Still Noticing, Collecting (Detour 13)

We spent the third weekend in January at the coast, an extended family tradition--long walks, seafood, puzzles, wine. Walks remembered and compared; stones retrieved from tide pools, examined, mulled, returned-- dropped gently, perhaps, or absentmindedly; or flung full-armed into the further surf, that pitcher's arc none of us ever truly mastered. Remembered others' beach traditions (blue glass planted for future harvest, after it might be polished by a winter's waves) and thought about collecting, noticing-- why we bother, what it means.

From Detours (Burnside Review Press):


13

If you throw blue glass into a field, it disappears like a stone in water.
Waiting, if the edges are sharp, for the unsuspecting foot. If it's beach
glass, already closer to a pebble than to the bottle scrap it was, it
settles unnoticed between roots, slipped by a mower blade, perhaps,
months later, or left alone, a single rock that isn't, where you think
it's not. But if you hold it to your eye, you can't see through--it's not
a lens, only a piece of old glass someone picked up, on an island in
Maine, say, on vacation, or inadvertently with the treads of a shoe, or
somewhere in between: seen inadvertently, then saved.

I'll be reading from Detours at the third annual Wine and Word Celebration at Winter's Hill Vineyard on February 16.  The tasting room is open 11-5; we'll have readings and word tastings on the hour, starting at noon. Also participating are Karen McPherson, Micaiah Evans, Cole Danehower, Eric Lindstrom, Jim Gullo, and Pedro García-Caro. Books, wine, and good company!

Detours (and Signs)

Some signs are more directive than others

Ordinarily, I grumble as much as the next person at the prospect of road work and its concomitant delays. But not lately: in preparation for the release of my chapbook, Detours, by Burnside Review Press, I've been collecting detour signs. Pictures of signs--I haven't stolen any yet. I pick out those orange signs in the distance and think not, oh, dread but oh, goody. My family laughs at me, but they help me look; strangers ask questions and I tell them, "Working on a little art project," that little meant to keep my activities just within the bounds of normal. I've gathered quite a collection, and snapped more than a few blurry smears out of moving vehicles.

Detours began as a detour from what I was supposed to be writing: my dissertation. More than a temporary variant on a routine route, it was a return of sorts--I started out writing poems and stories, not literary criticism. It's a side route I've maintained, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting, as I've continued to write scholarly prose (I did finish that dissertation).

One way--only?

I think of Detours as a kind of journey. Fragmented, interrupted, but circling back on itself from time to time, the fragments interconnected. I'm interested in collecting, in splashed images and unexpected lights, in words that sound different in different places, and places that look different in different words. Roads taken and not taken, by chance or by design. 

Detours can be ordered from Burnside Review Press.

Rain or shine

So, what is a chapbook?

My brother just asked. And before I fired off something snappy, I checked the hefty  Random House Dictionary of the English Language that I keep on the dictionary stand in my study. According to which, a chapbook is:

1. a small book or pamphlet of popular tales, ballads, etc., formerly hawked about by chapmen. 2. a small book or pamphlet, often of poetry.

A chapman, if you're wondering, is a  peddler.

Not too long ago (okay, probably longer than I think--I'm always losing track of this kind of thing) Poets and Writers ran a feature or two on DIY chapbooks of varying sorts. I was tempted, and I kept the magazine issues on the bottom shelf of that dictionary stand, but I haven't made one yet.

I might, though. In grade school, we had a Young Authors Fair when we all made books. Each kid wrote her stories or poems, illustrated as necessary, and then we made the covers, sewing the pages together (probably stapling, sometimes) and folding fabric or red-flocked wallpaper out of one of those heavy sample books over the cardboard. It was the best. I loved the whole event. All our books would be laid out on tables in the gym, and our parents would file through to ooh and aah. It felt totally real--we had made real books.

I kept making books long after grade school, though I haven't done much for a while. Still, I've been thinking about a bookbinding class. Just as art supplies lure me with their ranked rainbows in open boxes--just take one new colored pencil, or maybe two; just like candy--the bookbinding supplies on the next shelf sing out, You, too, could do this. Use your words this way.

I never developed much patience or skill with fabric crafts or wood. I couldn't build a dictionary stand like the one my grandfather made. But I do like paper. I like the juxtaposition of the handcrafted and the high-tech. Even as I type this on my snazzy laptop, I'm thinking about the gorgeous paper scraps I've been hoarding all these years, waiting for a project. Perhaps we can have both, at least for a while--the e-book and the pamphlet of handmade paper sewn with spider silk.

There won't be spider silk, but my chapbook, Detours, I'm happy to say, will soon be available from Burnside Review. More on that to follow--detour ahead!

Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest

The official notice is up on the Burnside Review website, so I can spread the word far and wide myself: my sequence of linked prose poems/flash fictions, "Detours," was chosen by Blake Butler as winner of the 2011 Burnside Review Fiction Chapbook Contest. I've been detouring with these words for a good while; winning the contest is immensely gratifying. I'm grateful to the literary journals that published portions of the manuscript in the past (Southern Poetry Review, Permafrost), and to friends who listened to or read all or part. And I'm looking forward to thinking about cover art, and planning a reading and release party for later in the year--with, I hope, some good wine and lots of friends. Cheers!