I Miss You Very Much ships a week from today!

(A broadside I made for my letterpress class last semester. The poem, which

is from I Miss You Very Much, has since been revised a bit.)

I Miss You Very Much starts shipping a week from today! The books look beautiful, and I'm excited for people to start receiving and reading them. If you haven't ordered a copy, you can do so at the Slim Princess Holdings website.

It's been an interesting week. I started class on Monday, taught for the first time this semester on Tuesday (and during that class, a student put his foot behind his head and hopped around the room, so I think it's going to be a good semester), made scones from scratch for the first time and wrote a pantoum that might not suck on Wednesday, and today I get to teach again. Tomorrow is the first Anthology reading of the semester, which is really exciting, and then a houseguest for the weekend, which is also exciting. Busy week, which feels really great after a mostly lazy summer.

Writing that pantoum yesterday felt phenomenal because I've really been struggling with just getting anything on paper. I'd had the idea to write a pantoum about trauma for a while because I think the structure of the pantoum is designed for such subject matter: the way the lines repeat and possibly change a little but ultimately stay the same echoes the way a person constantly recalls a traumatic event and considers many angles but ultimately can't change anything. And I rarely can read a pantoum without finding the repeating lines annoying, so I felt like a pantoum about trauma could make more effective use of the repetition. So the idea had been with me for a month or so, but I'd been dealing with feeling unable to write anything down for several months. But yesterday an entire pantoum draft.

Life is good.