Anne Elliot has a great piece in the latest Pindeldyboz: Read the Goddamn Poem

You still have time (until August 31st) if you were thinking of entering Night Train‘s Firebox Fiction Contest (final judge is Robert Boswell). It’s only $10 to enter and for that $10 you can submit two pieces under 1,000 words (you can also enter as many times as you want, provided you pony up the $10 each time).

Amanda Davis died too soon; that much we know for sure. As a reader new to her work, it is hard to come to her collection Circling the Drain without applying the knowledge of her untimely death, and without attaching some sort of prescience to her words.

In particular, one may feel this with the story “Crash” about a woman who is witness to a plane crash, juxtaposed with a devastating break up in her life and “Circling the Drain” about a young woman who has attempted suicide and is on the verge of death–this is not to say that Davis’s death was suicide because clearly it was not–but that she shows us at times a preoccupation with death (which I can appreciate having a similar obsession) and this preoccupation becomes a life force within some of the stories.

Here is from the end of “Circling the Drain”, for example:

Ellen feels ready when the angel comes again. She waits for him, listens for him, and when he finally brushes into the room, she thrusts a hand out to stop him and hisses with all her might. She hisses like a cat–it is all she can think to do–but her pure, icy fright makes her powerful, gives her the wisdom to act without question. Her heart thunders but her hand is steady.

The angel’s wings flap a little, birthing a gentle breeze that flickers the candlelight. Then the angel tilts his head at her and his features melt into Billy’s and Ellen begins to cry.

You bastard, she spits at him. You fucking bastard.

All at once the anger and the loneliness, the unstopped fury and rancid desolation comes rushing out, and Ellen weeps openly, her hands clenched in fists, her body choking out air.

And the angel just stands there, flapping his wings and staring, but he doesn’t touch her. He stays by the door.

So here the woman cheats death, fights back against it. Gets angry. Yet is it enough for her survival? We don’t know.

In the end, what you may find as a reader is that these stories are wonderful and quite sad. You will likely mourn for Davis and find yourself angry that we are not able to see how she would have grown as a storyteller. You also might find as you read these is that you forget about her untimely death and live, instead, in the world she has created here–a world of tremendous heart, and of brilliant mind.

Jordan interviewed Aimee Bender yesterday. Cannot wait to listen to it when it goes up on their archives.

This woman is very, very funny: Laurie’s Love Logic

Hmmm. This is interesting–What would you pay to star in a best-seller?:

The group of 16 writers will hold an eBay auction for the right to name characters in new books to raise funds for an organisation promoting free speech. The highest bidders will have characters named after them or given another name of their choosing, possibly fictional or, with permission, that of a friend.

While I admire the cause and the thought behind it, I’ll admit that I feel a bit squeamish about this from an artistic point of view.

It feels sort of like one of those events where hot bachelors are auctioned off to the highest bidder. It feels sort of like reality tv. It feels sort of like those books you could get when you were a kid–there was a whole story and your name was typed in in a really crappy way, thus making you a part of the narrative. I never had one of those books, but I knew kids who did. It never quite lived up to expectation as there was a whiff of Mad Lib about it.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m overthinking.

I love the new look and feel of the The Academy of American Poets website. Actually, the look is several months old now but I haven’t had much time to nose around. Anyway, as I was looking around I noticed that they have a program called Adopt-a-Poet–what a fabulous idea! You, too, can be a modern day Medici! Seriously, I love it and if I had money to burn, I would consider adopiting a poet for sure. Something to consider if you don’t have money to purchase your own poet, is to ask for one for your birthday or whatever.

If you want to stay on top of what’s going on at Bread Loaf this year, Moorishgirl is keeping a great log of events.

Standing in a bookstore (one of my favorite bookstores in one of my favorite towns) this evening reading Jane Kenyon‘s Constance–specifically Having it Out with Melancholy. It was one of those perfect reading moments when everything else is gone.

my favorite bit, I think, has to be the last section:

9 WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light
I wake at four,
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air
presses through the screen
with the wild, complex song
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment.
What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

I’ve lived my life until now free of a fear of spiders. Mostly, I think, because I live in the northeast where spiders are small, hairless things (or so I thought). The only time I recall fearing a spider was when a tarantula the size of my head crossed the road in front of my car (which I pulled to a screeching halt) when I was driving through the San Joaquin Valley.

And then there was today.

Today, I am officially afraid of spiders or at least one spider. The big, hairy, striped spider that is living on the lid of my compost bin (which I thought was feeding off a cocoon, squished into one of the corners of the lid but after researching further–see photo above–I think she must be a Wolf Spider and that thing her egg sac. Nice.)

I couldn’t see the thing because I have one of those bins which sits on its side and you twirl whenever you put crap in it. So it was underneath–right where I put my fingers AND TOUCHED IT, nearly squishing it (shudder to think).

I put the lid down gently and pretended I didn’t see it until after I had dumped my stuff in the bin and put the lid back on.

So now I’m thinking I either need to get in touch with these people, or stop composting, or never go outside again.

Alexis Manning is a movie publicist with a broken heart, a sick cat, inner religious struggles and a debilitating addiction to movies. When her engagement to her Jewish leading man ends with a conversion ultimatum, she’s forced to re-consider her carefully scripted life and start over. Her job promoting movies — her true religion — is the only thing holding her world together. Meanwhile, Lex’s younger sister Molly is living in San Francisco and is also freshly un-betrothed, suffering her own breakup blues without the benefit of sunshine and movie stars. When Molly decides to move in with Alexis, the two displaced sisters navigate the worlds of Hollywood, dating, work, family, pets and roommate struggles together. Naturally, nothing quite turns out the way Lex planned . . .

Okay. I don’t know Tracy and I haven’t read her book but one of my favorite people in the world sent me this event listing and so I’m posting it here because if my friend Joan Jolley likes this book, it’s got to be good. So, if you’re in Boston, go on and check it out.

RSVP to Joan Jolley