Happy Christmas! Tales from a Holiday Hospital Trip, and Challenges in Holiday Plans
- At December 25, 2023
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
Merry Christmas Eve!
Hello friends and family, wishing you all a very merry Christmas Eve! The picture on left is from a completely charming Christmassy store called Cranberry Cottage in Bothell, which I just found out is closing in January. So sad! But I was able to take my folks there and get my mom a Christmas present, so that was good.
My folks are in town but I’ve mostly been too sick to entertain (week four of the mega-virus that’s not covid or flu) so I’ve only had a partial Christmas experience so far. I had an ER trip again this week (that’s the third one in three weeks – and holiday ERs are weird) and numerous doctor appointments. I spend all night coughing and all day with stomach trouble – oh, it’s glamorous all right!
Challenges in Holiday Plans
Everyone has the idea of what the holidays should be, how things should go. They rarely include accidents, illness, bad weather, bad moods – which makes the pressure of the holidays to be happy almost impossible. Challenges happen – not just for me, but a lot of people this year. We try our best to be merry and bright, even in spite of the list of things that go wrong.
But it’s not really about being a Hallmark perfect family, or having a perfect time. I’ve been reading all week about friends having divorces, having emergency surgeries, getting covid – and of course, the news from the Ukraine and oh yeah, the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem, is extremely unnervingly dark. Life cannot be perfect. Life is not a Hallmark movie. We have to make do with the imperfect moments.
And so, that concludes our “challenges” section. Hopefully by next week I will have made a complete recovery. And it would be nice if, for once, there could be peace on earth. I wish you and yours a very happy holiday season.
Season of Lights, Year in Review and What’s Ahead in 2024
- At December 18, 2023
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 2
Season of Lights
This week I’ve recovered from my multi-week illness enough to start enjoying going out a bit to enjoy the holiday lights. Chateau Ste Michelle has a new “Wine and Joy” sign in lights, and as I write this I’m still warming up from going out into the Seattle cold to enjoy some holiday lights with my little brother and sister-in-law.
The Bellevue Botanical Gardens Garden d’Lights are one of my favorite holiday lights show, because their lights are so creative—flowers, dragons, birds—and they have a place for you to get a hot coffee and their gift shop is full of ornaments like mushrooms and owls. It’s important, I think, as part of my traditions/rituals this time of year, to celebrate the light.
Looking Back on the Year
This year has been a big one—I had a new book, Flare, Corona come out with BOA Editions. I turned 50. I had a full dance card at AWP where I got to talk about writing with and about disability and PR, among other things, I had poems in great journals, including JAMA. For the new book, I did readings, podcasts and interviews. I had big family visits from loved ones I hadn’t seen in too long.
I spent a lot of time at farms, getting to know more about pumpkin, lavender, and Christmas tree farms, and it helped my MS to work on stability and muscle development walking around all those farms, and it helped my feeling of community getting to know the farms and farm workers around Woodinville. It also, I realized, made me happy. I’m happy around plants and people who plant things. There was a reason I spent so much time in botany classes for my first degree! I also took a lot of pictures of these farms, which I also really enjoyed.
I noticed I spent less time on social media or watching the news this year. I spent less time tracking the pandemic. I lost some doctors (I mean, they quit being doctors, not that they passed away) to what I guess was “pandemic stress” and several years of tracking death tolls and hospital rates was wearing on me, too. So I tried hard to focus on what I could control: spending time with loved ones, writing and reading, and now we’re embarking on a remodel to make our main bathroom more handicapped-accessible. When you’ve got MS, yes, you can do physical therapy and exercises etc, but you also have to make modifications to your life (and sometimes your house) to accommodate your disability.
And What’s Coming in 2024
How is it already almost 2024? I hope better things are ahead? It’s very hard to say. I will be working on my next book of poems, and perhaps more prose as well. I hope to spend more time with friends and family. I hope to spend more time outdoors when possible. I hope (health permitting) to be going to a residency in Palm Desert, which will be my first residency in a while. Going into the fourth (!) year of the pandemic, I hope to finally recover a little bit of normalcy, or at least try to integrate a few more normal activities back into my life, like going to museums and galleries and bookstores. Covid still seems to be hitting my community pretty hard, though—it would be nice if they made some breakthroughs in treatments (or at least a new monoclonal antibody treatment). I may be starting IVIG treatments for my immune system issues, which is scary and possibly dangerous but also could be super helpful? I hope to write more about environmental and disability issues, as well. There are a lot of “hope” statements here. I’ll be working on my vision board for the solstice (one of my solstice traditions) and will try to visualize all these hopes. I hope you all have a wonderful year ahead, too.
And here are a few more pictures of me and my family clowning around at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens. Merry holidays to you all!
An Interview in Whale Road Review, Two ER Visits in a Week: Not the Way to Spend the Holiday, Books for the Holidays
- At December 11, 2023
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 3
A New Interview in Whale Road Review
Ominous But Bright: A Conversation with Jeannine Hall Gailey and Cynthia Hogue – Whale Road Review
First of all, a big thank you to Whale Road Review for publishing this interview, and to Lesley Wheeler for being a great interviewer, and to Cynthia Hogue for being a great co-interviewee.
