Fashion for Writers

Please forgive me for the months of silence, for not responding to your emails even though they were all long and beautiful and deserving of clarity and order and adventure, for being a weird friend and a weary friend, a reluctant stranger and someone who doesn’t know what to do with what she knows she wants to do, for being someone and also for being anyone and also for being the no one that no one is. This blog may be long overripe, and it may be time to move on, but I’m not sure yet.

If anyone who lives in New York City or the surrounding neighborhoods is interested in taking an advanced fiction writing workshop with this totally organized and totally inspired lady who e-sits before you now, typing with great conviction and meaning, please sign up for the fiction workshop I am teaching through the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. It starts the week of February 13th, and I will be teaching it in my living room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn! And I have cute teenage writers and equally cute college and college grad-age writers who can vouch for my dedication and weirdness as a teacher.

Holding pommelos in Shanghai. It is winter.

How Shanghai looks in my dreams is how it looks in my waking life or reverse.

Chinese New Year fart fest underway

Wearing a unicorn dress on the eve of the year of the dragon

See? Unicorns

I went to Shanghai last month and visited my grandfather’s ashes in a giant locker room full of the ashes of famous martyrs. Was my grandfather a martyr? I saw my friend Sam, and for two short days I felt as creative as I’ve felt this entire year. That either speaks of a very fucked up year or my friend Sam is not a real person with the usual constraints of mortality and mediocrity, but a vertically-victorious person sent down by a tremendous deity to teach me valuable lessons that I then squander.

I found the tiny, tiny baby ring that once belonged to a boy I loved the most in the world but we don’t speak to each other anymore, and I’m so afraid I will lose the ring somehow, and one day when we talk again, if that happens, I will know that I lost his baby ring with his initials on it, and I will feel sad and pathetic and useless and incorrigible. My book of poetry is coming out very soon, and next month, I will be doing some readings for it in New York and Chicago, and instead of disappearing, I will be HERE, telling you about all things ME ME ME.

Speaking of ME, if you want to see photos of the food that makes me happy and gassy and the occasional pointless, sulky, GPOY(M?) you can follow me on instagram at jennybagel. Also, I recently wrote a few things for Rookie: a story about loving your (my) sibling too much, an essay about the brown and black and yellow girls on Of Another Fashion and why their pompadours and poodle skirts mean so much, and a little essay about being bullied and bullying others in high school. And oh, I made a playlist of my favorite 50′s and 60′s girl groups singing my favorite sassy songs that were about boys and also not about boys. It was for Rookie and also, of course, for you.

Love,
Jenny