classroom visit, first printout of Lunatics' Ball

Just visited Jill Talbot's "Essay Form(s)" class at the University of North Texas via Zoom, which put me in the actual classroom, so instead of seeing a lot of individual faces I was seeing a semi-aerial view of Jill at a desk in front of the class, her students clustered around tables. The closest I've gotten to a classroom in  several years! Their questions were not what I expected, but all interesting: writing about real people, choosing details in portraiture, incorporating literature in my essays, writing groups vs. solitary writing.  I've been a big fan of Jill's writing for years, so it was great to meet her in person (virtually). Over the years she's let me know that she's teaching my work ("Little Colored Pills," "Haunting Houses"). So nice of her to invite me!

I told her before class that "Little Colored Pills" was written before I started THE LUNATICS' BALL, and to doublecheck that I did a chronology of my LUNATICS' BALL pubs and discovered that I've been working on it for five years (it feels like longer), that I wrote "Little Colored Pills" two years before I published it in 2019, when I published the title flash for the book and a number of others, probably with the collection in mind (I'd envisioned a chapbook, with fiction as well as nonfiction then). Jill asked me to read "The Madwoman on BART," which was published in 2020 and refers to my reading on Vivienne Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald, so my research was well underway at that point. Last week, for the first time, I printed out the entire manuscript: 375 pages (no preface or bibliography or acknowledgments yet), 91,969 words. The longest thing I've written since my 600-page PhD dissertation years ago. I'm reading the hard copy now.

Jill just wrote to me (some really nice comments from students, in both her invite and thank you) and gave me a few stills from the recording. I'll post a couple here.