Deborah Ager's Blog, page 23

Matthew Roth: An Interview With Serena M. Agusto-Cox

Poet Matthew Roth

1. How would you introduce yourself to a crowded room eager to hang on your every word? Are you just a poet, what else should people know about you?

I am perfectly content to claim the mantle of poet, if only because saying so might inspire me to write something. Power of suggestion, etc. I also teach at a great little school in central Pennsylvania, Messiah College. Add to that husband and father, fledgling Mennonite, tender of illegal backyard chickens, bread enthusiast, and now we're well into the archipelago of mundane islands barely worth a visit.

2. Do you see spoken word, performance, or written poetry as more powerful or powerful in different ways and why? Also, do you believe that writing can be an equalizer to help humanity become more tolerant or collaborative? Why or why not?

All these forms can be powerful and legitimate. I don't worry too much about the utility of poems, even though I find them useful and could point to plenty of examples where poems and poets have affected society. I try to write good poems, and I enjoy good poems by others. Fortunately, there will always be as many kinds of poems as poets.

3. Do you have any obsessions that you would like to share?

In the realm of poetry, I've recently become obsessed with understanding the long sentence. Most of the poems that astonish me employ these wondrous, serpentine sentences that suspend, for an almost unbearable length of time, the resolving gesture. In the non-poetry realm, birds falling from the sky for no reason (although I should mention that my book, Bird Silence, provides some tentative answers!). I'm also hopelessly obsessed with Nabokov's novel, Pale Fire. Don't even get me started.

4. Most writers will read inspirational/how-to manuals, take workshops, or belong to writing groups. Did you subscribe to any of these aids and if so which did you find most helpful? Please feel free to name any "writing" books you enjoyed most (i.e. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott).

Workshops were very important to me while I was a student, but my best education took place outside of class. I was lucky to have wonderful peers everywhere I studied. This is the real value of graduate creative writing programs–the community of writers. As for books, my students love Chad Davidson and Greg Fraser's Writing Poetry, and I often find myself inspired by their wisdom and examples.

5. Poetry is often considered elitist or inaccessible by mainstream readers. Do poets have an obligation to dispel that myth and how do you think it could be accomplished?

Labeling readers as mainstream or non-mainstream seems as unhelpful as trying to judge which Americans are more "real." To then try to write for one imaginary group or another seems like a waste of energy. To those poets who want to return to the 19th century, I invite you to read a month's worth of poems from the daily newspapers in 1877. When you're finished gouging out your eyes, give me a call.

6. When writing poetry, prose, essays, and other works do you listen to music, do you have a particular playlist for each genre you work in or does the playlist stay the same? What are the top 5 songs on that playlist? If you don't listen to music while writing, do you have any other routines or habits?

I need a quiet room. I tend to write first drafts longhand, then revise on the computer.

8. How do you stay fit and healthy as a writer?

Sonnets + Hip Hop Abs!

9. Do you have any favorite foods or foods that you find keep you inspired? What are the ways in which you pump yourself up to keep writing and overcome writer's block?

I wish I had some kind of healthy routine to share, but mostly I'm driven by the terror that if I don't write now, I'll never write again.

10. Please describe your writing space and how it would differ from your ideal writing space.

I tend to write in my office, where my books are, but it's far from ideal. I once spent a summer as a fire lookout in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana. Hauling my books up into the tower wasn't a lot of fun, but once I got settled, it was about as great a writing space as one could hope for, except during lightning storms.

11. What current projects are you working on and would you like to share some details with the readers?

I am currently on sabbatical, so I'm hoping to finish the next book.

Thanks to Matthew for answering my questions. Please do check out a sample of his work below:

No Mark

There was a high stone wall

separating our land—the small yard,

half sand, where my father grew

tomatoes—from the royal preserve.

Years ago, I was told, the king himself

hunted there among well-ordered trees,

made camp by the stream that coils

through its heart. There was even—

still it's there, though overgrown—

a small orchard of sweet peaches

and apricots. Now thickets

lie stripped by a tangle of deer,

the high wall my father disappeared

behind one day, overthrown

by slow degrees of frost and thaw.

Many days, I have stepped through

a breach, found myself in that

odd, forbidden state, my own

and not my own. And once,

beneath the government

of a twin row of sycamores,

I found the hoofprints of a horse,

each shallow C filled in

with tarnished bronze. Amazed,

I followed, until the hooves

stopped short in a clearing

by the edge of a small reflecting pool.

