Six New Poems in the newest issue of Rosebud, and When You’re Not the Chosen One

Sylvia posing with Rosebud (and tulips)

Six Poems in the New Issue of Rosebud

First of all, a big thank you to the editors of Rosebud, who decided to publish six of my poems in the latest issue of their magazine (pictured here with Sylvia and a vase of parrot roses.)

These were some of my favorite poems from my new manuscript, so it meant a lot to me.

Here’s one of them, “Summer of Bombs.” (I scanned this with my new tiny printer. I’m so excited about it!)

When You’re Not the Chosen One

You would think, by my age, as long as I’ve been submitting poetry (um, more than twenty years) that somehow rejection would stop getting to me. But you know what? It still does. In the last two days, I got one regular rejection, and three – three!!! – book rejections. For two different book manuscripts. It always takes guts to send out your book manuscript that you work and agonize over, and then, you get (mostly) impersonal announcements, plus telling you about who they will be publishing, not you.  Well, that is going to take more than a chocolate chip cookie to get over. You look at the winners. And you think, why is that person chosen? And why not me?? Why am I not the chosen one? (If you want some reassurance, go back to this post and see what Sylvia Plath had to say when she lost the Yale Younger Poets prize to George Starbuck. Let’s just say she was not gracious about her loss. It’s okay to vent sometimes. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be human. The poetry game can be brutal!)

Intellectually, you know they might simply be writing poems more to the taste of a certain press’ editorial team, or your book might have been too similar to a book they just take, or they’re taking into account (shiver at the thought) your author platform and you don’t Twitter enough or have enough Instagram followers or you’re not male enough or young enough or cute enough or whatever. You don’t become a writer at all if you don’t have an ego. Sure, you love your art, blah blah purity (as Sylvia paraphrases), but really, you don’t write to not be read, as the older woman writer reminds Glenn Close’s character in “The Wife.” (See it! Great things to say about the writing product vs the writer him or herself. Also watched the extremely bleak “Can You Every Forgive Me?” which is literally every female writer’s neurotic nightmare of failure and poverty in one movie! Although I kept thinking of every other way to make money besides forging famous writer’s letters…) On second thought, maybe don’t watch either movie the day you get a really big rejection (or three.)

I have been watching the frustration of some much loved writer friends who send out their first manuscripts over and over and get a ton of “finalists” but don’t get chosen. At least not yet. It’s a shame because these are very strong writers and I want to hug them and tell them to ignore the noise and that they’re terrific. If I had my own press I would have already published them. I don’t want them to feel that they are “less” as people or writers because today’s trends or editors don’t validate their work. In the letters of Virginia Woolf I’m reading, she tells another younger writer that she didn’t publish a thing (besides reviews) in her thirties. And her forties were when she wrote and published nearly all of the work we consider ‘important’ today. Sometimes it takes time to come into your own.

I’ve also watched some friends get wonderful news – my friend Kelli Russell Agodon just won a PSA prize for lyric poetry – and Martha Silano has a new book, Gravity Assist, coming out with a book launch in a few weeks – which, yes, I am actually happy to celebrate. You want your friends to succeed. You cross your fingers for them and cry when they cry and rejoice when they finally get the good news. As a reviewer, I come across a lot of poetry books – some of which absolutely blow me away. They are so good they are humbling.

Tomorrow I’m meeting up for coffee with a new friend who not only does poetry but documentary filmmaking (which seems an even more difficult world than poetry.) I think the best cure for feeling unloved, rejected, is to get back out there, send out your work (which I’m doing right after this post – carrying a poetry manuscript – a paper submission – to the post office) and get together with other creative folks.

This is also a great time to remind you not to feel “less than” when you go to AWP next month. It doesn’t matter if you’re not “poetry famous” or whatever. The most important thing is to go, try to have fun, talk to a few other people in your line of work that you like about their survival tips, and talk (gulp) to editors and publishers. (There are publishers I decided never to send to because I didn’t like the way they acted at AWP, I’ll admit – and I’d rather know ahead of time about the type of person that runs a press than get an unhappy surprise later!) Don’t worry about your fame level, worry about your fun level. Make plans to meetup with some online friends for the first time in real life. Dawdle at the book fair over a table of beautiful chapbooks or lit mags.  Go to a Portland art gallery or museum or, if the weather is kind, the famous Rose/Japanese garden (or Powell’s or VooDoo Doughnuts – you do you!) The point is, use it an empowering exercise rather than a way to make yourself feel small because someone looks at your name tag and turns away – hey, it happens. But discover great books, make new friends, and take advantage of a proudly weird city to do something out of the ordinary that you find fun. Dress up. Be proud that you are out there and trying in a world where most people never even try.

