I was invited to read from Detours at the IPRC on Wednesday night, with other Burnside Review writers, celebrating the publication of Burnside Review 9.1.
Great audience, great hosts–thank you, all! Nothing like an appreciative crowd and a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. And I came home ready to make stuff. Make books.
For those who’ve never been there, the IPRC (Independent Publishing Resource Center) is a support/advice/equipment/meeting center for zine-creators, self-publishers, letterpress lovers–so cool! I won’t be joining anytime soon (sadly, I live too far away), but this may be the year I finally sign up for that bookbinding class that has long tempted me. The little matters of patience and manual dexterity may trip me up. I am not, craftswise, quite a precision operator. Still, I do seem to have the patience to write and rewrite, so I may be teachable on other fronts.
When we made books in elementary school, I loved it. For years, I made my parents a book (inexpertly but affectionately hand-bound) of poems or stories for Christmas. My kids have brought home cleverly folded and arranged books–expanding accordions, tiny
rooms–that I love to open and refold. Or books might be room-sized: on a recent trip to Pittsburgh, I stood admiringly in Parastou Forouhar’s “Written Room” at The Mattress Factory, though I couldn’t directly read the script. Then there’s the sea nettle’s script, back-lit orange and mesmerizing (and, like the other hundreds of aquarium fans surrounding me, I found just being there was not enough, I had to take it with me as a picture). 
My children are right now making it rain, writing waterfalls across the sun-backed vine maples as they wash the deck. Collectible waterfalls? Probably. Not the porous basement kind a friend just told me about, rather the exuberant chore kind, the let’s-pretty-up-the-yard-we’re-having-friends-over-for-dinner kind. The this-chore-is-bigger-than-we-thought kind.
Cleaning and travel and a narrative detour, some art and some projects and quite a few plans: must be summer!