Cynthia and I talk about our new books with Lesley, and it ended up being a really fun three-way conversation. I hope you check it out! Here’s a short excerpt:
“LW: …What kind of future do you want to conjure? And can poems ever help make certain outcomes happen?
JHG: One of the original titles of the book was Post-Life. I was having a discussion with someone who was talking about being “post-doc” and it just led my imagination to think about what if I was that excited to be “post-life,” not dead, which was an interesting spin to me. Post-life has so many more possibilities. Hence the future tense! Since I started writing the book under the shadow of a terminal cancer diagnosis, my hope was just to leave a little something behind—but I wanted something more than a funeral dirge, something more funny, more hopeful. I have to say my essential personality is “hopeful pessimist” or “optimistic realist,” depending on how you look at it, and even with the worst news, I never really lost hope. My thought at the time was: what are the positives in leaving life behind? Which sounds a little crazy. My last book, Field Guide to the End of the World, was all about hope after the ultimate sorts of endings, so this was sort of a smaller, more personal version of that. (I did worry a little that writing Field Guide sort of conjured an apocalypse, you know?) So Flare, Corona isn’t trying to create darkness—it’s trying to focus on light, so to speak—the corona of the eclipse, the bright red of the Blood Moon, the coyote in the street—ominous, maybe, but bright.”
Two Visits to the ER in a Week: Not Fun for the Holidays!
Yes, I spent a great deal of time being sick enough to be in the hospital twice, getting IVs of fluids and tons of blood work and swabbed in the throat and nose multiple times. Nope, it wasn’t covid, just a bug that most people wouldn’t even be bothered by but, because I’ve got a weak-kitten immune system, became pretty serious. This is not a fun or cheery way to spend a rainy cold week during the holidays—I had to cancel going to see the Bellevue Botanical Garden lights with my brother, among other things. There were also three rejections this week, plus a scandal around an anthology I’d sent in a poem for and the editor taking things out of bios (for instance, people’s preferred pronouns, and in my case, my MS). That’s the first time I haven’t been sent a proof of my bio and my work before it went to publish, which I consider strange anyway. It was contentious and one of those things where you think, “the poetry world is so hard already—can’t people just, you know, print the bio the way it was sent, or just be kind and considerate to each other?” Oh well.
I have not been productive in the last three weeks—our Christmas tree is just now fully decorated; I usually have it done by the beginning of December. I haven’t written or submitted much. But that’s part of the cost of being a disabled/chronically ill person. The past several years, I managed to miss being sick during the holidays, but bam—it got me this year.
Books for the Holidays?
I understand people cutting back this year, as things are more expensive than usual, but you know what? Most books are the same price they were ten years ago! I don’t know if you’re the kind of person who gifts books, but if you are, I most heartily recommend the following:
-Kelli Russell Agodon’s Dialogue with Rising Tides
-Lesley Wheeler’s Unbecoming (speculative fiction) and (nonfiction) Poetry’s Possible Worlds
-Cynthia Hogue’s instead, it is dark
-Melissa Studdard’s Dear Selection Committee
–Rosebud Ben-Oni’s If This is the Age We End Discovery
Some of my favorite fiction reads this year included White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link (re-imagined fairy tales) and When We Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill.
and if you have friends or relatives who’ve struggled with a tough diagnosis in the past couple of years, may I recommend my own Flare, Corona? A book I hope others will find helpful in tough times. Hope your holidays will be healthy and bright!
A Podcast about Flare, Corona and Thoughts on Being Sick During the Holidays
- At December 04, 2023
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 0
A Podcast about Flare, Corona
A big thank you to Dion O’Reilly for doing this podcast with me about Flare, Corona. You can listen to the podcast below.
It’s a very thought-provoking conversation mainly because Dion asked such good, thoughtful questions.
Thoughts on Being Sick During the Holidays
I’ve had a very nasty bug (but tested at doctor’s office – not strep, flu, or covid)—mainly sinus issues, fatigue, and a very sore throat (along with an asthmatic wheeze and of course MS symptoms)—since Thanksgiving. I feel like I’m missing out on a lot of holiday merrymaking, including being able to write anything cogent or decorate my Christmas tree or go holiday shopping. It’s been colder and rainier than normal so maybe I’m not missing out on that much. If I’m not writing scintillating prose this week, I apologize—but this week has been productive from things I did in the past—I did have a poem come out in JAMA (which you can read here) about climate change and Persephone I’m very proud of, and a Podcast I did earlier in the year when I didn’t have sinus problems or a wheeze.
Anyway, I hope you are feeling fine and avoiding all the bugs in the world right now, and celebrating with friends and family, because we could all use a little light right now. I promise to have a better, more cogent post next week, if I’m better.
“Persephone Explains Global Warming” appears in JAMA!
- At November 28, 2023
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
- 2
So excited about this publication, for several reasons. Excited that doctors will be reading this poem, one of a series that will form my next book. Excited for my parents, who, since I got a Biology degree, always wanted me to be a doctor – well, at least I can now say I was published in JAMA. And excited for the thoughtful editor’s note that accompanies the poem.
Here is a screenshot of what the print version looks like, and links to the poem and note online:
“Persephone Explains Global Warming”
Editor’s note on the poem by Rafael Campo
And for those of you who do not subscribe to JAMA, here’s a sneak peek: