On orbiting

The Laurie household has been bumming around with writers a couple times now in a few weeks. First, AWP, where I caught the Missoula-based Sadness Museum & the most recent issue of Jubilat (which features no more and no less than three [!!!] Montana MFA alumni) at the Chicago bookfair. I followed up my free pencil-taking (from The Poet's House: Issa's cherry blossom haiku on pencil) with a good stretch of full-body shutdown in the Hilton lobby.

Then, it was the volunteer recognition dinner at the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Oak Park, IL last week. The gift certificates and heart-shaped candy were plentiful. The volunteers didn't want to talk about the man fiction. Instead, they wanted to talk about Hemingway's relationship with Fitzgerald, his poetry, and... the architecture from the World's Columbian Exposition. Juicy tidbit: Harriet Monroe, of Poetry Foundation fame, was madly in love with her sister's husband, one of the dreamers behind the concept of the Exposition.