Two Serious Ladies

My friend, the writer Lauren Spohrer, fellow expat of major city and resident of the absurdly springy Triangle area, has launched a great new project, Two Serious Ladies, an online journal running poetry and prose by women-identified sorts, that runs two authors a week. SUBMIT! SUBMIT! I told her about all of you. I have a piece up there soon, from a project called HE TOOK HER AS HIS WIFE, kind of Biblical shorties.

By the way, I have now suddenly come down with a ridiculous chest-cold, so I might be something like a corpse come AWP, I wanted to write, "corpuscular" because in my mind I felt that should mean: having the quality of a corpse, but instead it's something cellular. It is one of those luxurious colds, however. I am weak and calm yet strangely joyful. Today: white tea, ginger and lemon tea, the rest of the take-out spicy tom-yum soup, John went to the store and got ingredients for an immune system soup with cayenne pepper, garlic, shiitake mushrooms, miso, and astralagus root, for lunch raw kale salad with avocado and red onion and raw garlic, rubbing eucalyptus, peppermint and lavender-infused oil on my chest and back, wrapped in wool blankets, sunlight. I am reading Twlight and thinking of Austen today and Caitlin Flanagan and notions of romance. By the way: I am not blogging. I just have a typing problem.

AWP

This is one of my updates that's not a blog post, but more an announcement thing. I will be doing two readings afterhours at AWP, one Thursday night at the bathroom of Neo, at 10pm, the other Friday night at Beauty Bar. They will each be quickie readings, I will probably be reading one of the "Desire" sections of Green Girl.

Since I'm not on various social networks, for now, I'm a little plugged out of things. I want to be able to run into the people I've been communicating with here and elsewhere! I have one of those phones I can check emails consistently. I will be at the bookfair roaming around some of Thursday and Friday. I will have crazy hair and will be most likely wearing all-black. See if you can spot me. Wednesday PM I'm going to probably go to the Danny's reading (Danny's is the bar John and I had our first kind-of date actually, 9 years ago) as well as James Greer's Empty Bottle thing (the Empty Bottle is the bar that...well...ha...there is actually some resonance with the Empty Bottle and Green Girl, I'll tell you if you ask in person).

xoxo

break

After much thought, reflection, etc., I have made some changes as to my habits online. I have (probably temporarily) quit Facebook and Twitter. This has caused me to write daily again in my journal, and to feel less anxious and stressed out on a daily basis. The immediate reasons for quitting all these social sites so suddenly was because of the realization I was straining my eyes, by constantly staring at a screen, a recent trip to the eye doctor confirmed this, and that this eyestrain was contributing to my migraines, that have become so regular lately it is almost like they're an old, yet toxic, friend.

I must too take a break from here, a break that will probably be a semipermanent goodbye, as when I return, I think I will have reimagined this space completely, if I return it will be with purpose, like when I began. This is part of a personal journey - to break through, to become new again. I feel it fomenting. To exist merely in the quotidian is daunting, yet calming as well. I went and got bodywork done last week - to help with the headaches - a mixture of Thai and deep tissue massage. I plan to begin studying Zen meditation. I want to be less full of the self, less worried about others' perceptions. I need to stop being a writer for a while in order to write. This is only a personal, not a universal, conclusion. When I was a smoker I smoked two packs a day, easily. This is how I live. I inhale greedily, always, always to excess. Some can smoke one or two a day, and be fine, I was never one of those people.

I will have an author's site in place here within the next couple of weeks. I'll announce that here, and hopefully you who linked to FFIMS will link to that instead. Heroines will come out in the fall, and I want to be able to tell you when I'm doing readings, etc. I have begun to think about ways to transform my mss. The Book of Mutter into (also) an artist's book, and a series of performances and installations revolving around the work. I will be participating in a symposium on Violence & Community at Naropa, and for that I along with my partner John will be hopefully executing at least an installation but perhaps also a performance. If there is any video I will post it on this new site. I might be writing some essays in the future for other places, and I will post that on the site as well. I will keep FFIMS archived.

In the meantime I will hopefully be stewing, fomenting. Writing. Working on projects. Chasing after my psychotic puppy. Taking hikes in the mountains. Going to the ocean, which I haven't yet, even though it's only two hours away. I might be traveling this summer, which is exciting, to places, I never imagined I would possibly ever journey to.

