December 2oo7 September 2oo7 It’s September, and nerdy projects are on in full force here at La-La HQ. I did a lively and interesting interview with Will Brown, who hosts and produces the podcast program Cloudy Day Art, which is all about poetry. Will was kind enough to interview me about my interest in poetry and he asked me to read three of my poems, too. So I did. The show should be live in early October, after the one featuring an interview with Ted Kooser, 13th poet laureate of the United States. Go Will! I participated in my friend Niku Arbabi’s art show, opening October 2 at the Morgan Lane art gallery in Austin, Texas, by sending her a couple of mail-art postcards. Niku is a talented artist and crafter and she has put together this large mail art show called the Ephemeral Mailbox Museum, which includes a participatory exhibit featuring postcards like the ones I sent. For my contribution I made two cards in what I’m calling the Weeds Series. They are meant to look like personal ads for two different women, but their names are the names of plants (weeds, actually) and so are their descriptions. One goes like this: Hello, boys. My name is Viola Papilionacea but you can call me Wild Violet. I’m the one you’ve seen creeping along the ground with my tiny leaves shaped like hearts. I’m fertile, aggressive, and hard to kill. Niku is a zinester and artist who has many successful projects under her belt and underway. Check them out. White Blackbirds has been sent to Zagreb, Croatia, where it will be included in a zine reading lounge at the city’s first Ladyfest on October 12-14. Isn’t that neat? This Was Before You Were Born, my collection of spooky little family stories, is now available on my zine page. Also, and this is very special, I recently made the acquaintance of a poet named Amanda Laughtland. Mandy writes these incredibly powerful short poems, often with a great sense of a humor; they really kill me. She has an interest in found texts and is working on a book project of poems inspired by the postcards sent to her parents’ neighbors over the course of 50 years. She is going to include my found poem “Find Your Way” in her literary journal Teeny Tiny. (She’s also going to use my essay “I Live at Home,” which I wrote about moving back home with my mother when my father died, in the creative writing course she teaches—alongside Joan Didion’s essay “On Going Home.” Ted Kooser, Joan Didion, and me: friends! Hee!) I will be carrying current and back issues of her delightful zines and mini-chapbooks in my distro; look for them soon. August 2oo7 Hello, my friends. I have a new poetry zine out. It’s called Transcribing Birdsong and it’s a bunch of new stuff plus the best of One Room Schoolhouse, Bloody Yesterday, Breakdancing for the Pope, and Groundtruthing the Sanctuary. I may take these four off the zine market but for the time being they're available through my distro. My more niche poetry books—Word Math, which is found poetry; Learning to tell time, a haiku project; and Hallowing of a House, a long self-contained poem—will not be collected in Transcribing Birdsong, and will remain available as separate zines. And for those of you who have come here looking for the new project I’ve been promoting, This Was Before You Were Born (which will be a collection of slightly terrifying family stories I’m banging out on a typewriter), it’s almost finished. It will be out in early September. Oh you guys, I can’t wait until autumn. July 2oo7 I recently finished an interview zine called White Blackbirds: conversations with women who aren’t married and don’t want to be, and all I can say is wow. I think that, without having given it much thought, I had assumed that any women who responded to my call for participation would have lives that were more or less like mine. Why did I think that? There has turned out an incredible diversity of perspectives in this zine, which makes me smile and make little fists of excitement—you know, like how tiny little kids do. The women in this zine are from the UK, Australia, and the US; they are straight and queer; they are single moms, writers, activists, and all manner of other things. They are even more fascinating than I thought they’d be, and so are their reasons for choosing to remain single. When I finished the zine I posted a notice announcing its birth on an online message board for zinesters, and I’ve already gotten an almost overwhelming response, from people wanting copies of it as well as from people asking me if they could participate in a future issue, if I ever do one. I think I will. The institution of marriage is obviously in flux, and this frank discussion of its limitations really seems to be striking a chord with women—and a few men—from Generation X on down to the Millennials, those little doll babies. Please e-mail me if you have any questions about it, would like to sell it, would like to write about it or interview me, or to