Is it Mercury?

I heard somewhere that Mercury was retrograde; maybe that's the reason for all the idiots on the road lately--have been in a couple of really close calls with drivers who suddenly veered into my lane or glanced up from their cell phone chatter just in time to NOT rear-end me. C'mon, people. Pay attention out there. If I could teleport to Williamsport (oh, now I feel pressured to keep rhyming) I'd do it, but meanwhile it's back on the road where usually my main worry is stray deer.

Well, I shopped around a bit online and then went out tonight & blew a gaping hole in the 7KP budget, an act I hope I don't regret. We needed a printer, a good, dependable, total-access laser printer. So now we have one. It's still in the box: a Canon something-or-other. I'll clear space for it this weekend. And yes, we'll gladly accept donations (of any size) to help replenish the budget. Buy a chapbook! Buy two! Support our independent micropress!

We're still tinkering with the cover, but Erin Bertram's Inland Sea is on schedule to come out this month. Can hardly wait: wonderful poems.

Ugh, midnight. I'm a pumpkin. Night night, y'all.

Back to the blog

I'm still here: juggling teaching, grading, commuting, and the myriad tasks that come with the press. I need to head off to my next class in six minutes. Just ate a sandwich at my desk from the little coffee stand downstairs--I was going to make a sandwich but the bread had gone bad, something I didn't notice until after taking a bite, ewww. I need to head off to class in four minutes. Last night I tried to preserve some Japanese maple leaves by pressing them between waxed paper layers with a warm iron; I'm not sure it worked because the edges are curling up; I may try again tonight. It's a long winter to go without leaves. Three minutes till class time. We (the press) lost a significant benefactor today; I'm trying to roll with it but I'm not sure yet what the impact will be. Two minutes: time to gather my papers and notes. R just texted me that he found a recipe for kim chee chicken: I'm game. And it's showtime, and I'm off--

Cabbage

You planted cabbages to please me,
I know.
And there the last three or four of them clung
like pock-marked green moons in orbit
across the muddy sky of the garden slope.

We had to get out the hatchet
to chop the woody stem off the one I wanted.
And then I pulled off leaf after leaf,
each rubbery jacket bull's-eyed
like cigarette burns on an unfortunate table,
where slugs had tried to burrow in.

Before I brought it inside for a good scrub
I hacked off
half-a dozen leaves with my pocket knife
and flung them onto the compost heap,
flicking slugs off,
lacking the zeal even to deprive
them of their disgusting lives.
Autumn is here, and where
is the gardener's thoroughness
that would have been mine in March or May?

The essence of cabbage
as I chopped through its crunchy thickness
on the kitchen counter
was what the word October
smells like.
That pure white-and-greenness
that filled my head
with what grows and keeps on growing
was what I had needed all this
short and getting-shorter day.

:: Richard Tillinghast, The New Life

New chap covers

Last night I picked up the covers for Christina Pacosz's chapbook, Notes from the Red Zone. I got one copy assembled, just enough to cross the finish line on time (the official publication date is September 1st). More news soon on the 7KP blog--I'm still at the office right now--but here's a peek at the cover:[cover image: "Biblis" by Tim Haini. Used by permission. See more of the artist's work at http://eisenkalk.de]

Follow the poop

The Milkweed Experiment is a success: I noticed something had been eating the leaves and took a closer look. Caterpillar poop!

Two tears ago I managed to grow one milkweed plant from a handful of seeds. It only grew a few inches tall before winter, but came back like Jack's Beanstalk last year: crazy robust growth but no flowers. And no monarchs.


By this spring, the milkweed had spread, sending up eight or nine shoots! I had to stake them (they're planted right at the corner of a raised bed where the neighbor's downspout overflows constantly, and in heavy rain anything growing there can get shredded) but they thrived, blooming heavily and sending out a half-dozen warty outer-spacey seed pods:

Today, I took a good close look and found two caterpillars munching away: one smallish (pictured below) and another about as big as my index finger (the big caterpillar had tucked inside a curled leaf by the time I had come back with my camera, so no pic yet). We're going to keep a close watch on these guys--hopefully will get pics of a chrysalis soon.

CFS: Tattoo Anthology!

Click here to read the full article in the Los Angeles Times.

CFS: New online journal for writers of color

"Kweli Journal is a new online literary journal established to identify, promote and nurture emerging writers of color. We also seek to expand the audience of authors of color who already have a foothold in the industry. Our mission, as editors and publishers, is to find a broad, international audience for the artists that we publish and the work that we find engaging and uncompromising."

"As a biennial publication, Kweli plans to publish Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer editions. We encourage new and emerging artists, as well as established voices, to submit their work for consideration. Kweli is particularly interested in short stories, poetry, and excerpts from novels that are self-contained. We seek high quality literary work that is beautiful and sustaining, profound and powerful."

Click here for complete submission details.

CFS: Final day for Reginald Shepherd Prize

For all you procrastinators out there, today is the deadline for the Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize. The final judge is Carl Phillips. Click here for guidelines, then step to it!

Kudos

Congrats to Jeff Walt, whose chapbook manuscript "Vows" just won the Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. The news was just posted yesterday, only two months behind schedule (ahem). Best of luck with your new publisher, Jeff!

Duty

I drove up to Lyco today, after meeting Randy for a quick lunch. I had library books to pick up. And to drop off: five more books to donate, including Olga Broumas' Rave and J.D. McClatchy's Hazmat.

"It's our E-Z Borrow guy!"

Yeah, it's me. I brought my own tote bag. Fill 'er up.

Also fiddled with the cover(s) of our next 7KP title. Not so much "fiddled" as took advantage of a super-fast, super-loaded library computer to tweak my cover designs, save them as PDFs, and print out a color copy to stick on my wall for inspiration as I move into the assembly stage of this project. Will post the cover images over at Seven Kitchens sometime this week.

Picked up a print job on the way home: covers for the second printing of Judith's and Steven's chaps. Which look just like the covers for the first printing. But now we're in the second printing.

Some hammock time with At Work: The Art of California Labor before dinner--tandoori chicken, grilled shrimp, basmati rice, curried vegetables, naan, and an ice-cold beer. Oh hell, yes, Randy can cook. And leftovers in the fridge.

Upstairs, what I mistook for a book on the chair in the bathroom. Upside-down, on its spine, the title HEAVY DUTY. I pondered the sound of the words, flicked through a mental list--honoring our parents' wishes, being truthful, burying the cat, signing the DNR form all came to mind before I realized it wasn't a book. It was the cardboard packaging around the new shower curtain. But even then, even after mentally shoehorning the words back into their purely utilitarian place, they echoed with a deeper resonance.

Call for shark poems!

Please pass this along--what a fun opportunity!

Shark Summer Poetry Contest

CFS: Subito Press

for all you "innovative writers" out there:

Subito Press of the University of Colorado invites submissions to its annual book competition. We will publish two books of innovative writing, one each of fiction and poetry:

• Submissions will be accepted from June 1 to August 15, 2009 (postmark date).
• Submit manuscripts of up to 70 pages of poetry or up to 100 pages of (double spaced) fiction along with a $20 reading fee and an SASE for notification of results.
• Manuscripts should include two cover sheets: one with title only, the other with title, author's name, address, e-mail, and phone number.
• All submissions will be judged anonymously by the creative writing faculty at the University of Colorado; friends, relatives, and former students of University of Colorado creative writing faculty are not eligible.
• Simultaneous submissions are ok; please notify Subito immediately if your ms. is accepted elsewhere.
• Winners will give a reading at the University of Colorado in the Spring of 2010.
• Notification of winners will occur by January of 2010.
• Send mss. to: Subito Press, Department of English, 226 UCB, Boulder CO 80309-0226.

Micropublishing fiction

Please check out Dan Jaffe's article over at Kim's Craft Blog discussing how he published his story, "One-Foot Lover," with Seven Kitchens Press!

Mystery cactus

A few years ago--maybe five or six--I found a cactus leaf on the floor of a local greenhouse, next to a floor drain. A single leaf, rather small and wan, already limp from having been knocked off its mother plant--but looking around, I couldn't locate the source. I slipped the leaf in my shirt pocket and, fortunately, remembered it at the end of the day. After floating in a cup of water for a day or two, it seemed visibly revived, and I had not much trouble rooting it. I think I had to wait almost six months before it actually put out a second leaf.

Fast forward to last year: the wee cactus has been steadily growing in a narrow wall pocket (planter) in my bathroom and has four or five arching stems. Then, finally, it popped: seven or eight tiny flower buds that opened nearly all at once, after growing and growing for a couple weeks, into gorgeous shaggy multipetaled crimson blossoms. Such a nice surprise.

That was last year. This year, the cactus is a bit larger, though still on the smallish side, and still growing in the same planter. There's finally enough of it that I felt comfortable removing a three-leaf section to root for a friend. And it's blooming again, only this time one bud will appear, grow and swell for a couple weeks, and finally open--expanding open during the day and half-closing at night. Each blossom lasts about a week before closing up for good and eventually dropping off. Meanwhile, a second bud starts to develop on another stem, and then another, each taking its turn. It's a nice extension of the blooming period, but I don't know why it's behaving this way: the plant has been in the same location for years now.

Oh, and I don't know its name. Do you?

