Taking the Leap: The Insider's Guide to Exhibiting and Selling Your Art by Cay Lang

No, I am not a visual artist. Not trying to exhibit in a gallery. But I am teaching a class Tuesday for artists on how to write their artist's statement. Since I had never done one or read one, I thought I better do some research. I used to be terrified of offering to teach anything I hadn't spent ten years studying. I still over over prep for classes I'm teaching for the first time like Poetry Writing for Second Graders and Writing Your Personal Statement for Non-Traditional Graduate Students even though I have spent my whole life studying and teaching variations of these topics. But recently I've found myself better about taking these jobs and trusting myself to teach them well. I mean an awkward wordy sentence and how to solve it stays pretty consistent. We'll see how the artist's statements go.

Broken Prey by John Sanford

I've read it before; it's comfort reading. You know, psycho killers and the pseudo psycho detectives that hunt them down. Very relaxing.

Sleepwalk with Me by Mike Birbiglia

This book sucked. Mike Birbiglia is a comedian who's recently hit it big. I think there is a movie by the same title and now the book. It was flat, boring, repetitive, not particularly insightful or funny. I read a bit, skimmed a bit, and quit.

Cut me Loose by Leah Vincent

One of the blurbs about this book says you'll read it in a day and think about it for months. That's exactly what is happening to me. Certainly, I like stories about finding your inner feminist and not letting men boss you around any more, and I am interested in the secret world of ultra-Orthodoxy, but really I liked this book because it was so well written. It was beautiful and evocative and sometimes so painful I had to put it down.

The Sun (journal)

Sheila passed on her subscription to the The Sun, a literary journal out of North Carolina. You'd think I'd read a lot of literary journals because I'm trying to be published in them, but they can get a little dreary or heavy. I thought the poems in this one were ok, not fantastic, but I loved the essays. They were short (unlike the New Yorker for instance), well crafted, and engaging.