happenings: january 2016

this year is off to quite a start. a good one, i think. spiderweb salon successfully hosted our third annual winter formal last weekend, and a few days later i sat down with pariah art and three incredible writers to record our first podcast episodes. exciting!

i am working on being more focused right now & getting shit done. cutting back on drinking and the whole thing. it's hellishly great. and just in time too, because this month is stacked. here are some of the things i am up to and the reasons why maybe we might not see as much of each other for a few weeks unless we're collaborating on something... or if you can make it to any of these wonderful events! i really hope you can. (if it helps, this is my birthday month and i'd love to see my friends out & enjoying some art/poetry parties...so come on!) okay:

January 16 - performing ORBIT (a poetry and noise collaboration) with Lauren Belmore at The Wild Detectives in Dallas, TX
(opening for Bill Nace and Jake Meginsky as they come through on their US tour)


January 27 - co-hosting Pegasus Reading Series at Kettle Art in Dallas, TX with Sebastian Paramo
This month we host poet and translator team Kim Kyung Ju and Jake Levine, with Karissa Morton and music from Kent Evans.

photo by cameron cox, words by fatima-ayan malika hirsi, host of dark moon

January 28 - reading poetry at Dark Moon Poetry and Arts in Arlington, TX

January 31 - showcasing an art installation & recorded poetry set at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, TX 
WordSpace presents In/Verse Looped at Challet Dallas. this is a reprisal of the show we did in October at the Common Desk.


&go.

new year project

Dear friends and people of the internet,

I am working on a project & would like to collaborate with you! Your assistance is necessary for me to complete it.

To participate, please send me your New Year's resolutions, or if you don't prefer to use that terminology, please share what you hope to do/accomplish in the year 2016. You can send me as many or as few as you want and they can be as vague or as specific or as funny or as serious as you'd like! 

Your name will not appear with your contributions.

Please feel free to share this with your friends & family and have them respond as well, or just post/email their responses to me. In any case, I encourage you to talk to your loved ones about their hopes and dreams because it is important to know what they people in your life are looking to get out of their time and what they want to accomplish. It makes it all the easier to support them and love them in a way that works for everyone.

You can post your responses in a comment here, on Twitter @fiveglue, or send them to my email, fiveglue@gmail.com. Your name does not need to be attached to anything but if an email is provided or if we are friends on the Facebooks, I will keep you apprised to the project and how we will celebrate your contributions soon.

I will not be using any contributions made after Dec. 31, 2015.

Thank you so much for your help. As a little thank you, here is a picture of my cats:

crab fat mag

My poem {the books in my library} has found a home in Crab Fat Magazine. Issue 6, pg 31. Feels nice to be in such good company; if you have some time, check out the issue for free on their website:

bailey and dora

I did it! I made a chapbook! Everyone has been very kind and supportive about this little DIY number featuring beautiful art by Cameron Cox, and if anyone else is interested in a copy, there are still a few left after the Spiderweb masquerade so I would be happy to send you one if you get in touch with me. It might cost you a beer. 

In case you haven't been following along, this chapbook is a collection of poems i wrote for the She's A Bastard show that took place a few weeks back; it's a gender-swapped poetic retelling of A Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of a recently-deceased queer female artist. Get them while they are hot and, you know, exist.

poems and layout by courtney marie, artwork by cameron cox

lecturing etc.

Last week i got to speak to a wonderful classroom of fiction students and aspiring writers at UT Dallas. Looking forward to following these students on their journey from the page to the stage.

haints star

Two excellent writers, Colin Winnette (author of Haints Stay and Coyote) and Sarah Gerard (author of Binary Star) came to visit recently and we were very happy to host them at a Spiderweb show just for the occasion. A great crew of local writers and artists gathered 'round to regale our visiting friends with poems, stories, and songs, and the two travelers, tired of reading the same old things night after night, actually did an excerpt-swap. It was a special treat for everyone who joined us. Also notable, this was our first-ever show at Paschall Bar in Denton, and I think it was quite a success.

colin and sarah slinging books post-show

i did a fragments set and a short excerpt at this show

colin winnette reads from sarah gerard's binary star

she's a bastard

Had a wonderful time performing at She's A Bastard last weekend. For my set I re-wrote poems using The Picture of Dorian Gray viewed through a gender-swapped lens. (For those of you familiar with the book, my retelling was written through the perspective of a queer female artist named Bailey, of course, after the atrocious murder.) The poems were fun to write, even if some were finished at the very last minute, and the rest of the badass writers (Bonnie Stufflebeam, Bess Whitby, Lauren Belmore, and Makayla Price) all had really exciting performances too. 

I might put together a little book of poems using the works made for this show, since I kind of want to share them with the world but can't think of a journal that might be that into the specifics of the project. (Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough yet.)

Oh & everyone dressed up and we all had drinks and a few laughs afterwards. My outfit was not quite subtle; anyone not attending the readings must have thought I was really jumping the gun on Halloween. Or, you know, dead.