book_club tender square i should’ve known from the first meeting that we weren’t all that serious about the books, considering i was the only who had gotten through all of rachel kuchner’s “the flamethrowers.” but the club had been in existence for some time before i’d joined, i figured they were just having an off-month. my former co-worker from the ark, emily, had invited me to join and i was eager to meet new friends. * these women are the same ones i partied with in “the_last_time_i_drank.” after i got sober, the dynamic felt like it shifted, became awkward. book club wasn’t always about drinking wine, but it occurred from time to time. once, we were having a galentines day gathering and audrey went to pour a mimosa for me, which i had to refuse. teressa wanted to smoke a joint at the table, but decided to smoke by a window after i said that i was sober. i think i got a residual high from her, even from a distance that night. * i attended my final book club gathering in november of 2020, but i left without announcing that i wouldn’t be returning, i unsubscribed from our google group and ignored the group’s texts. i only reached out to jane and erin to tell them i wanted to keep in touch with them. perhaps i should’ve stood up for what was upsetting me about the dynamic of the group, but by that point i figured it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore. i’d been wanting to leave book club for nearly a year; when covid struck, i clung to our meetings because i had no other social outlet. by the time i reached the end of my rope i thought anything had to be better than staying. * i don’t like to be a person who keeps tabs on things. i don’t believe that we give in order to get in return. but it’s difficult to not feel slighted when you’ve made genuine gestures towards people and those gestures aren’t returned in similar circumstances. a couple examples: when emily’s father died, i arranged for the rest of us to get a tree that could be planted in her backyard in remembrance of him and we gifted it to her. when my mother-in-law’s cancer turned terminal last summer, i had to miss our july book club to be with her in houston. only jane reached out to say she was sorry after erin informed them all. after my mother-in-law died, teressa apologized at august’s book club for not sending her condolences, admitting her anxiety got in the way of reaching out. the girls let me talk about what happened, and i was grateful, but that was about the extent of it. when sylvania got accepted into pre-med program in louisiana, we held a big celebration for her and her partner in the spring of 2019 to send them off. when i got accepted into my mfa program, the girls politely nodded at the table. i thought maybe it wasn’t worth the recognition since michael and i were only moving an hour away. in the last book club i attended before moving, no one gave me well wishes for the journey ahead, and i slipped out the door feeling wounded. in our zoom meeting of april of 2020, i revealed to them how much i was struggling in my writing program, that i worried that i was on the verge of losing my creativity entirely after a rough first year that only seemed to worsen. emily cut me off and said, “let’s talk about something else.” * the final straw was how my own chapbook was received by them when it came out in fall of 2020. i am grateful that nearly all the ladies bought a copy of the book during the presale period. these sales were crucial because my publisher needed to have deposits on 50 books before they would agree to actually go through with the printing. it is common for small presses to have stipulations like this in their contracts with writers. jane was the one that suggested we read “mayflies” for an upcoming book club—we were a group that was about reading, and here one of the members had written something we could read and discuss! i felt awkward about it. i knew jane and erin were genuinely excited about reading “mayflies,” but all the links to previous publications i shared with the group through text had largely been met with indifference. i didn’t want people to feel forced into having a conversation about poetry when they clearly weren’t interested. i told them plainly that we did not have to read my book for book club, but jane insisted. as expected, only jane and erin read it and were willing to talk about it at november’s meeting. emily and teressa said they didn’t have time to read the book (it’s 30 pages long). dani never bought a copy. cj didn’t show up for meeting at all. i bit my tongue and smiled. maybe there’s a lesson there, the whole “approval comes from within” spiel. but honestly, what upsets me more is that they always looked at my art as more of a frivolous hobby rather than a serious vocation. maybe seeing me pursue a different path than their more traditional routes rubbed them the wrong way. i’ll never know. * letting go of this group of women that i had spent nearly 8 years with was not easy, but felt necessary. why stay when i was so dissatisfied? why stay when i felt like they viewed me as some antagonistic oddball who often put her foot in her mouth? looking back on it, i’m thinking i needed to let go of this energy so that i’d be ready to receive this space right here. as i mentioned in “how_has_blather_changed_your_life” i’ve only been posting eight weeks and i already feel so welcome, accepted, and supported by you all. i hope you all know what this place means to me, how restorative it has been through these challenging times. (and if anyone would like a free copy of my book, let me know and i’ll gladly mail you one. click on my screen name to see my email address and send me a message!) 210925 ... raze i'm so sorry you had this experience. people can be so thoughtless and casually cruel. just reading the part about emily cutting you off made me want to yell at someone i've never met. (and my unsolicited unbiased parenthetical opinion about "mayflies" is it's one of the best books of poetry i've ever read. i highly recommend dancing the snail_mail tango and snagging yourself a copy.) 210925 ... tender square thanks, j. i appreciate you. to be fair, emily may have been attempting to redirect me away from a painful topic, but it didn't come across that way at the time. it made me feel like i couldn't be honest about what i was going through when i had been *asked* how grad school was during that meeting. and thanks for for your compliments about "mayflies"; i consider it high praise given the source. 210925 ... epitome of incomprehensibility My "google fu" is currently weak, but I remember something from...The Toast? The Rumpus?...some literary-comedy online publication helmed and/or helped along by very funny women... Anyway, it was a series written as a bunch of emails among a group of women who tried to plan outings but kept failing at it. Most were spoiled and selfish types, which is often why things messed up. Only one of them seemed decent (well, there was another who never replied to the email chains) and she finally said, "Look, I'll have to leave, this isn't working for me." Long story short, this reminds me of that. The characters in that piece were funny, but I thought, "Imagine being around people like that all the time?" (Not to say that selfish people never change, or that a person can be selfish in one area and not in others. Certainly not to say that it's only women who are self-centered and competitive.) 210926 ... e_o_i that last "can" should be "can't" 210926 ... e_o_i Oh yes, and I'm looking forward to reading the poetry when you have a chance to send it! Thanks so much. 210926 what's it to you? who go blather from