Valentines in the Snow, Beautiful Ghosts at Roq La Rue Gallery, and Writing into the Winter Quiet

Valetine’s Day Flowers

Valentines in the Snow

Our plans for Valentine’s Day on Thursday were somewhat squelched by the snow and downed trees still around our neighborhood – the National Guard was called in to help people on the East side of Seattle dig out of their streets, people stranded by snow that refused to melt and unable to leave their neighborhoods on icy hills. Still, we drove out to a movie in the cold slush, which was fun after our weeks of being snowed in.

We decided to reschedule our Valentine’s Day plans, which included going to the opening of Roq La Rue’s group show, “Beautiful Ghost.” But it turned out the part of the art the gallery had planned to show was delayed because of the snow.

We finally tried to dig our garden out of the snow. We lost a little weeping birch that fell over under the weight of a foot and a half of wet snow and ice. Many cherry and apple trees on our street were knocked down, which was heartbreaking, and our neighborhood roads were actually blocked in both directions by huge downed evergreen trees – thank goodness for a neighbor who owned a chainsaw who cleared an area for cars to get in and out. My next door neighbor’s fifteen-year -old lilacs were split at the base. Nasty snow. Also, we had a nine hour power outage – but one of my friends nearby had a 24-hour outage – not much fun in the cold.

Glenn and I dressed for post-Valentine’s Day

Beautiful Ghosts at Roq La Rue

On Saturday, there was still snow on the ground, and a chill cold grey cloud dousing us with rain, but we were determined to do a little celebrating. We dressed up and went downtown to Roq La Rue, got to see the “Beautiful Ghost” show, and I spent time floating around the ghostly art. I have said before that I think being around art is important for writers, and even though I’m not a gifted visual artist myself, something about being around art and artists makes me feel happier and more inspired.

Me posing with “Bonny Swan” by Kai Carpenter

Here are a few shots of the pieces at the show, and me next to one of my favorites, “The Bonny Swan,” which reflects the narrative of an old English/Scottish broadside and folk song about a younger daughter pushed into the river by her older sister so that she could marry her younger sister’s fiancee. A harp is made from the drowned girls hair and bones that sings of her murderer. Yeah, I can see why I’d be attracted to it. Dead girl transformations, Scottish murder ballads, crimes being told by ghosts, instruments made out of bones?

Other pieces I was captivated by were this ghostly cardinal and “The Ghost of Miss Darcy Three Fish”

Afterwards we ambled through Elliot Bay Books, where Glenn got coffee and I picked up a copy of The Penguin Book of Japanese Stories, edited by Jay Rubin (a terrific translator whom I got to meet and think the world of) and introduced by Haruki Murakami, but I would have bought it just to see the stories by Yoko Ogawa and Banana Yoshimoto.

A Feature on Women Horror Writers and Writing into the Quiet

Anyway, we finally started getting mail and packages again, but there is snow again in the weather forecast next week. Feeling very ready for some sunshine and warmer weather. I want to see daffodils and cherry blossoms, not murdered cherry trees and bulbs buried under snow. The political climate and the weather have together been so depressing, maybe I’ll go sing drowned swan ballads to cheer myself up!

Speaking of horror and wintertime, a big thank you to Gallows Hill for including Field Guide to the End of the World in this feature on women horror writers! Click here to pick up a copy!

End of February can be a tough time for writers, because it tends to be a season on waiting on submissions, of still-too-long nights and dreary short days, of sad music (Ahem, acoustic version of “Northern Lights” by Death Cab and hey, for the heck of it, a version of “Bonny Swan”) So be kind to yourself, watch something that makes you laugh, read a novel or bring in some tulips. Spring awaits. Write into the cold wind.

New Q&A Up at Gingerbread Lit Mag, Seattle Snowpocalypse 2019, Snowbound (with Cats)

Snowy Back Porch View

Seattle Snowpocalypse 2019

Since I’ve last written, winter has appeared – with a vengeance – in Seattle. Last weekend it snowed five inches here – and never melted. Last night we got hit with another four inches. Grocery store shelves empty, traffic snarls, icy roads, helping cars stuck in the snow – we might not be able to leave the house for a while as no roads at ALL got plowed in my city of Woodinville. At least the cats got to enjoy it! One extra chore has been unfreezing and refilling our hummingbird feeders, as hummingbirds need extra fuel to stay warm in this cold spell.

