This Thursday, I’ll be performing a story about my grandmother’s breasts and how she tried to breastfeed all of her grandchildren as part of BALLS OUT COMEDY, a monthly comedy-variety show held at the Bowery Poetry Club. I’m hella nervous and hope it ain’t gonna be crickets and pity-laughs. The line-up is gonna be sick. The Bowery Poetry Club is gonna be sick. And I think I’m gonna definitely be sick, in the sorry-I-just-fainted kind of way! Cover is $12. Come by if you wanna see me get big or fart tryin’.

Love,
Jenny

Having had moved three times in the past six months, having had long bouts of loneliness and happiness knocking against each other like helium balloons tied to a fence post, having fits of brattiness when my friends are doing fine, fine jobs of being reasonable, admirable adults, having a lot to do and having mounting, unconquered fear over doing it, having cried at the end of the last four books I read and having been too stricken to get off at the right subway stop and having ended up in places I thought I might as well get to know, and having said all that, I just want to say that I’m still here. A little overwhelmed. A little monstrous. My little life and my little world still eager to interact with the larger lives and the larger world out there.

I’ve written a lot of things lately, but the one I really hope you’ll read (if you want) is a little summa summa something I wrote for Rookie last month about growing up lonely and weird, and being unable to let go of my misfit/loner/outcast identity even long after I had built the happy, creative bubble I’ve always wanted for myself. The essay is called Outsider/Insider, and I really meant everything I wrote and also everything I didn’t write in it.

Love,
Jenny

1.
Polka dot tights & 90′s crushed velvet for ramen in the East Village with Sam when he was visiting from Shanghai; sharing my heart stuff with my best girl Leslie at an all night diner where we WORKED on food smothered by other food followed by more food smothered foods; my parents have been married and taking care of each other for 30 years; the gold monies my mother coerced me into having and then I ate them later that night so that I could later “pass” fortune through me; my glitter shoes; Julia getting ready for her reading at AWP & me being the happy observer; Tony, my rice brother from another mother, & me trying to to figure out this bar that just had a political rally for a local democrat and was about to become a bar for a literary reading of slipstream/sci-fi/fantasy short stories. Most of these photos are from my instagram. I’m jennybagel on there, and you can follow me, son (if you want.)

2.
The luminous Helen Zou interviewed me for Chictopia‘s blog Everybody is Ugly. It’s a long interview. We talk about my favorite fashion blogs, my ambivalence toward fashion blogs, Diana Vreeland, cultural appropriation, Trayvon Martin, the time I danced so hard my dress literally unraveled off my body, my love poems, the performance of dressing up, being a dum-dum in France, whether or not there is such a thing as good style or bad style, my mom, and many, many other things. You can read the whole thing here.

I think you’ve seen this photo before. I found it again when Helen asked me to pick five photos for Chictopia and I realized this is the only full-length picture I have of myself from the past year. My friend Harry took it for me when he and his fiancée visited me in Paris. We were in Montmartre. I was happy and less lonely than usual on this day. I can’t believe this photo was taken almost a year ago. Why was it already so long ago?

3.
I forgot to post this back in February when I was frantically moving apartments and going out of town every week and trying not to spill my guts out onto the grassy plains of America from the excitement of my book coming out, but a few weeks ago Autumn Giles, poet of the sun, the moon, and stars, the magnifico behind the food blog Autumn Makes & Does, interviewed me for her biweekly podcast, Alphabet Soup, where she talks to poets and food makers and bloggers about food and poetry and consumption and creation. I’m not a food blogger, but I do make and consume food and try to create as much poetry as I can in my little life. If you’re interested in hearing me talk with Autumn about my fantasy food day, thousand year old eggs (aka preserved duck eggs,) the C-Town of Paris, crying while eating, loving our siblings too much, concealing my poetry at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Fernando Pessoa, the gurlesque and the gross, wanting to stay ignorant to love poetry more, the first things I learned to cook, and not being ashamed of being wild, then you can listen to it all HERE. You can also subscribe to her podcast, which is the bomb diggity, and listen to all her podcasts on itunes if that’s your jam. Click HERE to listen via itunes.

(photo: Wikimedia)

4.
Zachary Schomburg is biking around Portland and reading the poems of Portland poets. He’s a mouth for other mouths today and it’s all happening on the Academy of American Poet’s TUMBLR. I’m too fucking slow for TUMBLR (it took me several hours just to write this post,) but I know the rest of you can catch up quickly. He’s posting a video an hour. You’ll want to see this.