I love you all. Please keep in touch - my email is francesfarmerismysister@gmail.com.

Today I feel like the phoenix. Perhaps one has to self-immolate in order to begin again.

xoxo

links, links, links

I have been really super lucky to have worked with two extraordinary writers as my editor/publishers, Lidia Yuknavitch published O Fallen Angel, and Chris Kraus worked with me extensively on Heroines, which she will be publishing at Semiotext(e). Lidia and Vanessa Veselka are having a really great conversation over at The Believer online on violent women, and women writing, and there's a long essay on Chris' oeuvre as well as her stewardship at Semiotext(e) over at n+1.

Also: Maggie Nelson on abjection narratives, including Laurie Weeks' Zipper Mouth, over at Lit Pub.

NYC this Sunday (AGAIN)

Back home for a few days to chase after the darling psychotic puppy Jean Genet, much like Janey Smith following around Jean Genet in the desert in Blood and Guts in High School. Allegedly I'm supposed to write an essay due this week which I haven't started, which is giving me bad dreams. Anyway. This weekend's reading is going to be very special for me, because I'm reading for the first time ever with my good friend Suzanne Scanlon, whose first book is coming out through Danielle Dutton's marvelous Dorothy in the fall, and Helen Phillips, who I keep on hearing wonderful things about. At the KGB Bar Sunday night at 7pm! I would love to see you! I keep on going back and forth whether to read the blowjob/bartender scene this Sunday, I was reading it for a while and it freaked people out, and then I stopped, but now I miss it.

Also, oh, I supposed I have to mention, because I've become a self-publicizing monkey of the worst sort: Elissa Schappell wrote about Green Girl for her Vanity Fair column. I was really excited about it and blared it over the various social media and now I'm feeling embarrassed because it's, like, Kate, come on, stop being such a hooker about everything.

GLITTER BOMB

BOOM. Picture it metallic silver. Out in September through Semiotext(e). Collage and cover by Hedi El Kholti.

Also awesome because of: Jean Rhys Penguin UK silver paperbacks. Very saucy on the lower right hand corner.

also: I did the L Magazine questionnaire. 

occupations for women

So last night, after days considering and entering John's and Mairead's tireless and thorough copyedits, and days more of that taking every book in my fucking apartment and entering it into Chicago style, I turned in the final file (!) of Heroines to Chris and Hedi. This morning we're talking cover ideas! And tour! Exciting. People: this has been a years-long endeavor. Technically two straight years long of blogging and notebooking and rewriting and revising, etc. But then I think for as long as I worked on Mad Wife two or three years before that. So this morning, I am breathing (maybe?) a bit easier. Although I usually let myself celebrate for only a few minutes. This is how I always am. What is that? It's an illness. I mean, I posted about it on Facebook. That was my moment of punctuating. John and I hugged. I went to bed. I suppose I could have had a drink, although I've been abstaining, as wine and liquor and everything else has been absolutely decimating me the next morning, and since I've been feeling - a lot - better later - and have gotten over my acute phase of neurasthenia or what have you, I want to take it by baby steps, you know.

But I need to think about what's next. I am teaching, now - the Women and Madness class - and really enjoyed rereading Freud's case studies this weekend - that Freud, he is SUCH A TRIP. But I don't have obviously a full slate of classes. I am writing an essay on Caitlin Flanagan for The New Inquiry - I need to start work on that this morning, more than scribbling things that make me laugh in the margins of the book - although before class tonight I have to watch and tweet Gossip Girl and play with my darling puppy, so there's that. I am hoping to write more of these essays - it's funny, I feel like that's a return, but hopefully a different sort of return. I am also at work on Under the Shadow of My Roof, kind of concurrent with the essay writing. But regardless I need to figure out an occupation.  Right now I am considering: public intellectual, or, upon 6 years of graduate school, if I can ever get into a program, scholarly intellectual. Or, TV critic. Or, I don't know. It all feels so uncertain, the future. I know I will have readings to do for Heroines beginning in the fall, and I will be hopefully doing some more readings with Gina Abelkop this spring and summer. I'm going to be reading in Asheville this upcoming weekend, and two New York readings next week. Everything feels full, and sort of busy. I guess that's a good thing?