How to make a chapbook in five hours

Spent half the day printing, folding, cutting, gluing, frowning, squinting, correcting, re-printing, re-cutting, resetting margins, re-printing, recutting, re-folding, squinting some more, holding my head in my hands once or twice, getting up and walking away more times than that, coming back, hitting a groove, more printing, more gluing, more puzzling and pondering. Result: one proof copy of Number 3 in the Editor's Series. Two titles in one: Jeff Stumpo's The Icarus Sketches and Crystal Boson's The Icarus Series. It was due to go out in the mail today, but tomorrow will do. More news will be up soon on the 7KP blog, as soon as we get the cover image finalized. The publication date is scheduled for July 15th.

Really fun accordion-style construction, such that you can read both titles by continuously turning the pages right to left--when you reach the end of one book and close the cover, you just open it again and read the other book. I totally owe the construction specs to Michele, one of our spring interns, who figured out how to make what I had tried to describe with my hands in the air by taping little two-inch squares of blue paper together.

Will try to post a pic or two.

Hoya kentiana

I bought this wax plant at the grocery store I think--or maybe at Lowe's--two years ago. It was tagged as Hoya kentiana. I keep it hanging in the sunny bathroom window. It's finally started to bloom!

Below you can see a second bloom spur developing:

CFS: Chapbook DL extended: Hotmetal Press

Just passing this along; their guidelines don't exactly sound writer-friendly, if you ask me. . .

The 3rd Annual Hotmetalpress Chapbook Contest
http://www.hotmetal press.net/ PoetryPrize. html

Our prize is $350 and 20 free copies. We also want to send every entrant a copy of the winning collection.

• Page Limit: 32 pages
• Fee: $20.00
• Deadline: extended to Wednesday, July 15, 5 PM
• If you are looking for clues as to what we look for a winner, we wish you luck because our selections are unpredictable and eclectic. We like to take risks if the poems interest us. We do not know what poems will interest us either until we see the poems. Sometimes we request poems from the manuscripts for our magazines.
• Please make out a check for $20 to Hotmetalpress.
• Send it to Carole Towers; 1173 Sea Eagle Watch; Charleston SC; 29412.
• Judged by the staff.
• Please send a copy of your manuscript in a word document to:sea7@comcast. net.
• Your work will be read upon receipt of your check.

The entry rules:

• Single spaced poems in 12pt Courier.
• Attach title page with your name, address, telephone, and email.
• 32 page maximum limit including title, content page, acknowledgements, and pages.
• Anything with more pages will be eliminated.

CFS: Journal of Lesbian Studies: proposals due 7/03

passing this along:

ENDED DEADLINE - Journal of Lesbian Studies Special Issue on Black Lesbians- Call for Proposals

Call for Contributors— please consider and let your friends and colleagues know!

Thematic issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies on LESBIANS OF AFRICAN DESCENT: CONTEMPORARY perspectives by Bianca D.M. Wilson and Verlena L. Johnson

The Journal of Lesbian Studies will be devoting a thematic journal issue and book on the topic of LESBIANS OF AFRICAN DESCENT. This journal issue will focus on some of the contemporary topics being discussed among lesbians of African descent, including creation of community, resisting oppression(s) , intersectional identity politics, sexual culture, negotiating family life, etc. Pieces that locate their work and perspectives in the current historical, political,20cultura l, and/or social context will be given preference. We welcome several forms of work, including personal essays, empirical papers, theoretical papers, poetry, and visual artwork. All work should have been written or developed in the last ten years. Authors may use a pseudonym if they prefer.

If there is a piece you published more than ten years ago, you may want to submit a commentary on your own work regarding how things stand now.

For written pieces, please send a one-page abstract of your proposed contribution. For visual art proposals, please submit five images maximum for consideration and a 250-word artist statement/bio. Send all proposals to Bianca D.M. Wilson at bwilson@csulb. edu or Verlena Johnson at verlenasroom@ yahoo.com by July 3, 2009. Abstracts will be evaluated for originality, diversity of experience, and writing style. Please keep in mind that selected 1-page proposals will need to submit full drafts by mid-September, 2009.

Please let your friends and colleagues know about this project. We are limiting submissions to authors who identify as lesbian or same-gender loving women of African descent.

All thematic issues of the Journal of Lesbian Studies are simultaneously reprinted in book form by Taylor and Francis. We hope that the resulting book will be used in social science and humanities studies courses and will be available in feminist and Black community bookstores.

We hope you will consider writing about contemporary topics relevant to lesbians of African descent, so that important aspects of our communities receive the attention they deserve!

In Sisterhood,

Bianca D.M. Wilson and Verlena L. Johnson
Guest Editors, Journal of Lesbian Studies Special Issue

Hosta

Can't stop photographing these.

The new paper cutter is here! The new paper cutter is here!

Horizontal view.
Vertical view.

This dandy tool could shave hours from assembly time. I am so excited. (!)