The skinny of late. And pictures.

1) In the running for a creative nonfiction prize. If I could ask for you to go somewhere and vote for me, I would.

2) Won a fellowship to the Summer Literary Series for Creative Nonfiction in Lithuania. Only goes toward tuition, so between room & board and airfare (and double it because I'd have to/demand on/want to take my kid with me), there's no way I can go. But they gave me something, and I'm focusing on the compliment of that.

4) Had a run in with a crazy in a green pickup truck today. He cut me off (he was in a left-turn-only lane at a light, I was in the go-straight land, but he went straight instead left, directly into the path of my straight-going car), and when I slammed on the breaks and the horn, he stopped his car, got out, came over to my car yelling at me to "Slow it down, bitch!" (I was doing about 12 miles an hour at the most, having just pulled out from a red light.) "Slow it down! I'm an undercover cop and I'm looking for an address! So back off!" Took pictures of the back of his car, drove a couple blocks away and called the police.

5) Working on trying to find Clifford Irving, the author of Fake! and the controversial/hoaxed Howard Hughes biography that's the basis of the film Hoax. Anybody out there conveniently his cousin or niece or something?

6) Have apparently forgotten how to count.

Ohio Turnpike

I've been goofing around with tilt shift and and old photos. I don't have a camera that's capable of creating the effect, or Photoshop (which has a great process for doing tilt shift), but I found an (extremely, thoroughly, utterly, completely) simplified version for free that does an okay job. I wouldn't have been opposed to spending a couple of bucks on a decent program, but they all seem to be modules or attachments or whatever to big, fat programs (read: expensive) like Photoshop, so there you go.

Pektor's Hill, looking down at Pektor's farm.
(refuses to click to larger image, for some reason)

Train in Duluth

These are a couple of snaps. I think they're okay - not as good as some I've seen - and I know some things I can do to get better ones out of the freeware (like go snap some pictures from heights and better angles). 

South Bethelem, looking down at Bethlehem Steel.

Plaza outside by Shedd Aquarium, Chicago.

Getting work out there.

Thank you, Hotel Amerika, for taking my prose poem, Woof, and my whatever-it-is-lyric-essay(?), Exclusions. Can't wait to see them in the special spring issue, "Aphorisms."

Fresnel lens + eyeballs = weird.

This blog so messy, so, so messy.

I swore that, if I ever did this blog thing, my pages wouldn't look like those designers' nightmares you so frequently run into around the web. But, sure enough, that's basically exactly what I've made.

No much news lately. Couple pieces in the most recent Midway Journal (Volume 5, Issue 3). Best thing is, the next person down from me is my friend, and fabulous poet, Colleen McCarthy. I especially love "Hide" - it's luscious.

I managed to get a stack of submissions and grant proposals and contest entries in the mail in the last couple/three weeks. Now it's time to sit back and wait for the thousands of dollars to roll in.

Make sure you get on over to matchbook: stories quite short plus critical thoughts and submit an entry for their Ad Story project. You're gonna love the idea - it's super dorktacular.

Essay Daily: Not Really So Daily: Things I'm fond of that can be found in a review o...

Although I've already shown this off to a number of people, in emails, on Facebook, etcetera, I figure I might as well put it everywhere I can and at this point the only location lacking a link is now (well, not really, not anymore) this blog.

I was contacted by Craig Reinbold, a staff writer from Essay Daily, who was writing a review of South Loop Review Volume 12, and was particularly enamored by, and also somewhat puzzled by, my piece with the spurious title, "Untitled". Craig was intrigued, but felt the piece needed more, and was curious about how I saw the little "art exercise". Did I view it as an actual construction project? What was the piece doing, exactly?

I explained how "Untitled" came about, that the exercise in South Loop was actually just the first page of a four-page essay, and that I personally have a hard time seeing it stand on its own. Neither the first nor the second part entirely works without the other (the first even less so without the second). In retrospect I was probably too eager to see the piece in print, and probably shouldn't have released it in pieces this way. But the article in Essay Daily is a marvelous vindication of my feelings that the exercise cannot stand alone, and that it was kind of a weird editorial decision to excerpt it this way.

Essay Daily: South Loop Review Volume 12 review

Here's the portion of the piece that SLR12 took:

One of the undergraduate editors of South Loop wrote some short reviews for everyone who read or spoke at their publication party. She was very kind and generous with nice comments, and I thank her.

South Loop Volume 12. Reviews of the readers from Enjolique Bender.

South Loop Review Publication Celebration

If you're in Chicago on Thursday, October 21, swing by Columbia College to hear me read at the publication party for South Loop: Creative Nonfiction+Art Issue 12. My good friend, Holly Vanderhaar, will be reading as well, and it'll be Chicago in October, and that's just dandy. Even better, the event is part of the Creative Nonfiction Week at Columbia - there should be plenty to do and lots of great people to talk to.

South Loop Review

3:30 PM

Columbia College

618 Michigan Avenue

2nd Floor at Stage Two

Chicago, Illinois

Current publication info:

"The Myth of the Prose Poem" will appear in Sentence 8. Summer 2010. Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics is edited by Brian Clements and published by Firewheel Editions.

http://www.firewheel-editions.org/sentence/current.htm

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" and "Measurement of a Man" will appear in South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction and Art #12, fall 2010. South Loop is the literary journal of Creative Nonfiction Program at Columbia University and is edited by RéLynn Hansen.

http://cms.colum.edu/southloopreview/

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" also received an honorable mention in the Fourth Genre 2010 Michael Steinberg Essay Contest. The contest is held by Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, the nonfiction literary journal of Michigan State University. The journal is currently edited by Marcia Aldrich; the contest submissions were judged by the journal's founding editor, Michael Steinberg.

http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/

Befallen

A cubic stone. Lapis exillis. Stones, from a small dark cloud. Angular black pebbles. Warm polished pieces of flint. A cylindrical marble object of unknown origin. Warm oval rocks and stones, up to sixteen pounds in weight. A ball of limestone containing fossil shells and a creature like a trilobite. One half-pint of red rocks. Layered metamorphic rock.

Jack perch and sun perch. Water lizards. Living snakes. Thick sheets of white spider web. Periwinkles. Cut worms. Dead birds including ducks, catbirds, woodpeckers, many birds of strange plumage, and canaries. Catfish, trout, and perch. Unidentified living creatures. Fish. Largemouth bass, sunfish, shad, and minnows; some frozen, some merely cold, all fit for consumption. Live frogs and toads. Fish. A monkey, destroying a clothesline post. Hundreds of fatally injured ducks. A small shower of thirty-four fish, each about two inches long. A single fish.

Hundreds of golf balls. Eighteen inches of heavy chain. Two large metal balls, sixty-five pounds and one-hundred-ten pounds. A six-pound piece of charred metal, pierced by two drilled holes. A large brick of metal turned up at the ends and pierced through by two large holes.

Burning sulfur. Lumps of transparent fiery jelly that disintegrates into fine white particles. Cinders, from a small dark cloud, that set fire to the ground. Flammable sulfur rain. A fireball. Fireballs and burning cinders.

Blood and meat. Liver, brains, and blood. Strips of bloody flesh, covered in fine white hairs. Meat. Flakes of fresh beef.

Rock candy. Green peaches from a dark cloud.

A domed mass of quivering purple jelly. A very large, pale yellow object, descending slowly.