PREORDER SPECIAL: New book! ‘Unsleep’s Village’ will be released in early April! Until April 1, you can purchase a copy for $10. $2 off the cover price and includes shipping (or local hand delivery). PayPal $10 to rabbitlight at gmail dot com. Bloggers & reviewers! Email me your mailing address for a free review copy.

Quite fond of this one the Wolf and I did last night:

PRIMAL//CARNAL from CHELSEA WOLFE on Vimeo.

I’m nearly finished with a new book that I hope to have released no later than April. Get stoked.

Chenelle and I are producing a series of one acts by women. It’s all new work so please! Submit your stuff! And please! Repost on your Internet haunts! The deadline is December 15th. Our Facebook group has all the details.

Sent off the prints for the Greenville Presents show. Very pleased with how they turned out. I do best with juggling many projects, my attention span is terribly short, but invariably that means some never get finished and some slip through my fingers. The ones that slip away cause me a great deal of anxiety. I like faithfulness, I like knowing deeply. Even so, I am learning that not everything ought to be completed. It’s alright to let some things go. But it’s the discernment I am having difficulty with. I’m never sure when to be faithful and see something through and when to release. Maybe that’s a knowledge that comes with age and experience. For now my filter seems to function by piling it all on thick, seeing what has the strongest hold. I’m busy, and I like that.

There are things happening and I am participating in them.
In order of appearance!

One.
Tonight my dear friend Chelsea Wolfe has an hour long set on KDVS, from 11 PM till midnight. Chelsea is a brilliant musician and the other half of The Wolf and The Rabbit, so you should listen regardless, but there will also be a recording of me reading a few sections from The Pecan Tree. You can stream online at KDVS.org.

Two.
This Saturday the San Francisco Center for the Book is having their annual Steamroller Printmaking event. It’s super fun and if you’re looking for a good overview of the possibilities of letterpress and printmaking, this is the event to attend. I’ll be volunteering, probably inking blocks and whatnot. Noon to 5 at 300 De Haro street in San Francisco.

Three.
Erica Schrag is opening a new gallery space, Greenville Presents, in Greenville, SC and I will have work in the inaugural show on October 16th. I dearly wish I could be there, so if you can attend, you should!

Yeah, so, I am completely incapable of doing anything creative or even reading a book this summer. Sacramento is too fucking hot and too wild to do anything but drink, take pills, drink, run around town adventuring with my amazing friends, drink more, take another pill or three, smoke a bowl and pass the fuck out. Maybe swim in the river. Sometimes journey to the beach. All I honestly want to do is lay on the couch on my porch and watch the leaves sway in the sunlight. I am officially giving up on any attemps at productivity till the Equinox hits and the temperature drops.

Not much to report on the home front. Hunkered down in Sacramento and spending most of my days furiously writing and editing and falling in love with my friend here all over again. Still trying to finish up the IS, IS books. I cannot believe how labor intensive they are. I finally got my photographs developed from Hatch but my scanner is in San Francisco SO, you know, a little longer yet before I can post those up…. Working on a significant addition to the am i human site which I’m excited to show off soon. I upgraded my Word Press and accidentally erased all your comments which was a huge bummer. I still can’t figure out how to change the color of the font when you type so you can actually see what you’re typing. Basically trying to tie up the loose ends of various projects before plunging into new things. Expect some serious blooming here as we saunter toward the Solstice.

My sincere apologies to everyone who ordered IS, IS! My unexpected flight to California has put a bit of a cramp on my production schedule. But don’t for a minute believe I have forgotten your patronage, oh no, my darlings, oh no, you tiny books are coming just as soon as I am able!

And a real update soon? Is it possible? Let’s hope for my sake that it is is is.

Posers like hella.

Rich made this beautiful poster for me and I adore it. I DON’T adore desperation and dramatic reactions to desperation, but what can you do, times is tough and so next week I’m headed back to California where my love and my heart lie…. San Francisco do you have work for me, tell me sweet lies and say yes yes yes.

I have a story in the new issue of Blackbird. It’s a fantastic issue all around and I’m excited to be a part of it. You should read the whole damn thing.

Well speak of the Devil! I’ve been accepted to Hatch Show Print’s winter internship program. I’ll be in Nashville for the month of January, working in the shop. Thrilled!

I am headed to Paris today, loosely in conjunction with Human Parts of Me Want to Eat the Flowers off of Trees being a part of the Colette show. This journal will be on holiday until I return on November 2nd.

Lastly, Jessica Hallock sweetly interviewed me about Human Parts of Me. Transcript below.

Jessica Hallock: Meat comes up frequently in Human Parts of Me…. What significance does the eating or handling of meat have for you, & also what significance the fine line between living vessel & lifeless carcass?

Jessalyn Wakefield: I grew up eating wild game. My family, at times, also raised and slaughtered our own animals. We lived out in the middle of nowhere, the dogs were always bringing home dead and rotting things. So carcasses were fairly omnipresent in my childhood. Even so, there was always reverence and fascination with a slaughter, or with my father bringing home something from hunting, or even the dogs dragging half rotted deer down the road that just never left me and hasn’t left me to this day. The significance is, I suppose, in the fascination and reverence that I experience at the sight of something dead. I cannot wrap my mind around lifelessness. And that by eating meat you take another body and make it part of your own. That eating meat, muscle tissue, specifically feeds your own muscles. That’s an incredibly powerful act to me. Flesh of my flesh.

That fine line between living vessel and lifeless carcass exists for me as Mystery.

JH: Early in the dialogue between the Angel & the Woman in The Waters of Jordan there are motions of voicelessness, of an inability to give voice - characters cutting off, falling silent, long spaces between phrases - that seem remniscient of Beckett, whereas in the stories this voicelessness is expressed more in obscenities, a failure to attend to dialogue, discontinuity in speech, etc. - do you feel this disconnect, or gap, between the voiced & the intended in your own life?

JW: It’s less voiced and the intended, that is, the internal and the external, and more about the internal voice and the internal comprehension of that voice. I feel a constant inability for my self to communicate with its Self. I experience a huge disconnect in understanding what I am thinking and feeling and experiencing, being able to name what is going on internally. I often have inappropriate emotional reactions to situations, or don’t understand why I have the reactions that I do, or don’t know what I am feeling or thinking about a situation at all. My interaction with the external is fairly naive and surface most of the time.

JH: Are the nausea & disgust (or self-loathing) encountered in your stories emblematic of a response to the absurdity of existence, or more a result of a distance from that existence? Or something else entirely?

JW: I think the disgust and the nausea go back to the previous question, having to do with the frustration and perplexity I experience at the closed off nature of my internal life. Experiencing strong reactions and being unable to deal with them because I cannot name them, experiencing a void when I know I should be experiencing a reaction. Etc. It all builds into a sickness, you know?

JH: What is the significance of the animals in the scene?

JW: Need. Submission and humiliation because of need.