5.
Speaking of videos, I’ve been making some ‘lil somethings and I will show you the first thing tomorrow. Today, I’m happy for everything and am not going to be afraid when I walk outside. I’m happy you’re reading this. I’m happy we know each other however what way we know each other. I’m happy I still have time to know more people. I’m happy I still have time to know the people I already know. I have to go outside now.

Love,
Jenny

I just hope I can be half the hot mess I have always wanted to be.

Please stop by and say hi if you aren’t busy with cooler shit to do tonight.

I’ll be reading with Adam Wilson, Abby Sher, and Joseph Bernardo for the Sackett Street Writers’ 10th Anniversary Bash at BookCourt Bookstore in Brooklyn. Games and baked treats and wine and giveaways start at 6:30. The reading starts at 7.

Here are the deets:

Facebook event page
BookCourt
163 Court Street, Brooklyn
7PM

Love
Jenny

I’m back from tour. I will tell you what happened on tour–the rock that shattered Zach’s van window, and the porcelain figurines of Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel and the other angels whose names I don’t know, and sneaking kisses on stranger’s porches in the rain, and seeing miles of abandoned homes, and reading in a beautiful house that sat on the corner intersection between several crack houses, and listening to Jade Tree records, and running away from an Iraq war veteran–I will tell you about all that! But right now I am too weak to say more and I am back in my home and there are so many people in my life I wish I could take better care of, and also right now, I want this song to be the arms that cradle me or the hands that could have caught me when I lurched out of the subway today thinking I was going to faint and hit my head on the platform or, if I was lucky, maybe on the box of candy that the very nice boy who sells Welch’s fruit snacks on the D train on Mondays and Wednesdays had set down next to him.

I also want to say hi to new readers of this blog. I wonder if you are disappointed because I think I’m not doing a very good job interacting with whoever is reading this thing and I would like to do a better job but I feel like I’m always putting off the good stuff and coming back right when I’m in the middle of bad stuff, which makes sense because it’s like who is going to stop the best week of their life to talk about how great it is when you could continue just being in it? This week has been a hard week. Last week was bathed in a golden happiness that I wanted to stretch out like a blanket over the rest of my life, and maybe that is contributing to my current state of decline.

If you’d like, please say hi in the comments and leave your blog or website address if you have one so I can visit it and say hi back or if you don’t have one I will try to send you an email to say hi if that’s okay, and if you have any questions for me, or anything you want to say to me, whether it be important or trivial or kind or cruel or sad or hopeful or annoying or clever or whatever, please say or ask it in the comments as well and I’ll answer everything in the next post.

With love,
Jenny

Just about nothing is significant and yet I still experience it all like I can’t wait to go on or else just go on. Today was full of people I love like Claire and Kyle on three-way, no-video video chat and Patrick and Eric in the back of a bar that smelled like citrus fruits and seeing my dad outside his workplace and him walking me to the subway which was only a two minute walk but the happiest two minutes of my day and, of course, happy new home times with my new roommate, Steve, who runs The Rumpus, which is something you should be reading if you aren’t already reading it because it’s one of the most hospitable places on the internet for perverted and elevated conversations about literature, poetry, sex, jealousy, not-jealousy, and the other tortured and pleasurable miscellany of our pleasurable, tortured lives.

Tony took the picture of me trying not to noticeably tremble while reading twat poems at the Hideout in Chicago for the Black Ocean/Octopus/Letter Machine off-site AWP reading. It was a night of good trembling and trembling-trembling. Thank my depressed butt that I was in a Mandate of Heaven playsuit, which always gives me courage, and a flower crown from Lou Lou Loves You, which I had to take off at some point because I didn’t want people in the audience to think I thought I was someone who feels floaty enough to wear a flower crown, and because at some point, I didn’t feel floaty or floating but so solidly planted and so solidly rooted that I very much wanted to take everything off just for the pleasure of being unburdened, but I knew that would be an act that would be interpreted and read in ways that would depart too drastically from how I envisioned and felt the act to be if I were to commit it, and I know I can’t control how other people read me or understand me just as other people can’t control how I read them or understand them but still, I have my dreams.

