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I hate cooling cakes. I want to eat them instead.

[lingma]

“The Man With the Pumpkin Head” by Robert Walser

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Making it through this week with help from some friends and their beautiful words. (She arranged herself like that.)

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September so far.

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Trying not to dip my brush into my tea.

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94–100, #100daysofremixedstories. For a hundred days, I’ve been cutting words from a section of my novel draft and remixing them into sentences. I started out doing one a day, then discovered it was more fun to wait a couple of days in between and work in threes. Last week one sentence suggested another and I didn’t stop until seven. A lot of days I stared at a pile of words on a blank sheet of paper and thought, I see nothing. Or all I saw were words stuck in their original context. But when I forced myself to cut more and rearrange, some small magic came and transformed the pieces into something new. Again and again I was reminded that to create a spark I had to put one sentence in front of another. Or behind another. A sentence + a sentence + a sentence is how you start a story. It’s how I’m writing a novel, and I have to trust that process.

[reads-writes-bakes]

Cookies and zines from our last Zine Lab session at the Davis Arts Center. This has been a disheartening week in many ways, and it’s helped to keep my hands busy making stuff. I hope my students feel that way, too.

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Isn’t this a great way to define poetry, or any kind of art? I highly recommend listening to episode 13 of The Fail Safe podcast, so you can hear poet Lauren Haldeman say a bunch of other interesting and inspiring things.

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Well, this week I made peach jam, two cakes, cobbler bars, and this Frangipane tart with rye crust. An excerpt from my novel-in-progress was published at Territory; I started a zine along with my students at the Davis Arts Center, and our broodiest chicken finally stopped trying to hatch nonexistent eggs. Happy Sunday.

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I’ve got a novel excerpt in the latest issue of Territory—this is the first bit of the slow-going novel I’ve sent into the world. Plus, I’ve been building all of my #100daysofremixedstories from the text of an earlier draft of this, which makes “Bedtime Stories” not quite the original source, but almost. Territory always does such cool stuff, and now they’ve turned my excerpt into a box of chocolates you can read one piece at a time (it’s even more Whitman’s-y on a desktop). I’m thrilled to be included in the Love issue, and I can’t wait to read the whole thing. Read “Bedtime Stories” here: http://themapisnot.com/issue-viii-elise-winn

[bake-club]

Small Science Collective

Inspiration for the Zine Lab​ coming up this Saturday at the Davis Arts Center​: The Small Science Collective “produces small zines and web comics on topics from ants to galaxies.”  If you want to join us, you can still register!

[reads-writes-bakes]

66–68. I feel bad when I get behind on #100daysofremixedstories, but I’ve discovered it’s more fun to do two or three at a time.

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Packing up zines for the cool kids who work with Erica Lorraine Webb. (Want to make zines with me? I’m leading a workshop at the Davis Arts Center!)

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I’m halfway through my 100 Day Project, #100daysofremixedstories! Here are days 49 and 50.

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First garden bouquet: dahlia, Thai basil, dill, scabiosa, salvia, nasturtium, and cosmos.

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45 & 46. #100daysofremixedstories

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Days 40–42, #100daysofremixedstories