gwynnega

So glad I went to the No Kings protest in Los Feliz (a couple of blocks away from Skylight Books). I'd gone to Glendale for the April protest and had seen photos of that Los Feliz protest, which looked fairly sedate. Today it was huge, festive and joyous. Friends of mine were there, but it was too massive to spot any of them. Lots of great signs, lots of "ICE GO HOME!" chanting. L.A. at its best.

I stayed about an hour, and would have liked to stay until the end, but I was getting too much sun. It did me a world of good to be there.

Oh what a stressful week. But Georgia! That happened this week too, though it feels like it was weeks ago.

Also on the positive side, today's mail brought my contributor's copy of the new issue of Not One of Us. It includes my werewolf pantoum "they keep resurrecting Larry Talbot," plus work by Sonya Taaffe, Alexandra Seidel, Francesca Forrest, Jennifer Crow, and much more. I look forward to reading it.

This month Miriam Hopkins is TCM's Star of the Month. Tonight they're showing Trouble in Paradise, Design for Living, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Maybe I'll attempt to de-stress by watching some of them.

I'm delighted to announce that my Gothic tale, "The Two Mrs. Mansfields," will appear in a future issue of Not One of Us, one of my favorite magazines. It's my second fiction sale of the year. I like this trend.

(Meanwhile, Mitt Romney just announced he will vote to convict and remove Trump from office. Just one Republican, yet I find it heartening.)

I am hennaing my hair on a cool, overcast LA afternoon. (Rain is coming tonight. We've been having way more rain this winter than we've had in ages.)

Trump has been our so-called president for just over two weeks, though it feels like a lot longer. I am heartened by the pushback against his agenda, both in the streets and in the courts.

I've been playing this song a lot.

My poem "family (a form somehow must)" (my "weird Brady Bunch" poem) will appear in the April issue of the beautiful Mithila Review. It's my first sale to this publication, as well as my first writing sale of the new year, and I'm very pleased about it.

Meanwhile, this morning the GOP caved to public pressure and reversed its attempt to gut its independent ethics office. It's just one battle, but a heartening development nonetheless. In this uncertain time, I am all for heartening developments.

I am hennaing my hair on an unseasonably warm Los Angeles November afternoon.

I keep composing blog posts in my head about the election and all its possible horrible ramifications, but I seem to have too much to say to say any of it at the moment. Yesterday I got my hair cut, and everyone at the salon (me included) was talking about the awfulness of the election. Then I went to the Iliad Bookstore, and the owner was talking with customers about the international implications of the election. As they wound up their chat, the owner said, "I was doing okay, but then you started talking." I know what he meant. At least I got to see the bookstore's two cats snoozing peacefully on top of cardboard boxes, and I bought Boris Karloff and His Films by Paul M. Jensen (1974).

I keep thinking of appropriate music for the moment--songs like "Save the Country" by Laura Nyro and "People Have the Power" by Patti Smith. But the music that seems to help me the most right now is Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Yoko's live version of "Don't Worry Kyoko" from Sometime in New York City (1972). I've tended to prefer Yoko's more melodic work, but now it's her screaming that resonates.

My poetry feature is up at Postscripts to Darkness. It includes two poems ("People Change: A Love Story," beautifully illustrated by Carrion House, and "Linda Blair Pantoum"), plus an interview I did with Sean Moreland, in which I talk about, among other things, poetry and horror movies and poetry about horror movies.

The election is tomorrow. I am veering wildly between apprehension and cautious optimism.

It is Henna Day, in the midst of a spate of lovely autumnal LA days. (Another heat wave is scheduled for later this week.) Yesterday I baked pumpkin scones (from a Trader Joe's mix), and they are delicious.

The election is three weeks away, and I'm on edge, though at least the polls are encouraging.

I'm enjoying the new Shirley Jackson biography (Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin), which is full of amazing information, such as the fact that "Jackson tried to structure a story around a potato kugel recipe."

I voted by mail a week ago, because my polling place got switched from the convenient place across the street to someplace where I feared I'd have trouble finding parking. Driving to work I saw one polling place with a line out the door.

I have physical therapy this afternoon, and I'm glad there'll be at least one hour today when I'm not glued to Twitter, seeing horrifying things like this.

I hope Obama wins, of course, but I also hope it's a quick, clear-cut victory. This is going to be a very long day...

Signal boost for rose_lemberg: Stone Telling needs submissions for the Queer issue (deadline February 20th). Guidelines are here.

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The Winter issue of Goblin Fruit is live!

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I've been doing some research on mid-1970s U.S. feminism (for chapter 19 of the Jo book). I've made two happy discoveries: 1) I own a ridiculous amount of source material on this subject (most of which I'd collected in the '80s-early '90s but hadn't looked at in years) and 2) JSTOR has all of off our backs magazine in PDF form. I have thus been geeking out looking at the September-October 1975 issue, which includes such fascinating items as Ellen Willis accusing Gloria Steinem of being a CIA front, and the American Dental Association attempting to track down Patty Hearst via her dental records. I was ten years old in 1975, but sometimes it really seems like another planet altogether!