Skagit Weekend with Pumpkins, Gardens, and Amazing Light, Owls and Coyotes for Spooky Season, October Moods

Glenn and I in sunbeam at Roozengaarde

Happy October! A Trip to Skagit with Bulbs, Pumpkins, and Perfect Light

Well, another October is here! We took a trip up to the Skagit Valley and it was wonderful and gave us all the fall feels. The perfect golden light! Cute kids and cute dogs at the pumpkin farms! A gardening wonderland at Roozengaarde (giving me spring ideas—pink daffodils, pink frilled tulip bulbs—now for some digging lol!) The changing leaves on the drive up! Herons, owls and snow geese! Not to mention opening our door at night to hear coyotes yipping it up! Spooky Season indeed!

: Mt Baker with Dahlias

: Pink Dahlia closeup

: Changing leaves on the drive

Gordon’s Farm Fox Sign

We stopped by a produce stand (and got Italian plums, which I love) and at Roozengaarde with its amazing fall dahlias and tremendous daffodil and tulip bulbs (all pink this time!) and enjoyed strolling around—it’s free this time of year, as opposed to April when there are lines of tourists, and we had a seventy-degree sunny day, also rare in April.

Down the street is the working farm, Gordon Skagit Farms, which during October, becomes an out-of-control pumpkin farm. Old farm equipment? Check. Produce from their orchards and farm? Kettle corn? Fox signs? Check, check, check. And an amazing array of pumpkins. We had a great time walking around, we saw a barn owl in the barn (I know! Its natural habitat—but still, pretty cool!) And we got armfuls of orange tulips to take home.

: Glenn and I with pumpkin display

: Barn Owl

: Apples with Mt Baker

Migrating Snow Geese on Fir Island

Random dahlias behind a church in Skagit

October Moods

What is your mood going into October? Right now, I’m cooking pumpkin goat cheese pasta and Glenn is putting up Halloween lights (he goes all out for Halloween decor!)

Since I was sick for several days last week it was nice to get out on a really perfect fall day (not too hot, blue sky, a chance to enjoy the fall leaves and flowers before they’re all knocked out by our usual October wind/rain storm).

I also am happy to report I have a poem upcoming in Uncanny, which is a really cool magazine I had never submitted to because of its “hard sci fi” reputation. I spent September sending out work, and I’ve already had a couple of acceptances and rejections from that. October is seeming a little more productive, with me finally thinking about the next book after Fireproof, writing new work in a little but more of a playful vein instead of sticking to a theme or pattern. I’m also thinking about writing in other genres a little bit more—there’s no rule that poets can’t try other genres, and I think I like the challenge that other shapes and rules give me.

Our porch with pumpkins and zinnia

I’m also looking forward to more friend and family gatherings as the holidays are getting closer. (Remember to get your flu and covid shots—those illness levels are already going up in my area—never a fun takeaway from a gathering.) I hope to gather with friends at a local pumpkin farm, maybe getting together for a movie, and of course Halloween is always fun—we have one of those neighborhoods kids love to trick or treat in and the neighbors tend to gather and catch up that night as well. I’m picking up the house (which honestly gets more neglected in the frantic summertime) and putting up some cozy autumn decor (mostly glass pumpkins and throw blankets) but I’m not Martha Stewart. I hope that whether you celebrate Halloween, the Harvest Festival, Samhain, or any other rituals of the season, you give yourself some rest and comfort, open the door and listen to the coyotes, and check out the night sky on a clear night, maybe some apple cider or hot chocolate. Fall’s beauties are different than the spring, with its feeling of renewal, instead of moving into a season of more darkness and cold, but cozy, days ahead. It’s a good season for reading, too—I just got a couple of new books, Sophie, Standing There and Exit Party, to start after finishing The Witches of Cambridge, which was our wine and book club pick. It’s also a good time to give yourself some writing goals, like writing fifteen minutes a day before sleep, or sketching, or whatever feels creative and restorative to you. Wishing you a good spooky season!

Adventures at the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Harvest Fairs, the Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, Harvest Moons and Looking Forward

Glenn and I with pumpkins

Adventures: the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Fairs

This week brought some adventures with it. We were given tickets to the opening night of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, three short ballets separated by long intermissions. The first was Serenade, a kind of monotonal, plotless group dance with blue costumes and blue background, with music by Tchaikovsky (Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48). The second was a premiere of a pretty grating piece called Pages, with atonal repetition of terrible performance poetry, followed by equally grating sound (non-music), and the poor dancers having to wander around stage with a chair suspended over them. I started to wonder if I actually hated ballet! Then the third piece was charming: Pictures at an Exhibition was based on the original piano-solo concerto by Mussorgsky, with the dancers dressed in color block, which I believe was supposed to represent the joy of painting?

