Penny Hero (dot) Net

The panels are mostly amazing. The questions are mostly awesome too. I’ve only gone to one panel that was a pretty big dissapointment.

My favorite so far was the first one we went to about the short-short story, prose poetry, or “flash fiction”. Some writers read some of their work and then there was a great discussion on the genre itself, how it resists definition, a little about how to navigate editor’s expectations in order to get the work published. One of the most interesting conclusions one person drew was that prose poetry seems to really explode and blossom in the face of whatever criteria or definitions are sometimes imposed in a classroom because it gives a writer something to push against, to resist, and to subvert. This genre might be my favorite ever.

Another really interesting discussion was about how people seem to see the form differently if they are coming from a poetry background or a fiction background. To poets, the form is very new and very strange. To fiction writers, it is less of a shock, but it is still strange and very difficult to publish in fiction journals.

At one point, when someone mentioned that the internet seemed to be a perfect market for prose poetry, I almost had a mental orgasm, because I’d been thinking the same thing, and thinking about livejournal, thinking about the stuff I’d write and post on my crappy website back in high school that no one read.

I really think I’ve found my favorite form. I had no idea it was so much bigger than just little writing games writers played. I write so much of it all the time on the backs of scraps of paper in the writing center and in my notebooks as brainstorms for bigger stories that I never am able to write.

In Other News: Absinthe is FUN. fun fun fun fun fun. holy cow fun. And it’s fun to get it in a bar, where they light the sugar on fire right in front of you and everyone looks at your three flaming glasses not without a little envy but thinking either “stupid americans” or “stupid rich americans”. (it’s a bit spendy in the bars)

We tried it the other night in a bar, and it was a little fun. I drank much less than Dave and Gavin because the taste was so strong and I’d been drinking martinis and vodka stuff earlier. But they went for it. Both had two. I had about 3/4s of one and then ordered a guiness. Yesterday Dave went out to buy booze because bars were sucking down our funds like nothing (we’re spending about $45 a night on alcohol. It’s nuts), and he found a variety of absinthe for $50 (instead of the usual $150). It was probably much weaker, and also made with a slightly different root, but that shit was potent. We didn’t light anything on fire in the hotel room, but we drank all of it. ALL of it between the five of us. I took a lot of pictures, but now my camera is missing. I hope it’s not lost for good. I think there’s an awesome shot of gavin picking me up just before accidentally whacking my head against the wall (awesome). Not to mention the shot of me, dave, and gav in the bathtub posing with the absinthe bottle.

So last night i felt like my head was filled with helium, and I couldn’t stop laughing. But this morning I was pretty pukey and I missed the early panels. I’m much better now though, and gav bought me veggies. I’ll make it to the 1:30 stuff for sure. Fuck if I’m going to drink again on this trip though. I think I had 4 glasses of the green fairy goodness last night. FOUR. Maybe I’m actually partly dead right now. ha ha.