nicenotnice

This blog is currently functioning as a runway. It's a warm up. It's the time when you twist the key in the back of the monkey or rev the toy car in reverse, the little gears and springs inside clicking as they pull taut, before you let it go spinning off out of control across the table, over the edge and onto the floor. In a beautiful way, hopefully. And while I'm not going to publish anything I completely hate--this is one of the only representations of my writing out in the world so I want to be at least somewhat conscious of what is available to potential readers/publishers/agents/slush pile readers, etc--I'm not giving it my best. Because I want to sell my best, because I work really, really hard on it and I would like to get paid to release it from the grip of my hot little controlling hands. Actually my hands are pretty big.

I'm realizing more and more that this particular residency is kind of perfect for the writing I'm doing. Much of the story I'm telling takes place in the South, or in the West, or in the desert. Much of it in Austin, in Arizona, in Joshua Tree. A great number of the most significant periods of my life--be they months or days or a moment in a bathroom, stabbing the passcode into someone else's phone--have occurred in the desert. This is odd because I spent the first 22 years of my life in Illinois or Wisconsin, but 22-30 were pretty much a non-stop shit show, which makes for more interesting writing, and that's when I was in the West. I also think the desert weird and dangerous and there's some old magic or something out here. Like if I were to have a spiritual awakening or finally meet my spirit animal, it would be in the desert. I just feel a little more receptive to whatever is out there, I guess. 

I'm going to put on an old album and make salsa with dull knives, because that is what I used to do in the essay I am working on, and maybe my spirit will travel back in time to inhabit the body of 23-year-old Brooke and access all those feelings and angst. Maybe I will just get jalapeno on my fingers and then touch my face.