January, Dear January

It's been a while since a real update here at Intagliod: blog named after the unbelievably joyous arrival of my first book.

In that time, this has been a place to go with quiet wishes, various sadnesses, celebrations, pretty finds to share in word and image and companionship of the imaginary kind. If anyone was reading along, I'd no way of knowing, but I could imagine someone was and it was companionship to me when I moved to new cities and new selves and had no friends for a time or really, no friends close-by. Here was a place to hang my hope-hat, my poncho of longings. Here was a magical wardrobe to crawl through and build my own globe: mosaiced with the loveliest writing or prettiest thing I saw that day, a stockpot of sensory-finds and sundry emotions and friendship, if only my own, to talk me through some super-dark days.

Then I met A Someone and that Someone has made life feel even richer, but has filled it too, with a little house in the country, our crew of kitties and frogs and garden and deer, raccoons, possum, birds demanding their feeders stay filled, Christmas trees that stay alive by being planted in the yard, a yard that remembers what we give and an us that stays in one place long enough to reap what we sow. It was a busier breathing I began and I love it, but it keeps me often, from returning here.

I wanted to sum up the newnesses though. The kitties that grew old and died within a span of a few short months. The man who helped me grieve and bury them. The decision to foster a trio of orphan kittens and to fail at one of those fosters, thus bringing us our little tuxedo  cat to keep our one year old Cricket company. Then Clementine, because like me she'd waited too long for a keeping-place. The house revitalized with three kitties again, no one yet two. The stampedes that fill our days. The joy of it all. The frog rescues every spring, the little pond that grows the tadpole to pollywog and pollywog to frog and tree frog. Their perfectly articulated miniature selves. The herb garden, tire planters that I took from an abandoned house just as they were to be hauled away. A sixties trend to cut truck tires into floral planters and paint them bright colors and the way that I took that old project, labored over by other older hands and slapped on a new coat of paint, planted some mums at its core and made the house a little more our own with their colorful welcome at the driveway's end.  And beyond that driveway, south, south, south from here, my adored sister has given us a niece and a nephew that fill me with more love than  I thought possible.  Life is good just now and as I know just how tentative our "just nows" are, i want to track that here, share that you, whoever you are, if only really me again at another time when I need to remember how good it all got again after it had at times, been so bad.

The ring. At long last and my first. A Someone became The Someone and before this year ends, I will be married. There is so much celebrating to be done and I am savoring it all. And now the next books: a chapbook called Aloha Vaudeville Doll that will be published by Dancing Girl Press in summer of this year and finally, my collection of poems: The Rub, won a prize and will be out in early 2014 by Elixir Press. I can hardly believe it all.

Building of Unseen Cats
       

When I woke up, it was the middle of the night and
my building was on fire. The hallway was not filled
with smoke, and then quickly it was. I rescued a few
older men from their bathtubs, a few babies from
their cribs. Outside, the air was filled with hair.
Everyone but me was holding a plastic cage with a
cat in it. We weren't supposed to have cats in my
building, but there they all were, an invisible nation
suddenly uncurtained into a blinding and brutal
world. Everyone looked at me with a face that said
let's never speak o f this. Let's not look directly at what
is meant to be loved in secret. Let's, for example,
imagine the sea is always, constantly, and forever
spilling toward us, that our screaming building is
something worth escaping.

Zachary Schmoburg

The Next Big Thing Series

Thanks to Amanda Auchter for tagging me. Watch soon for responses from: Lesley Jenike, Cynthia Arrieu-King and Kelcey Ervick Parker.

Here is the interview:

What is the working title of the book?  The Rub
Where did the idea come from for the book?  A combination of borrowed voices, re-imagined fairytales, a couple of Ophelias, a handful of Pinocchios, some lost and founds, some finds and losses, and what is swapped for "the real."

What genre does your book fall under? Poetry.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

What a question to send one to dreaming. Colin Farrell as the unruly beloved, Rachel Weisz, just because she's Rachel Weisz. Tina Fey as Ophelia.  Pee Wee Herman as Hamlet.  Daniel Craig as Pinocchio.


What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Throw the map out the window, Darling, there's more everything ahead.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? There are so many versions of this book over time. Some version is a dozen years old, another, six months. I swapped poems in and out, changed order, changed my mind, the sheets, hairdressers, and all the while, like most books, it was in a state of continual revision. There is not just one first draft of this book. Other manuscripts grew from this, stole from it and gave back or into it.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
All sorts of scenes, cities, loves and bad choices. Everything I wanted to keep or discard, the poems are always a way to try to remember and try to purge or forget. Mostly they have their own worlds and memories and I just try to listen in on those.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It's a pretty eclectic gathering of poems. I try to imagine everything from "where secret animals might graze" to "other animals" the ones that didn't make it to the ark or this version of the world, to a jive-talkin' Ophelia.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? 
My book won the 13th Annual Editor's Prize at Elixir Press and will be published in 2014.
It is neither agency-represented nor self-published.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY KEITH REHM!

If all day yesterday I had not been putting January 23 on my documents, then perhaps today when I went to write a check at my vet's office, I would not have had to gasp and say, "I missed a friend's birthday."

But I did and so I remedy that this morning.

HAPPY JANUARY 24th DAY OF YOUR BIRTH, FRIEND.

It's been a good year here and I hope that same can be said for yours. I hope beyond that, for joy and happiness each day of this next year.