A stone in its middle made it look

like a human eye. To one side

a thick-trunked magnolia leaned.

This must have been April,

the water clotted with pink,

fleshy petals. I stood wondering

when all at once the surface cleared

a moment, and I started

at the sudden flare of my face

peering into the pool, or well,

or deep oubliette, where I lay

staring up at the shadowed face,

which hovered like a stone

in the sky's open eye. Somehow

I knew, whoever it was,

he had not come to save me.

–published in Bird Silence.

The AWP House Party

Gregory Luce mentioned I forgot to discuss The Literary House Party that took place Friday night at AWP. His summary is below. He left out the mardi gras beads, the parade with floats, and the horses, but what can you do?

The annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference came to Washington last week. I am well outside of academe and so did not attend any official functions. However, there were many offsite readings and other events open to the public; in addition, "civilians" were welcome at their magnificent and overflowing bookfair on Saturday, the final day of the conference. I went to a very inspiring and enjoyable literary house party in Adams Morgan (not far from my home) on Friday night. I heard many good poems, met in person for the first time a virtual friend and fellow poet, Bernadette Geyer, and made the acquaintance of the editors of Drunken Boat, 32 Poems, and several other fine little mags.

If you missed The Literary House Party, I am sorry for your loss/missing. Drunken Boat, Born, Tuesday: An Art Projects, and Defunct participated. The wine flowed in a tall house in Adams Morgan (DC) not far from the main hotels, and the performers worked their magic on a mesmerized crowd.

I would like to share photos but it's a pain to get photos from my phone to the interwebs as of now, so that will be for another day. I've got poems to write before I sleep, mes amis.

Writing Rejection: It's What's for Dinner

Readers, I'm here today to talk to you about rejection.  Because, you know, I'm sort of an expert on this topic.  I have enough rejections to wallpaper my small apartment.  I have enough rejections to line my cats' litter box for years.  I have enough rejections to design a new paper airplane daily for the foreseeable future.  But that's not what I'm doing with them.  In fact, all the paper rejections are gathered and organized into this shoebox:

Some writers don't understand why I've kept my rejections.  (Even the email ones, which are probably triple the physical copies, are archived in my Gmail account.)  It seems masochistic — who wants to be face to face with their own failure?  But that's not how I see it.  Rejection isn't failure.  It's an opportunity to learn.  Every time I get a rejection — and most of them were, in fact, form rejections, sometimes on a quarter-sheet of paper that many poets consider insulting (it's not, it's just economical) — I gain a little insight about the process of publishing. With each rejection I figure out something that isn't working — and usually it's not even about my writing.  It's about my submissions.

Here's the thing about publishing:  Whether you're querying your first novel, submitting to publishers, or trying to get a piece into a lit mag, it can feel like you're throwing spaghetti at a wall, just hoping something will stick.  And after the first batch or two of rejections, you start to think, hey, being picky isn't working.  I researched the crap out of these magazines, and none of them wanted my work.  My work is genius, I just need to find a home for it, and the only way to do that is to send it everywhere.

Oh, yes, I made this mistake.  I had pages in my notebook where I wrote down every poem submitted and where I had sent it. I had poems out at twenty journals at a time, garnering rejections.  I collected paper for the shoebox and emails for the archives.  I am thankful for the strange quirk that lets this admitted clutter-bug be organized in one or two areas of her life (one is writing, I'll let you know what the other area is if I can ever think of it), or else I would have pissed off a lot of editors, no doubt.  My point, however, is this: Throwing spaghetti at the wall does NOT work.  What works is patience.

Almost a year passed before I published anything.  And I knew the editor of the magazine.  It was their second issue.  And, yes, the magazine was wonderful and the editor was discerning.  This doesn't change the fact that having a human face on my pieces definitely had an effect on my rising to the top of the slushpile.  Or the fact that it took another six months to land another "sale." (I have quotation marks around the word "sale" because the most I've ever made on a poetry sale is $10 a poem, and 95% of the time the payment is in copies of the magazine.  This is a truth, even if my mother is convinced I am being taken advantage of.  No, Mom.  This is industry standard.   Every few months after that, as long as I continued submitting, I published poems.  I've been in about two dozen magazines now.  It feels great.  But, the key was knowing what to submit where.  Or, rather, knowing (and learning) which wall to throw my spaghetti at.