: Harvest Moon

: Glenn and I on the way to the ballet

: Harvest moon cell phone shot

Me at Swan’s Pumpkin Farm

Then Saturday we decided to try a new pumpkin farm. We drove way out along the Snohomish River, along the beautiful Cascade mountains, past three gigantic fairs with slides and carnival tents, horse farms, and we even saw skydivers! Then, finally, Swan’s Trail [Pumpkin] Farms, which was enormous and swamped with people—and this is still October. There was an animal barn area, which didn’t seem to be well-supervised, a gigantic trampoline area, a bubble area, huge lines for cider doughnuts—and U-pick apples and corn which required a tractor ride to get to. So, we quickly decided this was definitely a place for kids, not kidless adults, went swiftly into the Country Store and bought a candle, missed the last bit of corn, got run into by a very rude but sizeable young boy. We sped the twenty-minutes back to the much-more our speed Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm, where the employees are all friendly, the children adorable and angelic, plenty of Pazazz apples and new sweet corn, and we bought another pumpkin.

: At JB Family Growers, Pumpkins and Mt Rainier

: Sunflowers and Blue Sky, McMurtrey’s

: Glenn and I with dahlias and sunflowers still, McMurtrey

: Glenn and I with pumpkin cart, McMurtrey’s

Pumpkins at Bob’s

Harvest Moon and Looking Forward

We wanted to explore further on Sunday but one of the pumpkin farms isn’t open ’til October 3rd and the other closed early on Sunday, so we just toured our local farms again (JB Family Growers and McMurtrey Farm), bought some kettle corn and a gourd or two and went home and made roast chicken with autumn vegetables and apples.

The Harvest Season naturally makes us think about the changing of time and seasons, what we want to learn, what we want to leave behind, what we want more of in our life.

This season I am looking forward to working more (and hopefully making a little more money to cover my expensive hobbies, like poetry and having MS,) to making more friends, to being a little more adventurous—although with the time change, we often start spending more time indoors and less time meandering around outside. Here’s to a fun and productive fall/winter season, with more reading, writing, and more time with friends around coffee and cake. (And yes, I still can’t share my good news with you yet, soon though!)

Literary Kitten Charlotte with The Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay

Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay

Very happy to say I am honored to have an essay in Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, with some powerhouses, like Diane Seuss, Brian Turner, Kimiko Hahn, and also some friends (who are also powerhouses), like Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver de la Paz, and Julie Marie Wade. I am looking forward to reading all the essays because the form is very interesting to me, and I like the idea that writing essays can follow the body or breath as form, that it can be experimental or traditional, that it does some things that poetry cannot do. My essay is called “When Poetry Gets Mutated: Writing Lyric Essays, Haibun, and Other Hybrids.” (Gotta represent the mutants!) Each essay also has a prompt, so it lends itself to teaching as well as just personal education. Check it out from Rose Metal Press! Also shout-out to the editors, Lee Horikashi Roripaugh and Heidi Czerwiec.

Wishing you all a good Harvest Moon Week!

Happy Fall! And How Many Pumpkin Farms, Social Week, and Good News to Come!

Kitten with Pumpkins, McMurtrey’s

How Many Pumpkin Farms

Hello and Happy Fall, everyone! It’s almost the Fall Equinox and I am here for it. How many pumpkin farms can you visit in two days? How many is too many? I don’t think there is such a thing! In the last several days we visited Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm in Snohomish (from which we brought home caramel apples and fresh corn as well as yes, a pumpkin—I also recommend the frozen apple slushies, though I didn’t get one this time around) and then went the opening day of JB Family Grower’s Pumpkin Farm and Puzzle Patch, down the street from our house, where the sunflower maze wasn’t quite in bloom yet, but the corn maze was very high and we also took home a few pumpkins.

: Glenn and I with display at Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm

: In from of pumpkin display and actual fields of pumpkin, JB Grower’s Pumpkin Patch

: In front of Bob’s display (with tiny windmill!)

Sunflowers and Blue sky

On Sunday, we visited with my little brother and went to McMurtrey Farm, where we visited with Jana and her farm kittens (there were two, but only one was camera-cooperative) and checked out the beautiful pumpkin displays under construction, and still gorgeous sunflowers and dahlias. It was a perfect bluebird day.

