This Blackfield cover of an old Alanis song says every single thing I’m about to say, and about a hundred times more poetically, so, although my hope is you’ll click on it and let it be the soundtrack to my post, you could just close your eyes and listen and we’d be good. This is the closest to a theatrical performance I’ll ever get, so I hope you’ll indulge me. Go on, click it. (Sorry about the commercial.)

My mother taught me how to read when I was two. I had a few Little Golden Books that I kept on the table next to the sofa bed where we slept, but the real books lived in the hutch by the front door, including a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanica she purchased impulsively from a door-to-door salesman and grudgingly paid for from a coupon book each month.

Mark Program: Give us a brief synopsis of your project.

Shanna Mahin: THE CONCERNS OF THE BOURGEOISIE is a fractured, messy story about my fractured, messy childhood and the fractured, messy time in my life after my homeless mother killed herself and I was forced to consider the implications. No, no, wait. Come back. It’s a comedy. I promise.

MP: Who should apply to the Mark Program?

Over on another blog there was a conversation about books that are HTC (hard to categorize). A well-regarded agent lamented that perhaps she’s lost her edge because she finds herself turning down beautifully written books that are just too HTC. Books that are too hard to package, too hard to market, too hard to ultimately find a home for.

Books I’ve loved so far this year:

I’m fat again. This is not a new occurrence. I was a fat kid, then a thin kid, then a fat kid. Lather, rinse, repeat. It’s complicated. It’s a problem. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

I had my mid-project review over the weekend. It was gently suggested that I might be on the wrong track, which I heard as, “You’ve left the track entirely and wandered away into the woods surrounding the track, naked and without a bag of breadcrumbs.” My brain is a serious paraphraser.