Try Drag and The TypewriterGirls Try Politics) since March. Both went exceptionally well by my estimation - good crowd, great readers and performers, great music, and amazing friends.

I always love putting on TypewriterGirls shows and working with Crystal. She's hilarious (unlike me) and constantly full of energy for the shows. We've been lucky in that we have found talented performers and poets like the lovely Mary Biddinger. We have also had wonderful audiences with good energy who enjoy themselves and are happy to get involved (after a few swigs of whiskey, sometimes). I feel all fuzzy after a show, and that's probably a good thing. In fact, I think I'm still on the high of Sunday's show, The TypewriterGirls Try Politics, today, and I can't wait for the next one.

Show highlights:
- Sing-along/burlesque to "16 Tons"
- Recitation of the Exquisite Corpse which lead to "all the CEOs in all the world" getting behind every detail of the Employee Free Choice Act.
- Citizen Kane... In space!
- Culminating the evening with a rousing and passionate round of Bohemian Rhapsody at the end of the dance party.



You know you want to come to a TypewriterGirls show.