I cannot believe how quickly semester three is going. I turn in my third packet next week. That’s just…mind-boggling. I’ve been working heavily on my thesis. A lot of it is reading. A lot of it is taking notes on other poems. And a lot of it is remembering to take time for self-care. But I’m seeing my poems shaping into creations that feel like explosions out of and into myself.

I recently started watching American Horror Story. I’ve been watching a lot of the same shows over and over (cause that’s how I roll), and I decided I wanted something new and different. It had been a long time since I watched anything horror related, and a friend of mine had just posted on FB about how much she loved AHS, so I decided to give the first season a try. That was less than two weeks ago.

I have no done nothing in my free time but binge season after season of AHS. It is SO incredibly good! Season one, Murder House, isn’t really “scary.” It’s more intense than anything else, with a lot of really heavy emotional situations. Season two, Asylum, is absolutely petrifying and is my favorite season so far. Sarah Paulson is phenomenal and Jessica Lange is transcendent. Season three, Coven, is decidedly not scary, although I absolutely loved its premise and its characters. Season 4, Freak Show, is the season I’m watching now. I skipped it originally because I heard it was very different than the other seasons. Season 5, Hotel, was disturbing in a lot of ways, but not scary. And Lady Gaga as The Countess was absolute MAGIC. Then I watched season 6, Roanoke, and it was absolutely horrifying. Definitely the scariest of the seasons I’ve seen so far, and also the most brutal/violent. But so, so, so good!

Once I finish Freak Show, I’ll be watching seasons 7 and 8, and then finding some way to watch Ratched, a spinoff of AHS with Sarah Paulson, whom I now absolutely love. She is iconic and I love her so much. I love that the seasons have a rolling cast, where the actors stay the same, but the characters change. It’s truly remarkable how well these actors can play such different characters! Sarah Paulson, Evan Peters, and Angela Basset, especially, do this in ways that I do not understand. Kathy Bates, as always, is also incredible, but Paulson, Peters, and Basset astonish me at every single point. Paulson, too, sometimes plays more than one character in a season, which I just…I don’t know how she does it.

I bring AHS up because, to my surprise, watching the show has actually helped inspire my writing. I’ve written several poems now that have some horror/speculative qualities to them and while the poems themselves may not fit into anything else I’m working on, they are giving me many new and strange ways of looking at/writing about grief and loss. I used to dismiss horror as a genre because I didn’t think it could really dig into the deeper parts of humanity, but then I started reading horror and watching horror and I realized that good horror always digs into the deeper parts of humanity. Fear, loss, longing, family, identity, forgiveness, strength, resilience, deceit, love, anguish, anger, regret…these are central themes that play out in every season of AHS.

So now I’m considering the cross roads and parallels of poetry and horror, poetry and magical realism, poetry and fantasy, poetry and science-fiction, poetry and gothic romance, etc. I’ve read collections of poetry that have considered these elements, too: Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter and Beast Meridian by Vanessa Angelica Villarreal come to mind, so this isn’t a novel idea. But I wonder how deeply the genres of poetry and speculative writing have been blended? And how far down into my own poetry can I take these ideas? How weird can I make them? How dark? How gothic? How “scary?” These are really just rhetorical questions for now, but they’re on my mind a great deal. It makes me consider all the ways we limit genre, and therefore, all the ways we limit ourselves by categorizing what can and cannot be deemed “poetry” or “nonfiction,” etc.

Often the new things we encounter are very strange and unexpected. And sometimes even in their unexpectedness, they make sense. They fit inside us in a way we didn’t anticipate. The more I write, the more I read, the more I want to explore, play, and merge together my obsessions. My partner and I are spending the weekend at his family’s beach house. I’m hoping it’s a relaxing time of reading, writing, and the soothing sound of the ocean. If it’s not too cold, I want to meditate out in the sand. Take pictures. Journal. Write notes. Imprint the ocean on my body, my psyche, my soul.