How is it possible…

….that I have not posted in so freakin long?

Well. I’ve been busy with the Usual Stuff, plus a nice visit with my kids, plus getting ready to teach in the fall. I still have to make my syllabus, but… I’m getting there.

Meanwhile, it’s a beautiful Thursday here in Baltoville, and I am going to post another poem, inspired by my Twitter friend @kwalsham… And then maybe tomorrow I will manage to put something fresh up at FireCat Club, which has been sadly neglected for MONTHS. Which is embarrassing.

So. Unfortunately when my Macbook died, I lost some stuff (LOTS of stuff), including my long poem of heartbreak & despair, Why I Hate Portland. So instead I guess I will offer you this:

September 18, 1862

In the sky above the fire, bats swirl through wifting smoke.

Shoeless, the boy sits alone, fingering a book,
small, leather-bound, closed with dirty twine,
the last memory of his brother.
His dog, a roan-flanked hound,
attached in Virgina as his own camp
follower,
sniffs along the edges of the fire.
A gnarled crumb of biscuit, hard and rancid, is theirs to share.

In a year of fighting, digging, marching back and forth,
he has come to expect
horror, smoke, the echoing whistle of grapeshot,
the scream and stink of dying men, the shattering of silence.

But Sharpsburg is the worst he has ever seen.

In a year of war he has never seen so clearly
how battle ground the day into shards of broken men
and horses left torn and screaming in the fields.
Federal guns mowed a cornfield, taller than a man, until
the crippled stalks stood no higher than the
soldiers dead among the rows.

Yet he knows that blackbirds hide throughout the forest,
waiting out the human folly,
that sunlight still flashes
from the steeple of the
church in town,
and he imagines running away and
finding a girl who would
love him
despite the dreams.

I will keep adding more, as I have more. And I will tag them all as poetry, of course, so you can find them. Thanks for reading.

I know what I did this summer (and other confusing matters of tense)

Wow. It has been so long since I posted here that I am rather embarrassed.

Things have been a little crazy, I guess.  Although I STILL have no job (and not much in the way of prospects, which is scary, until the cool but not very lucrative thing starts up in the fall), I do have my awesome project. And I have what you might call PROSPECTS for fall.

What awesome project? I’m glad you asked!  At school they have an award each spring, the Carol Peirce Award, which one student gets to go pursue SOMETHING over that summer.  This year, I won (yay me!) on account of my proposal.  I suggested that I could use it for research to write a more apparently Trans version of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, set in the Civil War (from then until now, anyway).  They were all, Ooooh, neat.  So my task this summer has been to use the funding to do research.

So far this has meant a lot of Interwebs, and an ever-expanding stack of books about the Civil War (we had quite a few anyway, because we are CW nerds, but…).  Also, in late May, it meant a trip down to Fredericksburg VA to see that battlefield. And in late June, the Otter Half and I hit the road with the Dog and visited Western North Carolina (ah, the mountains! the waterfalls! the songbirds!) and Eastern Tennessee (ah, the humidity! the mosquitoes! the beer!). It was an excellent trip, in many many ways, which I will describe at greater length soon.

A point of clarification:  Tammer, my hero/ine, starts the war attached to the 35th North Carolina Infantry Regiment, but at some point in 1863 ends up in Longstreet’s personal detail, and thus is at Chickamauga (not a regular stop for the 35th NC).  I am still trying to decide whether Tammer also goes to Gettysburg.  More on that later.  Anyway, from fall 1861 through the middle of summer 1863, Tammer’s path is the path of the 35th.  Which includes New Bern NC, the Peninsula campaign and Seven Days battles, Sharpsburg (Antietam to some of you), and Fredericksburg and 1862.

So anyway, we went to Fredericksburg.  WE, of course, is me, plus my constant companion (no, not the Dog, the Otter Half) (if you read Fire Cat Club, you know her as Muscles). It was both jarring and inspiring, a small patch of battlefield surrounded by subdivision sprawl. Still, with effort, I could imagine the ground on that awful day in December 1862.

Part of my confusion with this project has been HOW DO I AVOID WRITING THE TRANNY COLD MOUNTAIN, because I most certainly want nothing to do with THAT. Alas, Inman hits many of the same battles as Tammer.

Fortunately, the War is only the start of my project; perhaps a more accurate model than Orlando would be Pete Hamill’s Forever, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I am re-reading it now, for the nth time, trying to get a handle on how to write one character over hundreds of years.

Fredericksburg was…. Well, a mix. But Chickamauga!!! That was a really good part of the trip. First of all, they have the best visitor center I have encountered so far. The explanations and narratives are balanced, not offensively pro-Union like at Sharpsburg/Antietam. The Rangers are helpful. And they have a truly kick-ass light board explaining the movements of the battle. Should I ever win the lottery, I will buy one of those for Sharpsburg.

I’ll post pix later. For now I just wanted to show up and say hey. More on the whole trip SOON!!!