Work proceeds on the lunatics' ball

​Waiting with some trepidation for the edited version of my manuscript (my editor-self excited to see what the experienced editor will do to make it shorter, my writer-self worried about her darlings). Four of my writing group members have published books in the past few years, so I knew to expect this to be late. I keep checking my email anyway. In the meantime I’m busying myself with other, surprisingly time-consuming tasks: chipping away at a bear of a marketing questionnaire, checking all previous pubs for how the magazines want reprints to be credited (a distressing number of really good magazines have gone under), and working on the illustrations, which won’t be color (again my writing group consoled me here; one writer with a six-figure advance from Houghton Mifflin couldn’t persuade them to do any color illustrations). I’d never heard of .tifs before, or thought about pixels, and the task looked gargantuan but I’ve happily discovered that some places, like the Metropolitan Museum in NYC and the Smithsonian in DC offer high resolution downloads for free. I just wrote to Jon Crispin, the photographer who did the photographs in the Willard Suitcases project, and will wait to hear what he charges for a photograph. I’d really like to include one. His stunning color photo installation memorializing the hundreds of abandoned suitcases and trunks discovered in the attic of the Willard State Lunatic Asylum were a real inspiration. I wanted to imagine their lives, try on their clothes. I published an essay in PASSAGES NORTH, “Madeline’s Trunk,” based partly on his 175 photographs of its contents. I’d include one of them here, but that’s the point, they’re copyrighted! I hope I can afford what the artist Ellen Gallagher might charge for her “Odalisque” depicting Freud and a Dora-like patient. If I can find her. Gallagher had a website when I wrote the essay; now she doesn’t. I fell into a rabbit hole today researching the 1928 Man Ray photograph of Matisse and one of his odalisque models that Gallagher riffs on in "Odalisque." That is, I think it’s Man Ray’s photograph, or is it by Brassai? Legitimate sources differ. I need to know that, if not for the caption (I’m not sure at all that I’ll include the predecessor photograph), for the essay about Gallagher’s “Odalisque” and its significance. At any rate, I’ve managed to assemble an astonishing number of high-resolution photographs for the book. Here’s just one that I’m disappointed won’t appear in color because I write about Mary Todd Lincoln and I was smitten by the dress as a child after I saw it at the Smithsonian on a family vacation. Not sure if this will be interesting enough in black and white.

​Planning to read an unpublished flash from the THE LUNATICS' BALL at Patricia Q. Bidar’s reading at Books on B on February 28. Hope I’m not a wreck afterward as I was after reading the title flash “The Lunatics’ Ball” at Sasha’s reading.