Then we came home for a roast duck dinner with veggie rice pilaf and new sweet corn from Bob and the caramel apple we saved (enormous perfect apple FYI). Pretty fun! It was even more fun walking around the pumpkin field when I got good news that I can’t share yet…

: Glenn with Farm kitten Mittens, McMurtrey’s

: Mike and I in front of pumpkin display, McMurtrey’s

: Glenn and I under sunflower canopy, McMurtrey’s

Find the kitten!

Social Week with Book Group and Poetry Group

I had just been talking to a friend about how our social habits changed during the pandemic, and how I was so much less social than I used to be. Well not this week! Besides visiting with my farmer friends at the various pumpkin farms, we also had our J Bookwalter Read Between the Wines book club, where we discussed Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars. People were really taken by it, and I noticed this time around (I hadn’t re-read in a little while) the huge Bowie connection in the poems and listened to the songs that were referenced. I was aware of Bowie as a kid, but I think I mostly remember a couple of his later songs, but of course my main crush was Prince, who wasn’t quite as interested in space. Then the next day we had our poetry group, which was wonderful as usual and we talked about submission opportunities and shared poems and Glenn’s gluten-free red pepper and goat cheese pizza, and pumpkin cheesecake, and I ate more than my share of Witch’s Finger grapes (another seasonal favorite!), and we’re even coordinating a pumpkin farm visit and maybe movie get-together. After being so sick back in 2016-17 and then the pandemic, this feels more like my life used to be. Did I mention I have updated my resume and will be job hunting as well?

Good News to Share…Soon

Do you hate when people in the writing world tease good news they can’t share? Me too. That’s why I’m definitely not saying that I got good news that I can share soon, and I have to say that after a period of discouragement with the poetry world, it’s nice to have a little good news in a while, right?

I’ve also been writing more poems and sending out more work. That’s September’s magic—unwrapping new pens, setting up new spreadsheets, a little more motivation to keep going, especially on the days when it’s in the sixties and sunny and the hummingbirds are still busy at the last burst of September blooms. Anyway, happy Equinox and Fall to you! I encourage you to take advantage of the nice weather when you have it, because there’s really nothing better than a day with sunshine and apple trees, not too hot, seeing friends and family. It’s a good time to jump start your writing, submitting, and socializing!

Submissions, September 11, Setbacks, and the DMV

Submissions, September 11th, and the DMV

Hello friends! I hope your week was productive and full of good moments. I usually love when September arrives, but this week has been challenging, because of a couple of injuries (throwing out a rib and spraining a toe (?) which who even knew you could do that?) I’m covered in medical tape now and been sternly told to rest.

Before the injuries I had a visit to the DMV for one of the updated driver’s licenses, which require more than a normal share of paperwork—I brought a passport, my birth certificate, my wedding certificate (because my legal name is not my birth name, ugh), several other documents, but didn’t have my tax return, a mortgage payment or a bill that proves I live where I live. Ridiculous? Absolutely. Did I have a panic attack and never want to return to the DMV again? That’s right. I updated my driver’s license without the new whatever proving I’m who I say I am, just a regular one, and left thinking about how some of our government’s forcing of security over freedom really impacts each of us in weird ways. Trump wants us to have to bring all those documents for women just to vote, FYI. Another reason to vote Republicans out in the midterms!

One of my injuries I got because I have been hiking around local farms, and I wore skimpy shoes to a big farm full of loose gravel in the rain, and that’s how I got hurt. Watch the loose wet gravel, kids! Otherwise you, like me, will spend four hours in an urgent care getting xrays because you can’t move your toes.

Submissions this September Have Been Frustrating…

If you, like me, have been saving up poems to send out in September when lit mags tend to open, albeit briefly (onto that in a second), you may have noticed a frustrating trend: the day the magazine opens for submissions, it hits its whatever cap on Submittable—and closes the same day. I spent two hours this week trying to submit but finding every place that advertised being open actually closed because of this “cap.” A terrible way to run a lit mag, and an institutionalized way of making writers feel powerless and worthless—and believe me, we already feel that way without lit mags charging $5 to reject us after six months if we are lucky enough to get in the three-hour window (East Coast time, of course). I almost gave up submitting poetry for good. I know I get discouraged with the poetry world, the lack of acclaim, money, respect, etc.—but this new hurdle is so rotten for any working person, caregiver, or West Coast person, honestly, I thought I needed to raise the issue.

