I’m done with my stint as a faculty-artist-who-teaches-high-school-students-etc at Centrum. The sun is shining and after a chilly week, it is 80 degrees.
The class was full of amazingly intelligent, sophisticated girls, already as subversive in their writing at 16 as I can ever hope to be. When they got up to read their work on the last day of the class, and the room of parents and students and little siblings applauded them, I was so so proud. You can only do so much in a classroom setting. You encourage them to read. You encourage them to write. You give them exercises that (hopefully) help them think in new ways about poetry, character sketches, mythology, comic book characters, persona. You talk about rejection, revision. You sit with their work and talk about expectation, cliche, tone, surprise. You read them poems, in class we read out loud together chapters from Kelly Link’s “Stranger Things Happen” or a chapter from “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” You talk about your favorite writers, why you love them. You mention life as an artist isn’t as glamorous as they probably think.You talk about sitting in front of a blank screen all day.
But what they bring to class – their unique skills, humor, imagination – are the real gifts. Anyway, it was all very rewarding and fun, if exhausting. They really were little teenage comic book superheroines.
For some reason all week I kept seeing seals and otters at the Fort Warden beach. One day I got within five feet of an otter napping in the sun underneath an old log before I saw him. They swim and look at you, swim and look away, dive underwater and come back up to peek at you again. They do not seem afraid. It makes me think of the selkies. I think, if I came back as an animal, it might be as a seal.
Now I am ready to sleep and get back to my friends, my family, writing, blogs…
A quick note from the high-school creative writing class trenches
Before the students came in for a quick 20-minute class tonight, I set up the room, putting an array of my own books on each table: Japanese folk tales on one, Greek and Roman mythology on another, “The Armless Maiden” and “The Poet’s Grimm” and “Mirror, Mirror” on another, and the last one filled with comic books (Fray, Buffy, Witchblade, one called “Fables,” X-Men, Neil Gaimon’s Sandman “The Dream Hunters” with his fox-wife-type story, etc.)
When they came into the classroom, there was an audible “Whhoooshing” sound as they ooh-ed and ah-ed over the books. I tell you, is there anything better than people who love books? They even asked for extra time at the end to sit and read. Good times. These high school kids know Persephone, the Selkie wife, Miyazaki. It feels like a magical common language.
Also, the new Fall 2008 Willow Springs is out, and my poem “Risking Our Lives” is in there (from my third fairy-tale manuscript) along with poems by Tony Hoagland, Michele Glazer, Elizabeth Austen (among many others!) and an interview with Tess Gallagher…
Yes, I’m deep in work mode right now, reading and re-reading in prep for my upcoming high school class on “mythology, comic books, and you” for Centrum: “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon, re-reading Kelly Link’s “Stranger Things Happen” to decide which story to use in the class, and a book on the history and origins of superheroes called “Comic Book Character.”
But, I had to surface briefly before I disappear for a week in the class to direct you to new poems on 2River View:
http://www.2river.org/2RView/12_4/default.html
You know, the editor took two poems that I wrote at very different times, but put together, they tell one story. I didn’t realize it until I was recording them both. That’s the subconscious for you.
And, to show you the wonderful work my Becoming the Villainess illustrator, Michaela Eaves, continues to do – here’s the upcoming cover of indie-sci-fi-lit-mag, Talebones! Nice work, right?
First, sunshine! Yay! Finally!
In the media and sort of related:
I made the local paper, but they misspelled my name. Despite that, a good article – sign your high-school writer up today! Fresh air, sunshine, the ocean, and comic book/mythology creative writing exercises…
http://www.ptleader.com/main.asp?SectionID=101&SubSectionID=329&ArticleID=21140&TM=56653.35
This warms my heart. The rise of girl geeks AND the article name-checks Buffy:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140457?GT1=43002
(Update: Also in the media, poet Aimee Nez has a post up at the Book Critics Circle blog you should check out:
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-press-spotlight-aimee.html)
And congrats to my Mom, who just graduated with her Phd!
There have been some interesting discussions going on about book and manuscript organization – see here for Kelli’s and here for Anne’s, where she discusses the impact of Bruce Springsteen on her MS. So I thought I’d put in 2 cents of my own…
For me, organization isn’t a set thing – it’s organic and keeps happening. I’m always shuffling around the order of poems, especially the first ten and last ten, and adding and subtracting poems as I make up my mind about them.
With Becoming the Villainess, the decision to turn it into five sections that mirrored the anatomy of a comic book was made right around the time I sent it to Steel Toe Books, and a major rearrangement (making the narrative arc a little darker, rather than ending on a lighter note) happened around the same time. A re-titling happened at the same time as well. This was about a year after I started sending it out, and things just seemed to come together in a new way. Getting other people to read and respond to the MS was really key too – not because I neccessarily took their advice, but the advice got my brain to work in new ways, and the bouncing around of ideas was important to me.
