A brief note on the gender gap.

We've written about the gender gap in publishing fairly extensively before and I feel we more or less said what we had to say on the subject, but here is an anecdote that I think about when the conversation gets heated:

There was a period of a month or so where we only solicited women, and were very active in doing so. We made a point of it. We wanted to be part of the solution. We wrote them individually, praising their work and letting them know how we found them so that they could easily submit similar writing. Of those women we solicited, several said they would or might submit. None of them actually did so. While several women have responded to our general solicitations, none have responded favorably to individual solicitation.

You can blame that on the nonexistent reputation of our largely theoretical magazine, but I've heard similar things from many other editors with more established outlets. As such our publishing will not be as balanced as we would like, and we've had to make our peace with that. Editors are responsible for the doors they leave open and the methods by which they curate, but writers need also to take responsibility for their own careers. 

"It cannot be determined if she was buried deliberately."

"Last Seen Leaving" is one of my favorite stories in Curio, partly because of the form, partly because of some really brilliant sentences, and, in all honestly, partly because it has my favorite among the illustrations I did for the book. Check it out.

Fever Dreams

So yesterday, more or less immediately after making my last post, I started to feel sick. For a while it was okay and then it was terrible. I switched between burning up and shivering several times. At some point I went to bed. I couldn't really think or move. My head felt swollen inside itself. It took tremendous force of will to do anything. I slept and did not sleep.

As I was dreaming and not dreaming, I remembered how easy it was for a high fever to result in brain damage. I thought of how Bill Clinton's personality is said to have changed after his heart surgery, as sometimes happens, and wondered if this also happened sometimes because of a fever. I wondered if I would be a bad person and husband if my personality changed. I thought that maybe the change would be positive -- instead of becoming angry or short-tempered, I would become more generous and loving, a better person and husband.

I imagined my virus spreading. It would incapacitate Western civilization. People would trade not goods or services (which would no longer be produced by our exhausted bodies) but precious moments of health, which some would stockpile. I imagined Superman doing his best, but there was metal underneath his skin -- he could not empathize with our frailty.

Three luminous white lines rise sharply at a 45-degree angle. Two of them stop, intersected by a yellow line; the other goes gray.

I imagined that in the post-apocalyptic fiefdoms that would remain of our civilization, livestock would be both necessary (as it could feed itself) and nearly impossible to find. I (not me, but another me) searched a world overgrown with diseased wheat for a man who grew cows and dinosaurs. However I could never find him. My method of searching was that when I came to a door I would open it. There was no particular door I was looking for. I opened them all.

Then at about 2:30 I woke up absolutely certain that I needed to go downstairs and drink Cherry 7up and watch Futurama, so I did. Several hours later I woke up absolutely certain that I needed to go upstairs and sleep in my bed, so I did. That I could move my body came as a surprise. Today I taught my morning class but let them out early; I had almost misspelled "universal" as "universical" on the board, found it difficult to concentrate, lead discussion, or say words I knew perfectly well. Slept in the Puerto del Sol office on a couch half my length. Woke up with drool on my hands and panicked because I didn't know, for a moment, it was drool.

Am presently maybe sort of okay. Hoping to take another nap and feel better.

Artifice 3

I have Artifice #1 and I like it. I did not, for no particular reason, buy Artifice #2. I did buy, while I was at AWP, Artifice #3, and then I read it on the plane home from cover to cover. (I also read the second half of Matt Bell's book and parts of several other things: the trip back was pretty long.) I can't remember ever reading a magazine from beginning to end. It's not what I do.

I would be lying to say that I loved every piece equally, or that I even liked all of them: that's not what I do either. But Artifice now has the distinction of being one of maybe four magazines I know of in which every single piece engages my attention more or less absolutely. Since I want to make good books, as a reader, editor, and designer, the only reasonable course of action is to examine why. Some of these ingredients are unique to Artifice, some are not.

There are of course the editorial tastes and processes of the staff. No idea, beyond what the magazine makes apparent, what those are or how they work! There's a pretty good mix in the magazine of people whose work I know and people whose work I don't, which speaks well, and generally speaking I'd say they're achieving a good, solid "mix." (Quantifying what I mean by this would be awful and boring; check out the table of contents and speculate.) Anyway, they gots good taste.

