Writing each Friday

For the last few months, I have been writing each Friday with a colleague. We sequester ourselves in the on-campus writing center and spend 3-4 hours working on new projects. Sometimes, it is poetry. Sometimes, I find myself planning readings for the upcoming book. Sometimes, I find myself making lists of all the things I need to accomplish and soon. Sometimes ... well, the range of things that I take on in that time is as overwhelming as it is to try and write in my office.

They find me there, my colleagues. This is why it has been so essential to get out of the office on Fridays to do the scholarship that I want to do. I am so blessed, though, in that my university considers artistic work scholarship. So many universities do not. They see their professors as interesting for having outside interests, but in the end, they want the research articles. They want the reviews, chapters, academic books. My university is only slightly different in that they give equal weight to artistic ventures.

Today I find myself dreaming up another project: an interactive book of poetry, self-published via iBooks. I want to create what I am going to call an intertext, a work that deals in text, image, sound and movement. I wish I had the coding knowledge to create the whirlwinds that I literally want to create. I am going to think on it more. I want to use that frame to talk about the space between worlds, the Inter-, which has so many meanings and possibilities. Mentally, I am preparing to explore that realm, between, among and in relation to space, place, time, states of being, sex, gender, and more. I want to do this through prose poems, multiple voice laying, contrapuntals, concrete poems, animated graphics, video, music, and more.