Tomorrow, I’m going on tour with Zachary Schomburg, whose poems make me want to pee and cry (I smell a meme: cryingwhilepeeing or cryingwhilepeeingwhilelisteningtopoetry, or actually nevermind, I’m bad at the internetz.) He’s promoting his new book of poems, Fjords, which is a beautiful book of poems, and he also happens to be my editor at Octopus Books, and there will be six puppeteers with us from Manual Cinema putting on a brilliant multimedia live performance inspired by Fjords that will make you want to spoon yourself in public. The original music score alone is twenty baby hugs and ten more cute animal kisses. I’m joining him and the puppeteers on the East Coast/Mid-Atlantic leg of their tour. Today (Saturday,) we will be in Philly, and Sunday in DC and then Baltimore, and then Baltimore again on Monday, and Richmond on Tuesday, and Raleigh on Wednesday, and then I’m taking my broke ass on the Greyhound and maybe visiting some pals on my way back to New York. If you live in any of these cities, please say hi. I will either be shy or not shy and either way, I will be eager to talk to anyone and everyone and eager to be in out in the world and eager to share my car snacks with you and drink wine and beer and spirits with you and eager for whatever else is coming our way. You can find out more about when and where here, or I could just cut and paste it here on this site so you don’t have to click on any more links!

Dates (links take you to the Facebook Event Page):

March 17: Philadelphia, PA. Wherever We Feel Like It Reading Series
March 18: DC. Three Tents Reading Series. Big Hunt Bar (Afternoon)
March 18: Baltimore, MD. The Whole Gallery
March 19: Baltimore, MD. 1818 East Lafayette Ave. Say It With Writing
March 20: Richmond, VA. Gallery 5
March 21: Raleigh, NC. So and So Reading Series

I worry sometimes that I’m talking too much about me, but then I think if I worry about that, then why have any of this or try to do anything ever, and I don’t know, honestly, except I know that I am really happy I wrote the poems in my book, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, which, if you like, you can order from Small Press Distribution, or from my publisher Octopus Books, or from your favorite independent bookstore, or from the usual corporate suspects. And by the way, you can check out future upcoming readings in the NYC area or beyond at my website, www.jennybagel.com, and specifically here on the EVENTS page.

Well, I’m done talking about ME for now. Until next time, when I come back to talk more about ME.

With love,
Jenny

Yo New Yorkers! I am going to be reading from my teenage diaries tonight at for Cringe and talking about my love for the Hanson brothers, which I already went into embarrassing, uncensored detail here for Rookie last month for our OBSESSION theme. It’s a whole night of people reading from their teenage diaries, letters, and ephemera. If you have nothing better to do, please stop by! It’s happening at 7:30 at Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, 627 5th Avenue (between 17th and 19th Streets) in Brooklyn.

Saturday, I leave for a mini tour down the East Coast. You can see the dates here, and more on that and more on everything later.

love,
Jenny

Hi warblers and ramblers, if you’re in NYC this week and have some kind of desire to spend your time wastefully, I am here to let you know that I will be reading TONIGHT from my forthcoming book of poetry at Goodbye, Blue Monday in Bushwick for the Stain of Poetry reading series, along with four other brilliant poets–Dan Magers, Lauren Hunter, Kendra Grant Malone, and Matthew Savoca–who also have new books coming out (or recently published.) It starts at 7pm and here is the Facebook event, if you like that kind of thing.

On Tuesday, my horrendous existence will be reading fiction about love, lust, and longing for the Fiction Addiction Reading Series in the East Village. The event is happening at 2A Bar, starts at 8pm and you can get to hear fiction from Edmund White, Patrick McGrath, Helen Phillips, and MOI. All the readers will have their magnificent faces projected onto a brick wall on Second Avenue, which is a nice perk for that brick wall, at least until my ugly mug appears. Here’s the Facebook link.

For those you who live in Chicago or plan to be there for AWP, I will have copies of my book, Dear Jenny, We Are all Find, hot off the press in my clammy, greedy hands. Octopus/Black Ocean/Letter Machine are hosting a night of poetry, hand puppetry, video, and music at the Hideout on Friday, March 2nd, 9pm. I’ll be reading from my book and trying to get my face to look relaxed. The real beauty will happen when Feng Sun Chen, Christopher DeWeese, Rebecca Farivar, Peter Gizzi, Thurston Moore, Andrea Rexilius, and Zachary Schomburg take the stage. There will be a DJ spinning your best jams until late into the night, and I will dance like a Peanuts character because I don’t know any other way.

I will also be doing a mini book tour down South with the inimitable Zach Schomburg and his posse of peaceful, righteous marauders. I will post details about that soon!

Sorry everyone for so much HUMBLE WAG in this post. I will try to keep this stuff to a minimum and write about real things next time. Hope to see you tonight, Tuesday, next Friday or any day in any place that we might be.

Love,
Jenny

love,
Jenny

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