This week, we asked our brilliant and talented Entropy contributors to tell us what they’ve been working on these days.
Joe Milazzo
I am currently working on too much. First, a July 20 deadline for an essay on a recent exhibition by African-American painter and sculptor Sedrick Huckaby (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedrick_Huckaby /react-text ). A novel, tentatively entitled Visions of a Mexican Wrestler. Set in Dallas in the 1970s; narrated by a dylexic teen; an unabashedly prog rock novel, I suppose. A book of character and persona poems focused on matters of minor celebrity and tentatively entitled Acrostic Aspic. Finally, for the month of July, I am composing and recording very short pieces of electronic music, one track per day. The final results (31 of them) will be collected under the title Pocket Drones and be made freely available via my Bandcamp page. https://slowstudies.bandcamp.com/ /react-text .
Jeremy Hight
Working on a novel imagining the unknown early life of photographer Vivian Maier, fused with the story of my family coming to America, and a chatbot of the main character that dislikes my writing and talks to people about identity and life. I am also working on a text work that can shift POV in a long story I will write so the reader can read the story and its details as many different cohesive versions of itself.
Sylvia Aguilar Zeleny
I am working on two things, the translation of a novel by yours truly (why? Because why not!); and a short-story collection titled Basura (trash) in which I am polaroid-ing characters living edgy contexts.
P.S. It is very hard.
Sara Finnerty
I’m working on a novel I started maybe 15 years ago, put aside for years at a time, reworked 1000 times, and am working on again now, because I still can’t stop thinking about it, and my head is still not yet ready (because of baby brain) to work on a new novel. I’m also in the middle of a few essays. The one that is almost ready, and I am very excited about, is an essay about myth making, and adolescent girls.
Robin Myrick
I am writing the Election Poems series that can currently be seen on Entropy of course (through November), that I plan to compile into a book afterwards. It’s a project that becomes more challenging as our national conversation/non-conversation becomes more fractured and intense, and it’s often a wearying task to remain engaged with all that. But then I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. And though the project can be soul dimming at times, it’s never ever boring. I’m also working on an essay about my next door neighbor, who passed away last August without anyone noticing it had happened for almost a week. After she was found, details of how her life had been crumbling around her for awhile began to emerge, as did the fact that she seemed to have no one, or perhaps chose to isolate herself. We’ll never know which, but our mutual landlord decided not to rent her apartment again, and today her things still sit there, without anyone ever coming to claim them. It’s in many ways the story of a lot of women, a lot of people, in a time where folks are so connected and isolated all at once. Maybe my deep feeling for her situation is why I also started working on a long-delayed autobiography project this summer, told in short stories, called Astrodome.
Nick Kocz
I’m working on a novel about a woman who steals her husband’s mistress’s baby. The first draft was finished remarkably fast but now I’m trudging through the second draft and am filled with gloom and doom. Wish me luck!
Rhys Nixon
I’m starting to plan a novel about the toxic masculinity I’ve experienced in my life, a book of poetry, and wanting to start doing more essay writing in general after my break from writing.
Lavinia Ludlow
Hacking away at a rough draft of novel #3 about living abroad in London. The protagonist experiences a culture and way of life beyond an American context. Having trouble sitting for more than twenty minute increments because the content is just so heavy.
Nicholas Rys
I am working on some short pieces of prose with the hope of stringing them all together for a chapbook.
Janice Lee
I’m pretty excited to be working on a new novel, that so far includes the washing of hands, an emptying city, a photographer, the arrival of a cat covered in blood, and dead pigeons, and tentatively titled IMAGINE A DEATH. I’m collaborating on a book of poems centering around decapitation scenes in films with Michael du Plessis. I am also supposed to be working on an essay about music and sadness and the effects on the brain.
Gina Abelkop
I’m working on my first novel, titled WE LOVE VENUS!, and it is really, really hard! As a poet I tend to work in short, intense bursts; this practice means the novel is crawling along at a snail’s pace, and has been for the past three years. It’s a speculative fiction cartoon comedy absurdity about how environmental poisoning has pushed a group of women to the final frontier, aka outer space, aka the planet Venus, where they attempt to build a new kind of life for each other.
Andrea Lambert
I’m working on a noir addiction and recovery novel set in San Francisco, San Diego, CalArts and Los Angeles called ANGELINA AT THE SERRANO. It covers all the mishaps and wacky friends and lovers of the last 12 years. I’m doing that book for Camp NaNoWriMo this month. At this exact second however I am reading through a different novel called SCAFFOLDING because an ex required I change their last name a second time and I need to make sure no typos occurred as a result of the change. SCAFFOLDING is my nineties punk Portland novel that was recently excerpted in Entropy & I’m trying to find a publisher for. At this point all of my exes who object to being written about can take a number and wait on the long line forming to the left. I’ll change your name if I get to it.
