year ends (I say the same things, but for real, this time)
Dear You—
A lot has happened since I last wrote because I’m terrible at keeping up with this. I keep thinking I’ll use these tiny letters as a way to publish bits from my works-in-progress or draw attention back to older stuff, but between actually working on my works-in-progress &, uh, living... It’s the same reason I’m a terrible pen pal. I start writing a letter, get busy & abandon it, & then feel like I need to keep adding to it as more and more happens, so I never get around to actually sending it out.
So in the interest of getting this out before the end of the year—end of the decade, yikes—this is once again a list of lists, lists of what I’ve published & what’s forthcoming, what I’m working on, what I’ve been reading, what I want.
My biggest news in recent months is that Bottlecap Press is publishing my book-length poem, The Loneliest Show On Earth, in February 2020. February 18th, to be exact. I’ll be sure to spam you with links to the order page as soon as it goes up. In the meantime, if you’d like a taste of it, you can read an excerpt at Pussy Magic or hear me reading an excerpt on the November edition of Performance Anxiety.
My second-biggest news is that my poem other words for mainline won the 2019 Hal Prize for poetry, & another of my poems, Great Blue, got an honorable mention. They can both be read here.
Oh yeah, & I finally released my nonfiction collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Punk, as an ebook. It can be downloaded here—pay-what-you-want, starting at $0. You can listen to the companion playlist here, because of course I made a companion playlist. (&, if you'd like to read an excerpt, may I suggest The Future Is Unwritten, which is the final essay in the book & yesterday was, after all, the 17th anniversary of Joe Strummer's death.)
I released issue #25 of my zine, Reckless Chants. Speaking of zines—my poem Love Letter with Trains and Brautigan appears in Fluke #17, & my poem fractured fairy tales appears in Radical: A Lit Zine #1.
Other poetry publications from the past nine months include: in the summer / it’s a pity in Memoir Mixtapes vol. 10, three poems in FIVE:2:ONE #thesideshow (one of which—in the city / baby sometimes—is a sort of sequel to in the summer & oh yeah I made a short film to go along with those poems, so give it a watch if you have the chance), three poems in the special Haunting issue of Neon Mariposa, Deep Red Bells in this year’s Hallow’s Eve issue of Pussy Magic, Final Girl’s Love Song at Okay Donkey, Hodag in Petrichor, four poems in Moonchild Magazine, two poems in Vamp Cat Magazine, & Lilac Palace, 1987 in Kissing Dynamite.
I've published a few pieces of nonfiction. I'm particularly proud of Survive, published at Pussy Magic (it also appears in WWTAWWTAP), Parental Personality Crisis, published at Tiny Essays, & If It Weren't for Daphne Gottlieb, published at Brain Mill Press. I also had a lot of fun writing my TPQ5 list & Poetry's Dead (Undead Undead Undead) (a tiny essay about poetry, Halloween, & one of my WiPs) for The Poetry Question.
I only published one piece of fiction this year—Tarantella della Petrosinella, a dark retelling of Petrosinella (the Italian version of Rapunzel)—but it was published at Corvid Queen, an absolute dream mag, & they nominated it for Best of the Net!
As far as stuff I published prior to March, I'm still really proud of our faithful, reckless hearts (poetry) & Venus in Furs, Nightclubbing (nonfiction).
In Bone & Ink Press news: after significant delays, the copies of Shut Down Strangers & Hot Rod Angels: an anthology inspired by the music of Bruce Springsteen, are finally in my hands. I am so, so proud of this book, & still absolutely in love with all the pieces published in it. You can order the digital version or the paperback in the Etsy shop. Pretty much every title on the 2019-2020 roster got pushed back a month due to the issues with Shut Down Strangers, but I'm slowly getting caught back up, and copies of Alex DiFrancesco's fantastic chapbook Bird is the Word: The Iggy and Biggy Cycle should be arriving on my doorstep tomorrow. You can find more information here (then check back next week & it should be up on Etsy.)
Speaking of Etsy—thru December 31, you can get 15% off any order of $5 or more when you use the coupon code ENDOFYEAR2019 at checkout. & shipping is always free within the US on any order of $35 or more.
& speaking of Bone & Ink Press & Etsy—I still have a handful of copies left of my chapbooks, forget the fuck away from me & The Girl With the Most Cake, as well as digital editions. If you haven't purchased them yet, maybe read the reviews (linked above), then buy them on Etsy?
& I had the absolute honor & joy of performing in From Natchez to Kenosha: A Tribute to Tom Waits (held two days before Tom Waits' 70th birthday). A friend of mine was kind enough to capture some video of my performances, so if you'd like to you can watch: Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis, Nighthawk Postcards (from 18th Street)/Tango Til They're Sore, & Everything You Can Think.
Here's some stuff I've been reading online:
This Assembly (K Weber)
i would like to write a poem about boyhood... (Danielle Rose)
The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords (Alex Pappademas)
London Calling at 40 (Chris Harvey)
On "Art Heroes" and Letting Your Idols Be Human (Alex DiFrancesco)
Frankenstein's Postpartum Depression (Micaela Walley)
Doe, A Deer, A Female Reindeer: The Spirit of Mother Christmas
& offline:
Rebel Hearts & Restless Ghosts (William James)
Year of the Monkey (Patti Smith)
The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
The Mirrormaker (Brian Laidlaw)
Four-Legged Girl (Diane Seuss)
The Crying Book (Heather Christle)
Ghosts of You (Cathy Ulrich)
Finally, 'tis the season—both for giving & for naked capitalist greed—so on that note...
If you wanna just give me something nice, I have an Amazon wishlist. (If you'd prefer not to order from Amazon, I totally get it, so obviously if you wanna send me any of this stuff via a different source, that's cool, too.)
Or you could donate some $$ to me for my tattoo fund (I'm planning a tattoo in celebration of the publication of The Loneliest Show On Earth).
If you'd like to help out both me & Bone & Ink Press, you can order from the Etsy shop (& don't forget to look above for the discount code if you're ordering by Dec. 31!) or from Payhip.
Or you could donate via the press' Ko-fi. Donations to the press will be used for things like postage, website fees, & getting the press featured at The Poetry Question.
And if you'd like to help out me &/or the press but don't have any $$ to spare (which I totally get), there's an easy way to do it: review a title on Goodreads. As of right now, all of my existing titles & all of Bone & Ink's existing titles are on Goodreads.
That's it for this epic list of lists. It's two days past the solstice, it's the second night of Hanukkah, & in two days it's Christmas, & then the New Year. Best wishes to you & yours, & thanks for reading.
Love, love, & love,
Jessie Lynn McMains