Sunday, November 02, 2008

Holding my breath...

... till the election on Tuesday. In a strange way I feel like everything is on hold till then. I have a feeling I'm going to be up very late, glued to the returns. I'll be glad to see the end of the political commercials, though. This has been my first experience with living in a swing state, and boy, both parties have certainly spent some serious money on Indiana airtime -- not to mention all the state-level and Indianapolis-area races.

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Went to a good reading tonight at Boxcar Books: Eugene Gloria, Ross Gay, and Curtis Crisler. This was the first reading I'd been to in the store's new location (right next door to my favorite brunch place, the Runcible Spoon); they have a smaller space available for readings than they had in the old location, and it was absolutely packed, uncomfortably so. Nice to see that good a turnout for poetry, though! (I think it was mostly MFA-program folks, as I saw very few people I knew and it was a young crowd.) It was a little hard to hear from the other side of the room, but from what I could hear, the three poets complemented one another nicely. Afterwards I ducked out right away (was feeling a wee bit claustrophobic) and went next door to the Spoon, where I ordered a spiced coffee and drafted a new poem. Always a good sign when a reading makes you want to write.

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Thinking about what I want to read this coming Saturday when I read with Dory Lynch and Shana Ritter. I'll read a good bunch of poems from Breach, since this is the official chapbook-release reading, but I want to read some new stuff too. I hope we get a decent audience!

Maybe I should wait until after Tuesday night to decide what I'm reading, so I can know how depressed everybody's going to be -- or, hopefully, not.

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I'm now officially registered for AWP, so I guess I'm really going. Should be fun, though I'm a bit nervous about it all. I think I'm going to drive to my mom's in northern Indiana and take the train in to Chicago, so I don't have to pay the Hilton's exorbitant parking rates or cope with driving in Chicago. I am so not a city girl.

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It's 1:20 AM. An hour from now, it will be 1:20 AM. This daylight saving time stuff is weird. (We're new to this here in Indiana, and we're still a little freaked out about it, to be frank.)

But it will be nice to see some actual daylight before going in to work, at least for the next few weeks. I'm looking forward to that.

3 comments:

Collin Kelley said...

Good luck with the readings. I'll want to hear a full report about AWP.

I love that we have an extra hour now of sleep in the morning.

Peter Cole said...

thanks for coming out to the event.. hope you had a good time despite being crammed in there.

Keyhole will be at AWP as well. Stop by and say hello

Anne Haines said...

Collin: Oh, you'll hear all about AWP... except of course for whatever parts people give me bribe money NOT to post about. Muahahahahaha. ;)

Peter: Thanks for stopping by! It was a good reading, & worth dealing with the packed conditions. I hope there are some copies of Keyhole left at Boxcar; I'll try to stop by there & pick one up when it's a little less mobbed.