…Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (being photographed  by Larry Sawyer) regaled the crowd with poems about sweater girls….

…Carlo Matos did his best Fernando Pessoa……and Simone Muench performed some poemes noir:

Congratulations, Switchback, on your new home and your fourth birthday! Here’s to many years to come.

An interview about the collaborative poetic process of EG and me by William Walsh at the Kenyon Review blog

A profile by Olivia Clarke in the Sunday Chicago Sun-Times

An interview by Katherine Wootton in The Nervous Breakdown

And an omnibus review I wrote of five wonderful, recent-ish collections of poetry by Matthea Harvey, Katy Lederer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Robyn Schiff and Karen Volkman at Open Letters Monthly.

Thanks to Bill, Olivia, and Katherine! Now to find some cake.

…was packed…

…packed…

…packed with people…

…all there to attend the most highly anticipated literary event of the year to date, the Chicago launch of Artifice magazine, hosted by the lovely and amazing Tadd Adcox…

…and Rebekah Silverman…

…and read at by the sparkly Tim Jones-Yelvington…

…the Marcel-assisted Christopher Phelps….…the cyborgian Susan Slaviero…

…the fresh-from-Maine Jefferson Navicky……the smashing Kelly Haramis and Davis Schneiderman…

…me (and–not pictured because she’s in Boston–Elisa Gabbert)……and the hilarious and profane Derek Phillips:

Plus, there was a staged reading of the noir-ish Andrew Farkas’s “Police Procedural” featuring the actorly stylings of Tadd Adcox, Brandon Will, Andrew Farkas, Jacob Knabb, Davis Schneiderman, and Kelly Haramis:Adam Daniels took a lot more photographs that will probably be available somewhere soon, but for now, I offer you the back of his head:Thanks and congratulations to Tadd and Rebekah for putting out such a beautiful magazine and for putting on such a killer (seriously, there was a killer on the loose) party.

…and these students…

…and these students:

Fremd puts on an amazing program annually known as Writers Week. You can learn a lot more about it here, but suffice to say, it’s a seriously awesome event. Before I went on (and showed the audience a very tiny picture of Elisa Gabbert, my collaborator, from That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness)….

…I listened to a presentation by YA author Robin Wasserman…

…and after I went on, I enjoyed the hospitality of the Hospitality Room. In addition to more baked goods than you could shake a stick at, the room had many words of wisdom to offer, including these:

…and these:

Thanks to Dan “Danger” Hays and Tony Romano for inviting me, and thanks to all the students pictured above for being such killer listeners and for asking such fun questions.

The evening was emceed by Brandon Will who did a stellar job…

…and who also did a small interview with me beforehand that you can read here.  Thanks to Brandon and Suzy of the Book Cellar, thanks to my co-readers, and thanks to everyone who came out to hear some literature on Ash Wednesday.

1. Food Rules by Michael Pollan
2. Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson
3. Twitterature by Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin
4. For You, for You I Am Trilling These Songs by Kathleen Rooney
5. The Art of Conversation by Catherine Blyth

They also liked Erika Mikkalo’s reading of her story-made-of-26-even-shorter-stories, “26 Letters”: Kathie, the bookseller running the show, did a thoughtful  introduction of me in which she said that reading my  book made her think of lots of positive words that begin with vowels (thanks, Kathie!) and then I read half of the eleventh essay in the book called “However Measured or Far Away,” the one about my cousin who decided, at age 29, to become a Roman Catholic nun:

This was the third book launch I’ve done at Women and Children First, and as usual, it was great to be there, thanks in no small part to their great publicity……and super-welcoming attitude. So: thanks to Women and Children First, thanks to co-reader Erika Mikkalo, thanks to Beth Rooney for the cookie recipe and Martin Seay for the cookie-baking assistance, and thanks to everyone who braved the freezing rain to come hear a reading on a Wednesday night! Stay tuned for further readings, including one with Cristina Henriquez at the Book Cellar on Wednesday, February 17th.

…as well as some inspired judging by Shawn “Shawnimals” Smith, Jessica “Girls Guide to Rocking” Hopper, and yours truly. We huddled very seriously to discuss the well-matched performances of Davis “Blank: a Novel” Schneiderman versus Rebekah “Artifice Magazine” Silverman, and James “Order of Odd-Fish” Kennedy versus Andrew “Self-Titled Debut” Farkas. Then in the stunning finale, Kennedy and Schneiderman faced off in a triple-draw-a-thon. All of us judges had to pose on-stage, Live Nude Girl-style (except, you know, with clothes on) while the finalists drew 18-second-gestural-sketches of us, and then special guest judges judged the drawings. At one point, Jessica got drawn with a baby and Shawn got drawn with a penis (which, looking back, now seems weirdly Freudian). Kennedy drew me with a really big smile…

…although it could also look like I’m actually really angry, kind of snarling. Perhaps because his art is so flexible and open to interpretation, Kennedy won. Congratulations, James Kennedy! And everyone else! You rocked!

“”I don’t know what I’m in the process of becoming,” Kathleen Rooney concludes after contemplating her bikini wax in this uneven essay collection that glorifies its author’s 20-something ennui. “I just know that I’m going there with very little hair down there.” A self-satisfied celebration of painful grooming is a suspect vehicle for trumpeting one’s feminism. But Rooney — a poet, essayist and sometime composition teacher who wrote “Reading with Oprah: The Book Club that Changed America” and a related piece for this newspaper — is not at her best when self-congratulatory, but rather when fighting mad.

“Give me your tense shifts, your misspellings, and your passive verbs,” she writes in “I Will Catch You,” a biting condemnation of plagiarism from a professor who prefers flawed original prose to stolen work; this piece should be required reading for any new college student — and Joe Biden. Beltway insiders may prefer Rooney’s gossipy take on working as an aide for a U.S. senator. But it’s Rooney’s angrier writing — grappling with her cousin’s decision to become a nun, or her own retreat home to Chicago after a failed stint as a teacher in the Northwest — that suggest this very young author will outlast her quarter-life crisis,” he says.

You can see it in its natural habitat here. Thanks, Justin/Edie!