[instrumental interlude featuring inanimate grin]

One of my offices is in historic Quaker Square, which is currently undergoing a massive road and bridge reconstruction project, and it has been difficult to remain subtle when trying to photograph the various wonders of the site. Sometimes I feel self-conscious, so then I just pretend I'm playing with my phone. But look at this fellow, so excited that Wednesday is here at last, and that the weather in Akron is so darn balmy. And nobody else has taken his picture. He stood nice and still for me and just kept grinning.

July looms at the end of the week, which means the end of the lo-to-no-po diet, and thus I will have to learn how to get more writing done when my children are home. So far it's been fine and non-taxing having a summer without teaching, but the summer without childcare will begin in earnest next week, and I am going to have to get crafty. I am also going to have to get frugal. Hopefully I can do both at the same time. This is going to be an interesting experiment.

I have lately been really interested in 1) reading fiction and nonfiction, 2) Goodreads (I'd neglected it for a long time, but now I'm totally smitten), 3) puffy clouds of the "happy" variety. I hope these aren't symptoms of anything serious.

Will begin writing again in two days. Sending some poems out, too. Upbraiding myself over shoddy, ridiculous system of keeping track of submissions. Checking the mailbox, but unsure of why. And that's about it.

Counterproduction.

According to the poems I have been reading lately, the world is pretty damn full of birds and trees that keep waving branches around for various reasons. Sometimes the birds are on the branches, but not always. Sometimes the birds and the branches are somewhere other than America, and the poems usually clue us in to that fact in the title.

Birds haven't been on my radar much otherwise, though we did have a creepy squirrel incident a while back where twenty or so of them rampaged a neighbor's tree, then crossed the street in a mob, and then rampaged a different neighbor's tree. So far I have not seen this phenomenon appear in a poem, but who knows. I have a lot of poems yet to read.

May and June have been my po-diet months. As in: no-po. I've written one poem since the end of April, and I think I will keep it that way. Maybe two, but I'm going lo-to-no-po, kind of like a cleanse but without any grapefruit juice or whatever. I feel as though I have lost pounds upon pounds of productivity. I need not-writing time, however, and I think my poems will be different when I dive back in again.

In the meantime, I will amuse myself by photographing the ground, which has more personality than you'd think, even though it is wingless and flapless and branchless.

Move it or _______ it.

So far this has been the summer wherein I repeatedly lose--or almost lose--various things (keys, phone every five minutes, important paperwork, books, outdoor cat) and scare the shit out of myself, and then find the various things again, and it's like Christmas morning. I can speculate that this is the universe teaching me:

1). To be more careful with where I throw things.

2). To be more appreciative of the things I toss on my counter.

3). To be more organized.

4). To think a little more about what it means to lose something.

Anyway, it's rather disconcerting. Normally I'm not a person who freaks out about her keys all of the time, etc.

Perhaps all of this losing/finding is to blame for the utter poem drought around here, since April. I've written one poem since 5/1. It was just fine, too. Perhaps this is due to having the kids home from school, and doing a lot of reading other people's poems. It makes the most sense for me to consider May and June to be poem hiatus months (officially, not just by default) this year, and to pick up like a bat out of hell on 7/1. Or thereabouts.

In not-lost news, I am getting some exciting nominations for The Saint Monica Library Project. And holy cats, I am selling a lot of books, too. I need to chill and stop checking the Amazon sales rank so obsessively, but I'm just so excited. If only I could translate that energy into new poems, I'd be all set.

Right now I am officially "out of the office" until August, with the exception of my work at the Press. We celebrated on Sunday by going to the beach without the kids, and I spent a lot of time just staring at the sky. Then a monster thunderstorm rolled into town, but I don't think I caused it with all my cloud-gazing. Or maybe I did. You never know.

The Saint Monica Library Project.

[We interrupt the usual musings for an important public service announcement.]

Saint Monica isn't the patron saint of libraries, but libraries were a saving grace to Mary Biddinger. That's why she is donating four copies of SAINT MONICA to libraries in need, along with a lifetime subscription to Barn Owl Review for each library. Ideally, several of these libraries would be in rural areas, like the setting of the book.

To nominate a library in need, send links + a brief rationale (300 words or fewer) to mb at marybiddinger dot com by 7/5/11. The four libraries will be selected by Mary in consultation with the Barn Owl Review editors, and announced here and elsewhere.

Note: while the book does contain some adult themes, it's not "blasphemous" in a way that would be unwelcome at libraries. Please share this call for nominations, and support your local library whenever you can. Thanks!

