in which hellkitten goes to writing camp

welcome to hellkitten's temporary resucitation caused mainly by a need to get away from all that serious writing i'm supposed to be doing & the endless frustration arising from using substandard web editing programs that's leaving the website in a pathetic state of disrepair [www.hellkitten.com]...prefacing disclaimer - while you can email me your comments all you want, it's doubtful i'll pay them any mind unless you know me well enough to know my middle name or you've actually written something i didn't throw against the wall in complete disgust or at least in a sad 21st century attempt to emulate that icon of intelligent womanhood, miss dorothy parker...so here goes

july: this month i go to my almost alma mater, Reed College for Tin House 2005, spend a little too much time in the woods of Oregon, discover a new beer and rediscover the genius of denis johnson (and his stylin' hawaiian shirts), not to mention dorothy allison (as good a breakfast companion as she is a writer), chris offutt (great teacher, nice shirts!), francine prose, nick flynn (dancing fool and hula hooper extraordinaire), d.a. powell (the nicest Real Poet I've met yet), aimee bender & more...wherein I also learn more about writing in one week of offutt workshops than possibly all of the fiction workshops i've suffered through over the course of the last two decades...this followed by a visit the Family Home where i see that "the new people are keeping it up pretty good", meet cousins i didn't know i had, resist attempts at conversion by a rock climbing born again xian teen from northern B.C. (damn those canadians anyway), and return to a big fat stack of rejection letters, the biggest roaches you've ever seen ("even bigger than texas!"), and the day job...rounding out july deep in the summer hell of another nyc heatwave/terror scare, endless CSI reruns, no money to do all that laundry, no Big Plan for the Future and too many damn good books to read...some of the recent and not so recent reads will as usual be reviewed here eventually along with whatever else crosses my immediate horizon - lately it's backpacker magazine (like porn for the desk slave), all those pesky documentaries you know you're supposed to watch but really would rather watch CSI like the rest of the country, and of course don't forget everything you never wanted to know about all the places to drink, eat and listen to music in nyc & probably some leftover stuff from the old hellkitten.com back around the turn of the 21st century before what's-her-name met some guy on the internet with a car and a job and moved to long island to sell underwear for a living...

quotes of the moment:
"the longer I listen to people, the less I know." - dorothy allison
"if everything lives happily ever after, make it worse." - chris offutt
"you can't just barf on a page & call it a poem - it's important to have some sort of container there." - d.a. powell