Summer News and Autumn Goals

I haven’t posted a whole lot this year but it’s been a busy summer so far. A quick trip to Philadelphia, a cancelled camping expedition, baseball games, pool adventures, parades, and I moved in with Amelia and Henry at long last. I’m settling in and getting back into a writing groove after spending most of the spring packing. Beyond a busy summer personally, I’ve been busy publishing and writing too.

I released my second book of the year, We Have Waited Long Enough, with my friends Kevin Ridgeway and Gabriel Ricard. I saw it as kind of a band but instead of music we made poetry, sharing poems and writing response poems back and forth until we ended up with a book. It was great fun and we did an online reading with more readings in the future. Keep an eye out for that this autumn.

I also did a reading at Dorn Space up in Gloversville, NY, a gorgeous little town out in the rolling hills and farmland past Schenectady. That was with a bunch of great poets who each brought very different styles to the mic, and I read mostly from my book Talavera Sunsets, available from Bottlecap Press (plug, plug, plug!).

I’ve been submitting poetry collections to contests but not many poems individually to magazines, save for The Paris Review (not holding my breath). I’m working on a full revision to an old novel I wrote over 14 years ago called The Last Cold Night, a noir/mystery that takes place in Troy NY during the Depression with Gothic and Lovecraftian horror elements. I rewrote it a few times since then but this is by far the best version. It was once 125,000 words, now down to 87,000. Much better, tighter, faster. I have a small press in mind for that, and then it’s on to one of the three first drafts I’m halfway through, one horror, one rural noir, and one a small family drama about a mom and son in a trailer park in 1989.

This fall has a lot going for it so far. I have a reading planned in September that takes place inside a cavern (yes, a full-on cavern) and trips to San Antonio planned (not one but two). Henry has never been to a SeaWorld and maybe it’s time he saw a whale do a backflip, or at least ride the Rio Loco. I’ll have more readings and releases coming soon, so keep an eye out here.