Lunatic Fringe

Okay, so I may have let this blog languish a bit. For oh… a year? More? I’d rather not look at when the last entry was dated. But hey, I’ve been busy! After all, last time I was here, I was a lowly graduate student, but now I come to you as a Master of the Fine Art of poetry. My two years at the University of New Hampshire were hectic, transformative, illuminating, stressful, existentially complicated, hysterically funny, and deeply soul-satisfying. This was a place where I wrote a series of poems that reimagined Hindu mystic poet Mirabai’s devotional poems to Krishna as obsessive fan letters to a cult movie star, and had all my fellow students and professors not only roll with it, but help me make them the best poems about Buckaroo Banzai and Takashi Miike that they possibly could be. I finally learned to give up my ideas of what should be considered “poetic” and write about what I loved. My thesis had four Deep Space Nine references, one Doctor Who poem, a robot love story, poems set on Mars and Europa, and a poem with a title stolen from a line in Battlestar Galactica, among other things. My favorite comment to receive in a workshop was “well… that shouldn’t have worked, but you got away with it.”

Now I’m back in New Jersey with a manuscript to shop around and the occasionally steep challenge of self-motivation. I have been in school for almost literally as long as I can remember, and to be out now is so bizarre and unmooring. Self-imposed deadlines… fun! But I’m getting there. I’ve also started doing voice over work again, which is a blast. I hadn’t had much of a chance to do any acting while I was working on my degree and getting back into that is so exciting. I’ve been volunteering for LibriVox.org, which is an organization that records texts in the public domain. What I love is that they do plays and dramatic readings with parts, so that it’s almost like listening to a radio play. I’m also working on recording a solo audiobook for them, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World. My next post will be all about that process and about her. Warning: I may be a little obsessed with Margaret Cavendish. She is my spirit animal.

I’m writing this at nearly 3:30 am, because there is a lunar eclipse tonight. A beautiful, bright red blood moon should be appearing right now in my sky, but the weather has decided not to cooperate, and currently, I can see nothing but clouds. I may have just now taken a break to go outside and curse the sky…. It didn’t help. Ah well. I just turned on a livestream of the eclipse. They’re playing Pearl Jam in the background. We live in a remarkable age.