Jessie Hennen

Every so often I have days in which I’m still wearing pajama pants and it’s mid-afternoon, and I become convinced that, because I haven’t left my office (our beautiful second-floor library with all of our books and my grandmother’s green desk) that I’ve done nothing. Really I have though. To prove it to myself, here’s a list.

I have:

• Line-edited three manuscripts, none of which are mine, but all of which are promising.
• Enticed best friend and former college roommate Michelle to come down to Iowa City for the Mission Creek festival next week, hooray.
• Chatted with my Skype student, a brilliant homeschooled teenager who I met while teaching at Duke TIP. I gave her the dialogue punctuation quiz I’d assigned my college students yesterday. She aced it and added funny details.
• Had a rather discouraging phone call with an editor from Slate.com in which I stammered like a girl and she said, “They’ll let you know if they are interested,” then sighed at me.
• Out of spite, sent our “Day in the Life of the Workshop” project proposal to editors at The Millions and The Rumpus. “I’m trying to capitalize on the fact that Hannah Horvath just got into Iowa,” I wrote. “Call me!”
• Looked at apartments in Iowa City for next year. Again became disheartened.
• Nuked bowl of Lean Cuisine. While eating, saw that housemate had received Kevin Brockmeier’s “The Brief History of the Dead” in the mail. Snuck it open and read the first chapter, which is so good that I cannot adequately summarize it. Brockmeier’s seminar tomorrow will be full of me fangirling out.
• Heartened, wrote this blog post.

Now I’m off to produce a workshop letter. Then I will drive my friend Jorge to HyVee so that he may purchase a cheesecake. For that, I have to put on something that isn’t pajama pants, and while that’s probably for the best, I am now a bit sorry to leave them behind.