---

Throughout my life, libraries have been a church for me. There's nowhere that I feel more peaceful and safe, and reverent. Working in libraries helped feed me in undergrad, and the cramped confines of a study carrell eased me through the panic of studying for doctoral exams. I plan to donate copies of Saint Monica to my various alma mater institutions, and to libraries in Northeast Ohio, but I'd really like to broaden my scope, and to reach readers in places like the town where the book takes place (and beyond). To make this a more enduring commitment, I will also donate lifetime subscriptions to Barn Owl Review to these four libraries, in the hope that there's somebody like me back in the day, checking the magazine rack obsessively for new journals to arrive. Thank you so much for sharing this, and for nominating, and for supporting your local library.

~MB

Tumbleweeding.

Sometimes I just don't like epigraphs. But I also don't wear jewelry, so what do I know. I've noticed an epigraph-y trend in some of the manuscripts I've read this year. As in: a lot of epigraphs. I have a brief description of Saint Monica (the original saint) in Saint Monica, but it's not an epigraph, it's more like a preliminary note. I used to wear jewelry, sometimes a lot of it. I'm not sure what happened. And I do believe at one point I had some epigraphs in a book manuscript, but then I took them out and renamed it Prairie Fever.

Is an epigraph more like a charm bracelet, or an epi-pen? Or maybe it's the opposite of an epi-pen. Yikes.

My paper clip bins are all teeming with paper clips of yesteryear, which means only one thing: I've cleaned my English department office because I'll be away from it for a while. In the next few weeks I'm making the transition to being home with the kids most of the time, with a few exceptions (Press work, etc), until August. So far I've been surprised by how busy I am, despite not teaching. My house is probably about 25% cleaner, too. I'd like to raise that percentage a little.

The sleeping...wow. Not having to wake up at 5:30 every morning? Awesome. However, I have noticed that by sleeping until 7:30, I somehow lose several hours of daytime. How is this possible? To compensate, I occasionally stay up until 1:00 am reading. Must discontinue that. Anyway, that's how things have been going so far this summer.

I am incredibly happy that Saint Monica is selling like a little hotcake. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has bought a copy. You RULE! The only other tidbit is that I have an interview up at Midwestern Gothic. Do you know about this journal? It's really cool. The first-ever litmag I've read as an e-book, too, which was scary for about 1/18th of a second, and then it was really, really awesome.

Okay, back to counting epigraphs, maybe writing some of my own.

Underpinnings.

Wow, I sure am making up for my poetic binge of April. I haven't written a new poem since 4/30. I was thinking I'd welcome June with a bang, and write a new poem on the first day, but it simply didn't happen, and it hasn't happened. I've been reading more than writing. As always, reading makes me want to write differently. That is, if/when I ever write again. Ha ha.

The next two weeks are a flurry of having to tie up a number of loose ends, before my childcare disappears completely and I am On Vacation for the rest of the summer.

I am still in kind of a tizzy over Saint Monica being here and all. I help my authors with this stuff all of the time (review copies! press releases!) but it feels different doing it for your own book.

I send many, many thanks to Sandy Longhorn for her thoughtful review of Saint Monica. I'm usually kind of terrified to read what people have to say about my poems, but the experience of reading this response may have cured me. I feel like I learned something about my own poems through Sandy's thoughts on them.

In a silly way I keep asking myself questions about the book, in anticipation of other people asking me. For example:

Saint Monica is a fairly lengthy/substantial chapbook. Why didn't you make it into a full-length collection?

How much of Saint Monica is true? Is Monica you, or someone you knew?

Will you ever write Saint Monica poems again, or is she a closed book?

If Saint Monica is a cautionary tale, what is the message that you are trying to convey?

I guess today I will answer that last one, there. If I had to boil the book down to thematic elements, I would say that it's about the way that girls--especially girls of a certain milieu--were taught two things: a) to submit to a higher power, whether that power is God or your best friend's older brother, and b) that there is a connection between domination, pain, sexuality, and obligation. The book also tries to make the case for some kind of mentorship, whether it's having a best friend who knows more about the world than you do, or having a patron saint who somehow keeps you from tumbling into ravines, or being bound with tape and tossed into the trunk of a car.

Until my most recent project, I wrote constantly about violence. I also wrote, or tried to write, about the difficult task of determining your own moral bearings in a world that imposes so many rules upon us, including senseless ones. Although Saint Monica is in many ways focused upon the adolescent experience, I hope that it is useful in showing how often our adult decisions relate to mistakes we did or did not make when younger. It's a book about alternate possibilities, with the hope that readers recognize that they exist. It also has a pretty decent classic rock soundtrack, but that's unrelated.

[Thankfully, the poems themselves are a lot more interesting than this analysis. Saint Monica blesses you if you made it through both paragraphs.]

In related news, if you missed it earlier, Nick Ripatrazone has some fantastic commentary on one of the poems in Saint Monica here, at The Fine Delight, as well as an interview with me about the book, where I talk about Catholicism, and many other things.

I promise you that I will write a poem again some time soon, perhaps by the end of this week.