The arrangement and organization of my two current manuscripts are both still in flux – I arrange poems chronologically, by theme, and then try a different tack. I start writing a new set of poems, and decide to include them, then lose an old poem that feels now like “filler.” I’m trying to keep the manuscripts as close to fifty pages as possible (one’s sixty, one’s fifty-three) because I don’t want readers (who may have to read 1000 manuscripts) to be overwhelmed. I do all the usual stuff – I read the TOC to see how the titles flow and if I’ve got too many of the same kind of poem next to each other, I put the pages all over the floor and furniture (difficult to manage with two curious cats, but…) to see if they want to group together, I think about theme and how I want the reader to feel starting and finishing the book. I play different music and see if that jolts things together. Also, when I re-read the MS, I often find little tweaks I want to make from poem to poem – wow, when those poems are next to each other, I want to drop this couplet, I want to eliminate the repetition of this adjective, etc, etc.
So what about you, dear blog reader? What are your magic organization tips and tricks?
Have to cancel my Seattle reading tomorrow…still down with stomach flu…
and in other news, Seattle colder than Siberia (and my little town is a little colder than Seattle…)
From The Seattle Times this morning:
“It doesn’t seem fair, but it’s the cold, hard truth — accent on cold: While Seattle hasn’t seen a 70-degree day in more than two weeks, Fairbanks, Alaska, has had six of them in the past 10 days.
Just about everyone, it seems, is toastier than we are. You’ve heard of International Falls, Minn., the self-proclaimed “Icebox of the Nation”? It’s had four days this month in the 70s, topped off with a pleasant 75 on Sunday. Across the Atlantic, the northern destination of Oslo, Norway, has been passing the 70-degree mark nearly every day recently, while even the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia, hit the 70s last weekend.”
I had a wonderful weekend, I mean, way more wonderful than usual, which was promptly followed by a 24-hour bout with the stomach flu/food poisoning. Since vomiting is on my list of least-favorite things to do, I thought I’d ponder some of my favorite things which kept me sufficiently distracted during my down time:
–Steven Colbert. Scary smart, off-beat cute, and impossible to pin down. He’s my media crush.
–Aimee Mann. Her new album arrived just in time. Go here and listen to a song from the album:
http://www.aimeemann.com/
–Haruki Murakami. I grabbed the new fiction issue of The New Yorker and enjoyed it immensely. One of the highlights was Murakami’s essay on how, at thirty, he started distance running and also trying to write full-length novels. His breezy tone, which comes through unmistakably even when translated from the Japanese, is a wonder. I love his short stories. An aside: while reading The New Yorker, I realized just how much American women’s magazines talk down to their reader. British women’s magazines suffer from this a little less, but it’s really very insulting. Also, there was an in-depth discussion of the problems of God, faith, and suffering, which I always enjoy, but I was surprised to see for some reason.
–My husband and my cat, Shakespeare. Because when I was miserably curled on the floor at 2:30 in the morning, they came and joined me.
Poets on the Town
I had dinner last night with the delightful Kelli Agodon and her husband last night. It’s always nice to catch up with poet friends in my little town, which is at least an hour’s from other small towns.
Also, if you are a high school person or you have any high school kids with nothing to do in the Washington/Oregon area who would be interested in studying theater, arts, or writing for a week, the Centrum High School Intensives weeklong program still has scholarships available! For more information or to register, go here:
http://www.centrum.org/youth/yap-hs-summer.html
I’m pretty excited about this. I think I’ve already got ten students signed up for my class! It involves discussing how mythology and comics/graphic novels are related, and having students write their own myths and comic book superhero characters. Should be fun.
- At June 04, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Open Reading, Steel Toe Books
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Public Service Announcement:
Do you have a poetry book you want to be published?
Did you know Steel Toe Books’ Open Reading time is the month of June? See this page for details. The cost is only the cost of one book ($12) from Steel Toe Books catalog – you could get my book, or Mary Biddinger’s or John Guzlowski’s or Martha Silano’s – really, nothing but good choices 🙂
Good luck!
- At June 02, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In CD Wright, convergences, Poetry
- 0
Odd Convergences in a Small Town…
Sometimes things just come together. Today I got two contributor copy magazine issues (of Mythic Delirium – a paying market, by the way, of science-fic poetry, and Poetry International, where I share pages with the likes of Li-Young Lee, Nin Andrews, Lynell Edwards, and more…) and two acceptances in e-mail, one from the very last issue of the Journal of Mythic Arts, a terrific resource that I’m so so sad is at an end.
Then, I got an acceptance of a query for a poetry journalism piece, then an e-mail inviting me to a small reading and Q&A session with CD Wright (!!) this very afternoon! She’s going to read in a few days in Seattle, but she happened to be in my small-town neck of the woods for a local class, so it was basically the ten students, ten folks from Copper Canyon, and me! Fun times. She read some from her newest book, which I liked as it was all post-apocalyptic. I definitely benefited from hearing her read her work – I had thought of her as a difficult poet, but when you hear how she reads it, it no longer seems difficult, if that makes sense. She was very charming and down to earth, too, answering questions. She talked a little bit about collaboration with artists (which I loved hearing about) and about hybrid forms (same.) I asked about her use of the line, which always seemed to me to be very progressive. She responded that “I was never very good at the line, but I was good with sentences, and dialogue, and so I wrote around my weaknesses.” Ha! Like I said, very charming.
It was also my first day of this current residency, which goes through June. If only the cabins had internet – or I had one of those roaming internet devices. It seems like all my work these days – submitting, researching, interviewing, etc – requires an internet connection. And don’t forget I’m researching new cities to live in, as well – the move is just around the corner now, and we still haven’t made a solid decision…
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.
