Jamie Iredell's Blog, page 26

Stuf

I spelled that with one f 'cause I think--but I didn't check--that's the way that S.E. Hinton spelled "tuf" in The Outsiders. I'm probably wrong, but whatever.

I finally slept for ten hours last night. It was the shit. My wife said that I was talking about sleeping like I was talking about sex. I had to admit that it was probably better than sex, simply because sex only lasts for four hours for me (yes, ladies, that's right; no that's totally bullshit). It wasn't exactly the same as sex, but it w

WIMTN

The Greying Ghost chap, When I Moved to Nevada, is selling fast, and I hear it will sell out soon. Get yoself a copy while there's gettin. J.A. Tyler said that it's "akin to gritting your teeth and begging yourself to stop". Yes.

I have not been sleeping. I don't know if this is a writerly contagion of some kind, because it seems like a lot of writers whom I know cannot sleep, and we often cannot sleep around the same times.

I slept a total of ten hours last week. So far this week: 7. I'm doing

New Book from C&R Press

Allison Funk's

The Tumbling Box is now available from C&R Press. While laying out and designing this book I of course got to read it. I really enjoyed the series of ekphrastic poems drawn from paintings by Dürer. Here's a sample:

Virgin and Child with a Monkey

After an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (about 1498)

Where has the monkey come from?
The last thing she'd imagine
Among the irises, the lilies of the valley
That fill a German garden.
But she welcomes

I am reading Proust again

Last time I did this, it spawned a surge of creativity. Something about Proust makes me want to write. I'm into volume 2 of Remembrance of Things Past now, Within a Budding Grove.

Writing Exercises

I've been really busy this summer, and I haven't written much here. But, I've been wanting to talk about some of the classes I'm teaching, and the exercises I've been using to get these "kids" to write. Some of them are far from kids, but you know: it's hard not to think of even the seventy-year-old woman who's trying to learn how to write as one of my "kids".

I've been teaching two classes: a Regents Preparatory Course, and a Fiction Workshop. In Georgia, college students--if they want to gradu

The Chapbook Review

has posted its monthly issue, and includes reviews of chapbooks by Tina May Hall, Norman Fischer, Sarith Peou, Mary Ruefle, Geoffrey Forsyth, Leonard Schwartz, Michael Kriesel, Thomas Cooper, and a multi-writer piece that contains stuff by friends Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Brooklyn Copeland, and Adam Fieled (not actually a friend I personally know, but I know his writing).

John Madera is doing a fantastic job with this rag focussed solely on the chap. It would be lame of me not to mention that <>Matt</>