Oh, hey, 2014. How you doing.
We're back at school--week three starts tomorrow, and although I have four entirely online courses, all of which are already designed and didn't require updating, I find it hard to get back into the swing of the workload. Maybe it's because I decided to join three committees and do all that service even though I'm not contractually obligated and there's no guarantee that doing such work will even result in an offer of non-temporary, possibly-TT employment? Maybe it's because I'm an overachiever and like to see things done right and like to have a stake and a vote in my place of employment? Maybe because I enjoy coming home on Thursday evenings and getting knocked sideways with the first stress-induced aura of the semester, and then lying on the floor, drinking an IPA and listening to Dave Hause at top volume? WHO CAN TELL.
(p.s.! I am actually not angry like that paragraph makes me sound. Here's proof: a friend from up nort came to visit and we ate family-style at the boarding house in town with the funny vagina name! Poems and nonfiction recently got picked up by Quarterly West, Nimrod, CutBank, Birdfeast, Salamander, Sundog Lit, and The Nassau Review! I have been wearing cozy flannel shirts and RIGHT NOW, REAL TIME, this pie is a-coolin' on the sill!)
On that note, let's get in the time machine and go back to the early weeks of January, when we took our delayed honeymoon roadtrip over to Oxford, Mississippi, and spent two cold days in our version of literary nerd heaven.
Most people didn't understand why Oxford. But it's the home of Larry Brown, and Barry Hannah, two of the B's literary heroes. The program there has fostered some of our other favorite writers, and the food in town is excellent, and so is the bookstore. We ate lots of catfish, and might have gone out to Tula to find the Brown house, driving slowly down the back roads and squinting at the phone photo I'd taken of a page in a book titled A Literary Tour of Mississippi. We lurked around the bookstore until we screwed up the courage to introduce ourselves to the owner and former town mayor. We drank beer underground on a cold night. We found the cemetery where Faulkner, and later Hannah, are buried. We went to the Ole Miss special collections and asked to pull the files and spent a long afternoon looking through first drafts and unpublished stories and letters from Brown's editor at Algonquin Books. We walked around the sort of town that our current one would like to be. And as we drove back to the Boro, the sun set over Dublin, and I twisted the camera over my shoulder and took a few photos of the sunset at 71 miles an hour.
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