There is also the cleanness of the presentation. The magazine is, for all its focus on formal experimentation, itself a very simple object: a pleasantly tactile monochrome cover, a manageable number of light-weight pages, white instead of the standard creme, with small dimensions. This seems intuitively like a strange decision, but I've come to like it a lot. The magazine serves as the constraints of its own production. Submitting to Artifice is a really interesting process, because it's forced me to think about my work in different ways: not simply how might this text fit into a magazine, but how might this text fit into this magazine? 

But first and foremost, and reflected in both of these other aspects, there is the magazine's name, concept, and mission statement, which are all one word. I wrote here before about my tendency to read On Earth as it Is whenever I am reminded to do so, and sometimes when I'm not: I think it comes down to the central idea of a publication focusing on prayer-narratives. The concept itself is sort of interesting to me, but the fact of a constraint and a focus on the  pieces they publish is extremely attractive. Whatever they publish, I have one clear criterion beyond my own personal tastes by which to consider it. I don't really love everything they put out either, but the focus helps me get past that and think about the work productively anyway. It gives me a reason to engage where I might otherwise step away.

Not everything in Artifice is formally wild, but it is all very interesting, partly because even if you don't engage immediately with the text, there are questions of design to consider. Why are these paragraphs separated by a full blank line, and why are these merely indented? Why does this story continue after white space on the same page when there is a "scene break" or other transitional point, and why does this one begin a new page each time, leaving so much of every page blank? What are the blank pages for? Are they time to breathe? And what do you make of the text that seems to scroll, ticker-like, across the bottom of the book? (The bio section explains its means of generation.) 

Not everyone can have a focus on artifice in writing, of course, but the underlying lesson here is something any magazine can apply: the more choices you make, the more it brings to life everything you publish. I find the majority of publications today, both serial and otherwise, utterly boring, but a more useful way of putting this is that I feel they make too few choices. Most publishers focus on magazines and books (but especially magazines) that are apparently interchangeable, and the especially daft among them mistake this for building a "brand." I don't want to pick on anybody but it's fairly easy to call to mind publications where everything looks more or less the same. The work dies as a result of its homogeneity: in a very real way, I fail to perceive it, often going whole pages without actually seeing a single word, even as I am ostensibly "reading." (This may sound like an extreme way of putting it, but I'm willing to bet you've experienced the same thing, perhaps often.

Which brings me to what every writer and editor can learn from Artifice: even if you're largely interested in what might be called, at various times, traditional, mainstream, realist, narrative, or literary writing, you owe it to those writers to publish interesting, challenging work that makes you and your readers reconsider what your publication is capable of. It's not just that I like that stuff better, it's that placing writing generated and presented by different means brings all of that writing to life: Davis Schneiderman's "The Vertebrate Mitochondrial Code" isn't exactly a thrill ride (it is, instead, exactly what it sounds like) but it does bring a thrill. This is a magazine where unexpected things can and will happen. The fact of this decision makes the inclusion of more conventional work of easily recognizable form a more interesting decision. It helps me to perceive more traditional work as existing as a result of a series of choices.

Which it does -- all writing is a result of choices. There are no defaults. We often forget that.

Particular highlights in the magazine include Dustin M. Hoffman's story "Seven-Eighths," the story of Darrell, who may either go to the punk rock show tonight, or watch his friend take too many pills and die, as well as Addam Jest's "The Beautiful Necessity," of which this is the opening paragraph:

Women are very rarely matters of cold scientific observation, but are colored both by their own sexual emotions and by their own moral attitude toward the sexual impulse. The ascetic who has subdued his own carnal impulses may see no elements of sex in women at all. No two trees put forth their branches in just the same manner, and no two leaves from the same tree exactly correspond; no two persons look alike, though they have similar members and features; even the markings on the skin of the thumb are different in every human hand. Every principle of natural beauty is but the presentment of some occult law, some theosophical truth; and the Law of Women is the presentment of the truth that identity does not exclude difference.

Also much more, and many others.

"Husbands are combination animals."

I am back from AWP, with many books to read and talk about. But also I met a lot of great people, Laura Ellen Scott among them. I'm not sure if we literally high-fived -- I was sitting behind a table -- but we did strategize about getting you -- you -- to read Curio and spread the word about it. I would tell you the plan but it's happening to you right now. (I guess it's a pretty simple plan.)

