February Paper Boat
Somehow, we are nearing the end of February, which like last month seems to speed and creep in equal measure. To quote T. Swift:
“ All my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February.”
But things are happening amidst a world in utter chaos and absurdity, a place where I and I imagine other creatives are holding on white-knuckled to artmaking and routines and fighting the urge to run away into the woods forever. I saw someone quoted the other day that it was important to go on making art and devoting time to creativity, that besides the things like protesting, making calls, writing letters, could be one of the most important things you do. Also a documentation for prosperity.
It’s perhaps easier to fall into imagined worlds than chart a course through the real one. And yet, sometimes you can do both. We’ve been watching Westworld, the latter seasons which I had not yet seen, which delves into AI and the ramifications on society. Last night, we saw Good Luck, have Fun, Don’t Die, which painted a similarly grim picture from the future about the dangers of its pervasiveness. These are things I am mulling over, along with other pieces of art and media we’ve seen recently that deal with hive minds and consciousness like Pluribus and The Antiquities we caught on stage last spring.
In creative things, I find myself actually working more in a 19th aesthetic vein, no doubt spurred by similar amusements like the new adaptations of Dracula and Wuthering Heights. If you follow me on socials, I’ve been making daily collages for FEBRULLAGE this month, which have a similar Victorian feel. So I write to you at the crux of old aesthetics and new technology, which is a strange, but fruitful, place to be.
Until March,
Kristy
NEWS & NOTES
NEW PUBLICATIONS:
Some new poems from my AMERICAN CYCLORAMA series recently made their debut in a new issue of Bending Genres. Its the second set from this newest series currently out in submissions, so you may be seeing more if they are picked up by other venues (you can see the first set in Dread Literary Review published a couple months back.)
COVER REVEAL:
My next collection of poems will be coming in late summer (likely August)—which is romp through the horrors of marriage. Well, not my marriage (we are still in the honeymoon stage…lol..) but the book features things like NOLA vampires, Bluebeards wife, Victorian governesses, and more…I will once again be charting the trials and tribulations of self publishing as we get closer on the blog, so keep an eye out for that.
CURRENT PROJECTS:
Lately I have been writing in the real of other genres than poems—both drama scripts and the very, very early draft of a collab novel that I and my husband, have started working on. (While he has written scripts for his old job, and I have written more prosey things, the plays are new for me and the novel new for him, so its interesting to see the variations between genre expectations in terms of narrative and scope. I’ve completed initial drafts for two plays—one, Graveyards of Chicago based loosely on my archer avenue poems all those years ago and an adaptation of Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is actually going pretty well.
I did dip my toe back into more poetic pursuits and completed the collage/poem series of Bluebeard poems, which will be coming as an e-zine project soon (as well as a print edition made especially for Patreon subscribers. You can get a little taste below.
WORK-IN-PROGRESS
from THE ABBATOIR LETTERS
In the end, I shall wear my death like a wedding gown. Like a drowning doe in the cistern. A fist in my back. The wives before me hung like chandeliers, their ribs just another architecture of rust and time. You said anywhere but here & I thought of Eve, of apples, how hunger is just another name for the same desire. The blood wouldn’t wash off. Wouldn’t forgive. I scrubbed until my hands until I could see right through them. Could feel out the tiny bird bones that littered your beard and tasted like a grave. Everything was so white, the red was alarming. Seeping from my ears and between my legs until it was everywhere. Copper running in veins along the walls.
ON THE BLOG
Some process notes on literary adaptations, love, and monsters, and writing about Bluebeard’s Wife.