I moved in January and haven’t made a place for my books. I brought a few stacks that I thought I’d read but mostly I haven’t touched them. I have a stack of weird choices I made at AWP, where you’re all excited to be seeing everyone, and to get free totes and sometimes drinks, that I mostly haven’t touched, either. I have been checking out a lot of things from the library and flipping through Mike White’s Addendum to a Miracle (Waywiser, 2017), showing it off to friends to surprise them, make them laugh.
I recently read Three Tall Women and A Raisin in the Sun; plays seemed more approachable to me with the distraction of moving, getting a job. These two especially are quick, I read them both in one night, and really funny on their way to breaking you. If I’d read either before, I don’t remember, and I’m so glad, because I found them, it seems like, at the right time. I also got The Norton Book of Ghost Stories, edited by Brad Leithauser, who’s faculty at the graduate program where I got my MFA. Two incredible stories in it, “The Axe,” by Penelope Fitzgerald, and Marghanita Laski’s “The Tower.”
Otherwise I have Stevie Smith and Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Alicia Stallings and bell hooks. A review copy of Erin Dorney’s I Am Not Famous Anymore, out by Mason Jar Press, which is based in Baltimore. There are a lot of shelves, originally for tools, in the shop my grandpa was in the process of converting into a living space. We can’t find yet where the plumbing leads, or if there’s a crawlspace. The book in there I most like is Christine Schutt’s Florida.
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Jessica Hudgins is a writer currently living in Mansfield, Georgia.
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