Anyway, the new story, "Witch," is great and short and sweet.

Fabricants and Fabrication

From "An Orison of Sonmi~451" in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas:

An ascending fabricant absorbs language, thirstily, in spite of amnesiads. During my ascension, I was often shocked to hear new words fly from my own mouth, gleaned from consumers, Seer Rhee, AdV, and Papa Song himself. A dinery is not a hermetic world: every prison has jailers and walls. Jailers are ducts and walls conduct.

Just barely into this section, but I'm sort of thunderstruck by Mitchell's ability to enter into this voice after having followed him through a pious notary, a sarcastic composer, a spunky girl reporter (through the eyes, apparently, of a whack-job novelist), and a smarmy old publisher. There's nothing I love more in a fiction writer than a penchant for trying on different voices; I like range, and more than experimentation with form or language or genre I tend to find myself fully entranced when a writer can convincingly experiment with someone else's voice in place of their own.

There's an extent, of course, to which every voice a writer takes on is made his or her own, but this seems to fall back on the kind of essentializing that happens when people talk about writing as a medium that exists for writers--that writing is for voices, for being heard, for preserving one's words. And its related caveat: that therefore nobody can write like Joyce. Nobody can imitate Toni Morrison. Well, maybe not, but what a depressing view for contemporary writers to hold as they try to write something as lasting, as great. The old idea of a writer as half painfully humble, half disgustingly vain helps explain it--how gratifying to view ourselves as outclassed on the one hand and scrappy underdog champions on the other!--but I think I'm happier to imagine myself as an utter fabricator from the start. A dramatist. Sure, it's my voice, but I don't have to worry about being "true" to my voice if the only thing "me" about it is that it's coming out of my mouth. As I see it, writing fiction is pretty much about putting on a show anyway, and the results for me are more satisfying the less they sound like me. One time a judge for a fiction contest said he thought my story was written by a 40-year-old man, and I was like, Amazing, This is what I want to make people say for the rest of my life. I didn't know it was you.

Range as a writer isn't lauded so much in the academy, in my experience. I can see why--it's not like the semester structure really supports the study of an author's full range, or even their development over time. The object tends to be to get good as fast as possible, preferably without taking on extra years and extra debt. The short story collection or the novel-in-stories is usually as close as it gets, and these, in my experience, tend to be selected more for their unifying aspects (their discernible, and teachable, patterns of form, language, characterization) than for their broadness, variety, or range. There have been two counterexamples: The Wavering Knife, by Brian Evenson, and now Cloud Atlas. They are both great, and I feel like I learned more from them than from, say, a collection of William Trevor stories, which I now look back on and fail to discern. There was the one with the guy falling down the stairs; did that happen after the dinner date, or in the same book...?

Range also can pose readership problems, I'm told. People who loved you for your book where you wrote like an 18th-century pirate might have a harder time falling in love with your 1920s speakeasy operator or your go-go '90s businesswoman. And genre set entirely aside, maybe literary audiences got to know you for your quiet, penetrating stories of rural life and now you're throwing them a curveball with your novel about a young woman's struggle to survive in the big city. Same deep understanding, same keen penetration into the mysteries of character, perhaps, but those readers thought they knew you, thought they were getting to some heart of you, and the fact that the situations have changed has necessarily changed the way you write about them. They opened their hearts enough to perceive you as an individual with a spirit and not just the invisible force that guides the pen. Now they don't know what to think.

I'm inclined to think these are fake problems. It seems like musicians encounter them and survive all the time. If you are a big Sufjan Stevens fan, for example, and you don't like the new Sufjan Stevens albums with its differences in character, then you don't like that particular effort and probably you try again next time, and if he disappoints you again, well, you're not a Sufjan Stevens fan anymore. But you still liked those first few albums, and somebody else really liked those next two albums. It could potentially ruin a career, but it wouldn't ruin any particular effort retrospectively. But I do know enough people who honestly feel as if they're reading the effort of a particular soul when they're reading that I'm wary of saying that it doesn't matter at all, that it's a fake phenomenon, and that all you're ever in love with when you read is whatever's been put there on the page for you. I mean, I think it's self-evident that you're never really "getting to know" the author as a person, regardless of how their work makes you feel, or how much you read of it. But personalities can matter. Kurt Vonnegut as a person, not just a writer, has profoundly influenced Mike's life. I like to think William Goldman as a personality, at least, and not just a writer, has influenced mine.

