a writer is essentially a spy
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a writer is essentially a spy
Dear love, I am that girl.
Dear You,
I ate a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich for lunch today, and thought of Harriet the Spy. And then I thought of Anne Sexton’s “The Black Art”: A writer is essentially a spy. / Dear love, I am that girl.
The biggest news since I last wrote is that my poem “Santa Muerte, I ask you to remember…” was an Editor’s Choice in the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. It will be published in the Spring 2024 issue of the Paterson Literary Review, and I plan on attending the awards ceremony in Paterson in February 2024. I can’t even fully express why receiving any kind of recognition in this particular contest means so much to me. But if you know me or my writing at all, you know that the Beats in general and Ginsberg (along with Kerouac and Di Prima) in particular, have been some of my biggest inspirations for the past, oh, 26 years or so.
In other poetry news:
I’m in the first volume of Paper::Knives Paper::Cuts video lit zine, performing some of my poems. Nicholas Michael Ravnikar of Paper::Knives also conducted this interview with me, wherein we talk about a range of topics, from writing process and time management as a parent to the poetics of nonbinary reference and musical influences.
I have two poems forthcoming in Buffalo… Journal (later this month, I think). Sometime later this year (or next, depending), an excerpt from one of my poems will be appearing as part of a mural on a wall of the old Horlick Malted Milk factory here in Racine. At the end of last year, I finally sold out of copies of Wisconsin Death Trip, but people are still interested, so I’m working on getting it into print again—I’m hoping to have that done sometime this month, too.
Oh, and I’m gonna be one of the featured performers at a Pride Month poetry event on June 30th, in Milwaukee. So if you’re gonna be in the area, come on out!
But really, I’ve been mostly writing fiction (as well as some memoir-fiction hybrid stuff) lately. I’ve had all these stories I started then abandoned, or made notes about but never wrote, for years now, and I recently decided I needed to get them down before they were lost to me forever. So I’m doing 1000 Words of Summer (the only other time I’ve attempted it was 2019), and it’s going swimmingly so far. I finished a (very messy) first draft of one story, made significant headway on another which I first started two years ago and have been thinking about ever since (and more stuff just keeps coming up with that one—I’m a little afraid it may turn out to be a novella), and started writing a third. And, god, I’d forgotten how fun and freeing fiction can be. It’s fun to invent characters and their lives; fun to research things which have nothing to do with my own life. And it’s freeing in that, even if I am writing fiction-memoir hybrid stuff, if I call it fiction I can write whatever I want! I can straight-out write about someone I really know, or something that happened to me, but if I fudge a few details and call it fiction? No one can get mad! I don’t need to worry about who reads it! Or, I can take the seed of an idea from something that really happened, but shape it into a more interesting story than it would be if I just gave you the “facts.” And if I call it fiction, no one’s gonna say: “Hey, that didn’t really happen that way.”
Don’t worry, though—I’m not giving up on poetry. I’m working on editing a big batch of poems I wrote during NaPoWriMo this year, and I’m also working on a book-length sonnet sequence (a la Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Fatal Interview), tentatively titled Untrue Aftermath.
Other than that, life is mostly dayjob stuff, and parenting stuff, and trying to get Bone & Ink Press back up and running. (I’m hoping to have the New Wave anthology done and in print next month. And I finally updated the website. It’s still a work in progress, but anything is a step in the right direction!) Plus some reading and gardening and cooking and yoga. (I write about ye olde wild days a lot, but I am truly quite a boring person now, haha.)
I’ve been digging Kevin Spaghetti’s photography and this Teen Vogue article about the history of Anti-Racist Action.
I’m slowly working my way through The Wayward Writer, by Ariel Gore, which is part of what spurred me to start writing fiction again. I’ve also been reading a lot of great fiction, including: Shy by Max Porter, Especially Now by Jonas Cannon, After Sappho by Selby Wynne Schwartz, Flash Fiction America, Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary, and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. Oh, and I’m rereading Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country and Other Stories by Chavisa Woods, and I still love it just as much as I did when I first read it, six years ago.
That’s all, for now.
xoxo,
JLM