poetry friday: residue: inaugural night

On inauguration day our mid-morning at the residency was partially cleared so we could watch the event.  Imagine around fifty children’s authors in a room, sitting on 70’s furniture and surrounded by shelves of geopolitical business books, watching a TV screen slightly larger than a laptop.  Got that image?  Good, now erase it.
I was talking [...]

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how to fix the ALA

Every time there is an award ceremony someone is always upset their favorite book/movie/president didn’t win and then whines about how it’s unfair, how the real winner was robbed, or how, clearly, the judges wouldn’t know a winner if it bit them in the ass.
This isn’t gonna be like that.
The ALA 2009 Youth Media Awards [...]

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a hothouse is not a home

Have a good semester.
Will I see you at breakfast?
When does your shuttle come?
I already miss you…
For the stragglers among us — and I am among the stragglers simply because I got a short nap in after dinner — the pull to call it a night and do our last minute packing is in defiance of [...]

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rock, paper, addendum (NSFK)

It’s a totally different city, two totally different dudes, and yet it appears that these conversations keep popping up everywhere as if part of the collective unconsciousness.  I was downtown in Vermont’s capitol city getting some quarters and Nutella (can’t properly do laundry in a dorm without both) and as I was passing I caught [...]

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poetry friday: on the rez

Well, here we are nearing the midway point through the residency and oddly I find myself jotting down little poem-like things when my mind wanders.  In the event there are grads or faculty who are wondering: No, my mind is not wandering during your lectures.  Just before or just after, perhaps, or in those moments [...]

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speed dating

The process of picking an advisor begins with what we jokingly call sped dating.  Actually, we don’t pick an advisor so much as we limit the possibilities from among the many.  And I guess it technically begins long before the speed dating, as we spend the early days on the rez in a casual frenzy [...]

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first workshop

There’s a good chunk of the residency devoted to Workshop, that place were groups of us hang out and get work critiqued for a good hour or so.  The groups are artificially random – that is, there are a balance of genres and people at various stages of the program with little else to connect [...]

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go greyhound, with philip seymour hoffman!

First, if you think this about a celebrity sighting, well, no.  It isn’t.  If through some Google search you stumbled onto this thinking there’s some crazy story about me and an encounter with a great character actor, well, thank you for bumping up my hits.
Last summer when I took the bus to my residency it [...]

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mermaid rock, paper, scissors (NSFK)

The travel day starts on the T, where some college Joe’s are talking on the way into downtown.  For the sake of not wanting to embarrass the institution they belonged to I will not identify it here.  Suffice to say, they are students from a school in Boston.
Joe Paper: So, listen.  Like, which would you… [...]

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clearing decks, catching up, freaking out

Hours from now I’ll be on a bus headed north for Montpelier.  From all over the world — literally — a small band of like-minded folks will be descending on the smallest state capital in the United States.  We’ll be there to reconnect, recharge, and retreat.  We’ll also be there to stay up way too [...]

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non-poetry friday

Prepping for school residency really messes with my rhythms.  I’m too distracted, too torn by things to do, mixed-up with a combination of anxiety and excitement.  This meeting-twice-a-year thing has all the feel of summer camp, where you come from all over to see your camp friends and become inseparable until it’s time to go [...]

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