RachelVB.com

Category: Writing Life

  • There are worse addictions

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    rachelvb
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    My mom is coming! In one week! I have no idea what we are going to do yet, but I don’t care! I just hope the weather is nice and not like it is now – 40 and rainy and possible snow. I want her to enjoy our yard, the weeds and lumps and Iris…

  • And And And…

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    rachelvb
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    Today is another night shift. I woke up too early and will definitely fall asleep at my desk once 11:15 pm rolls around. I’m still bitter about all of it, but am pretending what’s it’s like if writing were my real day job. Still in pjs, coffee mugged and scalding, a scarred banana waiting to…

  • Pretending your a cat day

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    rachelvb
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    Today, we start the night shifts at work. They’ve been shuffling people around to other community papers and decided not to rehire the positions where there are holes – ununionized us – we get to fill the holes on top of our normal jobs without extra pay. I’d say the jobs the designers are filling…

  • Fertilizing

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    rachelvb
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    I’m starting to arrange my poems from this handy dandy essay about grouping poems I found on P&W by Katrina Vandenberg. This is what happens when you teach yourself (or try to teach yourself) new things. I’m the maladjusted homeschooled kid who watched power rangers and Sesame street way longer than was socially acceptable. But…

  • Crock Pot Closure

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    rachelvb
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    I told myself that if your car was in the driveway, I wasn’t going to drop off your crock pot. I wanted to make sure you weren’t home, that there was no chance of awkward encounters. The point was not to chitchat, the point was to get this black, heavy thing out of my dining…

  • poof

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    rachelvb
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    It’s times like today when I’m completely overwhelmed with my work and what to do with that I wish I went to grad school – like someone there would magically poof it for me and all of it would come together. I’m literally without direction other than the random finds from the internet. How the…

  • Poets are everything

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    rachelvb
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    mismatched socks on clotheslines, gold flakes around the rim of a shot glass, tattoos, car fluids, cotton dust orbiting like satellites. We are failures and mechanics. We are immense sneezes and skin biters. We are compressed pieces of cork crumbling particle by particle in life’s hands. We are crock pots. We are complicated. We pick…

  • Excerpt from Inside HigherEd

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    rachelvb
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    Capitalism vs. Art One of the fundamental themes of “Seminar,” Rebeck said, is “What does it mean to be an artist in this world we live in now?… What does it mean to be an artist in a capitalist society?” “I’m not so sure that having the critics endorse you is a sign that you’re…

  • Thoughts?

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    rachelvb
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    Anyone have any thoughts about small presses, writing contests – to enter or not to enter a listing that probably every other poet on the planet is looking at?

  • Meant to be seen

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    rachelvb
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    I haven’t gone IN in a while. Maybe it’s because I’ve been pretty content and fear is keeping me from dragging my feet against the river bottom. I don’t want to deal with all the silt. I don’t want to muddy the water. I told my mom that I got my tattoo, so I wouldn’t…