request a copy. You can also buy one for one buck on the “zines” page of this site. The title White Blackbirds is taken from an old Irish expression that goes, “There will be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot.” June 2oo7 Ooh, The New Confessionals got a lovely write-up in “From the Stacks,” a weekly column by the Utne Reader’s zine librarian. Hooray for Utne, fighting the good indy-publishing fight since 1984. May 2oo7 Hey folks. Here’s an update for you. I just got a couple of zines accepted at Microcosm, which is an amazing publisher and DIY media distributor. I’ve admired the work they do for a long time so I’m very happy to be a part of things with them. They’ll be carrying The La-La Theory as well as a title that I’m not at liberty to reveal because it is “by” my top-secret nom de zine. Check out Microcosm; you’ll discover some interesting things. I’m excited too because in early June I’ll be participating in a panel discussion about digital literature at the famous West Chester Poetry Conference. They asked me to be on the panel because of the Inquirer column I started at the beginning of the year. I hope to meet a lot of poets and participate in some of the workshops. Another awesome thing is that Mike Peich, the director of the conference, also runs an all letterpress publishing imprint at West Chester called Aralia Press, and he’ll give a demonstration of it there. Can’t wait. I have finally finished a compilation zine called The New Confessionals. It’s an anthology of funny, moving, and unique first-person pieces from zines by 12 different women, and it has a lovely illustration on the cover by comics artist Liz Baillie. I hope you will consider buying a copy from me. One copy costs $3, and I am sending every penny of this to a fine nonprofit organization here in Philadelphia that helps children who need shelter and other services. One last thing: I’m working on a new project called White Blackbirds, which will be a collection of interviews with women and girls who have made the decision not to marry. If this is you, get in touch! (email: katie at thelalatheory dot com.) The name comes from an old Irish saying that goes, “There’ll be white blackbirds before an unwilling woman ties the knot.” March 2oo7 Hello, rabble! I just got back from the taping of a radio show called Live at the Kelly Writers House. Live is a monthly reading series performed in a lovely old house at the University of Pennsylvania, which hosts tons of different kinds of readings, writers’ groups, and the like. The show airs on the public radio station XPN. I was very excited to have been asked to participate, and even though I was so nervous I thought I’d have a stroke I think it went okay. I read five poems from three different zines and one work-in-progress (Lily’s forthcoming traditional-form poetry zine, Obsolete). My voice is way quavery during my little introductory question thing but the poems sound all right, and I'm really happy to have shared them this way. The other readers sound great: there was Justin who does “Decades of Confusion Kill the Insect”; Kate, who does an awesome zine of urban exploration called “Thermidor”; King Wenclas read from a zine-novel he wrote just after September 11; and Casey, who organizes the Philly Zine Fest, read a piece about technology. A local singer-songwriter with a gorgeous, classic voice named Birdie Busch played two songs. The show airs on Monday, April 2 at 8 pm. Tune in, suckas. January 2oo7 Man, I love the new year. I don’t like New Year’s Eve, mind you. I just like a fresh start. Here’s what’s been happening with me in 2007 so far: I started a new column for the Philadelphia Inquirer that will cover the phenomenon of online literature. I plan to talk about the space where traditional forms meet new media and in effect create new forms. It will run every other week in the Currents section of the Sunday Inquirer. I’ve been soliciting, reading, and acquiring some really fucking good fiction and poetry zines for my distro, which I plan to have stocked and ready to promote by March. My own newest zines, Lily & Hyacinth Go To The Renaissance Faire and One-Room Schoolhouse: Poems, are being carried by Bluestockings, a radical bookstore in New York’s lower east side. This month I also made a tiny zine called Ground-Truthing the Sanctuary, which is a collection of 4 sonnets I wrote after visiting a nature sanctuary in southern New Jersey. I’m working away on a bunch of other zine projects. The New Confessionals will be a compilation zine of first-person writing from zines by women and girls. I’ve decided to donate all the proceeds to a charity that supports women and families who need shelter and other services because of poverty and/or abuse. I plan to promote the hell out of the zine once it’s finished. And meanwhile, Lily is hard at work on her traditional-form poems. My goal is to have her book finished and printed by March. |
