I have a (very) short story in the new Kozyndan book, The Unknown Portraits. Their solo exhibition reception and book release will be on October 1 from 6-10 PM at the Magic Pony gallery in Toronto. If you are local you should go and tell me about it!

Also, the MP3 of my reading from Chelsea’s show the other night on KDVS is available if you click here. Chelsea also plays a heartbreaking version of “You Are My Sunshine” that I can’t get enough of. Over and over.

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!

Now that the weather’s snapped, I am making an extraordinary effort to finish all the books I got half way through this summer. The list is long and disparate: The Virgin Suicides, A Clockwork Orange, Ulysses, Methods of Book Design, In Our Time, The Tempest, Perfume, Early Plays: Eugene O’Neil, The Art of the Visual Book… on and on. It didn’t matter the length of the text; at the half way point it became impossible to read another page.

In the end the only books I finished this season were my third reading of Light in August and A Book of Common Prayer. Reading a Faulkner novel is kin to breathing for me and something about Didon’s Sacramento heritage kept me compelled in the latter.

Despite my backlog, I recently purchased The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You and Virgina Woolf’s selected letters, both of which I am eager to dive into. I’ve been skipping around the Woolf a bit and came across this passage in a letter to her sister, written shortly after she and Leonard acquired their hand press and established The Hogarth Press:

May 22, 1917

Dearest,

We’ve been so absorbed in printing that I am about as much of a farmyard sheep dog as you are. I can hardly tear myself away to go to London, or see anyone. We have just started printing Leonard’s story; I haven’t produced mine yet, but there’s nothing in writing compared with printing.

There’s nothing in writing compared with printing. It is absolutely true. It is difficult to describe how fulfilling printing is when one is also a writer. What it feels like to construct the actual body of the spirit you have made, to move out of the world of concepts and into the world of the physical, and these ultimately the same worlds.

The difficulties of having a studio in San Francisco when I am living in Sacramento are becoming overbearing. I feel as though my work as a printer is regressing because I no longer engage in regular practice as one. I’ve never given much serious thought to owning my own press because of my nomadic ways, but for the first time in my life I feel nested in a single location and the idea of owning a press is starting to make sense. And to be appealing. And exciting.

Jessalyn with long term goals? Heaven help me, I very well may be making them.