But still I appreciate and admire range in an artist more than almost anything else. We have the opportunity to masquerade ourselves--convincingly--as almost anything, and I think that's thrilling. Why consistently pretend to be someone who is in fact very, very much like ourselves? Aren't there more entities, more personalities worth "getting to know," even in the very limited sense--the very limited kind of knowledge I suspect we as writers are able to provide?

Goodbye, AWP Pedagogy Forum

Mike tells me, and I kind of can't believe this isn't all over the Internet, that the moderator at his session this morning announced the official end of the AWP pedagogy forums. Seems like the official line on this is a little underdeveloped right now: they're saying it'll allow them to focus on more pedagogy-related panels. Which seems impossible, as the pedagogy forums currently subsist on volunteers (the moderators may get paid a little something--I can't imagine it's much) and take place in all of two hours and four rooms--so it's difficult to see how they'd be freeing up either money or conference time to dedicate to other forms of pedagogy discussion. It's difficult to imagine much of a motive, period, unless they just feel like the pedagogy forum is too insular, or lacks mass appeal, and that they could lure more registrations by having big names come to talk about pedagogy. Your guess is as good as mine, and I hope you'll share it, as I'm expecting either a brief statement on the website with no further explanation or no statement at all--just word of mouth.

Again, knowing so little about AWP's motives and plans for pedagogy makes it hard to say too much at this point, or to get up in arms and super-righteous about it. Pedagogy is good for AWP, though, I'll say that much--while they're always clearly trying to market the conference to writers outside the university, there's no denying that writers who also teach or who someday desire to teach or who are currently being taught are the main AWP attendees. And the pedagogy forum has given those who can't sell a panel on the strength of their name or affiliation a place to pitch new ideas--ideas that, from my reading and mingling at last year's pedagogy forum, are starting to take discussion about creative writing pedagogy in a new direction, focusing on concepts, philosophies, and methods of teaching rather than strictly on assignments and activities. 

This is what creative writing as an academic discipline needs. The more we rely on established teachers, many of whom, by the time they earn their reputation, are leaving their teaching days behind and moving on to jobs as directors of departments, only teaching classes here and there, or only teaching at retreats and camps--or retiring from teaching altogether--the less we're really talking about the current needs and climates of the creative writing classroom. I think it's plain that the creative writing classroom is a different place now than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Students are often savvier in certain ways, having read the usual literature earlier and earlier, or having had full-period creative writing classes as early as middle school. They are also more diverse, both in where they come from and in what they write--to make room for different forms, genres, and creative aspirations in the writing classroom is hardly avoidable, and I am amazed when teachers treat these differences as invisible. Sure, to teach "Show not tell" and realistic, vivid description theoretically works for any person's story. But eventually you've got to deal with the fact, and plan your class around the fact, that the people in your creative writing classroom are there for different reasons, with different expectations, and often, with very different needs. "Show not tell" is going to be utterly elementary for some, where some may actually need to be taught how to tell, how to narrate logically and authoritatively, before they can learn to show. We need new teachers--the people teaching the Intro to Creative Writing courses--and attentive and changeable teachers--the people taking notes and paying attention to whether their methods are having positive effects--to help boost and maintain our discipline.     

Check out more fun Nin Andrews AWP drawings.

That's not to say old pedagogy isn't good pedagogy. Good exercises are good exercises, and good teaching skills die hard. Charles Baxter's advice wears well, and when I had the pleasure of having him sit in on one of my fiction workshops at Butler, his advice was outstanding, thoroughly and broadly applicable, and his teaching manner was that of somebody still very much "in" the classroom--he was paying attention to our classroom, not just using a packaged lecture or handing out a time-worn diagram of the model short story. (Have seen one of these used in a mock workshop by a job applicant. Was mortified.) There are plenty of renowned creative writing teachers who deserve every ounce of their reputation. But taking away the opportunity for fledging teachers, aspiring teachers, to help define our pedagogy takes away our ability as a group of educators to respond in relevant ways to the problems that confront us. More and more, just like every other non-professional program on the college campus, we are going to be asked to define and defend our value, and we do that by defining and defending our pedagogy. If we can't clearly and convincingly articulate what it is we aim to do, and more importantly, how we aim to do it, then campuses will increasingly find reason to cut us out.

