Audio project

Next Thursday I go to Lewis and Clark College to read and record four poems for their archive, Oregon Poetic Voices. So I wonder: maybe I should read the entire damn book and archive it at my site. Why not? They are fun to read, more fun than just about anything I've written. And it wouldn't be a huge project at all, easily done over the summer. I suspect I'll go ahead and do this.

I haven't found a comfortable rhythm with the novella yet. Part of it is space. I need to start working in the basement office again, fewer interruptions. Upstairs, with H here, it's like writing in a mall or something. Lots of activity. The phone rings off the hook when H is home. I get 3 phone calls a year. However, the last time I took the netbook downstairs, it slid off the table and broke, so clearly I need a safer setup than I was using. I have 2 computers and a keyboard down there, pretty crowded. I think I need a portable table and area just for the netbook. The point is, I don't think working on the novella upstairs is going to work.

The other possibility is write it on the PC downstairs, not on the netbook. Use a flash drive to transfer files as I need to. But I'm a little frustrated today that I've made so little progress these last few days, having already "dreamed" the vignettes that I write next. I need to get them down.

Picked the brain of a younger poet in town who was very kind to share info on the local reading scene and so on. He also does book publicity, specializing in poetry, and his rates are pretty reasonable. Maybe I'll hire him to set up readings for me in the fall. I never have chased the reading scene before but I so much enjoy reading from the poems, I seem to be doing this very thing. A first. So far, just the Oct 7 at Blackbird set up. I'm going to try and get in at Wordstock but am a tad late applying -- hoping the July publication of the book will help. If not, I can try again next year if the energy is still there.

S.P., a fine playwright in town, had a Facebook entry about his version of the good old days, which were about ten years ago, so I couldn't resist a comment about my version, 30 years ago. It's all relative. But I got a kick out of seeing that the cycle continues, there always are "good old days" no matter what your point of reference.

But facts also are facts, and 1978 was a theater season at The Production Company like none before or after, which is the subject of my essay on Peter Fornara.