February 1, 2026

Happy new year! As we speak, I'm sitting on my couch with my partner watching the MTG Lorwyn Eclipsed Pro Tour coverage, on what could be the final match of the whole PT. Do I know what's happening? Not quite. But I'm happy to be included. One of my favorite things about my relationship is that we each have hobbies that the other person isn't pressured into including themselves in. It's pretty cool.

Last weekend we went to Portland OR, as he competed in an RC (and I got to wander around the city!). I had great coffee, went to the Japanese Gardens in Washington Park, went to the Lan Su Chinese Gardens and their teahouse, bought a ton of small press titles from Powell's Books, had a great time, etc etc. Lovely city. Will have to go back & rent a car so I can get out to the Tillamook factory (& nearby hiking spots, sure, but I have my priorities).

While in town, I also snuck across the border into Washington State and met up with the incredible m klein (@stone.spiral everywhere I believe) and attended an open mic at their local library. btw -- m klein runs the incredible asynchronous seasonal writing workshop To Light A Candle, and you absolutely have to sign up for it. M chooses 5 beautiful poems and provides generative prompts based on each of them -- her workshop has never failed to pull some poems out of me, inlcuding two of mine in the Michigan City Review of Books and one in Mason Jar Press's Jarnal.

That aside: The open mic was so lovely, with easily 50-60 people in attendance, and a really supportive group of local poets. This was an event I'll be keeping close to my heart for a while :)

I often don't think anyone reads my work -- kind of comforted by that thought really -- so reading to a group is confronting. My father, who reads everything I write, always responds to me with a "Well, I mean, you're publishing it, so" and he isn't wrong. But still I have a hard time imagining anyone actually reading my poems and responding, maybe even thinking about them later. But I'm wrong! I have very kind and lovely emails from strangers to prove it! I only wonder at what point this feeling goes away!

Well. I have a few readings coming up this spring that I'll put in more detail on my home page. I haven't really written anything in the last three months, so I'm slowly learning what a poem is again. I'm still underemployed, despite my efforts, but that may be changing somewhat soon; nothing's final 'till it's final, so I shant say anything else just yet. Oh! And I've started reading for Baltimore's own fifth wheel press, so send me something to read :)

If you're here, thanks for being here. Always more to come.

February 23, 2026

Well. I don't want to be melodramatic, so I won't be.

I re-read my blog from 2/1 before beginning to type this, and I had left off believing so firmly that I was going to move forward as a candidate for a job that -- to be honest, I still believe I'm the perfect candidate for. It was a gig structured identically to the graduate assistantship I held for 5 semesters, in the field of my MS, and yet. I have no reason not to be honest; I cried a lot.

I've been finding that I cry more, the older I am, and I wonder why. In an odd way, I think it's a mark of security -- I don't think I trusted myself enough to cry when I was younger. Or I didn't trust anything around me. Like if I started to cry I wouldn't believe I could hold myself together ever again, or that I could cry everything around me away and become unmoored. Or maybe I'm more hormonal now than I used to be. But that doesn't sound right. I got a generic, nameless form rejection from a job I'd gone through two rounds of interviews for and cried an entire Friday night away. Bummer.

Maybe I'm due to re-read Heather Christle's The Crying Book. Or try again at Cry, Baby: Why Our Tears Matter, in which a man/pastor tries to make himself cry every day for a year to better understand himself and his emotions.

But all of that aside. I want to give up, but I'm still applying places. I can't exactly not; I'll be 26 this year and would sure love to have my own health insurance. I think I have pretty strong prospects at a job I don't especially want that pays $20k less than I was looking for and $10k less than I was willing to settle for -- not that I would dislike working there, I just know I'm grossly overqualified. And hey, it'll beat my other prospect, that has a starting salary of $37k. My county government has said publicly that $25/hour is a living wage to live here, btw.

What's something happier to talk about? I read Erin Taylor's Bimboland this weekend and loved it. Such strong ways of discussing loneliness and self-commercializing around it, only to be interrupted by the total loneliness of the pandemic (though the pandemic is hardly the most important part of this collection, my friend Romy Rhodes Ewing said of it "...2020-era poems still feel incredibly fresh which is so hard to do" and I can't agree more). I watched "The Love Witch" (2016) last night and am still thinking about the production of it. It exists somewhere between "good" and "bad" -- beautiful movie, great effects (?), great costumes, makeup, sets. Writing left something to be desired, but I admire any movie that shows hog. MAFS AU has been crazy. Media has been going off. I've been working on reading more of the books I own -- I have my whole library catalogued in a spreadsheet, and according to my list I have 170+ books I've bothered to lug across >3 apartments that I haven't bothered to read. Fixing that.

I was watching a lot of the Winter Olympics, too. Lots of curling and figure skating. I also caught a lot of women's skeleton as I took my car in for repairs -- one hell of a sport! All internal car repairs, btw -- not to mention the damage done to my car after the winter storm we got at the end of January! My apartment complex did such a bad job handling the snow and ice that I was spinning my wheels in slush every time I came home all week, and the stray ice ripped shit off the bottom of my car! Nothing too essential, I think, but I'm still pissed!

Happier things. I know I've said already that I'm excited for AWP, but I'm so excited for AWP. Really, I just want to make friends and buy sick books :) If I figure out this employment stuff, maybe I'll even go out to Chicago next year :)

What else is there to this life?