From Elizabeth

Okay, as most of you know… I was not, in fact, found guilty for perjury. The only thing I’m guilty of these days is being incredibly happy.

While I too miss the intellectual rigors of being in school, I find that working 6-8 hours on my own work every day (often longer on the weekends) is quite refreshing. And I am well positioned to attain my insane goal of reading 150 books this year, including vaguely dipping into the suggested reading list for the subject-test GRE in case I ever decide to torture myself with a PhD program.

Although I have yet to completely revise the novel (I’ll say it’s maybe 80% of the way there), I am also working on several other projects. In the spring, I completed more than sixty poems and have assembled 55 of them into a collection (Money for Sunsets) that is currently under consideration with several pretty decent presses. Several of these poems have either been published in journals or are forthcoming. One of them got printed on a T-shirt and ran around Greenlake in June (and can be found online in several places because of participation in the Running Poets of Greenlake). I am also currently revising my thesis short-story collection, As Long As Someone’s There When I Get In to begin sending it out in the fall, and am in the beginning-to-middle stages of a novella about living in wartime in a country that doesn’t really feel it, which is loosely based on Stein’s World War II-era Wars I Have Seen. Recent work of mine can be found in a few other places (recently published or forthcoming), including Redivider, Pebble Lake Review, Turnrow, Knockout. I was also shortlisted this year for Rose Metal Press’s Short Short Fiction Chapbook Contest, judged by Ron Carlson.

Carol and I, after moving in together a little over a year ago have recently decided to move into slightly bigger digs. As we both do most of our work from home (well, all of it in my case), we thought it might be useful to have studies that did not “double” as anything else. We currently live in the Broadway Park neighborhood of Bellingham (directly across from the park,
in fact), and just bought a house up the street about three blocks where we will move once the bathroom has been fixed and the garage converted into a studio.

We were married in December in Vancouver, BC (since we’re second-class citizens in the states). The ceremony was small and lovely. It took place in a beautiful old Victorian home situated a stone’s throw from the water, with just the two of us, the marriage commissioner, and two of our close friends who drove up from Portland to witness. Both our families were upset not to have been invited, but we agreed to have a big wedding if it’s ever legal here. To cap off the weekend, we got to see a knife fight up close in a 7-11 in downtown Vancouver. It wasn’t really funny then to think we might die so soon after getting married, but I did take pictures of the 7-11 the next day to include in the album. Oh, and we’ve also applied for permanent residency in Canada (a first step towards immigration). It takes 18-24 months to get all the paperwork done. So, just in time for the next election we’ll likely be eligible to leave if we want to. A comforting thought.

On the kid front, for now it’s just the dogs. Our 14 year old Corgi died in July and we’ve recently adopted a cattle dog mix with one blue and one brown eye. In addition, we also have a blind/epileptic Spitz, who actually plays a pretty good game of fetch. They take up much less time than real kids, even with the daily hikes anywhere from 3 to 10 miles. However, they don’t look nearly as cute in a tutu.

Best,
Elizabeth