Though if we can't do that--if we can't do more than point to a tired handbook of tried-and-true methods as evidence of our teaching efficacy--we probably don't deserve to call what we do a "discipline" in the first place. This is the question I think writers in the academy, and AWP as an entity, has to answer. If writing is a discipline, it must allow ample time and space for serious discussion of practices and methods. If it's not a discipline, then it may be it's only a hobby. And if its only a hobby, there's no real reason for a conference--AWP would be a retreat, a camp, an elaborate yearly meeting of a massive writer's help group.

Interested to see if we'll hear more on this after the conference is over.

"'The ghost baby lives in a cup and instead of legs it has a tail'"

...and "beagle Louise kills Paris the G-pig. In a dramatic turn of events."

"37 lbs.", our next in Laura Ellen Scott's Curio, is up for your enjoyment.

"Total Eclipse"

Annie Dillard:

I looked at Gary. He was in the film. Everything was lost. He was a platinum print, a dead artist's version of life. I saw on his skull the darkness of night mixed with the colors of day. My mind was going out; my eyes were receding the way galaxies recede to the rim of space. Gary was light-years away, gesturing inside a circle of darkness, down the wrong end of a telescope. He smiled as if he saw me; the stringy crinkles around his eyes moved. The sight of him, familiar and wrong, was something I was remembering from centuries hence, from the other side of death: yes, that is the way he used to look, when we were living. When it was our generation's turn to be alive. I could not hear him; the wind was too loud. Behind him the sun was going. We had all started down a chute of time. At first it was pleasant; now there was no stopping it. Gary was chuting away across space, moving and talking and catching my eye, chuting down the long corridor of separation. The skin on his face moved like thin bronze plating that would peel.

...

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world's dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet's crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there. In the black sky was a ring of light. It was a thin ring, an old, thin silver wedding band, an old, worn ring. It was an old wedding band in the sky, or a morsel of bone. There were stars. It was all over.

Would have taught this essay tomorrow for a creative nonfiction class, but our campus is closed again so the city can save electricity. I really hope the students read it anyway. It's fantastic.

Things I Like and Have Been Liking

Sitting around the house without work, power, or your spouse tends to lead of ruminating by candlelight over things you've enjoyed more or things you think you might enjoy more. Here is a list of things I've enjoyed more than sitting at home alone with the power out (which is not to be taken as any indictment of their enjoyability). 

The Count of Monte Cristo

Not the book, but the anime. Mike got me this series for Christmas, and though it's only 24 episodes long we've been slowly taking it in for over a month, and just finished two days ago. It's not that the series lacks appeal, but that it does seem to require some acclimation, some digestion, and some adjustment of our general TV-watching mood. It's animated essentially in layers--hand-drawn over CG, textures and patterns over the hand-drawn, so that the characters tend to look as if they've been in a fight with a Geocities wallpaper. 

It took me about four episodes to get used to this, and to the telling itself, which is centered on the Count's mistress's son Albert rather than on Edmund Dantes and his gradual transformation into the Count. The series tends to emphasize the sordid intrigues of Paris and of a world (spoken of with gravity and dread: "Eastern Space") meant to stand in for the lawless, pirate-haunted, desert islands that populate the book. This for me was a little difficult to follow--not so much because I'm familiar with the book, but because to follow Albert is to follow this sweet little rich boy, naive of the plotting and manipulating that is immediately and obviously apparent to us. Eventually, that focus is earned as we watch Albert shed some of his spoiled and self-important naivete about the world while retaining his idealism and strengthening his youthful exuberance and passions. I don't mean this to be a spoiler, and hopefully if you watch the show it won't be--but Albert literally hugs away the final problem of the series. It is the kind of ending Mike and I have always marveled at in anime, where the character saves the world by the sheer power of their refusal to compromise one single thing. It is at once inspiring and ludicrous. 

