I'm going to start with this:

Two days ago I released upon the world Joshua Marie Wilkinson's and Lucas Pingel's newest chapbooks bound together in a single volume. Buy it here: clicking this will take you directly to the raddest shit on the planet.

Poets are poor. Poets need money. This is how we make it...

I was reading the Black Ocean blog today and am enthralled by Chris Tonelli's idea of a bizzaro AWP that is made of entirely of "off-site" events. Personally, of the three AWP's that I've been to, I've never seen a panel that I was really interested in, and the ones I usually go to (just so I can feel I've gotten my money's worth) have almost all been really bad. This last year I was a big fan of the No Thousands reading and the year before the Steal This Reading rejuvinated my interest, not only in poetry, but in the community that comes with it.

Anyway, I'm saying it here now, I am in. Tonelli, you have my interest and with that comes my enthusiasm...watch out.

In other news, yesterday I got a phone call from James Galvin welcoming me into the Writer's Workshop at Iowa. Today, I got an automatically generated, electronically signed rejection letter from Minnesota. The upside to that is the decision has already been made. Sorry Luke... I'm still waiting on UMass Amherst and Brown, but in all honesty, I'm probably going to Iowa. Not only would I need to get accepted into those programs, but they would need to come with pretty sweet packages to get me out there.

One thing I've realized over the last 36 hours...saying Iowa Writers Workshop in casual conversation is really hard. Go on, try it.