a new month: february. blueprintreview unfolding. the proof-copy of "in transit", hopefully arriving soon. a time of closure, and opening. and of parallels. here some lines from Daniela Elza, who just finished a manuscript, too, and put the feelings in beautiful words:
"The work on the manuscript brought its own fascinations and rewards. To see these poems all in one place is like giving life to something new. The way they start echoing each other. The way they start telling things that individually they could not." (link)
reading it, i thought: that's how working on "in transit" felt. only that i didn't find the words for it myself.
which now leads to another parallel: blurbs. there i was, trying to put a blurb together for my collection. and got stuck. so i tried to trick my inner censor, and switched to the new-books-page of blueprintreview, to get it ready - and filled in some details, to get into edit-mode. then tried a draft for Rose Hunter's book "Circus" blurb, based on one of her mails. and then moved down to in transit, and tried to keep this casual tone, and pretending this was another author's book, too.
Rose wrote back later, and said what i had felt all day long: "Perhaps the author is the last person who should be responsible for the blurb on her own book.... "
and to round up this cirle of coincidences, i contacted Molly Gaudry about her book "We Take Me Apart", which i had seen online, and she wrote back saying: "the work you published of mine is excerpted from We Take Me Apart. And you and BPR are thanked in the acknowledgments!" -- and after i included the cover, Rose wrote: "And how exciting, to be there with you and Molly. Molly is the reason I first starting blogging..", and later picked this up in a blog post (link).
such a good string of coincidences, and inspiration across continents. sometimes i wish we all could meet up, somewhere, for a glass of sangria/rotwein/whatever.
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4 comments:
Good trick of yours, re fooling the inner censor. Thanks for the link! (And your help.) Yes, we should all get together sometime, for a glass of something! One of these days I'm going to go to AWP, I'm thinking, more and more.... I even went so far as looking up where it was this year. It's further for you to go though!
AWP would be fun, ladies.
AWP -- can only dream of this, unfortunately, but i just checked: it would be in Denver, Colorado. which is, well, a neat distance of 5200 miles from here.
Ah, is that all. Perhaps teleporting will have been invented by then, in a few short months. They should do some kind of live-streaming, or conference videoing thingy, for the geographically removed and/or financially challenged. I wonder if they do? If not, maybe we could suggest it....
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