The Negative Repercussions of September 11 on Our Country

This is a post that I put up on Facebook.

The morning of 9/11, 2001 dawned here in Seattle as a beautiful bright blue-sky day. We were woken up by a call by my brother-in-law, who asked if we were watching the news. We weren’t. But as the day unfolded, and we worried and waited to hear back from NYC friends, and a former employee who had just taken a job at the Pentagon, I did not foresee the things that were ahead for us as a country. I did not foresee the ripple effect which would negatively impact our daily life, our mindsets, our criteria for right and wrong for years to come. Of course, I mourn the victims – firefighters, police, office workers, plane passengers and flight attendants. But I can’t imagine the following list as a good way to honor the fallen.

The Iraq war, which seemed to be the wrong target to be striking out at since neither the funding nor the actual terrorists came from Iraq.
The ruining of the magic of flight—the political theater of taking off your shoes, taking out your laptop, being unable to travel with essential medicine or an adequate amount of drinkable liquid. And an enormous increase in government workers in the form of the TSA. Yes, I remember before that group existed. It was better before we (and I’m including children, grandmothers and wounded veterans, all of whom I’ve seen pulled aside by TSA) were all treated like potential terrorists.

Things like updated Driver’s licenses that were going to require you to bring proof of marriage, birth, bill-paying, taxes, passports, and whatever ridiculous list of things that are not keeping us safer.

Things like the increase in racism and anti-Muslim sentiment. Can you imagine our current President saying anything like George Bush II’s speech on being tolerant and not blaming the Muslim religion, that the attack was a repudiation of Muslim values? Because I can’t.

The cover-up of the air pollution in midtown Manhattan after the towers came down on 9/11? I guess foreseeable by a government that consistently refuses to protect its own citizens. (See: Supreme Court saying we don’t have the right to clean water. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if we took away their clean water access?)

But that day has hurt America in more than just the obvious ways. It reshaped us as a country that valued security above freedom, prejudice more than kinship, paranoia above logic. It eased towards becoming a country of hate and racism, not America that welcomes the poor and needy but sneers at them. I hate to see what America has become. Maybe it can be better again. Let’s hope so. Maybe the fact that 30 percent of Americans don’t even remember 9/11 (because they were born after it happened) means the poison it left behind – literal and figurative – can be eliminated.

Next Week Will Be Brighter (Probably)

Next week, readers, I promise to be somewhat more uplifting. But this was a tough week. And I can’t be the only one experiencing these thoughts, anxieties, frustrations about our country, our literary system, etc. I’ve been struggling with paying bills, so I will be talking about trying to re-enter the job market, so stay tuned!

September Submissions with Stressful Intervals, Storms, and Late Summer Sights

Hot Air Balloon with trees

September Submissions with Stressful Intervals

Well, this week was exciting—and mostly not in a great way. My dad got sick with pneumonia and wound up in the ICU, we were so worried. He’s back home safe tonight, thank goodness. Then Friday, I meant to go to a Woodinville farm, cut some flowers, and go downtown to a poetry reading. Unfortunately, instead of any of that, Glenn and I got stuck in a bizarrely strong lightning and rainstorm and ended up having to go back home. (The one day the weather forecasters had said we wouldn’t have rain, we had the storm—the other days the weathermen swore would be wet were dry and sunny, so ?? Don’t trust Seattle weather!) Not as stressful as family being in the hospital, but still a bummer.

: Anna’s hummingbird

: Me with flower garden (McMurtrey’s)

: Glenn and I pose with dahlias

Orange rose

Late Summer Sights

The rest of the week was spent updating my resume (I’m tentatively looking for work again), writing poems, submitting poems (although not to Cincinnati Review or Prairie Schooner, which both closed in under a day, before I got in a submission, whew! Crazy! Submitting is an adventure sport these days.) Also, re-reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars for book club.

On the days without thunderstorms, Glenn and I spend time at the Chateau Ste Michelle rose garden, getting corn and apples at Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm, and cutting flowers and cuddling farm kittens at McMurtrey Farm. Late summer all around—hot air balloons going up and down, hummingbirds at the final blooms of summer flowers, and earlier sunsets.

Tomorrow we’ll have my little brother and my nephew over for a barbeque, rain or shine (as long as there’s no lightning), and we’ll grill some of that new farm corn from Bob’s. The last days of sunshine and temperatures in the seventies may be nigh. I do love the fall here, however brief and unpredictable—when the sky is blue and the air is a little bit chilly. Wishing you all a happy and safe holiday weekend.