It is Monday, though I feel quite cheerful because I have a new computer that works (thank goodness, finally) and I wrote a letter to the editor at the Atlantic and I’ve never written a letter to the editor before but I thought it was for a good cause (to cheer Kelli and Pacific U) and this afternoon I am going to a very smart rheumatologist who may at last tell me why I’ve had a fever for two months and have albumin-anemia and high C-Reactive Protein. This I believe has been the cause of my fatigue and “down” moods lately – I was telling a friend that I feel my “down”-ness is in my body, not my head, that’s exactly it. I actually feel okay with my life, especially now that: a. I am wondering where to rent next (always an adventure when you’re picking a new town, even a new town in driving distance) and b. where/if/how I should work (teaching? publishing? more freelancing?) and c: I feel happy about the third manuscript I’m working on, and how I’m writing a lot of poems about sleeping women. It’s just that I have so little energy – like having lead weights on all the time. I always feel weird talking about my physical stuff here but it’s hard to explain my life without also explaining that stuff, if you know what I mean. So, it’s part of my life – like writing, like my husband and cat, like where I live – it’s part of the life environment – when you are sick, it affects everything else.
But enough about me! Here’s a neat link to an interview with one of my favoritest faculty at Pacific, Dorianne Laux, at the Smoking Poet!
And, apparently, a party run by the Poetry Foundation was shut down by police in Chicago this weekend. Look, poets are already paranoid enough that “the man” is out to get them – you don’t need to encourage that kind of thinking, fellas! Wish I could have been there to see 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.



Responsible Artist
When your CRP is elevated it’s like you’re always fighting a cold or infection and it leaves you exhausted. Easy to mistake these symptoms for depression.