early tulips

This afternoon, Maya and I pilgrimaged to my dear friend Meryl's house, where she tried tempeh for the first time and also had pasta, strawberries, and olives, and sometimes, yes, all at once.   Meryl has been in Oregon the past three months while her husband had a fancy guest spot with a tattoo artist amongst the pines, and I don't think I'd quite realized just how much I'd missed this poetess dear friend of mine.  We talked about projects of ours--ones that are growing within us, ones that are out in the world, attempting to find homes. We talked about The Wait and the journal we jointly edit poetry for and upcoming readings and adoption processes and vampires in manga and trips to France and what-all else.  All the while, Maya cycled herself up onto tables and tossed dice about the living room and tasted the dirt in her potted plants.  It was a sweet, drizzly afternoon.

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I also mentioned a new reading challenge:  It started when I clicked onto this tumblr post:  My Puffy Face Moment.  It's written by a fellow uofmnmfapoet, it's good, and it was picked up by Newsweek's tumblr.  Woo!  This led me to click over to this tumblr post:  The Part I Edited Out, another of uofmnmfa.  I'd been considering taking a year to read only books by women, and now that I'm no longer twined to another's reading agenda, it makes sense that I give it a whirl.  I won't go full-on with media as Adriane is doing, though I think, for some spaces, I might try a month focusing on another medium, another month on another medium--long enough to have an idea.  This makes me think a lot about the VIDA count.  I'd also like to spend some time projecting the project through the lens of motherhood--presenting only books by women to Maya and such.  She might not understand the editing that is going on, and perhaps all that will happen is she will get grumpy that I've hidden all the Dr Seuss and Eric Carle, or maybe we'll discover something incredible.  Either way, for the time being, I've made a little bookshelf over on Good Reads, and just to be clear:  I am a feeder fish on Adriane's sharky project.  I may have considered doing it for a while, but it's not novel, and she's taking it to a new level.  She's also an essayist, so she'll write about it much more coherently and eloquently.  

And, as I gear up, as the project will commence in May, I have thought:  oh no, Ryan picked up Eduardo's book from the bookstore on the way home yesterday, so I've got to get that in, and I've got Roots going by the bedside, so I darn well better start cruising on that one, and make sure you don't miss any others because at dinner Ryan asked I wonder how long you'll last... and that did it, of course, there's no backing out now...