From the French word "coller"

"The world is splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon..."

I write only because

I went back to work at IUSB this week and am starting back at Indiana Tech next week, which means summer is officially over.  It was a great summer full of baseball games, beaches, breweries and distilleries, bike rides, fireworks, road trips, and great summer reads.

Highlights from the summer:

1)  A family road trip to Nebraska with my parents
2)  A family road trip to Missouri/Arkansas with my husband and in-laws
3)  Katy Perry concert with my brother (yes, I love Katy Perry)
4)  Weekend visits to small towns in Michigan for antiquing and visiting breweries (and an organic distillery!)
5)  Watching my brother play a million baseball games with his summer travel team (he is now a senior in high school!)
6)  Getting to spend time with my best friend, Dee (even if it was in the hospital, but she gets to go home tomorrow!)
7)  Finishing off the summer with a SilverHawks game with my husband for Bethel College night (where he is a graduate student)

And, of course, I have to share my reading list from the summer:

Book of Hours by Kevin Young (poetry)
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Nine Stories by JD Salinger
Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Bone Palace Ballet by Charles Bukowski (poetry)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Letters Home by Sylvia Plath (my current reading material)

I spent the summer absolutely mesmerized by JD Salinger.  If you haven't read his work, you should.  This was the second time I had read Catcher in the Rye and I loved it even more the second time.  Franny and Zooey was a little more difficult for me to get into, but I loved Salinger's short story collection.  Brilliant.  And then there's The Bell Jar.  Before this summer, I knew of Sylvia Plath and had read a few of her poems in college, but I became enthralled by her writing this summer.  I absorbed every bit of her "life story" in The Bell Jar and skimmed through several books of her collected poems.  And then I found an old copy of Letters Home at a secondhand bookstore and have hardly been able to put it down since.  If I want to be inspired, I read Plath. If I want to be depressed, I read Hemingway.  (I tried my hardest to read A Farewell to Arms this summer, but just could not get into it).

And I got lucky with my own writing this summer.  I had four poems published in various literary journals and magazines over the course of the summer.

Follow the links below to see some of my work:

2River View (2 poems)

http://www.2river.org/2RView/18_4/default.html

FIVE2ONE Magazine

http://five2onemag.onimpression.com/search/label/Kristin%20LaFollette

Futures Trading Magazine
http://futurestradinglit.weebly.com/exchanges/futures-trading-22

I'm still writing as much as I can (in as many different ways as I can).  Poetry.  Blogging.  I have a longer piece of narrative collage in the works.  And I'm still working on photography, painting, and collage-creating.  And school is back in session.  Let the busyness begin.

Here are some collages I've been working on.  Until next time, my friends.

An ode to Sylvia Plath.  Still a work in progress.

St. Andrew the Apostle...or The Old Man and the Sea.

The inspiration came from a tattoo I drew up for my best friend.  She got the tree tattooed on her foot.