New Poem in Redactions, Spending Some Time with Poets, and a Week of MS Pain Management

Sylvia poses with the new issue of Redactions

New Poem, “Fairy Tale Redacted” in Redactions!

I’m happy to announce my new poem, “Fairy Tale Redacted,” most fittingly appearing in the literary magazine Redactions’ new issue. Seems everyone’s been talking about redactions and how they affect the reading of things lately (cough, Mueller Report, cough), but I have been reading redacted documents since I was a little kid reading my dad’s research on nuclear safety. So I decided to give it a little spin with how fairy tales might look if they had a censor (which they often did!)

“Fairy Tale Redacted” in Redactions

Sarah Mangold and I celebrating!

Visiting with Poets Always Cheers Me Up

So happy after a rough week (more on that later) I was able to visit with wonderful local poet Sarah Mangold, to talk poetry and publishing and celebrate our birthdays (a bit late) with sparkling rose and cupcakes! Yay for Taurus Poets! There’s something so cheering about spending time with other writers, especially ones whose writing you admire, and not just talking shop but sharing stories about where we thought we’d be and where we think we should be. It was a great way to spend a rainy weekend day, especially because I finally felt up to smiling and talking again! Could not have had a better afternoon.

Smiling again

A Week Learning about MS Pain Management

So, I learned the hard way about managing pain with MS – specifically, I spent eight days almost unmoored by something called trigeminal neuralgia, which about 1/3 of MS people will experience, like the worst combo of TMJ/toothache/migraine. It kept me from smiling, talking, chewing food, or generally doing anything but curling up in bed for a week. During this time my neurologist tried a few different strategies – an anti-epilepsy drug that’s supposed to block nerve pain (that made me sick), an anti-migraine drug that helped me sleep but didn’t stop the pain, my first experiments with CBD oil (helped, but didn’t fix), and finally and most effective, the dreaded steroids, which calmed down not only the pain but the nausea, trembling, and fatigue that came with it. This was my first day smiling in eight days – I felt well enough to get my hair cut, visit with a friend, and take a stroll around the wineries. I know pulsing steroids is sometimes a necessary evil with MS, and I know they take a toll long-term, but I am so happy to be out of pain. I immediately wrote a poem and worked on my two in-process reviews with my renewed energy.

I also went out and I visited with this peahen (look at those neck feathers!) and a fantastic pink tree with a terrible name – the “Beauty Bush” in the “Pink cloud” varietal. It smelled wonderful and was indeed a pink cloud, even on a rainy day.

And while I was out of it in lots of pain, I did see a wonderful movie, Ladies in Black, about a young Australian girl who wants to be a poet and works at a department store set in what I think was the late forties. It had a really wonderful and timely message about the enrichment that immigrants bring to a country (I didn’t realize there had been so much anti-immigration feeling in Australia after WWII but apparently there was a lot – I also learned there was a war between Australia and New Guinea at some point? Americans learn literally nothing about Australia in any history class), and I might have been pretty out of it but I’d love to hear what you thought of it if you get to see it. I’m looking forward to seeing girl-friendly teen comedy “Booksmart” (I was a real nerd in high school who never went wild so it speaks to me) and “Late Night” with a killer combo of Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling, soon. After my disappointment with Game of Thrones, I decided I wanted to give myself more female-empowering entertainment, written by women, with main characters who are women, with empowering storylines. Am I just kidding myself? Is there enough of this to actually go around?

Anyway, wishing all of you a wonderful and pain-free week ahead. And lots of poetry. And pink cloud flowers.