Thank god(dess) it's Friday

If you haven't checked out the Tallahassee Pridefest website, please do. It's an exciting line-up of events and folks, including yours truly. I'm reading Tuesday night with Terry Galloway at Pridefest's literary event, Quill, at The Warehouse, 706 Gaines Street. It begins at 7 p.m. and it's free!

Many thanks to Jessica Handler (author of the brilliant memoir Invisible Sisters) for recommending to the organizers of the Red Clay Writers Conference. I'll be leading a workshop on confessional writing (both poetry and fiction). The conference is in November at Kennesaw State University and I'll be in fine company with Marc Fitten, Hollis Gillespie and many others.

If you missed "American Idol" this week, here's the performance recap from Tuesday and the "shock" non-elimination recap. As always, you can catch my recaps at Project Q Atlanta every week.

On Wednesday night, I went with some friends to a sneak peek at the Spring premiere episode of "Glee" at the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. It was a fundraiser for the Grammy Foundation and the theater was packed with "gleeks." No spoilers from me, but I can tell you that this episode, which airs Tuesday night after "Idol," is a game-changer for many of the main characters. Jane Lynch is more venomous (and hilarious) than ever as Coach Sue Sylvester, who will stop at nothing to see the glee club destroyed. Idina Menzel -- from "Rent" and "Wicked" fame -- also begins a multi-arc storyline as the director of a rival glee club. She's fantastic!

The wonderful poet Mark Doty also skipped AWP this year and summed up his feelings quite succinctly in a recent blog post:

This is the first AWP conference I've missed in a while. Truly my system just rebelled at the thought of doing it again so soon after last year; Chicago felt like a kind of psychological boot camp, as if we were all slogging together through some difficult period of being in a community so large, vibrating and edgeless that it seemed to swallow all individual life. Everyone's always trying to analyze what's so strange about the experience of the conference: a vast number of fundamentally introverted people in one place, a social situation that makes everyone want to feel known and recognized, and then makes the known and recognized want to run and hide. These are true but not entirely an adequate explanation of the existential peculiarity of it.

You can read all of the post on Mark's blog.