A Q&A with Gingerbread House Literary Magazine

Thanks to Gingerbread House Literary Magazine who posted this Q&A feature on fairy tales and poetry with me today: Gingerbread House Q&A with Jeannine Hall Gailey.

Ironically they posted my poem about the White Witch last week, and then it seems the White Witch of Narnia has descended on us in Seattle to install an unending winter! Seriously, we have no temperatures above freezing on the forecast for a week and more! This is much colder (and snowier) than average for us. By late February we usually have some trees starting to bloom – not this year, it seems.

Early snowfall on my garden – now it’s covered!

Snowbound

So, with no way to escape and trapped indoors, what are my plans? Working on a Plath essay on spec, a fellowship application, and received two acceptances in the last few days (both of which, unfortunately, were stuck in my spam folder, so I didn’t even get to celebrate them right away.) I may send out one of my poetry manuscripts another couple of times, too. Still reading Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath’s letters, and checked Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man out of the library. And although January was full of rejections, I’ve had two acceptances this week. Thinking about starting our taxes, finally. If I hadn’t already gone a little crazy from being stuck inside last week by the snow, I’m sure I’ll be a little “The Shining” by the end of this one.

Birthday and Superbowl Celebrations, pre-snow

Last weekend we celebrated my little brother and sister-in-law’s birthdays along with the Superbowl. The bad part was we fed them all our food and then were stuck on icy roads trying to restock the fridge. We haven’t had trash pickup or any delivery trucks since then, and the grocery store stocks have been raided – dairy cases empty, bread, lettuce, bananas, meat – all gone. The day we got out to Redmond, it took us an hour to get back to Woodinville – usually an eleven minute drive. Out on the road, spinouts are common, jack-knifed trucks block lanes of the highway, and Glenn had to rescue a woman in a Prius stuck in ice on the bottom of our own street, which is a mild hill! Seattle, Woodinville, and Kirkland aren’t really equipped to deal with snow – they don’t have snowplows, they don’t salt the roads, which tend towards curves and hills, even main thoroughfares remain treacherous and covered with ice in our hilly area of Woodinville/Kirkland. Many folks here (besides us midwestern transplants – I literally had my Driver’s Ed driving classes in a steep, hilly Cincinnati neighborhood, with ice and snow fog and poorly operating brakes in an old car, so besides my MS vertigo, I’m a darn good ice driver) have no experience driving in the snow. One of the days we actually got out, a Miata spun out in front of us and nearly hit us pulling out of a driveway onto a main thoroughfare and ended up blocking both lanes. So if you live in the area, be careful! The hardware stores have been sold out of snow shovels and de-icer for a week. Try to keep your hummingbirds fed (and a birdbath with water – birds are looking for water with all this ice and snow) And be sure to keep your phone charged, your car full of gas, and a shovel and kitty litter in the back of your bar (along with water and blankets) in case you get stuck. The woman who got stuck on our street said she called both AAA and the local police and both were too busy to help individuals who were stranded – there are too many stranded cars!

So, as a writer, I certainly have no excuse not to do some reading, writing, and more tedious tasks (cleaning, taxes, fellowship applications, submitting…) Wish me luck and no power outages! We are supposed to have more snow all week and wind and freezing temperatures.

PS Be extra friendly to your neighbors who may be disabled – crutches, canes, and wheelchairs all have issues on the ice, so even getting their mail may be treacherous. Be extra kind to teach other. If you have to drink some extra hot chocolate, pull out that extra blanket and book you’ve been meaning to read, make a phone call (if you have power) to someone who haven’t talked to in a while – and enjoy the quiet.

 

The Winter Witch Arrives in Seattle, New Poem up at Gingerbread House Lit, Queen Anne and More Sylvia Plath, and Looking Towards Spring

Hummingbird closeup (immature Anna’s?)

The Winter Witch Arrives in Seattle

Sure, it’s been a polar vortex in half of the country for a week, but today is the first day we’re actually getting cold temperatures and a chance of snow – and the cold weather’s hanging around for a whole week! I’m still struggling to get over my cough, which has been hanging around since January 1. So keep warm out there!

Gingerbread House  – “The White Witch Retreats”

A big thank you to Gingerbread House literary Magazine for publishing my weather-appropriate poem, “The White Witch Retreats,” complete with a beautiful piece of art work. It’s sort of a mashup of Narnia’s White Witch, the Snow Queen, and Game of Thrones mythology, with a dose of environmental concerns…Fun, right? I can’t get away entirely, it seems, from fairy tale poetry!

