Happiness: We're All in it Together

I saw a wolf on a highway in Louisiana.

Driving through some of Alabama and Georgia and South Carolina I read this book and laughed out loud so many times.

I did not laugh AT it out loud.  I enjoyed the hell out of it–although there is ridiculousness towards the end, involving a Catherine Wheel, and I did wonder why the heroine takes her 9-year old step-kid, who suffers from PTSD and is selectively mute, on dangerous adventures.  But seriously.  Dogs fart.  Things are set on fire.  The heroine’s clumsy sets off a chain of wonderful. It took me 250 miles to read.  It saved me from seeing graveyards of unborn children on I20.  There are so many good things romance novels can do.

There are presents under the Christmas tree here in North Carolina.  I am trying not to over-book this year.  Although each member of my family asked for one.  We are a genre family.  Fantsy/Sci-Fi/Mystery.  Wrapped right now for my kin are the following books: one by  Janet Evanovich, two by the dude who wrote the Game of Thrones books, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, a book about our brains and metaphor, Maus, and whatever anyone got me.  We’re pretty cool.  Except I never ask for romance novels.  I don’t want to know that someone in my family skimmed through the book to look for the sex scenes to see if they’re (there better be more than one) any good and the book is worth it.   Just the thought of my dad saying to someone in Barnes & Noble, “Would you rate this steamy?” turns my stomach. Although he’s the one who made me read all those goddamn J.D. Robb books.  Oh Roarke.  Oh Dallas.  I bough 27 from the series in a lot on ebay this summer.  It took me 24 days to read them.

There’s all of that.  Also–Weather Reports You was my 2nd favorite read this year.  For six months I’ve been thinking about all the weather in the titles of the books I loved this year.  Chris Martin, Aaron Burch, Ryan Call.  I am going to wait to see if 2012 is the year of weather and then I’ll realize that every year was the year of weather in all the books.

Except Meredith Duran’s The Duke of Shadows was my 1st favorite read this year.  I’ve read it seven times so far and shadows aren’t weather so it might’ve ruined the roll I was on.  But I’m recruiting incredibly smart people into loving this genre I love by giving them this book.  It is so wonderful.  I hold my breath when I think about it.  The historical details, the intrigue, the characters.  I read 52 romance novels this year (argh I went nuts and bought every single Lisa Kleypas), and have probably read close to 400 in my lifetime (the number’s low only because I re-read Judith McNaught even though I sometimes hate myself for it, Jennifer Ashley, Sheri Thomas, Eloisa James, Laura Kinsale, Victoria Dahl, Lisa Kleypas (GYPSIES!) and Elizabeth Hoyt so often) and I think this is the best one I’ve ever read.

I also reviewed Iris Winterbach’s special kind of amazing, The Book of Happenstance, at Necessary Fiction. 

Anyway, my Buffalo Bills are about to play my husband’s Denver Broncos.

So…cheese curds and early beers to all and to all a good night!

In what can only be the most random/greatest find in my life, allow me to introduce you what should’ve been a from the basement billboard hit:

I work alongside the amazing folks at American Short Fiction (OH MY GOD you MUST READ Christopher O’Connor’s “Under the Big Night Sky” in the latest issue. My immediate thoughts were: HOLY SHIT. Vonnegut. HOLY SHIT. God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. (My husband has a tattoo of the phrase “Neither cast ye your pearls before swine” on his arm) Enough said).
For WORK, I have to go to Five Things: Cocktails, a stop on Austin’s Lit Crawl at Cheer Up Charlie’s during the Texas Book Festival.

All of that? And:
I get to help bring creative writers into public schools to work with students. Who write the most beautiful things I will ever read in my life.

(In Denver one of my students wrote a poem “The Killer Donkeys” that starts “The Donkeys kiss / whoever they want whenever / they want” SWOONFESTFOREVER)
I get to help bring creative writers into senior centers to work with Austin’s Silver Voices in Ink. Who write the most beautiful things I will ever read in my life.

