Whenever I haul all of my stuff to a different apartment I always feel a weird sensation of internal movement, even if that movement is only a quarter of a mile away, only to a different portion of Logan Square or a puddle jump to an apartment on North Avenue overlooking Humboldt Park. Every time I move I enter another old, yet entirely different space in Chicago and the spirit is sometimes similar but never actually the same.

I’m leaving the side of Chicago I’ve rented four different apartments in the last couple of years for one in Lincoln Square, within an old courtyard building with brown sponge painting on the walls and antique teardrop lamps on the wall and claw-foot tubs and all sorts of other old, comforting things.

I ask myself what I want every time I haul a collapsable box of books into another empty bedroom, with wood floors and a small closet and heavily-painted over white walls. I’m not sure.

A friend of mine told me that she loves waiting to board a flight, even if it really just means sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair and watching out the windows until an airplane refuels and crews bring in luggage into its cargo bays by elongated, glorified golf carts.

She always feels focused inward and outward, in tandem with the general feelings of everyone else in the gate that waits and wants to fly somewhere else, cramped together but open.

My next move feels like that.

I will spend one of my last nights as an intern tomorrow night at the California Clipper, at 1002 North California Avenue, near California and Augusta to celebrate the winners of the Guild Complex Nonfiction and Very Short Fiction competition.

I’ve repeatedly bugged all of my friends, Facebook acquaintances and hallway companions in the confined spaces of the 12th floor of the 624 S. Michigan building at Columbia College to submit their work, and now we wanna celebrate.

We will announce the winners of each competition, then invite both writers to the stage to read, showcasing a small series of fictional short shorts and well-crafted non-fiction.

Doors open at 8 pm, readings begin at 8:30. Did I mention it’s free?

I have a story in a forthcoming Columbia College collaboration between the art and design department, several fiction writers from my Fiction Writers and Publishing class, and a handful of illustrators. The magazine is entitled Boom. Boom. and features a short-short creative non-fiction story I wrote this semester, Not Dirty.

It’s about a girl and a bathtub and hairbrushes and a lost city called reno-town… I’m pretty happy with it. The original release was slated for next friday, but hiccups on the design end have pushed this and a handful of readings back to January.

I have been hurrying about, working on final projects at Columbia and getting my act together to re-launch an online portfolio, which will be growing and evolving continually through the next months.

I am importing all earlier blog entries, from my old blogspot blog, here as well.

I’ll be reading nano non-fiction this friday, in the 1104 S Wabash Film building elevators as part of Elevated Diction’s run of Parents Weekend. I’m a little excited.

I don’t know why it makes me feel awesome to read stories that are somewhere between five and ten seconds long to bewildered  Columbia elevator riders, but it gets really good somehow, at least when a parent looks at you, and then the elevator, and then you when the elevator door opens, and loudly claims, “THAT MAN DOES NOT KNOW HIS BIOLOGY.”

Me: I’d love to read for Elevated Diction again. Let me know, I’ll bring my nano-shorts!

Dave: Dakota. Nano short. I think that describes how tall I was in 4th grade. 

I am flying back to Chicago in just about two days…
After a month of gluten-free picnics, haphazard travels, spontaneous expensive book binges, countless couches with countless friendly strangers, and more hours of my life reading and writing than some people thought necessary

I’ll be coming back.

Or, in a bit. I’ll be missing The Printer’s Row Ball, The Windy City Story Slam, and a slew of other literary events and festivals— to take another break in Colorado for a reunion. I keep egging myself on that it’s still possible to just skip getting to know my family members again and stay right where I belong in Illinois. That’s advisable, right?

In any case, it’s going to be a complete about-face for me in the next few months. No traveling, no picnics, no french conversation with foreign boys, but a whole lotta organizing.

After over 12 hours walking, sitting in train stations in Marseille, Paris, Mannheim, and Munich, and a short time sitting on the front stoop of a house in Neubiberg while it rained and I sat on my copy of When You are Engulfed in Flames, I am back in Germany. Ready and willing to fly back in a few days.

This started yesterday afternoon when I was in Marseille and realized there was either something wrong with the atm or my credit card or my life, and I had no cash left and no apparent way of getting more, and I got really, really creative to get out of the country without paying the TGV or the Deutsch Bahn an enormous amount of money for the overnight.

But I am back.

Because muzak has long been out of any resemblance of vogue, yours truly and a whole host of other SilverTongue writers will be doing readings this Friday at the 1104 S Wabash building during all Manifest events—within elevators.

We coined a name for our kind of prose—nano readings—otherwise known as short-short-short-short-shorts, and we’ll be performing various versions of it, all day long. 

If you’re on campus during Manifest, check us out.