Lots to Celebrate Edition- New Poems up at the newly relaunched Shenandoah and SWWIM, Zoolights and Red Panda Cubs, Thanks to Escape Into Life for a Pushcart Nomination

Glenn and I amid barn-themed holiday decor

Lots to Celebrate Edition

Pushcart Nomination from Escape Into Life

It’s easy to get a little grumpy this time of year – holiday stress, trying to get things done, waking up to cold and dark. Sometimes I get awfully discouraged by the poetry world. But I hope you will join me in celebrating today. It is a good day to remember to be grateful.

First of all, thanks to Kathleen Kirk and Escape Into Life for nominating my poem “Blood Moon, Flare, Coyote” for a Pushcart Prize – and you can read all their Pushcart-nominated poems here. My friend Karen Weyant is up there with me! So excited.

Two New Poems Up at Shenandoah and SWWIM!

And a big thank you to SWWIM for publishing my poem, “Scar,” as today’s featured poem.

And after over a decade of submitting to Shenandoah, I have a poem in their newly relaunched issue. When Beth Staples, who recently took over the literary journal at Washington and Lee, sent me the e-mail a few months ago, I was in shock. A dream journal for me for sure, and happy to be part of the relaunch.

The poem is called “Introduction to Writer’s Block.” It’s also an extremely personal poem for me, as it describes trying to write poetry again after a severe MS flare hospitalized me last fall, and I was struggling with memory loss and aphasia, trying to literally find my words again. Anyway, so happy to be in the issue!

ZooLights and Baby Red Pandas at the Woodland Park Zoo

I mentioned in an earlier blog post how we’ve had a rare week of sun in usually gray and dark December here in Seattle, and we took advantage of it to go check out the Woodland Park Zoo’s new pair of female red panda cubs. It had been a long time since I’d seen red panda cubs, which are just about the most adorable (and fairly rare) animal on the planet. They will only be there for a few months. I spent about forty minutes in the freezing cold just gasping at the cuteness and taking about 150 pictures!

Then, just as we were leaving, they switched on the “Zoo Lights” so we did a quick tour of those, too, after visiting the snow leopards. And whoops, another red panda in a hammock!

Today the morning is clear and cold again, Stellar jays darting in the trees, hummingbirds around our feeders. I am looking forward to seeing some writer and artist friends for “art dates” in the next two weeks. I am thankful for publishers who send out royalty checks (this time, thanks to Two Sylvias – they always send royalty checks right before the holidays, which seems a lucky time to get a check) and thankful for people who volunteer at our zoo to keep red pandas and snow leopards alive and healthy, thankful to all people who create art – and those who support art with their time and money. I am thankful for days I have enough energy to get up and go out of the house to experience the lucky world I have around me – flowers, trees, holiday lights – and thankful that this year I am not as sick as I was last year around this time. I am starting to think, in a hopeful way, about 2019. May it be a better year for all of us.