E. Rowan Mena

Providence to San Francisco: The Move (Part 2)

June 10, 2014 by E. Rowan

Oh, and actually that wasn’t the end of it.[Part one: pickup, and botched delivery before we arrived.] Today, June 9, I heard from my friend that the driver had contacted him (not me, not the manager or dispatcher) to get access back to our apartment. Because he had accidentally delivered someone else’s stuff as well as ours. I told my friend not to do anything, and that we would handle it, since I didn’t trust these people to figure out which stuff […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: cross country move, fidelity moving, fidelity moving group, moving nightmare

Providence to San Francisco: The Move (Part 1)

June 10, 2014 by E. Rowan

Moving with Fidelity Moving Group The estimate was extremely low, almost unreasonably so, but Manisha seemed professional, and was very reassuring. The estimate was for 40 medium UHaul boxes, a 3-person couch, a queen sized mattress, a cedar chest, and a large piece of artwork, and was $1100 from Providence to San Francisco, including carrying up 2 large flights of stairs in San Francisco. The communication was bad from the beginning. Manisha told me that we would get a call […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: cross country move, fidelity moving, fidelity moving group, moving company, moving nightmare

The End of Night by Paul Bogard

April 22, 2014 by E. Rowan

I’ve never really been afraid of the dark, which is odd because I’m an anxious person in general and the dark is a primal fear. I’m clinically phobic of spiders, and of heights, and it turns out thanks to a good friend one summer I was able to prioritize those fears. I am more afraid of spiders than of heights. We were on a bus day-trip into Albania, to see the spectacular ruins at Butrint, curving along narrow dirt roads. […]

Categories: Reviews • Tags: dark, dark sky week, darkness, light, light pollution, light tresspass, paul bogard, review, the end of night

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Cyborg Erotic

April 5, 2014 by E. Rowan

Just re-read Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic” thanks to a friend of mine reminding me how phenomenal it is. I’ve been thinking a lot about erotic energy recently. A few weeks ago a different friend gave me Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” to read, and it was revelatory. As I was reading it, I felt as though it was revealing me to myself. I don’t know that anything has ever made me feel so intensely engaged in all my […]

Categories: Cyborg • Tags: audre lorde, cyborg, cyborg manifesto, cyborg sexuality, donna haraway, erotic

4 Percent Universe by Richard Panek

March 23, 2014 by E. Rowan

I have an amateur’s interest in physics and astronomy. I once took a class (and still have the course book) called Physics for Poets. I’m ok but not brilliant at math, but love the abstract thinking, the scientific deduction and inference, of rigorous attempts to understand the world (at whatever scale). This is the kind of book that is written for someone like me – an understanding, or at least an ability to understand, some pretty complex theoretical concepts if […]

Categories: Reading Journal • Tags: 4 percent universe, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, darkness, non-fiction, physics, richard panek, science

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CFP: Queering Translation – Translating the Queer

March 3, 2014 by E. Rowan

Oh boy does this sound great! Call for papers: Queering Translation – Translating the Queer Centre for Translation Studies, University of Vienna 26-28 March 2015 Aim and Theme of the Conference: Since de Lauretis introduced queer theory as „another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual“ (1991:iv), this approach has played an important role in the analysis of sex and gender in Literary, Film and Cultural Studies. Despite its claim of interdisciplinarity, Translation Studies has yet to fully integrate […]

Categories: Call for Papers, Translation • Tags: conference, queer, queer literature, translation, world literature

The Hair Experiment, The 1st Month

March 3, 2014 by E. Rowan

It’s been a month since I cut all my hair off, and it’s getting a little longer. I’m still getting compliments on it from friends I haven’t seen in a while (hello AWP). And today, on the train back to the Seattle airport to get back to Boston, something really nice happened. I had just gotten onto the train and was putting my headphones on when the man sitting across from me said “Excuse me…” I looked up at him, […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: body hair, feminism, hair, shaving, short hair

Poetry in the Streets (of Seattle)

February 23, 2014 by E. Rowan

I have a bad habit, it’s something I can’t really help. I have extraordinarily good hearing, and like many introverts, I’m especially observant in public. I notice a lot of little things all the time, and have mostly learned to tune out (to some degree) other people’s conversations. But I can’t do it when they’re talking about poetry. I have another bad habit, one that I suspect is common to those in my general demographic – MFA-land educated writers. When […]

Categories: Poetry • Tags: AWP14, James Franco, poetry, Seattle

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The Road to Seattle: Unicorns!

February 22, 2014 by E. Rowan

AWP, the largest writers’ gathering known to man, is in Seattle this year. Sometime next week, about 10,000 writers, editors, publishers, MFA program representatives, and essentially anyone who things they can earn a living working with literature in some capacity will be descending on Seattle. Like lemmings running to their doom a herd of unicorns running into the sea to escape the red bull. I came out a week early, to visit family and friends, and generally enjoy the awesomeness […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: AWP14, Seattle, unicorn

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Funding for the Virtual Arts NonProfit

February 11, 2014 by E. Rowan

Running an online literary journal is a lot of work. I’ve been doing it for a few years now, and just started as the Managing Editor for Drunken Boat, an awesome and well-established journal for literature and arts entering its 15th year of continuous online publication (wow!). One of the things I’m doing a lot of is infrastructure building, which includes researching and applying for grants and other kinds of funding. And one of the things that keeps being a […]

Categories: Publishing • Tags: arts management, drunken boat, literary journals, literary publishing online

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