There are things in the suck in the world.  But my work-life isn’t one of them.

see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

that you check this out.  I’m the Writer in Residence at Necessary in Fiction in September.  I love writing reviews for them and was so thrilled that they asked me.  I know this first post is “me”, from my novel of fictional essays,  but there’s a lot left to be devoured in the month, from many other people who have really interesting things to say.  So you should check it out.

There’s a really wonderful interview with the magical Jennifer Denrow up at the Sonora Review.  She says the most beautiful things.

“I’m here is one of my favorite declarations because it feels so true. And I don’t know what it means.”

“I know what’s important for me—that I continue to look at things, past the point of seeing them, and then past that, into not seeing them.”

“It’s difficult to know the appropriate boundary for imagination—at what point it moves from an attempt to decipher the world into a construction of the reality of the world. I can’t ever tell the difference but I continue to try.”

I will read everything she ever writes.  Because everything she writes and is is about a kind of dynamic discovery of discovery.

Most recently, I read California.  At Canyon Lake.  On my Wedding Anniversary escape from the 105 degree every dayness here in Texas.

What I can say about this book is this:  I held my breath when I read it.

A version of me that is not me will be reading from my forthcoming choose-your-own adventure chapbook, “You’re Going to Die Jess Wigent” tonight at The Moon Stone Arts Center in Philadelphia! This is some quantum shit that Fact-Simile is creatin.  I will be live-streaming the version of me that is not me reading.  Perhaps this is a sign of the higher harmonic generation end of times!

He comes home tomorrow, July 20th.  As you might expect, this, is, you know, a big deal.  It’s also a big deal in other ways: because in some way it also ends the time in Wales for both of us.  I’ve lived vicariously through him for the past two months.  When it’s been 100 degrees FOREVER in Austin, on Monday he told me he had to turn on the heat it was so cold and rainy.  I don’t think there’s been a single Skype-moment when he hasn’t been wearing his NorthFace winter jacket.  Anyway, I’ve started writing two books about Wales: one, a hybrid non-fiction-ish type thing, as a way to honor the beautiful, strong country that it is, and the other a lewd historical romance because I’m tired of only reading historical romances, now I’ll write one.  Anyway, here’s two videos I posted on our “We’re in Wales” blog (the song in the first is from the North Wales band Joy Formidable the other has the same song, Bombadil’s “I am a Pyramid”, the Scottish band Loch Locmond’s “Wax & Wire” and I think Sigur Ros) and a tiny part of the non-fiction-ish thing:

It is because of my husband that we came to Northern Wales.  But I chose the island where we live: Anglesey: Ynys Môn: Mother of Wales. To see how living near the sea transforms a face.  To hear what the salt and wind do to an ancient language tumbled with double consonants.

There is proof of humans from prehistory here.  This place where when we hang our washing out to dry it gets wetter.  Fifty-three degrees north.  Where the wind wrestles in every direction, bullies you into a corner where it will come from behind brick to upend your umbrella and composure.

The English.  Too many of them shit on where we live.  Our perfect island, where we disappeared to spend our first year married, where the sea looks like a stream as it rushes through the Menai Straits, rushes deadly in the direction away from Ireland. “It’s the home of sheep fuckers,” someone in the pretty city of Bristol , England says. But the Romans never took it.  And King Edward couldn’t either. On our island are people who descend not from dukes but druids.

Also:

There are real black sheep

here.  They exist outside

of song.

There’s a lot more already–did you know, for instance, that a Welshman discovered America first? I guess you’ll have to wait to find out more.  Or, you could always go to Wikipedia, like I did, and look up Prince Madoc and ignore everything it says about “myth” or “lies.”.  It’s not as if he’s not already famous. I mean, Southey wrote a whole book/poem about him.

Anyway, Frank gets home a week before his birthday.  A present arrived that I opened because I am also a mail-slut and checking the mail is my favorite part of every single day.