1097 Launches

It's been a really long time since I mentioned it, but a few friends and I have been working on editing a print-and-online little monthly zine, called 1097 Magazine, and the first web version is now online at 1097mag.com. Feel free to come on over and check it out. It's all of our first forays into editing and publishing, so it should be interesting to see how much we trip over ourselves. It's been fun - a LOT of reading - and it definitely helps to get inside the heads of those that read my own work. I never really understood how a minor infraction against submission guidelines could send some editors into an insane fit of rage. Now I do. When you're reading 200 poems, give or take, one being out of order and taking an extra five minutes to format feels like the end of the world, and it's incredibly hard not to reply and just scream your brains out at the thoughtless bastard behind it, until you realize you have been that bastard ... and you don't.

In more personal news, I've been a bit down. The second of Western Oregon's two seasons (the rainy one) has arrived, and I'll need a bit of time to adjust to it. There are other things too, but frankly, this has never been a particularly personal blog. I had one of those once, one of the billions of "Waaaah, I hate my life" blogs, and frankly, I bored myself. It's been an odd year, and that may be all that needs to be said.

Back on the poetry horse

Between coming back home and going back to work, I have been on a vacation hangover, trying to bring myself to sit at a desk for the beautiful daytime hours and get something, anything, done. In the meantime, I've gotten absolute shite done in terms of writing. So I sat down this morning and took a couple of hours to myself and finally put pen to paper again. I think I'm going to go back, at least for a little while, to writing rough drafts on paper. Because I sit all day in front of a computer screen, my eyes are already sick of that particular glow by the time it's writing time, and my fatigue hurts the process terribly. I got some progress done on a few poems I started while in Britain, so that's good. There are also a few anthology deadlines coming up, and so I hope I can get back into the prose habit as well. When I split my writing time between poetry and prose, I think that's when I find myself happiest with the products of both. Oh well. Short post today - not much going on. Bye bye now.

Introduction

How do I start this blog? I've run, and continue to run, a number of blogs around the various interwebs, mostly on soccer. I'm familiar with the blogger's routine of shuffling through the daily news sources to find those few gems worth expanding on, but this is different. This is about me. So, I guess I start with an introduction to me. My name is Ian, and I'm a displaced east coaster, living now in the moist and cloudy confines of the Willamette Valley in Oregon. My formal training is as a scientist, a biologist to be exact, and I have spent the past four years working in northwestern Alaska studying seabirds and the little sea creatures they eat. After that project lost its federal funding, and after a few unwelcome changes in my personal life, I decided to seek therapy in an old habit, my writing. I've always been a huge reader and consumer of both poetry and prose, and wrote a lot for my self, but never thought I could write for the public. Mostly I was just lacking confidence in my work, and thinking that 28 was a little late to start a second (or more accurately, fourth) career. But, in the meantime, I was writing more than ever - pages and pages every day, notebooks every month, and some of it seemed to be better than before. It seemed as if the events of my life in recent years had focused me a little, and made me a little bit more interesting of a person, which I think of as an absolute prerequisite for being a good writer. I don't think I'm a good writer, not yet, but I think I'm getting better, and I'm happy to say that I have recently gotten my first acceptance! A poem of mine, called "You Are" was accepted by the online magazine Chantarelle's Notebook, a small but pretty well-known little website which has published some pieces I've really liked. That will be coming out in August, by the way, and I'll certainly blog about that here. This is my semi-public journal, where I'll talk about my writing, my life, traveling (I'll be in the UK for a good bit of the summer), etc. I hope it's enjoyable to read, or at least, if it's not, that it doesn't take too terribly long. Thanks for coming.

In addition, I am in the process, with a few friends, of putting together an online journal of our own. It will be called 1097 magazine, and will be exclusively dedicated to showing off the talents of new and emerging artists, authors and musicians. I'll be talking about 1097 a lot on here, and the site will eventually have a link to this blog.