And, in a way, so is this show. I came to enjoy the gratuitous animation and found it suited the melodrama of the plot. There's a club girl with hair made out of sequins, a newsman with a shirt made of sensational headlines. Once I got used to it, these exaggerations complemented the storytelling well. 

Besides, there is something I love deeply about revenge stories. My next novel will be one if I can come up with a situation solid enough to support the explicit plotting and impossibly high emotion that revenge brings with it. Would you ever pursue revenge? I don't think I would. I love imagining the person who is otherwise like me, but would, under the right circumstances, devote the entirety of their lives to one ludicrously single-minded pursuit. Most of the best books I can think of are revenge books on some level. Go! Do the outsized and complicated deed that could never resolve the past! I am in love with reading about that quest.

The Simpsons, Season 7

In planning my writing class on The Simpsons, I began to feel that my collection was just a little lacking, and I had to decide which season was most needed to bring it up to par. This was the one I chose. It's full of classics, of course; you've got Bart selling his soul, Lisa becoming a vegetarian, Homer making himself obese to get on disability, Mr. Burns finally waking from a coma and naming his shooter, and Selma entering a sham marriage with Troy McClure. But what I found out after rewatching this season (and this one I moved through quickly; I've already watched a few of these three times, plus commentary) was that I really bought this season for Marge. Marge's character develops in really stunning ways this season. 

There's "Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield," where she finds a Chanel suit on clearance and uses it to fit in to higher society--I about lose it when we find out that Springfield has a luxury clothing district, and that Marge drives herself there in secrecy and desperation to obtain a Chanel dress for her initiation into high society, this time at the regular price. It helps that Marge is my mom--naturally selfless, fiercely loving, fully committed to the life that she was kind of trapped in (my mom is old enough that she was never going to get to be much other than a clerk, a teller, a teacher, even if she had great aptitude for other things, which she did). So when Marge buys a dress she can't afford, I think of my mom doing that, and I think of how very much she must have wanted what wearing that dress would mean for her. And how sad when she gives that up. But how hard it would have been to carry out what she wanted anyway. How sad for Marge that nothing can really ever change, and what a testament to her that she finds joy for herself in other ways, making it work for her anyway. 

There's also "Marge Be Not Proud," where Bart shoplifts and Marge briefly grows distant from him. Watching these two in tandem is telling, I think--if Marge can't have anything outside her family, and if her family lets her down, then what's she got? They really got to the heart of her this season, I think--much more so than the Marge-centered episodes that center on reversals, where she gets a boob job, or becomes a cop or an Olympic curling champion, or starts weightlifting, and so on. Reversals of her character aren't nearly as interesting as the kinds of explorations you see in Season 7. But they do help, in the scheme of things, to show us how hard she works to "be" Marge Simpson, all the performances she puts on, and what other kinds of performances she might like to try for a day. That kind of thing. I could write feminist love songs about Marge all day. Not that she represents a feminist, or even a kind of feminism. It's just that she sort of explains all the things, closeted and tamped-down things, women really need in order to take their right and full place in the world. Marge doesn't need a different job, or a different husband. She needs something of her own to put her faith in.

I do read, as well, not just watch TV--I promise. I just haven't finished anything recently. I'm gearing up for David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, which we're reading in our master's workshop, and I hope to get some time soon to finish Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Others, a book of stories that are sometimes fables, sometimes fantasy, sometimes sci-fi, all pretty impeccably imagined and made to matter. Looking forward to be able to say more about these soon.

"They called themselves the Ark of the Moon"

Story 11 in Curio, "Moon Walk," is up. Beat the Snowpocalypse with hay moons, brutal summers, and white-clad girls in barefoot procession.

Bear with us

With Mike at AWP and New Mexico under the effects a bizarrely severe winter storm, posting may be sparse the next few days. Power is back on now, and the Internet seems to be improving--though, as a rule, southern New Mexico doesn't tend to be very prepared for the roadway and power demands of a snowstorm. I'll be preemptively cooking and stockpiling blankets in the event we go off the grid again.

In the meantime, here is your 2011 AWP bingo card from We Who Are About to Die. I will be playing at home, and attending panels on the academic job search and the defense of sci-fi/fantasy in my mind.