In my spaghetti-throwing heyday I sent my very-non-experimental work to experimental-themed magazines.  I was desperate to get in anywhere.  I submitted to mags like Tin House (now there's a dream for a new kid) and mags that folded after one issue.  I was not thinking from the point of view of editors, with jillions of submissions to pick through, trying to figure out what would look best in their magazines.  I was not reading the magazines critically, and only sending work that fit on those pages.  I was trying to.  I convinced myself that I was a very careful poet who was choosing her poems with great discretion and reverence for the magazines to which she submitted.  I was a liar.

Anyway, back to my Box o' Rejections.  I like my box.  I talk about it a lot with fellow poets, especially when said poets are looking to start submitting their work.  Because this business is like 99% no.  If you want to put your work out there, you're going to hear "no" a lot from agents, publishers, and magazines.  If you get a magical yes and end up with your work in print, you're going to hear more nos.  No from reviewers.  No from readers.  Let the rejections you get now serve as armor — both armor against the No Army, and an armor of knowledge in your submission process.  As someone who spent the beginning of her writing career publishing exclusively poetry, and exclusively in magazines, I was prepared by my Box o' Rejections when I began querying agents with my first novel.  I was prepared for the Nos, and prepared to query not only widely but carefully.  The spaghetti-flinging method, while tempting, is kind of a mess waiting to happen.

So, I guess this post is to say this:

1. Do not fling spaghetti.

2. Get used to hearing no.

3. Let your rejections build you up.

4. The spaghetti thing again.

All Best,

EKA

PS: I'm sorry if my spaghetti metaphor made you hungry.  I'm very susceptible to this as well.  At least I didn't use a Taco Bell metaphor.  Okay?

E. Kristin Anderson grew up in Westbrook, Maine and is a graduate of Connecticut College. She has a fancy diploma that says "B.A. in Classics," which makes her sound smart but has not helped her get any jobs in Ancient Rome. Once upon a time she worked for The New Yorker magazine, but she decided being a grown up just wasn't for her. Currently living in Austin, Texas, Ms. Anderson is active in her local chapter of SCBWI and blogs at ekristinanderson.com as well as the YA-5 while co-editing the popular blog Dear Teen Me. As a poet she has been published worldwide in around two dozen literary journals from the indie-queen Fuselit, to the prestigious Cimarron Review. She is in the process of querying her first young adult novel and keeps herself busy writing and revising other novel projects. She wrote her first trunk book at sixteen. It was about the band Hanson and may or may not still be in a notebook at her parents' house. Look out for Ms. Anderson's work the forthcoming anthology COIN OPERA II, a collection of poems about video games from Sidekick Books.

AWP 2011 Conference Roundup

On Wednesday night, I visited the book fair to set up the 32 Poems table. The aisles were clear–a strange sight. I looked at the wide aisles with relief, remembering a previous AWP when we all squished into tiny aisles to reach the various tables. After setting up, I met a friend for dinner at The Lebanese Taverna, which I am sure all 6,000 attendees must have sampled at some point.

The next morning, John wrote to say he was stuck in Texas due to snow. One inch of snow in Texas is a big deal and evidently shuts down airports. (Yes, a Chicago person laughed at that.)

The Grist Magazine folks from Tennessee were nice to have as tablemates. Sharing a table makes me happy. It saves money, certainly, but I like how it forces us all to talk to people we might not meet otherwise. Our table, by the way, was within 20 feet of poles covered with ripped insulation, leading many people to speculate rats had been at work.

During the one panel I attended, the speakers claimed not to know they were supposed to talk as well as read. (Oh, no, another "reading" panel.) However, they did talk and one guy was able to pull a talk from a previous event out of his pocket. NOTE: If you do not know you are supposed to talk, should you mention that to the audience? I took notes on my mobile using Evernote–noticing that many others still use paper–and wondered if everyone thought I was a texting fool. I took digital notes on my phone in order to experiment with how I liked it, if Evernote trumped paper, etc.

On Thursday night, I was back at The Lebanese Taverna (we had reservations but it did not seem to matter) for dinner with a bunch of people. The host did not seem to take people in order, so one had to keep asking. He said the customers were taking a long time and lingering over coffee, so I asked him if he needed me to rough people up. He smiled, but humor did *not* get me a table. What got me a table was J., who managed to ask at the right time. The host looked confused, asked her if she was me, and then said we could have a table that had recently been cleared.

