Break-ups and Make-ups

Saturday I felt like poetry was breaking up with me. I was pretty sure that I just wanted to get a job on an oil rig, or in a pipe yard, or something that I could just do and not care about. I feel like I sold my soul to poetry in grad school and on Saturday I felt like poetry was giving me my soul back, which is incredibly sad, but sounds incredibly nice.

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A while ago I talked about how I was working on a proposal for an ecopoetics conference. My paper didn't get accepted. On Saturday I got a form rejection. Which sucks for all the reasons that form rejections suck.

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Red Lightbulbs had a reading for their last issue. I didn't get accepted. I really wanted to be in their last issue because I was in their first. Last Wednesday, Russ basically apologized for not taking the poem. It made me feel good, but it's still a bummer you know?

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Last year for Thanksgiving I was in Portland and my sister came to town. It wasn't sunny a single day. It was a bummer, but we went out a bunch. We went to North Portland for Transgiving, which was amazing.

me+my sister (I don't feel like I'm a pretty girl)

This year I'm going to be in Chicago. I don't think there will be drag involved.

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On the way to Chicago, I'm reading in Omaha. On Saturday I was thinking of cancelling (you know, so I could start my oilfield career). I changed my mind Saturday night. On Saturday night I hung out with some of my favorite people. We ate delicious food. We talked about poetry. We talked about writing. We drank delicious beer. We chat rouletted.

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I hung out at Lily Hoang's house with Richard Greenfield and Evan Lavender-Smith and Carmen Giménez-Smith and Krystal Languell and Dylan Retzinger. My first thoughts when seeing Lily's house was that it was "cool". I'd been there before when the house was another faculty members house and it wasn't cool, but classy. Lily made an amazing stir fry at midnight while chat roulette was happening. Before that Evan and Richard nearly fought each other over a Rae Armantrout poem (Richard was right, FYI). I had two really great conversations with Evan about writing. We talked about Avatar and about why anyone does anything at all, especially write, and we talked about what I should read next and what he's excited about now. Later Lily would mention her relationship in passing and I wanted to say something about how Las Cruces is a great place to get over a relationship; there's nothing to do but write and stare at the sky. I didn't say anything though.

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I normally wouldn't name all the names of the people I hung out with. This is to say thanks. I almost quit writing Saturday.