An Outing Across Town…Traffic, Open Books, and Trying to Track Down Medicine

One of my prescription medicines has been discontinued, and we tracked down a last dose at a pharmacy in Queen Anne. No problem, it’ll be a thirty minute trip across town. No, it was a four-hour round trip! The new “tunnel” – replacing the Alaska Way Viaduct – opened and traffic was the worst I’ve seen it in a while, compounded with so much construction and destruction it looked like an apocalypse had occurred in certain stretches of downtown. And 30,000 people running through the tunnel, along with a protest of people in wheelchairs protesting for more accessible design traversing downtown (which is sorely needed!)

We ducked out of the traffic for a moment to stop at Kerry Park at sunset (hadn’t been there in a while, but definitely one of the best views of the Seattle skyline around) and after we had the prescription safely in hand, we stopped in right before closing to Open Books, and picked up Dorianne Laux‘s beautiful new and selected book of poetry Only As the Day is Long, and also picked up Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation with the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight by Terrance Hayes. And Glenn snapped a photo of Field Guide to the End of the World on display! Glenn also snapped a pic of me in my somewhat sad and barren looking February garden. It’ll be much prettier in a month, I promise – already the hyacinth and daffodil bulbs are poking up. I look tired (not sleeping well as a result of this dang cough) but hey, this is probably what I’ll look like at AWP too – I rarely sleep during the three-day poetry-extravaganza – although I might have another pink hair mood by then!

Sylvia Plath Road Trips, Poetry Publishing World Quotes, and Looking Towards Spring

A few days with cold rain and a cold have given me time to catch up on my reading, specifically Virginia Woolf’s letters and now I’m dead in the middle of Sylvia Plath’s letters, Volume II. I thought this quote might have about today’s poetry publishing world, instead of 1959’s:

Here’s a quote regarding not getting the Yale Younger Prize in Summer, 1959:
“I am currently quite gloomy about this poetry book of about 46 poems, 37 of them published (and all written since college, which means leaving out lots of published juvenalia.) I just got word from the annual Yale Contest that I “missed by a whisper” and it so happened that a louse of a guy I know I know personally, who writes very glib light verse with no stomach to them, won, and he lives around the corner & is an editor at a good publishing house here, and I have that very annoying feeling which is tempting to write off as sour grapes that my book was deeper, if more grim, and all those other feelings of thwart. I don’t want to try a novel until I feel I am writing good salable short stories for the simple reason that the time, sweat and tears involved in a 300-page book which is rejection all round is too large to cope with while I have the book of Poems kicking about. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (O-it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used to solely as a love-and-admiration-getting mechanism (bless my psychiatrist.) But I still want to see it ritualized in print.”
(She’s referring to George Starbuck, a neo-formalist who went on to run the Iowa Writers Workshop and may have had CIA connections…please read Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers to learn more about the CIA’s deep connections to the literary world and all we hold dear…Oh Sylvia, if you had only known how deep the cronyism and favoritism went back then for male writers…you might have been less bitter, but maybe not.)

The other fascinating section was a part describing an All-American road trip Ted and Sylvia took in 1959, where they went camping and fishing in State Parks all across America, from the east coast to Montana (where they enjoyed $2 steaks!) and Yellowstone (where their car was attacked by a bear while they were in it) with Sylvia fishing like a champ all the way to California. It was such an extraordinarily interesting portrayal of Sylvia Plath’s life as outdoorsy camper girl that it made me wonder if she would have been happier staying in America (almost certainly) and such a vital presence – not the moody glum portrait most Plath readers have in their mind. Her travel writing is descriptive and gripping, which makes me wish someone would make a book and movie out of this episode in Sylvia and Ted’s life.

From Woolf’s letters, I was entertained at letters from Virginia and Leonard’s “courtship” in which she admits she isn’t physically attracted to Leonard and after his proposal, pleads to “let her remain free.” The least romantic love letters ever, perhaps! Of course she did get married, and apparently even wanted children before doctors advised Leonard it wouldn’t be good for her health (and since there was no contraception available in 1914, this means…well, draw your own conclusions.) And yet they stayed married until her death many years later. Virginia and Leonard provide an interesting portrait of a working literary marriage – very different from Sylvia who you wish could have adopted a little of Virginia’s frostiness towards Ted!

Well, off to get ready for a birthday celebration for my little brother/Superbowl party, which means Glenn has made enough food for an army and we hope the windstorm and snow don’t start up til after! Have a happy February week, and remember, spring is around the corner now!

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall Gailey
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a writer with MS who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and is the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize, Field Guide to the End of the World, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. 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 Ploughshares.

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