Meander. Meander. I spent a lot of time meandering and not as much as you might think at the 32 Poems table. I stopped and chatted with Eduardo Corral, caught a book signing with January O'Neil, met Kelli Agodon, walked around with Martha Silano (and bought her book), picked up a copy of Birmingham Poetry Review (with my poem inside), and bought books by various 32 Poems contributors. I also chatted with Melissa Stein (check out her new book Rough Honey), Dan Albergotti, Dan Nester (bought his book How to Be Inappropriate), Randall Man, and many others.

By the way, January O'Neil blogs her AWP "Confessions."

Josh Corey talks book buying at AWP and blames Coffee House Press.

Jeannine Hall Gailey discussed how to survive NOT attending AWP.

Collin Kelley gives good reasons for not attending AWP on his Modern Confessional blog.

Kelli Agodon shares the open letter from Claudia Rankine.

Tin House shares the #AWP11 Twitter feed.

Call for Interviews and Reviews for Poetry Appreciation Month

If you are a small press or independent publisher and would like to talk about your business to readers of the Savvy Verse and Wit blog in a guest post format, please contact Serena Agusto-Cox.

The appreciation month takes place in March, and you can find the details here:  http://savvyverseandwit.com/2011/02/call-for-guest-posts.html

Agusto-Cox is also looking for guest reviews of independently published fiction and poetry.  Reviews should be sent to Agusto-Cox by Feb. 25 for inclusion.

Claudia Rankine Letter

I wanted to share this letter from Claudia Rankine. If you feel passionate about this topic, please consider sharing your thoughts.

*****

Dear friends,

As many of you know I responded to Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change" at AWP. I also solicited from Tony a response to my response. Many informal conversations have been taking place online and elsewhere since my presentation of this dialogue. This request is an attempt to move the conversation away from the he said-she said vibe toward a discussion about the creative imagination, creative writing and race.

If you have time in the next month please consider sharing some thoughts on writing about race (1-5 pages).

Here are a few possible jumping off points:

- If you write about race frequently what issues, difficulties, advantages, and disadvantages do you negotiate?

- How do we invent the language of racial identity–that is, not necessarily constructing the "scene of instruction" about race, but create the linguistic material of racial speech/thought?

- If you have never written consciously about race why have you never felt compelled to do so?

- If you don't consider yourself in any majority how does this contribute to how race enters your work?

- If fear is a component of your reluctance to approach this subject could you examine that in a short essay that would be made public?

- If you don't intend to write about race but consider yourself a reader of work dealing with race what are your expectations for a poem where race matters?

- Do you believe race can be decontextualized, or in other words, can ideas of race be constructed separate from their history?

- Is there a poem you think is particularly successful at inventing the language of racial dentity or at dramatizing the site of race as such? Tell us why.

In short, write what you want. But in the interest of constructing a discussion pertinent to the more important issue of the creative imagination and race, please do not reference Tony or me in your writings. We both served as the catalyst for this discussion but the real work as a community interested in this issue begins with our individual assessments.

If you write back to me by March 11, 2011, one month from today, with "OPEN LETTER" in the subject heading I will post everything on the morning of the 15th of March. Feel free to pass this on to your friends. Please direct your thoughts to openletter@claudiarankine.com.

In peace,

Claudia

openletter@claudiarankine.com

Langston Hughes Missing from DC Restaurant

The Washington Post reports that the stolen cutout of Langston Hughes as a busboy was taken by Thomas Sayers Ellis, who teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

The Washington Post writes:

"I took it," Thomas Sayers Ellis told us Tuesday. The Washington native…said he grabbed the lifesize photo of Hughes as a protest — because he doesn't think the restaurant/performance space pays poets fairly for their public readings.

Should Busboys pay poets more than they do now?

"You would think that an establishment that makes as much money as Busboys would have set in place a reading series with a respectful pay scale for writers," said Ellis. The restaurant gives poets a venue, but also profits from their talent. The literary community, he says, doesn't know if Busboys is the "good guys or the bad guys."

Although the lesser known poets are probably happy to appear on the stage at Busboys, more established poets expect large fees for their appearance. If the writer is bringing in audience (and the audience is spending money), wouldn't it make sense to share a percentage of the revenue with the writers who drew the crowd in the first place?

What is Truth in Poetry?

Deborah Ager (@32poems), host of Twitter's #poetparty on Sunday nights, started a party a few weeks ago with an inquiry on truth in poetry: what is it, and how much truth is necessary in poetry. It's a philosophical question, really, one with no right or wrong answer.

