Anyone in the Northeast who didn’t spend at least one entire day outdoors this weekend doubtless feels robbed and/or ashamed. Luckily for Fence, we avoided this fate, but only barely. We spent Friday evening and all day Saturday at the Juniper Festival in Amherst, Mass., peddling books to the few who dared come inside. (This is what happened in Albany while we were gone.)

Despite the fact that we were surrounded by great presses and journals (UDP, pilot, Bateau, The Sienese Shredder, Conjunctions, Pocket Myths, Small Beer…) the resounding sentiment, to me at least, was comprised of a semi-pitiful daydreaming about lemonade, campfires, and waterproof inflatables. We sold a very small amount of books and subscriptions, despite a deal that rocked Chicago in February; but you know, people shouldn’t be worried about buying anything that’s not ice cream on the first summer-like day of the year.

The day was pre-redeemed, however, by luxurious accommodations at the home of Andrea Lawlor and Bernadine Mellis, the sweetest people in Leeds, Massachusetts. Their apartment, tea, cats (Sleeves and T’other) conversation, and favorite breakfast spot were more than charming enough to make up for any amount of books dragged back home and put back upon the office shelves. In fact, we’re like sisters now, since they’ve shared their kombucha mother with me. Or does that make us cousins?

Check out their latest project, The Odyssey, a lovely zine with amazing contributors and an accompanying series of short films, all bound with a perfect sailor’s knot.

–posted by colie

is not so bad, even though I have wanted to exeunt it many times. Not suicidally, but career-changingly. And now just back from my first vacation ever–on Ocracoke Island–it’s been eye-opening to realize completely for the first time that Marx was totally right about how people are not meant to just do one damned thing over and over like this, but “do one thing to-day and another to-morrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” Home car office car grocery store car daycare car bed alarm clock yoga car work car home etc. A week on an island with no schedule or plan–such a cliche! I found in the bookshelf of the rental house and read Under the Tuscan Sun–is instructive beyond measure. It doesn’t matter what job I’m doing; at some point I will want to switch again. I just don’t want to do the same thing every day. I want to do different things with every day. I suppose the only answer is to become a train-hopping hobo. But I’m certain that gets old too.

Now off again at the end of the week to one of my favorite book-loving pockets of the country, the Happy Valley of Western Massachusetts, to sell books and see poets at the Juniper Festival. A teensy change-up to keep us changed up.

says Fence Books author Michael Earl Craig in this interview. “Even Mary Oliver is hilarious in her first drafts.”

Read to find out what Earl has to say about the West and History, about Surrealism and bowel movements, and about the Heavy Duties of Poetry.

& & & & 

AND see new poems by him in this (great) issue of Octopus.