Long Live May

Hello {Outward from Nothingness} readers,

It’s May 1 and so happy May Day. Let the May blogging begin.

(Except also this month, there will be some overflow from April as Saehee Cho posts some additional work related to her theme of translation. Saehee set the bar high with her work last month. There’s no way I can measure up; at least failure is an art form.)

Blogging is spur of the moment. A bit raw, a bit less than fully digested. A bit of writing as thinking as present moment as there goes the moment it’s already over.

This month, I am wandering in various literary & artistic communities and wondering about how we build or re-build or un-build this thing called “literary community.” This term that references many forms: conversations, musings, support, connections, collaborative experiments, chapbooks, journals, anthologies, gatherings. Building temporary structures: specifically, the space of [out of nothing] and the space of a trip to Tucson (on Amtrak!) for an encounter with trans/genderqueer poetry.

So first, I have some questions about this thing called an on-line literary journal. About what it means to be published somewhere, about why “we” (“writers”) work so hard to be published, about what being published does, how it changes us, how it connects us to others. So over the course of the month, I am going to reach out to the some of the other writers included in the latest issue of [out of nothing]. To find out more about them. To learn more about their practices. And to find out what it means to them to appear fleetingly (or perhaps permanently) in this sort of on-line space.

This month is also the Trans and Genderqueer Poetry Symposium at Casa Libre in Tucson. The gathering is timed to coincide with the release of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, an anthology from Nightboat Books edited by TC Tolbert and TIm Trace Peterson. So my plan is also to reach out into the actual, physical world and connect with people in spaces, bringing back reports from the field. With a line-up that includes CA Conrad and Dawn Lundy Martin and Samuel Ace and numerous other writers from the anthology, I can’t think of a more exciting space to explore.

So yes, wanderings and wonderings about these nets of people, nets of thinking. All these ways of reaching out into the world, of not isolating oneself in one’s room. And troubling community, because trouble is the only thing that really seems to make community. We respond to trouble; we make trouble. Let’s trouble.

* The image was one of the first to come up by Googling “Wanderings & Wonderings,” which apparently is the name of a number of other blog projects. Good company!