I asserted that if there were 100% truth in a poem, it isn't a poem. A fellow poet agreed and said 100% truth makes a memoir. Another poet made to clear that he completely disagreed with me.

I stand by my assertion, but I also stand by my critic's. You can't have it both ways, you may say.  There's truth in that as well.

"Truth" is a powerful word, a word that can have so many different sides, so many different meanings behind it, and yet, they are all correct. Truth is a poly-sided die from a Dungeons and Dragons set.

What I meant by my statement is that poetic license has to play a part in the poem. Last year I wrote a long poem about three trips to the same city within a seven month period. But those trips also included three different sets of fellow travelers that went along with me. So in order to avoid a choppy and clunky poem, I combined all three trips into one and included only one traveler with me as my road map to writing the poem.

In terms of a "what happened" standpoint, to write the facts down as they occurred would have truly been more like memoir. I had to make the poem work, and because of poetic license at play, the poem was not 100% truthful.

Perhaps my critic saw "truth" as personal truth: emotion, context, feeling, passion, values, morals, every intangible creation that comes more from the mind and soul of the poet; truth is not "what happened."

And to this, I completely agree. I did not sell my poetic soul to the devil to write the poem; everything in there was 100% my personal truth. When I consider "truth" in my poetry, I include personal truth as well as "what really happened." Poetic license is by definition a lie, or if that is too harsh, an untruth, and therefore 100% truth doesn't exist in poetry.

But it isn't just poetic license of the "just the facts, ma'am" kind. Poetic license can and does also include removing oneself from one's personal truth, what matters to the poet, and by doing so, the poet is engaging in a conversation. A poem may take the devil's advocate side of an issue, a side the poet doesn't instinctively agree with, and so again, the poem does not contain 100% truth in it. The flip side of this, of course, is the poet's underlying values are still very present in the writing of a poem, and to this I also agree.

A panelist in a discussion on poetic truth at AWP's 2011 conference said, "Poets use research to disrupt the authoritative eye." And she was right, regardless of topic. And if history is written by the victor, as the saying goes, then historical truth is subjective, even when dealing with factual events. Doesn't the loser as poet view either facts or personal truth in history differently than the victor?

First Poetry Book Contests: The Count

What's your magic number? Go on. Tally it all up. Mine, this year, is 21. As in: 19 contests. 2 open submission periods. Not one more, and not one less. The number could be higher (and for some of my friends, it most definitely is). But, well, for me 21 sounds right. The multiple of 3 and 7, two prime numbers, somehow "do their dance" until they become another number—a nicely odd number whose final digit, were it on its own, is another lovely prime number (and whose first digit, on its own, is the sum of that same prime number-plus-that same prime number).

Do you see what I did there? I discussed what I am doing in a totally arbitrary way. I broke down the number of contest entries—both submitted and yet to be sent—in a way that sounds like a puzzle or a tongue twister but that somehow makes sense to the part of my mind that is ignited by mathematics. This has absolutely nothing to do with poetry, with writing, with the business of what we do, with getting my own little manuscript somehow published and sitting on the shelves of your local bookstore. This has nothing to do with the fact that it's MY (precious?) poetry and MY (beloved?) book and MY (stubborn?) belief in what I do.  As silly as it might seem, I did it anyway. It settles something in my stomach to break down the numbers in this way, and it makes me forget about the voice inside me that says, "Your future! Your future! This is all about you, about fulfilling this dream you have. It's about sharing what you have to say! This is about a book!!!" It makes me forget about an anxiety that can rip apart my ability to focus on all of the other areas of my life and that is something that so many of my friends and colleagues are also enduring.

When I break the business of contests down, it's not about my book. It's about numbers. It's about math. It's about something that is far less personal to me than every word, image, metaphor, line break, and ounce of hope, searching, passion, and desire that fills every poem on every page of my book. It's about giving myself distance and making it easier for me not to obsess so much over what contests I have already sent to, how much money I have already spent, what decisions have been made and what responses I have already received.

