Three Chapbooks Are Sitting Here Beside Me And I'm Gonna Write A Paragraph About Each One

This fun little thing is chapbook I did with my poems and my wife Sara's recipes. We are giving them to select friends and family for Christmas. I did the cover art. That dog is the only I can draw. Someone once called it "endearing." Someone else once called it "stupid." I think it's a dog drawn from a 25. For real though, it is a cool little thing with 8 poems and 6 recipes. You know what that means: you better hope you're on that list of friends and family.



This is one of the coolest final projects I've ever done, besides probably my manifesto project. Really stoked about this Writers Community chapbook, featuring work from Ryan Rader, Tyler Fields, Mead Jackson, Ben Rogers, Spencer McNelly, Cody Sean Davis, Layne Ransom, Jeremy Bauer, Elysia Smith, and myself. Also, the cool cover photo was taken by Rochelle Martin. These are some of my best friends, favorite student writers, and biggest supporters. They are $3, but I kinda wanna throw them at parents and friends and say look what we do. I'm seriously impressed by the writing in here. It’s been a great semester for the Community and this book is a testament to that.



This one is my pal Ryan's final for the manifesto class. I helped him with the formatting, so he was nice enough to give me a copy. I was also smiling big to see my name in the acknowledgments. That's our friend Joey Haney on the cover. He was a Jackon Pollock painting for H-ween. I danced with him when he was in that costume. That was funny. About this book though, seriously, it's an essay/manifesto called "The Millennial Hipster: Superficial Reflections," and it's one of the more thoughtful things I've read in a real long time. The book came out beautiful, but the words, man, the words shred hard.

I LOVE CHAPBOOKS AND PROBABLY LOVE YOU TOO.

The On Switch

For my Book Binding/Manifesto class, we were challenged to write a manifesto and bind it, using the skills we've learned in class. I was having trouble coming up with a manifesto topic to write this long thing about, so I used and expanded a series of poems that I started over the summer. The thought was to come up with a topic, title it "On [Topic]," and let loose, combining feeling and thinking, something I'm not always the best at. (Some of these have popped up on this blog) Here is one:

On Caring
Wanting someone not to die, harm themselves, shoot up a school/workplace is one thing. Wanting someone to have lots of money or bigger breasts is another. Telling someone they have spinach in their teeth via text message is one thing. Telling someone they have spinach in their teeth by shouting across the room, HEY DOUG SAVING THAT FOR LATER?, is another. Visiting a children’s hospital, homeless shelter, or old folks home because that’s what your dead grandma would want is one thing. Visiting those places because you need another volunteer thing on your resume is another. Trying is one thing. Trying is another.


I'm pretty suck at the sewing/gluing part of book binding, so I decided to type them (YES TYPE LIKE ON A TYPEWRITER YES LIKE 150 CARDS) and build a box/sleeve to store them.







Basically, my idea was to capture some of my top interests--poems, simplicity (notecards, posterboard, spray paint, typing), errors (left some mess-ups and obvious corrections), and that think/feel combo. I'm really happy to have it done, but I'm really happy that I did it this way.

Here is another one:
On One Capability of Your Mouth
It is a good thing I think for you to say to people good job and nice shirt and you are real and I love you. I don’t care who they are, the highly educated like it, as do short people and shy people, especially the shy ones, and teachers and your dad. Go up to him and say Dad, you are nice. Thanks. Watch him turn to a puddle of pudding, mushy and great, because of you. Good job, I’d say if you did this and we could eat him together.