Some Odd Days: Journals, 2020-2024
Excerpts from a chapbook
My debut chapbook Some Odd Days: Journals, 2020-2024 is available now from Bottlecap Press!
https://bottlecap.press/collections/bottlecap-features/products/someodddays
The official description:
“Some Odd Days is a collection of journal entries pulled from handwritten notebooks dated between 2020-2024.
Daily observations and struggles, pieces of fiction, memories, and thoughts on the process and nature of writing all converge to form a portrait of a writer working through the post-pandemic era. Much of the work is grounded in and around the city of Indianapolis, however regional and international travel punctuate the text and bring forth new movements and ideas within memory and art. Sequenced not so much chronologically as thematically, Some Odd Days exemplifies the role of the personal journal to condense time and space into a more honest and multi-faceted vision of self-hood.”
Several months back I began reading through the various journals I’d filled up over the course of the pandemic. Most of these, especially those written from 2020-2021, were written in a fugue state. Reading them again in 2024, I was surprised by how unwell I was. The isolation and depression I captured was shared by the world at large, and like the world, I moved on from it. We’ve all turned away from how unbearable that time was. I’m not convinced that this turning away is healthy. There is still reckoning, on individual and societal levels, that needs to be done.
Some Odd Days is my own reckoning with the era. Despite much of my journal writing being hard to sit with, I found many fragments moving—depictions of travel and memories, attempts at fiction, prose that bordered fiction and reality, observations and ideas that I’ve dropped or further developed. Many of the fragments I hardly remember writing. Reading through these journals and assembling what I felt to be of value allowed me to revisit a time I’d been too quick to move on from. I hope that the collection will help readers do the same.
Excerpts:
I feel a body trapped a few inches below my outer shell, and it is vibrating. This is how I imagine manic suicides happen: you don’t have a choice.
This is probably why it’s been hard to write lately. I feel so tense as I write, my figure rigid and painfully arched towards the page. When my writing feels liberated, my body does as well.
Much of this is usable, even.
…
The thing was, Spanish could leave you anywhere. It would abduct you in the
dead of night. You would wake up with your eyes shrouded and sweet nothings
lullabied into your ears.
…
Kansas. A road stretching out to eternity, until night falls and you’re
surrounded by nothing. Barely perceptible outlines on either side of the road
suggest something large in the distance. Tired enough that I see dead faces on
the road. Bodies lying along the occasional guard rail. I’d prefer blindness to the
inhuman darkness of this road at night.
…
Her face was inexpressive and inexhaustibly still, a remote lake on the
unreached peak of an unnamed mountain.
Omg, congratulations!