And let me tell you something. It's necessary. Finding a way to gain distance from a process you're so incredibly immersed into matters. What I wish to say is not that you, who also happen to be trying to get YOUR book published, break down your numbers like I am, but that you find a way to get distance from your manuscipt. And from the uncertainty, time, and "lady in waiting" nature of book contests. We've already thought about the intention of the book, about staying in the present and believing in what it is that your manuscript does and says, about just jumping off the cliff and even sending the manuscript out. But I also want to suggest that giving oneself distance—finding ways to depersonalize the experience of submitting the manuscript (and emptying the bank account)—speaks to the ways that we as writers can "take care of ourselves" in the process. We're not saints, martyrs, or mercenaries whose sole existence is for the manuscript we hope to publish. We have school, and jobs, and classrooms to teach, journals to edit, gym classes to go to, first dates to go on, winter boots to buy, roofs to fix, children to raise, movies to watch. In short, we have lives to live that exist beyond our manuscripts and the hopes we have poured, willingly, into their fate.

Here's What Happened to Me

When fall semester ended, I shoved myself off the grid. I slept, I went to the gym, I traveled, and I took the time to take a deep breath and just say "no" to doing any and all work that seemed to tilt its head in my direction. In the middle of these precious few weeks "off," I knew that while there were a bunch of book contests with upcoming deadlines, I didn't have a deadline until February 15 (read as: I did not choose to have a deadline until February 15). I chose distance from submitting to contests with upcoming deadlines—even though they were with reputable presses whose books are generally gorgeous, even though I liked the work of recent winners. I decided that the 21 places I was sending my work to for the 2010-2011 submission year somehow felt right to me, had already been budgeted, and were all at presses that might work quite nicely for me. Adding more contests and open reading periods would make me obsess more over press websites, or would make me dive—all-consumingly—into the aesthetic inclinations of judges, such as research of their recent contest activities would reveal, or would make me wonder, obsess, and worry even more over my manuscript and what it takes to print and send it than I had already bargained for.  I had already chosen my sweet number, 21, and anything added would mess up a sense of balance and distance that I have come to value. So I turned my count—my magic number—into my own little mathematics game. And it made me smile. And it made it that much easier for me to print out my manuscript and prepare envelopes to the two deadlines I have this month.

(And hey, listen: that's not such a good way for me to honor everything that I have thought about with my book's intentions and sticking with the publishers I think will be awesome matches for what I have to say, and jumping into that extra worry is definitely not a good way to take care of myself as a writer seeking publication.)

What's your count? Did you also say "no" and shrug your shoulders at some contest opportunities and say "dude, ok, enough is enough"? What will you do to gain some necessary distance from your manuscript and the crazy contest world?

A complete list of contest deadlines can always be found on the Poets & Writers website. That said, book contest deadlines for this month include:

Kundiman Poetry Prize/Alice James Books, judged by the Kundiman board and AJB. February 11. ($25)
First Book Prize/Cleveland State Poetry Center, judged by Matthea Harvey, February 15. ($25)
National Poetry Series/Coffee House, Fence, HarperCollins, Penguin, U Georgia Press, judge not disclosed, February 15. ($30)
Kathryn A. Morton Prize/Sarabande Books, judged by Marie Howe, February 15 ($25)
AWP Award Series Donald Hall Poetry Prize/Pittsburgh Press, judged by Dorriane Laux, February 28. ($15 AWP members, $30 everyone else)
American Poetry Journal Book Prize/Dream Horse Press, judged by JP Dancing Bear, Feb. 28 ($25)
Modern Poetry Series/Fence Books, judge not disclosed, February 28 ($25)
Sawtooth Poetry Prize/Ahsahta Press, judged by Paul Hoover, March 1 ($25)
Washington Prize/Word Works Press, judge not disclosed, March 1 ($25)

Charlie Jensen on DC

Charlie Jensen wrote a blog post about how to survive in Washington, DC during the AWP Conference. A few of his suggestions and comments are so 100% true that I find them hilarious.

Weather

Our weather is unpredictable, but one thing you can be sure of is that it will be unbearable. Be sure to pack the following:

Sweaters

Umbrellas (2–1 will fail due to high winds and/or be stolen)

A swimming suit or board shorts

A parka

A light cardigan/tank top set

A warm hat

Sunscreen

Crocs (just kidding–are you even reading this?)

Socializing with the locals

You can identify most DC residents easily, as they begin conversations this way:

"Hello! I am [DC Resident's name]."

"Hi, nice to meet you."

"Yes, it is. What do you do?"

Recommendation: do not reveal you work in the arts, are an artist, enjoy art, or advocate for arts funding. Instead, say, "I am a lobbyist." This will make most people vanish into thin air.

Be sure to visit Charlie's blog.