[vintage UtR] Club Bangers are Made Not Born; or

It's always interesting to watch the evolution of my own thoughts and ideas. It wouldn't read the same if I wrote it today. Similar but not the same. Anyway...

Monthly Meter: July

fellowship/publication submissions: 7 fellowship/publication acceptances: 1 fellowship/publication rejections: 4 books: Black Rage - Drs. William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs Pym - Mat Johnson Secret Shame: I see dumb people. Mantra of the Moment: "Do not thin yourself. Be vast. You do not bring the ocean to a river."

Myth Maker

maybe something like but not really mythological--I probably can't judge for myself because I believe in myself (at least my existence) on most days...

Monthly Meter: March

fellowship/publication submissions: 1 fellowship/publication acceptances: 1 fellowship/publication rejections: 1 books: 0 Secret Shame: Spring please and thank you. Mantra of the Moment: Spring please and thank you.

Monthly Meter: May

fellowship/publication submissions: 5 fellowship/publication acceptances: 0 fellowship/publication rejections: 1

Monthly Meter: June

Secret shame; I may or may not plan my dinner around episodes of A Different World and/or Jeopardy. Sometimes maybe.

Breathing Lessons 101 at North American Review Bicentennial

So I presented Breathing Lessons 101 for the first time as the multi-media project it is--well, with some of the photos I intend to use anyway--at the Bicentennial of the North American Review in Cedar Falls, Iowa. The two women on my panel were also multi-media artists, one a fiction writer, Susan Jackson Rogers, talked [...]

Di-Di Mau: A Memorial Day Reflection

The grinning boy that never became a man represents so many soldiers that left parts or all of themselves on battlefields. I often say that I am happy to know my dad; honored I was chosen to be his. But I am fully aware that the man I know is not the one my mother fell in love with and married. That guy seems like a cool dude--not necessarily cooler than the man I know. But I would've liked to have known him outside of stories and pictures (and maybe gotten some of his speed skills--he was a track phenom too). But I was denied that. War does that. War requires that. Freedom requires that. On Memorial Day, when we memorialize the physical bodies lost in service, we have to also remember that those who came back physically alive did not come back whole. And on Memorial Day, I memorialize them--and the parts of them we lost--too.