here, there, everywhere (but not really in Chicago)

I keep unintentionally neglecting the blog because I have been a whirlwind of travel lately and spent most of last week not knowing what time it was.

I went to Naperville, Illinois for a fantastic bookstore event, and then spent a day running around various nearby Illinois locations for Fox Valley Reads which was a wonderful community reading event and I had a lot of fun babbling about all things circusy.

So I was near Chicago but not actually in Chicago. I don’t think I can fairly say I’ve been to Chicago, and I very much want to go back to visit properly. I wanted to see that giant shiny coffee bean-looking thing.

But while I was not in Chicago there was a Miraculous Event!

If you have been reading the blog for a long while or a little while or at all, you have probably noticed that I write teeny stories called flax-golden tales and that I write them based on fantastical photographs by Carey Farrell.

Carey and I have known each other through the wonderment that is the internet for over a decade, but we had never ever met in person before last week outside Chicago.

Proof! We are both real people! With glasses!

Of course, she could have been a book-induced hallucination that manifested in photographic form, but I think she’s probably a real person and a lovely one at that and I am delighted that she is both real and my friend.

From not-Chicago I headed to actual Portland, Oregon, a city I had long thought mythical and I’m still convinced it might be, since during my two days there I sat in at least three different shiny red vinyl armchairs and also had dinner with Katherine Dunn. Not at the same time. I was in the mythical Land of Port for the Wordstock festival which was very fun and somewhere they now have quite a few photos of me draped across one of the aforementioned shiny red chairs.

Then I was back in Boston for a little over 24 hours including a field trip to New Hampshire to procure a rather fantastic pumpkin (I will take a picture of it when I get home) because it is October, after all, though now the pumpkin is patiently waiting to become a jack-o-lantern while I am in New York for a few days for reasons various and sundry.

This weekend I will be back in Boston for a bit and then off to London for a dark and decadent Hallowe’en evening with Audrey Niffenegger at The Prince Charles Cinema.

And then it will be November. Strange how that happens.

For now I am going to have a cappuccino and run off to enjoy the beautiful fall weather in Manhattan while it’s still here.

flax-golden tales: the last sunflower

the last sunflower

They put a fence around the sunflower because it was the last one.

The point, I think, was to protect it so eventually there would be more sunflowers and when there were enough they would remove the fence but it’s been years now and there’s still only the one sunflower.

It blooms every year. It looked up at the sun back when there were still sunny days which I remember but my sister doesn’t and sometimes she says she doesn’t believe me. But she’s skeptical about the sun in general because she’s only seen it in old photographs and it doesn’t really look the same in photographs as it did, or at least not the way I remember it did.

(My sister says the sunflower should have a different name now that there’s no sun even though I’ve explained many, many times that the sun is there somewhere and we just can’t see it.)

She comes with me to keep the sunflower company so it won’t feel too lonely. We watch it through the fence and sing songs to entertain it and once we brought a lamp but the sunflower wouldn’t turn to look at it, I think it knew it wasn’t real sunshine.

The sunflower always just stares straight ahead and sometimes down.

We haven’t figured out how to cheer it up yet.

 

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

flax-golden tales: watchdragon

watchdragon

At first I thought it was a dog—a Pug, maybe—but now I’m pretty sure it’s a dragon.

I tried asking when it first appeared by the gate but it doesn’t talk, it only growls and coughs.

Every third cough or so results in a puff of dark smoke and once in a while the smoke is accompanied by actual flame, so it’s probably a dragon.

A very small dragon.

I invited it inside but it prefers to stay by the gate. I tried giving it water but it wouldn’t drink it, after a great deal of trial and error I discovered it will only drink dark roast coffee spiked with whiskey. I bring it a bowl full every morning, but I haven’t found anything it will eat yet.

I don’t think it sleeps. It paces all night.

Like it’s waiting for something.

 

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.

fall 2012 schedule

Since I am terrible about reminders regarding such things, here is my fall schedule of appearances:

Friday October 5th, 2012

JP Reads One City One Book
7:00pm The Footlight Club, Jamaica Plain, MA

Wednesday October 10th, 2012

7:00pm Anderson’s Bookshop Naperville/Reading & Signing
123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville, Illinois 60540

Thursday October 11th, 2012

7:00pm- Fox Valley Reads
Oswego High School, 4250 Illinois 71, Oswego, IL
On-stage conversation and book signing

Saturday October 13th, 2012

Details to come, Wordstock Literary Festival
Portland, OR

Wednesday October 31st, 2012

Waterstones Halloween Special with Audrey Niffenegger
Prince Charles Cinema London, England

Friday November 9th, 2012

7:00pm Talking Volumes
Fitzgerald Theatre, 10 E Exchange St, St Paul, MN

Tuesday November 13th, 2012

Read For the Cure
The Liberty Grand, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

flax-golden tales: dirty laundry

 

dirty laundry

I let my laundry pile up for two weeks before I finally relented and took it to a laundromat, after leaving yet another message for the landlord about the constantly out-of-order machines in the building basement.

I had to look up the nearest laundromat and when I reached the address it wasn’t a laundromat any more, it had been converted to a hat store that still smelled a bit like soap but the hat guy told me how to get to this other laundry place that looks like it’s been here forever even though everything is really bright and shiny.

The machines are all modern and fancy and I can’t figure out where the coin slots are but there’s a lady with bluish-grey hair and cat-eye glasses reading Dostoyevsky behind a counter so I ask her how the machines work and she asks me what it is that I want to wash.

I look down at my bag of laundry and then back up at the lady. Her hair is so grey-blue it’s almost purple.

“Clothes?” I say, and her smile switches to something that looks condescending and pitying at the same time.

“You want the ones behind the blue line,” she says, using Crime and Punishment to gesture in the direction of the line of colored tiles between the rows of machines.

“What do the ones behind the yellow line wash, then?” I ask, pointing at the identical row of machines along the wall.

“Pasts,” she says. “Except for the ones down the end, those are just for sins.”

 

About flax-golden tales. Photo by Carey Farrell. Text by Erin Morgenstern.