September is my least favorite month. I don’t like the way seasons turn—I like fall, but I could do without the “getting there” of it all. The transition, I guess, between too-hot-too-bright and oh no, I haven’t seen a single ray of sunlight today because it was dark when I left for work and dark again when I left to go home. The whole thing makes my bones hurt.
It wasn’t so bad this year, though. I tossed a tent over my tailgate and hung out in the woods for a few days. We cooked charcuterie meat over a fire and I slept in my van by the river through two overnight flash flood warnings. All I could think about was every flash flood photo I’d ever seen. Floods aren’t a surprise around here, of course, but it seems like there’s a new, more awful one every year.
That’s not news, though, is it? Every fresh disaster feels almost mundane in a world like this.
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Some actual news:
– I’m reading with Tucker Riggleman and Kevin Chesser at Canary Books in Fayetteville on October 16th. I’ve never been a person who willingly subjects themselves to an audience, and I haven’t done so in any meaningful way in at least 10 years. It should be fun.
– I received Best of the Net nominations for “We build an airplane” and “She doesn’t wish me dead,” from Good River Review and As It Ought to Be, respectively.
– I’ll be talking about The River on Our Hands with Boor Soirée and a new podcast from The Picket in early October.
– My second collection, currently titled Rib by Rib, is on track for release with Tulipwood Books next spring. I’ll have more to say about this in the coming months, but for now: putting out a book that’s so much more personal and strange and gross than anything else I’ve written is going to be wild. A lot of kitchens in these poems. A lot of blood. A few bad doctors. Some mud. That sort of thing.