Now I can focus on…moving? Eek!
So, I am feeling much better (thanks to a few doses of antibiotic) and the Port Townsend Writers conference is officially over, so I can get back to regular life. Regular life, right now, equals figuring out:
1. Where to move (city) – looking for hot, dry climates for my asthma. I have to take this breathing stuff seriously for a little while until my lungs get back into working shape.
2. Where to move (neighborhood) – checking Craigslist for rents, etc. If anyone one has any recommendations for neighborhoods around Scottsdale/Phoenix (the most likely city contender at this time) I am all ears.
3. Looking for possible work in the area (also appreciate any tips in that arena…)
4. Getting rid of some stuff from the house so we can move only what we have to (like turtles with our house on our backs)
5. Organizing garage sale (??)
6. Getting ready for family visits from my parents and then my little brother and his wife.
7. Where to maybe send some work out? Waiting for various checks I am owed? Nervously whittling on my two manuscripts or trying to work out some new poems?
8. Wonder why I am having pain in my neck?
Poetry is a weird ride. Sometimes I feel like, yes, I am making a difference, writing poems is really worth it when someone reads them and gets them and maybe it helps them a little bit. Then other times I feel like I am working on some antiquated art form no one cares about and certainly no one wants to pay for so why am I doing it?
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
Collin
Good luck with the move, Jeanine. You could always go to Arizona. Now that Charlie Jensen has decamped, they need some new energy down there.
Carol Lynn
Oh, Jeannine, so sorry to hear you’re under the weather again~
I hope you feel better soon. A chanage of climate might be just the thing 🙂 It’s nice out here in California-
Don’t ever stop writing poetry- you make the world a better place one poem at a time…
xo
Carol Lynn
Radish King
I don’t ever pretend to think my poems are going to change anything except perhaps me the day I write them. That alone makes it worthy.
newzoopoet
Jeannine,
Amen to that last part. I wonder the same thing at times…about poetry and politics. But I keep participating in both. I can’t stop.
Angela
Marcus Myers
I really enjoy reading your blog and your poems are fantastic…
Your frustration of practicing an antiquated art form is felt by most people who write poems, right? This speaking from solitude, from a quiet place with tendrils of imagination out to everywhere and everyone else. After finishing a poem, you want more than anything for it to find readers, but so often there aren’t many readers (not counting us, who read verse compulsively) who like reading poems.
Maybe this tension, while immediately distressing, is good for your writing over time.