from the Baltimore Book Festival...

This weekend was my debut at the Baltimore Book Festival, the first time reading the steam sequence. I was super super nervous, but I think everything came across very well.

While at the festival, I had my handwriting analyzed. It turns out I'm a very erratic person and go through moods very quickly, sometimes I'm moody, sometimes I'm warm and inviting. I crave my own space and don't respond well to criticism about myself and am impatient. And I also have a hard time communicating how I really feel about things, What really amazed me is how long the line for this booth was, how fascinated we all are with ourselves and how much we want to know something more, find deeper meanings in our birthdays, our zodiac, numerology, handwriting, etc. We need explanations, rational and otherwise. Easpecially around this time of year (I'm about to head back home for Yom Kippur), I always find myself wondering if I'm doing alright, if I'm a good enough person and how can I be better next year. I'm also wondering what sort of a coincidence is it that the book is really debuting at the beginning of the Jewish year. Moira had brought some wine to celebrate and what I really liked about the festival was really her, her wonderful friends in Baltimore, hanging out with Piotr and Molly.

I also met the fiction winner, Denis, and I'm very excited to read with him again and to get my hands on his novel Nora's Army when it comes out in October. After the reading we headed over to the swanky engineer's club and he toasted me there and we all felt really good about books. And on another note, I'm also realizing I need to watch what I say here as I found parts of a blog entry quoted in the Festival bulletin. It was the post about me having a poetry crush on Piotr and how wonderful it was to find someone near you whose work you really love and how you can get to know them if you're not too psycho or stalker-esque. Luckily for me, he was my editor so I didn't have to work any angles, I had a natural in. Before the reading he told me to pause. And afterwards, I got a big hug from him, from Jonathan, Moira, everyone. Something happened while I was reading that has never happened before---I felt almost trance-like, how the sequence read me, not the other way around. Something ghostly and beautiful. As if this woman I created could now speak.