October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard, by Lesléa Newman

My take: The author of Heather Has Two Mommies had been due to deliver the keynote speech at the University of Wyoming’s Gay Awareness Week just days after gay student Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in 1998. She ultimately delivered her talk, but understandably felt the incident at her core. Since then, she has completed this collection of poems about Matthew, his attack, and its aftermath in which she writes imagined responses from assorted perspectives — the attackers, Matthew’s family, a police officer, the fence upon which Matthew was strung up, a nearby deer, the road.

It was beautiful and stark and painful to read, and ultimately I felt I needed to keep it at arm’s length in order to get through it. I can see this being a good addition to a resource room or school library. I also think it would pair well with recordings or performances of modern slam poetry to explore verse as a tool for recording and understanding current and historic events.

Pages: 112

I haven’t emptied the cat boxes.
I haven’t taken out the trash.
I haven’t put away the laundry.
I haven’t washed the dishes.
I haven’t downloaded the Christmas music.
I haven’t figured out if we can upload the audio book from the library to Rudi’s iPhone.
I haven’t finalized which books I’m taking with me.
I haven’t packed.
I haven’t written any book reviews.
I haven’t put together our Christmas party invitation.
I haven’t finished a book today.
I haven’t tidied the living room.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in ages.

Thank you for calling. Due to her late night Cybils reading, sprite is unable to come to the blog. Please feel free to leave a message or try her blog again at a later time. Thank you.

When we went down to the garden today to see if we’d successfully grown any sweet potatoes, we discovered we’d managed to grow a pair of red back salamanders.

The one with the red stripe is hiding, but this leadback one woke right up when we shifted the bag of peat they were dozing under. (According to Wikipedia, they start hibernating around 50 degrees, which has been the high temperature recently.)

This past week, I’ve really seen the foliage around town start to change. Here are just a few of the trees in my neighborhood:

Another weekend, another to-do list:

• Tackle four Cybils nominees this weekend: The Storyteller, Catch & Release, Purity, and You’re So Sweet
• Dig up my potato and sweet potato patches and see if I grew anything besides greens in them
• Get outside on Saturday, when it’s supposed to be sunny
• Write reviews for all at least half the Cybils books I’ve finished reading
• Take the completed D.C. books back to the library
• Do a little shopping
• Finish my Christmas socks
• Pack the book bag I’ll be taking to Connecticut
• Download the Cybils nominee that my library only had on audio.
• Send out our Christmas party invitation
• Clean the area between the living room and bedroom
• Go to Goodwill

There are some other things I’d like to do, too. But they’re repeat offenders and I’m tired of writing down that I haven’t done them yet.